What Can I do If I Can't Find My Boot Disk For XP?

[Guest]

During the course of a move, my XP cd got packed away and can't be found
(Half of my stuff is in storage). Because of the NUMEROUS problems I'm
having (system constantly running @ 100%, even at startup; 30 + appilcations
running in the background; Outlook, Media Player, Norton Antivirus, and other
apps don't run visibly, but appear in the running processes list of
"Taskmanager"; If I do a restart or shutdown, I oten get hung on the "Loading
Your Preferences" screen, and so on!) I thought I should boot up from the cd
and see if I can correct some of these problems. What can I do if I can't
find said disk??? Can I boot rom another XP disk, hence having a different
product key?

 

[Martin]

During the course of a move, my XP cd got packed away and can't be found
(Half of my stuff is in storage). Because of the NUMEROUS problems I'm
having (system constantly running @ 100%, even at startup; 30 + appilcations
running in the background; Outlook, Media Player, Norton Antivirus, and other
apps don't run visibly, but appear in the running processes list of
"Taskmanager"; If I do a restart or shutdown, I oten get hung on the "Loading
Your Preferences" screen, and so on!) I thought I should boot up from the cd
and see if I can correct some of these problems. What can I do if I can't
find said disk??? Can I boot rom another XP disk, hence having a different
product key?

Well before you do any of that i would do a full virus scan and run AdAware
or similar. Then i would do start/run/msconfig and then write down all the
entries under the start up tab. Do a bit of Googling on them and see how
many you actually need to have running and then disable the rest