Adrian Mateljan

Due to unfavourable weather this weekend, paragliding was out - so I thought I might get a chance to progress some of my other goals for this year. Instead I spent most of it installing Windows XP Home on a Dell Optiplex 755…

Louisas desk

It all started on Wednesday, when Lou finally had her new desk delivered (she had ordered it last year). Its a Mahogany Singapore writing table with bottle green leather and solid swan drop handles (I just copied that off of the delivery note) with integrated Dell Optiplex 755 and full sound system from Intelligent Furniture. It is an impressive desk - I am expecting some impressive writing!

The first hurdle - network access. For some reason, it (being a combination of pre-installed Windows Vista and a Philips SNU5600 USB wireless network adapter) wouldn’t accept an IP address via DHCP from our BT Home Hub. In hindsight I think it may have been a simple case of the Philips software remembering the first IP address it was allocated (which wasn’t on my network). Specifying a correct address sidestepped the issue. It is not really like I have enough PCs to warrant DHCP anyway…

But Lou didn’t want to learn Windows Vista - so my task for Saturday was to install a spare copy of Windows XP Home I had lying around. I mean - how hard could it be?

Issue #1: XP doesn’t understand AHCI. My first attempt at installing Windows XP Home resulted in a Blue Screen of Death. Because I am a software guy, not a systems or hardware guy, I often find the underlying hardware has advanced a notch each time I deal with it. Thankfully, a simple Google search turned up the answer - I needed to change the SATA performance from AHCI to ATA in the BIOS settings.

Issue #2: The Dell drivers and utilities DVD doesn’t contain the XP drivers. I almost couldn’t believe this - I mean, its not like a DVD wouldn’t be able to hold all of the drivers for all of the Windows operating systems surely?. Again - I blame my optimism and/or naivity on the fact I do not deal with this regularly. Really, I should know better…

Issue #3: Attempting to download the drivers from the Dell web site in an efficient manner. This one is a story in four parts. The Dell web site allows you to see all of the drivers for a particular system and operating system. This is good. It has an option to “Download All”. This is also good. What it actually means is, once you have selected all of the drivers you want, it will download them all. This is obvious when you click on “Download All” only to be presented with nothing - because you haven’t selected anything. This is annoying. Adding an item to your download list requires a page refresh. This is slow. If you do this on IE6 on a PC that doesn’t have the correct drivers installed this is painfully slow. Once you have selected all of your drivers and click “Download All” you will be presented with your list of drivers and have the option to remove them. You will find out why when you actually attempt to download them and are told the maximum download size is 250MB. You will then go back and remove items to meet this limit. It then won’t work.

My first attempt was from the Optiplex itself using IE6 without the correct drivers installed. As mentioned above, it was painfully slow. I left it “downloading” about 100MB of drivers to go to bed. In the morning the PC had rebooted due to an update - so it was all in vain.

My second attempt was using Google Chrome on my laptop. The page refresh was much faster (dare I say usable) - but again, I got to the download stage and it just sat there. I caught up on all my Zero Punctuation without anything visibly happening on the download front. For a lark I tried downloading a single file - but Google Chrome kept giving file not found errors - it was not looking promising. (On the upside, they seem to have fixed the Flash issues I was having previously!)

Third attempt - Firefox on my laptop. I checked the individual download first - it worked - and then built up my download list for the third time. This time I had more luck with the download - I got a server error from the Dell web server!

For my fourth attempt, still using Firefox, I decided to simply download the drivers individually. No page refreshes. No download limits. This ended up being the fastest and least frustrating way to proceed. Oh, and it was successful too!

So if you made it this far you will be happy to know Lou doesn’t have any excuses left for her writing. The weekend wasn’t a total write off for me either - two of Da Ork Angelz are now complete, keeping me on track with another one of my goals for this year. Photos will have to wait until I have recharged Lou’s camera as the iPhone appears to be incapable of focusing on such small subjects. Now I just need to get back to my CMS…

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 18th, 2009 at 10:37 pm and is filed under Diary. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.