How to fix XP when it goes bad

MANY OF YOU overwhelmed my mailbox with advice, suggestions, and suggestions in response to my column "When XP Goes Bad: Life in Tech Support Hell." I've made an attempt to sort and distill the commentary, first with the observations and then starting from the least likely to most likely/most likely to work strategies, along with my comments:

Reader Observations
1) Computer phone technical support sucks. Many people ranted about the poor quality of what you get over the phone. It doesn't matter what Intel-based computer type you have or what former British colony is answering the phone. It just sucks. Double that for Symantec phone support, according to the letters I received. To be fair to Symantec, people like its website and if they dig through it, they seem to find answers.

And bloody Compaq charged my relative for the support call that offered the advice, "Go to another computer" as one of the three ways to fix the problem. Carly, have you no shame?

2) Nobody seems to be a fan of Norton AntiVirus. There's a lot of love for ZoneAlarm with AntiVirus, Trend Micro's products, and some other names in ones and twos.

3) XP distribution disk necessary for less-than-drastic fixes. HP and Compaq and other brand name manufacturers only ship a "QuickRestore" CD that starts off with (!!!) a format of the hard disk. (Score two points for the build-it screwdriver crowd on this issue.)

4) The majority of people suggested a strategy that reminded me of a line from "Aliens" - "Nuke the site from orbit, it's the only way to be sure." I call it Major Surgery.

5) WinPE to BartPE - If you have access to Windows Preinstallation Environment (WinPE), you can build your own self-booting XP CD with virus-scanning software and other goodies, but most people don't have Microsoft's special Enterprise Agreement (EA) and Software Assurance Membership (SAM) licenses.

A guy named Bart over in the Netherlands that has basically backwards-engineered the concept of WinPE XP booting from CD. You can find his BartPE program to build a Windows XP bootable CD at this page. It looks intriguing if it didn't have all the licensing warnings on it.

Unlikely Fixes
Get a Macintosh - Several people wave this around as the magic wand, but don't seem to work out a spreadsheet on the cost of buying new Apple hardware, new software, and the non-trivial issue that there are applications that aren't available on Macs. Plus the associated issue of supporting something that's got about three per cent market share after you extract iMac sales…

Move to Linux - Many people in Linux land seem to think moving to Linux is a good solution, but it just ain't practical for a lot of us in the desktop world. Again, it's an installed base thing. There are more applications and hardware gizmos under XP that just work when you install them on a (healthy) desktop.

One Linux user running several boxes at work was very frank: "Getting to the point--Linux problems make Windows problems seem like god-sends--in other words simple issues easily solved by the plethora of individuals with the knowledge and willingness to help even at no cost to me. Linux, unlike Windows, has a much smaller group willing to help, able to help, or accessible to help. Everyone in the linux community passes the buck. No one takes ownership of their problems. Bug reports go into the black hole known as bugzilla and end-users that report them hear nothing at all, absolutely nothing, back to help them resolve their problems.

"Getting updates is typically complex, programs are difficult to install, authors of those programs actually expect end-users to compile apps, they expect end-users to be willing to learn how to compile and resolve the compile problems when all the end-user wants is to run the program to provide some service or solve some problem. Those that expect you to compile just don't get it--the end-user is an end-user not a developer…."

Tactics before major surgery
System Restore - Rolling back changes to a previous state. In the case I was working in, this was a no-go for fixing the underlying problem.

System File Checker - Several folks suggested this Microsoft utility. Run within XP in a DOS window, the utility will scans system files against known signatures and replaces corrupted files from either a cache or the original system disk and/or compressed files downloaded as system/security upgrades. Best use is with a XP CD.

XPLite - Found at www.litepc.com, it comes highly recommended by a few fans and has been previously tabbed by the Inq. It sounds Very Cool by allowing you to strip out XP baggage (i.e. code you don't need) as well as being able to turn off Windows File Protection so one can simply write-over old versions of IE. I can't tell you precisely how cool it is, because nobody from Down Under has answered the e-mail I sent them last week with a press request. Not comforting, mates!

Major Surgery
"Nuke the site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure" - A frightening number of people suggested that if anything under XP was corrupted, the least painful course of action was to wipe everything out and start from scratch, either with a "QuickRestore" using manufacture-supplied CDs or (more recently) using a hidden disk partition that's set aside for restoring a grunged boot disk. An alternative strategy was to use a known-good copied disk partition tucked away on an external drive and just blast away everything. Once you have a good XP install, whip out the CD/DVDs and restore your programs and data (assuming you didn't tuck those away on an external disk as well).

About the only technical drawback to this scheme is that Microsoft only allows you to "install" XP up to four times. You'll also have to go back and either reinstall all the little fixes or put SP2 on top of it.

Alternatives to going nuclear
XP Repair, XP Restore
Both alternatives require an XP CD to boot from. XP Repair is the milder option and simply overlays all the windows XP components while leaving the registry intact. XP Restore starts from scratch and lays down everything as virginal. Both options will require applying the security fixes or SP2.after the fresh install, but should avoid the headache of re-installing programs and data. µ