This week I am expected to do a demo some software at a prestigious Boston law school. The software is to be demoed on my laptop. Unfortunately, my laptop is an ailing, aging Dell Inspiron 600m. A few weeks back the nic card started to fail and now the video driver has vanished into thin air reducing me to a 4bit 640×480 resolution. To make matters worse, it only powers on with a swift punch to the F6 through F8 keys and does not have a functioning cd rom drive.
Under most circumstances when a pc starts getting all wacky on me, I reformat it. However, the sporadic network card and non functional cdrom drive really creates a challenge when it comes to installing a fresh copy of xp. Luckily I found Roderick van Domburg’s blog entry regarding installing xp from a thumb drive.
To make matters worse I had lost my valid Product Key for windows. Thanks to NeoTechCC I was able to download a Windows XP serial KEY viewer to find out what my existing key was.
After a little over an hour, I was back up and running with a fresh copy of XP.
Now I should be able to isolate the nic and video driver issues.
