With companies dropping Windows XP off the shelves and refusing to revert to XP on any new computer purchases, many people have turned to themselves to get what they wanted, and many people have found that they might not preform the installation correctly, or that they cannot seem to get it to work period. This guide is meant to walk you through the process of setting up Windows XP Professional on your computer in a friendly and simple manner.
First and foremost, BACK UP ANYTHING YOU WISH TO SAVE!
This is a crucial step that many people forget about, yet it is absolutely vital if you have any files of value. There are a few options you have when backing up your data, and I'll go over a couple of them here. If you have a CD or DVD burner, you can burn your files to disc, if you have an external hard drive, you can just move your files on to it, if you're on a network, you can copy your data to another machine in your workgroup, or you could also use free online storage space (I personally recommend ADrive.com since you get a reasonable 50 gigs for free).
Some things I would suggest backing up would be your music, movies, pictures, word documents, saved passwords, your installers (you have been saving them, right?), save games, and configuration files are all good things to save. ***If you are formatting a Windows XP computer, you should back up your drivers as well, just to save you the hassle of finding them later. To do so, run a quick Google search for free driver backup program+win xp***
Once you've backed all your files up by whatever method you choose, you'll be ready to proceed with the installation. Pop the installer CD in your drive and reboot your machine. As it is booting up, you'll see a message telling you to press any key to boot from CD, go ahead and push anything, but do so quickly since it will only display the message for a few seconds. **Please note that if you do not see this message, you may have to access your BIOS setup and set your boot order to have the CD/DVD drive on the top position.**
After a couple moments a prompt will appear on the screen asking you to pick a location to install to. It looks something like this:
Go ahead and pick the location you want to install to, if there is only one option, that'll be the one you want. Once you have selected where you want to install XP, you're going to need to pick which filesystem to use.
Odds on, you want to pick NTFS instead of FAT, in this day and age, there is a very low chance you actually need a FAT partition. You can pick a quick format or a regular format, it depends mostly on how thorough you feel like being. A standard format will take longer, but you will be guaranteed a nice clean, speedy filesystem, but if you already have the same system in place (i.e. Picking NTFS partition to be overwritten is NTFS as well) you could just do a quick format since the basic filesystem structure is already there. Once you pick your location, if you need to delete the partition and re-create a new one, the installer will ask for confirmation, just in case.
Once the format is all done, it starts copying all the required files for installation onto your freshly created partition. Well that is going on, you might as well go make a sandwich or something, it takes a little bit depending on the speed of your disc drive.
After it finishes copying, it will automatically restart itself and load into the next stage of the wizard. It will take a bit of time as it installs most of the files you need to run Windows XP, but after a few minutes, it will ask for your Windows serial code. I'm not sure where you put it, but a good place to check would be the box or envelope your CD was in.
Once you've entered in your product key so setup can continue with the install, you're almost done. All that is left now is the final configuration of your OS. As it proceeds through the next few pages of the setup, you'll be customizing your computer to meet your own settings and preferences.
Conratulations, you've now finished installing Windows XP on your computer, and it took less then an hour to finish. Bet you can hardly wait to start using your nice, squeaky clean install. Have fun and as always, drop a comment if you need a hand, I'll be more then happy to help you out.
