Windows XP Home Edition Will NOT Load

[Guest]

I have a really old computer with a processor of roughly 400Mhz and with
about 65Mb Ram. It had a hard disk of about 7Gb running Windows 98, but i
bought a 2nd hand hard disk with 80Gb of memory and has Windows XP Home
Edition fully installed on it already.

I have downloaded and installed all the bios updates to allow the
motherboard recognise the larger memory hard disk and seems to find it OK.

When the data from the hard disk loads, it loads with lots of little small
grey rectangles on the bottom of the screen (not the normal XP loading view),
gets to full, and then does nothing!

Could someone tell me the problem and what hardware i may need to buy?

 

[Guest]

unfortunately, windows needs at
least 256 megs of ram as mentioned
here:

http://www.microsoft.com/atwork/getstarted/pcproblems.mspx

- db

 

[Ken Blake, MVP]

I have a really old computer with a processor of roughly 400Mhz and with
about 65Mb Ram. It had a hard disk of about 7Gb running Windows 98, but i
bought a 2nd hand hard disk with 80Gb of memory and has Windows XP Home
Edition fully installed on it already.

I have downloaded and installed all the bios updates to allow the
motherboard recognise the larger memory hard disk and seems to find it OK.

When the data from the hard disk loads, it loads with lots of little small
grey rectangles on the bottom of the screen (not the normal XP loading view),
gets to full, and then does nothing!

Could someone tell me the problem and what hardware i may need to buy?

Your hardware is woefully inadequate for Windows XP. A 400MHz
processor will be usable, but slow. However 65MB of RAM isn't close to
enough. I wouldn't attempt to run XP without at least 256MB, and
depending on what apps you run, even that may not be enough.

Over and above that, if you're trying to boot from a hard drive with a
Windows installation that came from another computer, you can't do
that. At the very least, you need to do a repair installation.
Occasionally that isn't enough, and you have to reinstall Windows from
scratch.

 

[Mark F.]

I have a really old computer with a processor of roughly 400Mhz and with
about 65Mb Ram. It had a hard disk of about 7Gb running Windows 98, but i
bought a 2nd hand hard disk with 80Gb of memory and has Windows XP Home
Edition fully installed on it already.

I have downloaded and installed all the bios updates to allow the
motherboard recognise the larger memory hard disk and seems to find it OK.

When the data from the hard disk loads, it loads with lots of little small
grey rectangles on the bottom of the screen (not the normal XP loading
view),
gets to full, and then does nothing!

Could someone tell me the problem and what hardware i may need to buy?

Insufficient RAM (Random Access Memory) for one. Windows XP requires a
minimum of 128mb (megabytes) of system memory to run. It is widely
recommended to have a minimum of 512mb (128 x 2).

The hard drive's 80 gigs is storage space, not memory. However, to run
efficiently Windows (all versions) require some free disk space for the swap
file.

Minimum requirements:
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/pro/upgrading/sysreqs.mspx


Mark

 

[Rock]

I have a really old computer with a processor of roughly 400Mhz and with
about 65Mb Ram. It had a hard disk of about 7Gb running Windows 98, but i
bought a 2nd hand hard disk with 80Gb of memory and has Windows XP Home
Edition fully installed on it already.

I have downloaded and installed all the bios updates to allow the
motherboard recognise the larger memory hard disk and seems to find it OK.

When the data from the hard disk loads, it loads with lots of little small
grey rectangles on the bottom of the screen (not the normal XP loading
view),
gets to full, and then does nothing!

Could someone tell me the problem and what hardware i may need to buy?

65MB of RAM, if that's correct, is nowhere near enough. Give up on XP on
this system. Stick with Windows 98.

 

[Uncle Grumpy]

Could someone tell me the problem and what hardware i may need to buy?

Turn that computer into a door stop. Buy/build a completely new one.

 

[cattanack]

I have a really old computer with a processor of roughly 400Mhz and with
about 65Mb Ram. It had a hard disk of about 7Gb running Windows 98, but i
bought a 2nd hand hard disk with 80Gb of memory and has Windows XP Home
Edition fully installed on it already.

I have downloaded and installed all the bios updates to allow the
motherboard recognise the larger memory hard disk and seems to find it OK.

When the data from the hard disk loads, it loads with lots of little small
grey rectangles on the bottom of the screen (not the normal XP loading view),
gets to full, and then does nothing!

Could someone tell me the problem and what hardware i may need to buy?

Unless you install more ram there is nothing easily that you can do.

You can make it work though, if you turn off visual stuff.

Go where the visual settings are and look around and turn every
clicked setting to off.

It will work,, or it 'should' work.

If not go back to Win98

Or use

Puppy Linux
or
Feather Linux.
or?

 

[Ken Blake, MVP]

Unless you install more ram there is nothing easily that you can do.

You can make it work though, if you turn off visual stuff.

Go where the visual settings are and look around and turn every
clicked setting to off.

It will work,, or it 'should' work.

It should work, but performance will be terrible, not matter what he
does. 65MB is simply inadequate to even approach decent performance.