RobertP said:
I'm trying to upgrade from ME to XP Home and keep
getting "Fatal Error: 5A9FF58H". I'm running an IBM
Netvista-850 Mghz, PentiumII processor, with 128 RAM and a
large enough hard drive. Please advise--Thanks --RP
Ernie said:
Your machine is woefully underpowered to run WinXP. If you
can get it to work at all it will be fustratingly slow to
use. I tried XP on a machine your caliber and after I got
it to work I gave up on it a month later.
Good luck.
Actually, other than memory, the machine should run XP just fine. I've
installed Windows XP on PII-400 with 256MB of RAM and the users are still
extremely happy. The secret is to get rid of many of the bells and whistles
after you install it - like the XP look (go classic) and lots of the popup
balloons, etc. Many of the services can be turned off and if you keep the
hard drive defragmented and minimize the startup programs, Windows XP can
run okay on a 400MHz machine and very well on a 850MHz such as the one
described. I would suggest more memory, however.
Speaking of memory, it is possible you have a bad memory issue. I would
suggest purchasing (if your machines books say it can handle it) a single
256MB module and put it in alone, see if that alone solves your issue. You
could also put the 128MB into a different slt internally, sometimes that
makes the difference.
Before upgrading, uninstall any applications you don't use often. Also make
sure all of your drivers and patches are up to date. Defragment your hard
drive and go ahead and run a scandisk/chkdsk. Scan your system for viruses
and adware/spyware as well. The cleaner your system is before the upgrade,
the better off you will be in the long run.
Also, get the upgrade advisor. It can warn you of incompatabilities before
you encounter them:
http://tinyurl.com/u8i
Good Luck! And you may want to look into upgrading your memory to at least
256MB.
