Is Win XP (Home) fatally flawed?

  • Thread starter Thread starter DW
  • Start date Start date
D

DW

Hi all,

This won't even be seen on radar probably but I will ask anyway!

Scenario:
I was doing some work on a Company Director's home computer as his
daughter
needed to get a college assignment out the next day. The PC in question
has
Win XP Home (I know, but you do these thing's :-( )
It had crashed when a 256mb pen drive was attached and was left in a
state
of non-boot. Safe mode/Last Known good etc failed to get it past the
Windows
Welcome screen.

The problem is that there are five in the family each with a User
account.
Downloading dodgy music and what not from sharing sites. I thought the
quickest and easiest would be to do a Manufacturers Recovery Partition
with
a clean install of Win XP and a saving of everything on the hard drive.
The recovery routine in question looked quite good, it saved the old HD
contents to a fresh folder. So far so good!
Then, I recreated new user accounts and tried to copy over the contents
of
each old user account. Three worked fine, two however gave Access Denied
errors. I tried booting into safe mode to gain access to the security
tab
for the folders, took ownership, unchecked Read Only etc, even gave the
everyone group full control, but whatever I tried, I got an Access
Denied on
these two folders. Managed to get some of the child folders to open
however.

Now I have seen this many times before with XP Home. Each user account
is
created in the same way, all local admins etc. For instance, upgrading a
to
a new PC. Take out old drive and put it in as secondary, copy over the
old
user data but some folders work and some don't! Usual routes for gaining
control fail miserably.
What with hard drives being so big nowadays and everyone with IPods and
GB's
of music files etc, a straight upgrade or recovery is a long-winded
affair.
The actual recovery from hidden partition only took about ten minutes,
but
getting all the user accounts setup, copying the data over and
reinstalling
software takes ages. Not forgetting all the Windows updates!

Anyway,
Has anybody any thoughts on this?

Thanks for reading,

Dave W
 
DW said:
Hi all,

This won't even be seen on radar probably but I will ask anyway!

Scenario:
I was doing some work on a Company Director's home computer as his
daughter
needed to get a college assignment out the next day. The PC in question
has
Win XP Home (I know, but you do these thing's :-( )

To begin with, there is zero difference in performance or stability
between XP Home and XP Pro. The two editions (all 4 editions in fact)
are compiled from the same source code base. The differences between
Home and Pro consist of certain specific features and functions that
are included with XP Pro but not with XP Home, and in a few instances
differences in the default settings for specific options.

Other than that the two are identical, and I do not see how any
differences between Home and Pro could account for the behavior you
encountered. I would suspect damaged or corrupted files as being the
more likely cause.
Good luck

Ron Martell Duncan B.C. Canada
--
Microsoft MVP (1997 - 2006)
On-Line Help Computer Service
http://onlinehelp.bc.ca

"Anyone who thinks that they are too small to make a difference
has never been in bed with a mosquito."
 

Ask a Question

Want to reply to this thread or ask your own question?

You'll need to choose a username for the site, which only take a couple of moments. After that, you can post your question and our members will help you out.

Ask a Question

Back
Top