How To Share Desktop In Windows Xp

Afterward 20 hours of toil and problem, our new desktop Samus is running perfectly!

She is a brand-new eMachines T5254 with 2 ii.1 GHz processors, 2 GB of RAM, and an Nvidia GEforce 8500, running (drum roll…) Windows XP.

Tower: $400
Monitor: $120 (merely we could accept gotten a comparable one for $80)
Graphics card: $80
Audio menu: $40
Optical mouse: $10 (why are these not standard already?)
Total: $650

That's a very nice complete setup for just $650, and we could have gone even lower if not for a few of our peculiar preferences. We got the tower, graphics card and sound bill of fare from Best Buy and the monitor and optical mouse from Discount Electronics.

Our motivation for getting a new desktop is that the games nosotros desire to play don't run on our laptops, or when they do run, they don't run well. We're usually on the couch when we play games on our laptops, then as long every bit we go a graphics card with an Due south-Video out, nosotros can play on the Boob tube. The integrated graphics card (which was really pretty nice, a GEforce six serial) didn't have an S-Video out, and then we upgraded to a very prissy one, the 8500.

The reason nosotros needed a sound card is considering the onboard sound carte was proprietary, and the manufacturer has only released drivers for Vista. Nosotros wanted to wipe Vista and install XP, and when nosotros did so, we couldn't get whatsoever audio at all. And so basically, we needed to go a stupid audio card just so we could run XP instead of Vista. Phooey on proprietary hardware specs, phooey on integrated sound and video cards, and most of all, phooey on Vista. PHOOEY!

What follows is the story of the xx hours of toil and problem we incurred when wiping Vista to install XP. I'm posting it in the hopes that it can save someone else from spending as much time futzing with it every bit I did.

The first thing to do is to remove Vista. A decent overview can be found at http://removevista.com, but I'll go into a little more detail here, because that site has things like "brand a boot CD and use it" which could use a niggling more detail. And so, hither are my instructions for how to wipe Vista and install XP.

Download the Ultimate Kick CD. It is an ISO file, which is a file blazon meant to be burned to a CD.
Burn the Ultimate Kick CD ISO file to a CD. Exist certain to burn down it as an ISO file: your CD called-for program might do the right thing if you simply double-click on the ISO file. It'south easy to make the error of burning a data CD that contains simply 1 file (the ISO file), just that won't work. So cheque to make sure the CD has more than 1 file on it when it's done burning.
Support all data yous wish to save.
Put the Windows XP install CD in your CD-ROM drive and kick up your computer. Mine says [F10] Kick Bill of fare when I'm booting up, so I hit F10 and it asks me which device I'd like to boot from. I option CD-ROM, and and so after a flake it says "Press any key to boot from CD" so I press a key.
Press R to repair an existing installation
fixboot c:\
fixmbr c:\
exit
Put the Ultimate Boot CD in the CD-ROM bulldoze and reboot, using the aforementioned F10 process.
Select Hard disk Tools -> Disk Manager ten (Samsung).
Format the C: bulldoze. Information technology doesn't matter which version of Windows you pick, considering nosotros're going to reformat after.
Put the Windows XP install CD dorsum in the CD-ROM drive and reboot.
Install Windows XP! In the process, you can reformat the drive as NTFS.

I learned most of these steps from removevista.com, and filled in the missing knowledge about kick CDs by hours of painful futzing. Also, I learned that if you lot have an XP CD that isn't bootable, you're hosed. (Unless y'all can notice some way to boot with the boot CD and so hotswap CDs, which I lost patience with figuring out.)

Later XP is done installing, be sure to connect to the Net to let it download all its service packs and vulnerability fixes and stuff.

Install the drivers for the Nvidia GEforce menu. This was no problem.

And so I tried to play a game. This was the point where I got "out of range" and "cannot display this video fashion" errors. The monitor would just go blank and display that fault. The TV would work fine via the Due south-Video cable, but the monitor was hosed. I futzed with this for several hours. I inverse the refresh charge per unit, inverse the resolution, mucked about with safe mode, returned the monitor and got a new one, cipher helped. And then I finally stumbled beyond the solution: download the latest DirectX patches. I also installed the latest drivers for my monitor, simply I don't know whether that fabricated any difference.

Then I tried to play a game, and it crashed for a dissimilar reason. I checked the log file and found that information technology was crashing when trying to initialize the sound. This was because the integrated sound menu was non detectable past XP and the manufacturer did not release any XP drivers. Grr! And then nosotros went out and bought a cheapo sound menu, and we couldn't become the drivers to recognize it. Grr. EDIT: See Randy'due south comment below for a link to the drivers for the onboard audio menu! This would take saved u.s. so much hassle!

I went into the BIOS and disabled the onboard sound carte du jour. That didn't set up the problem. I left it disabled, so it might have helped subsequently; I'm non sure. I think information technology was similar [F2] on kicking, then Integrated Peripherals or something, then Hard disk drive Audio.

So we returned the cheapo sound card and got a slightly less cheapo sound carte, a SoundBlaster (considering I know I can download drivers for those), and that worked except that at that place was an annoying corporeality of static interference. We spent some other several hours trying to fix the static. Nosotros checked the speakers, information technology wasn't the speakers. We moved the sound carte to a slot further abroad from the video carte du jour, and that didn't help. We tried putting various things between the sound menu and the video card, and that didn't assist. We tried turning the wireless off, and that didn't help. We tried muting the line in and the CD audio, and that didn't help. We knew information technology was the video carte causing the interference, considering we'd become far more sound static when nosotros'd do something 3D and graphics-intensive. But we couldn't effigy out what to exercise near it. Finally we only went back to Best Buy and bought a SoundBlaster Audigy SE for $40, popped information technology in, and information technology worked like a charm. Yay for throwing money at the problem! I don't know if the other semi-cheapo used audio card nosotros got (a SoundBlaster Audigy 2) was but bad, or what, just ownership a new ane did the play a joke on. Yay!

At present Kyeli is playing Sims 2, which is running smoothly and not even thinking about crashing. We take a beautiful desktop background, a perfect couch setup, working audio, working graphics, and a really great new computer. All is well, and I'm quite pleased with myself. (: Kyeli was very helpful also; I couldn't have done this without her assist. *kiss* (: