Bare Bones Troubleshooting Installation

I get a lot of letters from readers that experience trouble installing Windows XP. By the time they get around to writing me, the old operating system is long ago trashed and they have tried everything under the proverbial computing sun. Well, almost everything. It's a fact of life that when installing operating systems, less is better, especially when there are problems. If you're in the above category, give this a try.

Remove everything that is installed or connected to your computer so the only things remaining in the case are:
Motherboard, processor, and cooling fan
Graphics card
One stick of RAM
One hard drive
One CD ROM drive

That's it. No sound card, no network interface card, no modem, no extra hard drives or CD ROM drives. Especially important is not to have more than one memory stick, and it should be a minimum of 128MB. Connect up the monitor, the keyboard and the mouse and power up the machine. Go into the BIOS settings and look for a setting for the basic BIOS default configuration. Select it, then make sure that if you're booting from a CD ROM that the CD drive is the first boot device.

Reboot and let the installation process begin. I haven't kept track of numbers, but in the vast majority of cases the installation was completed with no problem. Once you have the basic operating system in place it's a simple matter to start adding back in the extra memory, drives, and devices that were stripped out initially.

A final tip. I know it's tempting to add everything else back in at once after a successful install. Don't do it. Something was causing a problem initially or you wouldn't be using this procedure. Add the pieces back one memory stick, one hard drive, one network interface card at a time and test the system for proper operation after each addition.