I don't expect anyone to really enjoy reading this or even get much out of it but I just felt like sharing a few (lengthy as always) experiences I had with my friends computer this weekend. He calls me up and says he found out that he needed service pack 2...after he actually had someone go to pick up MS Flight Sim X for him that day. I came over with my copy, skeptical if it would even install on his comp after I already had it activated on mine. We pop it in and it actually installs fine. Kudo's to MS for not making this hell for us. But then he mentions he doesn't actually know his ISP info which I thought we needed to active windows. I then proceeded to search around to find MS's phone number but stupidly enough it wasn't listed anyware on the manual that came with my copy of XP Home. We pondered screwing around with the date and time funcions to avoid activation but figured MS wasn't quite that thick so I just gave up and heeded his advice to just plug in the phoneline and see if that's enough. To my surprise it was able to update over just the phoneline without having any ISP info and I guess called an 800 number itself or something (if anyone knows exactly how this happens I'd be curious be cause it needed my ISP info and outside phone number when I did this on my comp.) So that seemed great and we were pleased that we were able to overcome our little issues there and then went on to install drivers and stuff. It went as smooth as you'd expect, in other words a bunch of restarts and boredom but nothing hitched us up until the video drivers. For some reason they failed to load and causes a serious issue. The computer would reboot spontaneously, get to the desktop and then freeze for about 20 seconds before rebooting again. This happened over and over despite my feeble attemps to revert to the default safe settings under the BIOS or check to see the video bus was set to PCIe and so on. Nothing seemed to work so I decided I'd jam the XP disk back in, and then change every boot priority to CDROM so it couldn't help but boot off the CD right? Believe it or not that actually worked and I just decided to reformat the whole damn thing and start from scratch to ensure no residual driver issues would bog us down. So we basically went though the very lengthy process of reformating, then just formating in preparation for installation, then installation of XP all over again. And then, despite the fact that I stongly urged him not to put in the VGA driver disk again we did and for no apparent reason it worked flawelessly and we were good to go after installing everything else...or so it seemed. We got FarCry on there and began to play untill I noticed there was no sound. We checked our connections and installed drivers again, ran diagnostics, which produced multiple "fail" results and offered the advice of "please try to reinstall drivers or contact technical support." I wasn't about to do that again so I just ripped the sound card out and set onboard audio to 'auto' and we were good to go. I'm still not sure what the conflict was there, we'd disabled the onboard audio before, and had all the volume control up and drivers intstalled correctly but it just wasn't working. But I suppose that's XP for you. And in the end it turned out the person he asked couldn't find Flight Sim X for him anyway so we couldn't even admire our crude handy work in the end.:doh:
