kellsdad said:
son crashed comp a couple of years ago, when it was fixed, the backup of
xp
was not on the hard drive, nor was office. How do I wipe the comp clean
and
reinstall these again?? HP's do not come with CD's, its all pre-loaded,
and
out of warranty
If you have no restore media, your choices are very limited. Basically,
you have to get new install media, which will cost you. Office is a
separate product, and often costs considerably more than XP itself.
First, though, contact HP and see if they can sell you restore disks. They
may be able to do this for a nominal cost, and taking into account the costs
of a new license, it's certainly worth the call or email.
You're probably into several hundred dollars here. New XP Home upgrade
install disks are often around CDN$130, and their lower price requires you
to have a qualifying install CD for a previous version of Windows, like ME.
The full retail version of XP Home is around CDN$250.
A retail version of MS Office can be in the CDN$350 - $650+ range. The
lower prices again require you to have a previous version.
An alternative to MS Office is Star Office, which is free and can read and
write MS office format files.
Bootable XP setup disks will allow you to partition and format the system.
You may see XP licenses for sale inexpensively on places like eBay, but be
aware that these may be regarded by Microsoft as already activated, and
ultimately be of no value to you since you can't activate them or update
them. Be very careful with this approach.
At this point, you might also start to look at new PCs with an OS and Office
pre-installed.. but be sure that you get restore media, or that you can make
restore media, and be sure you do that. And, be sure that the installed
Office version isn't a trial version requiring a further purchase. I've
seen that a few times.
There is another option that isn't for everyone. There's a very nice
version of Linux called Ubuntu, which is free, and which comes with Star
Office. The current version is 7.04. I recently installed it on an HP
D530, and it worked perfectly.
You just have to download the install CD image, burn it to CD, boot from it
and after booting, click on Install and go through the questions. It will
happily wipe the drive for you and install a filesystem that Windows can't
recognise. If you need to share files with Windows machines, this is
possible via Samba.
Incidentally, Dell is about to start shipping laptops with that version.
However, while Ubuntu is far easier to use than most previous Linux
versions, you will still have to sometimes use a console window and type
commands - for example, if you need to share files with Windows machines via
Samba.
HTH
-pk
