Installation

Preparing For A Disk Based Installation

If you decide that you want to copy the entire contents of the installation CD to the hard drive so that you can limit the chances that you will be prompted for the system disk when you change anything, be aware that you will be copying about 6,100 files from the CD to your hard drive, and it may take some time to get them all transferred.

In order to get things started after you have booted to the startup disk, you can type a single command to begin the transfer from the CD to the hard drive. Assuming your local hard drive is C: and your CD-ROM drive is H:, the following command could be used:

XCOPY32 H:\I386\*.* C:\I386\ /E

If you wish to have the system verify that each file was read and written with 100% accuracy, simply add the /V switch after the /E switch shown above. This command will copy all of the files in the I386 folder on the installation CD as well as all of the folders and files underneath it over to the C: drive in a corresponding I386 folder. This is the method often used by corporations with client PC's when they are installed individually. It is especially common with laptops, because you don't want to be lacking for system files in the middle of a plane flight or client visit. I happen to think it is just convenient regardless of the reasoning, so I use this method for my own individual installations regardless of system type. Hard drive space is dirt-cheap now, and there really is no excuse not to take the plunge and get a big hard drive, particularly given the size of the XP operating system and the paging file requirements that it has. When all is said and done, you should have about 500 megabytes of installation files over on your hard drive, and you should be able to put your XP Home CD away somewhere safe.

Once the files are copied, all you do is run the WINNT.EXE program from the C:\I386 folder and you should be able to start your installation. Regardless of whether the install is from the CD or the hard drive, it turns out there is very little user intervention provided for or allowed with Windows XP. You pretty much have to sit back and let it do its thing, answering the occasional prompt when asked. For instance, you may be asked to verify the time zone and language format or a few other things. Hopefully you are using standard IDE hard drives or other supported devices. If not, be sure you have the driver disks handy so that XP can find them when it needs to.

User Accounts

During the last stages of the XP Home install, you will be prompted to create accounts for each user who will be accessing the machine. If you have been using a home network and have had to logon to other machines in the house to use that network, you will want to make sure you type in all of those login names exactly as they are on the other machines in the network. XP Home will use these login names to determine what access rights and privileges users have on each XP machine on the network.

For now, simply type in the name of each user. You can change the specific settings for each one at a later point in time. If you do have a home network going and each machine has the system resources available to properly run Windows XP, you may want to consider upgrading every machine to XP Home. Microsoft is giving discounts to users who upgrade multiple home systems at once, so you may save some money there.

Regardless of the cost, if you are not technically savvy with networking and security, or if you have kids, it may simply be easier to have all the machines look and act the same. The ability to logon by a simple click instead of typing in a user name may help make things more convenient.

If you only have one machine that you are going to share, user accounts can make this process much easier. By default each person has full administrator rights to the computer, but you should edit the user accounts of others who use the machine to help limit their ability to do damage to the system.