Old Weird Ward
Unless otherwise noted, that which is posted here is opinion, which is protected by the First Amendment to the US Constitution. If you don't like my opinions, go somewhere else. Nobody is forcing you to actually read this drivel.
The presumption exists that you can read at all.
That may be a large assumption.
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Sunday, December 05, 2004
- - - - - Things Computerish - - - - -
I've been a bit busy for the last few days, so no recent posts, but I think I'm about to make up for it - read on.
One of the biggest frustrations in the world is when your PC rolls over, pukes, and won't boot. The durned thing was running just fine yesterday, and today? Pffffft!
Back in the bad old days of Windows ME and earlier, you could boot from a single floppy disk with a little set of utilities handy to let you at least recover your important files (the ones that you meant to back up last week?) so that you could wipe your system down to bare metal and start over again.
Now, in the Wonderful World of Windows XP, you can't do that. In fact, Windows XP Help, when queried for "boot floppy", came up with directions on how to make Windows NT 4 boot floppies.
Well, there's a better solution available.
You can, with a little effort, make a Windows XP bootable CD, with a little handy-dandy set of utilities on it, that can help you salvage your oh-so-important files that you really meant to back up last week. This includes some disk utilities AND software for burning data to a CD (presuming you have a CD/RW drive on the machine in question).
The Ultimate Boot CD 4 Windows (web site HERE) has complete instructions on how to make one.
So far, I'm able to successfully boot a variety of PCs with Windows 98, 98SE, ME, Windows 2000 Professional, Windows XP Home, and Windows 2000 Professional. The tools on the Ultimate Boot CD are impressive, to say the least. I have a couple of minor quibbles with a couple of the utilities that he included, and a couple that he did not include, but this combination of a bootable CD and a bunch of freeware/open source utilities is More Than Good Enough.
Microsoft should have done something like this years ago.
The Ultimate Boot CD 4 Windows is Highly Recommended by Old Weird Ward.
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