The Holy Grail of Windows [XP]

The holy grail of Windows [XP]

I have found the holy grail of windows today. Too bad I didn’t discover this five years ago, could have saved me a lot of headaches. But in order to understand what the Holy Grail is, we have to back track a bit.

It’s all about getting the computer to work, drivers. In the DOS era there were little drivers. There was usually a CD ROM, Sound if you had a sound card, and a mouse driver. Despite those configuration files many programs had to write in support for that hardware, mouse included.

It wasn’t usually a problem but you could spend a bit of time trying to configure a program to work with your hardware. If you didn’t know the settings you had to guess. There was a limited amount of hardware, so there wasn’t a lot of guessing to do. There was also auto detection, if that worked.

I moved from DOS to Windows 95. In that era Windows was optional, DOS was still the main supported software. Windows 3.1 I really don’t count because it depended on DOS, but 3.11 is a different story, but developed too late to be an era. I still remember that day I moved from DOS to 95. It was because my mouse stopped working. My brother said I needed to install a 20 megabyte mouse driver. That was Windows 95 on a slim install. I trimmed it down to about 6-8 megabytes. That’s very tiny, about the length of a 30 second high quality song.

Windows 95 had great DOS driver support. Upgrading was a dream, everything just worked, usually. Reloads were frequent, but if you were a DOS user, it made you a “tech.” Manufactures started to jump into the game; they had to write their own GUI (Graphical User Interface) to make a computer more suitable for the average user. Before that it was usually a text screen where you use the arrow keys to select what you wanted, press enter to go into the directory, and backspace to go out. But with Windows 95, you just had to slap your own software in the box.

Slap they did, and this trend continues today, but it got kind of harry in the Windows 98 era. When Windows 98 came around they improved many features of 95. You no longer had to restart the computer for changing the time; the interface had more options, more system control. Software got a lot more complicated. A lot of manufacturers installed software that would slow down the computer, not on purpose to get sales, but to add more features.

Despite how similar Windows 98 is to Windows 95, the drivers were drastically different.  DOS was still needed to do repairs but no longer supported. CD-ROM and sound drivers for DOS were very harder to get a hold of. All of your hardware by this time needed a driver’s disk. This software, usually contained on a CD, allowed the hardware to function. But, it often installed a lot of annoying useless programs that you’d never use. Computer retailers were worse, they would preload junk onto the computer.

Drivers were not a problem with 98 though, because when you backed up your old windows installation, you could just point your drivers to where the old ones were. They would install and as long as they were not corrupted, they would work fine. You had to pick and pull between a few directories or folders in windows but they worked like new. Computer manufacturers included an install disc that had drivers on it usually. Though, this is the era where drive images became popular. A drive image is a picture of our hard drive or all of your data. Instead of installing a program and configuring it, it just put in the raw data where it’s supposed to go, reboot and it worked. This was a lot easier on some customers.

Windows ME or millennium was great with drives. With Windows ME the first use of a functional driver locater that would search every directory for the drivers was used. Windows ME was pushed out a little too early, and the big boom of computer manufacturers came in too. Whenever you have a lot of new guys you get a lot of bad parts. When you use bad parts, Windows will not be stable. People were quick to blame Windows ME instead of the bad hardware. Windows ME is just 98 with a facelift.

So Windows 98, which was more forgiving prolonged further. Windows 2000 was out for about a year before the next major step XP. Fading off of the windows 98 eras was the XP era. XP was robust, stable and friendly. It had many features that people needed software normally; it was built right into the system! First time you come up from a fresh install you hit the ground running. Well that was the idea anyways. CEO’s of computer manufacturers learned their lessons in the past. People couldn’t work with DOS over phone support, and this is with English native speaking support too.  The preloaded images were good, and companies only gave images to reload the system. Yet people lost the discs. It’s like losing the keys to your gas tank on your car. Why you would not keep it safe or discard it is beyond me, but people didn’t think it was important until they ran out of gas, or in this case the computer crashed.

The Windows XP era was in full swing, though the system was stable, it wasn’t perfect. DOS became dead; it wasn’t even an option to boot to anymore. No one supported it, no one used it. Computers, when they crashed ended up with a crutch… drivers. Manufacturers found out they can post their new drivers online to get better performance or stability out to help people out. While this was helpful, unless you had an update, you were screwed because most manufacturers at that time did not put up good support online.

Windows XP went through a lot of changes over the years. The World Wide Web became very popular, not just as a hobby but as a necessity. Computer manufacturers started to post their drivers online, well a few did anyways. Just about everyone was using XP now so everything was designed for XP! Programs could use a utility program called Direct X. Direct X started in the 95 era for games mostly. Instead of programming your game to work with every card out there, you just had to program it for DirectX. Direct X would point itself to your working hardware, using the drivers. Programs and games depended on DirectX to get sound or video. This is what’s called a dependency. Windows 95 was full of program dependencies. So Microsoft invented a file called a Dynamic Link Library or DLLs. The DLL was a great idea, but it had very bad consequences. Windows 95 was the first that I know of to use DLLs. But when you installed a new program that needed a new version, it would install a new DLL into Windows.  Now your old program doesn’t work. With XP, a special directory was made for keeping older DLL’s or older dependencies to keep the program working. This is why people loved XP, all of the programs just “worked” seamlessly in XP, and largely no one noticed the mess every program made.

When programmers write a program, they don’t want to start from nothing, making a program to interpret the keyboard strokes and where to write ‘1’s and ‘0’s. Someone else did the work for you, so just plug in a dependency and you have a head start. The wheel is invented, just use the wheel, and don’t reinvent it every time you use it! Improving the wheel is different, that can always go forward.

So XP handles all of these interoperating dependencies almost independent of each other, thus makes the file structure very complex. This was also the era for anther hardware boom. To date there hasn’t been as big of a boom as the Edge of the Pentium 4 era. Especially the 3GHz (3 gigahertz) Pentium 4, though that’s the most popular processor out there STILL, It’s one of the worst garbage scows to work with.

Quickly coming with the big boom still underway was the coming of the Vista era. Vista hit at exactly the wrong time. Like Windows ME, people hated it. Largely due to the huge amount of hardware suppliers that came out at that time. Hardware failed which it often did, people, blamed Vista. Vista had to support every piece of hardware from every sweat shop from every corner of the world.

The other problem was 64-bit. With so much going on and complicated programs and hardware, it was time to step things up. Problem with switching from 32-bit to 64-bit is everything in 32-bit had to be remade from scratch to work with 64-bit. You have many years of software from 98 and XP eras trying to work with Vista. People expected their 10 year old programs to work, WHY? People don’t want to spend money; some people buy a car and expect it to just run forever. I don’t know anyone who has only had one car their entire life.

So many STILL use XP. To this day people struggle and try to make it with an 8 year old software system. While there is nothing wrong with Vista and Windows 7 is a heaven send, some people prefer XP. Now with Vista and 7, driver support is almost like magic, it goes online and makes it work. Windows 7 does this automatically. Vista you have to press a few buttons. But XP you still have to scour over many bad websites on the Internet. If you have a Sony VAIO, the best support you’ll have is using it as a boat anchor.

On all Microsoft Windows systems, when you install a driver it places physical DLL’s and files it needs into its structure. It can call upon these files whenever you need. Windows 98 doesn’t have driver problems, Vista and 7 don’t have problems either. After XP you just needed an Internet connection and it would almost fix itself!

Our beloved XP system was still in the dark though. As for finding drivers, if you didn’t have a manufacture website with everything or a disc with drivers on it. Which makes up is most of the cases this late after the era, you were Doomed. There are universal drivers out there, if you’re lucky to be supported. There are expensive programs to download drivers for you, but you often pay forty dollars or more to find out the program doesn’t support your computer.

So if your computer crashed, you could possibly have a dead computer. That is until now. But the strangest thing about this is the solution it’s so simple. It shocks me that I have never run into anyone ever telling me about this. If you can’t get into windows, or if you something isn’t working right and you need to get windows running right again, here’s what you do.

Fist thing you’ll need to do is backup all of your data, don’t sweat it. It’s very easy to do. Go to www.linuxmint.com and download the latest live CD of mint. After you burn that to a CD you’ll have to boot off of it. When booting off a CD-ROM a computer when first turning on it will give you a boot menu button like F12, Esc or F10. After you select this option and select your DVD/CD ROM drive Linux Mint should start to load. After it loads you just have to open up your computer. When you see all of your files, make a new folder called “backup”. Move everything into that folder. If you have left over empty folders that won’t move, just delete those. Now that your computer is backed up exit Linux Mint and shutdown the computer.

Put in your Windows XP install CD and boot off of that. The menu’s should be simple just go through a normal install but DO NOT FORMAT. After windows loads up you’ll have a pretty plain screen, usually no sound.

Open up the start menu, go to control panel. Click on Performance and Maintenance, and then go to System. Click on the Hardware Tab and go to device manager. Every yellow question mark is a hardware part that Windows doesn’t recognize.

Now here’s where the grail comes in. Double click on the question mark device, and then click on update driver. Select Install from a list or specific location (Advanced), then next. You only want “Include this location in the search:” Now the path you want is c:\backup\windows\inf\, type that into the white text box. Now you can click next.

What happens next is it will search that folder and eventually find the device you’re looking for. After it locates it needs to know where the install files are. You’ll need to search your computer backup for those, but let’s just make Windows do the work for us, right? Hold down the Windows key (the flag) then “F” at the same time. This opens up the search function, now the easy part. Click on All Files and Folders, type in the exact file it’s looking for. Now before you search, you need to go to the advanced options menu and enable all search functions, except search tape backup and case sensitive. Now click search, after a bit the file will appear. You will need to note where that file is located. Then minimize the search window and tell the driver installation where the file is located. You’ll have to do this for every file it needs. It’ll be scattered throughout the system no doubt. But it will work!

You’ll have to repeat this process for every hardware device not found by Windows. It’s a bit of work but it indeed works!

I hope this helps a lot of people out. I have a few old computers with a few devices that I can’t seem to find drivers for. I know how to hide the devices, as well as a few work-arounds.  This isn’t the only trick or hack I’ve been able to discover for windows XP. I’m the kind of person who will play solitaire on the computer that Windows is being installed onto. When I get some time I may post pictures on how to exactly do this.

Till next time!

-Ken

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