my son's hand-me-down.....

My son upgraded to Vista, and bought a whole new system. I have inherited his old system, which is only about 3 years old, and runs XP. My current system is circa 98, and runs, wait for it....... 98!
I'm going from a 3GB hard drive to 80GB, and at least twice the RAM, but I will have to figure out how to configure everything using XP. I can't find anything except Spider Solitaire on XP, so I'm thinking it's time to go to the library and get the Dummies book or something similar. We're going to reinstall XP first, just to start with a clean slate, then I'm sure I'll be asking lots of questions about how to configure stuff. It's been so long since I first set everything up, I've forgotten most of it! But if I did it the first time, I should be able to do it again!

Right click on the taskbar and choose "properties"
Choose the "Start Menu" tab and
Choose "Classic Start menu"

If that's not close enough to what you are used to, you can also

Right click on the desktop and choose "properties"
Choose the "Appearance" in the Display Properties popup and
Choose "Windows Classic Style" in the Windows and buttons dropdown.

Why not be really brave a go for a linux distro..

Now that is fun!

And guess what? All the software is free!

If you play games or use an ipod or something else that requires windows forget this advice though.

whatever you choose, make sure you patch it, anti-virus it, and firewall it - because we have two laptops at home - one runs XP(needs all the above) the other Ubuntu(needs none of the above

), and guess which one just keeps on running without slowing down?

No matter how you treat an XP box after a few months it just seems slower.

whatever, they both run the sdk jdk stuff - I personally prefer the editor I use in linux, but I guess it is what you are used to.

One final thing.... I am not anti-microsoft (it has earned me a living), I just prefer linux now.

Nick White
mcse, ccna (and scjp!! hopefully after the 12th April - fingers crossed.)
[ March 21, 2007: Message edited by: Nick White ]

Carol,

You show an amazing amount of courage, determination, perseverance, humour and generosity, and I so admire you! You rock!

Okay - now that I got that off my chest, I can tell you that I know virtually nothing about XP, but whenever I end up trying to use it, I run to

http://www.tweakxp.com/

for help.

There are also free Windows XP tutorials out there, but I haven't been motivated enough to try them out.
(first link og google for 'windows XP tutorials' was
http://www.learnthat.com/courses/computer/windowsxp/)

All the best,
Katrina

Thanks Folks! Got the new/old system fired up, and just got the wireless internet connection working. Now to look into downloading all the java stuff. I figure I'll just take it one step at a time. Wish me luck!

Good luck!!

Hey, does this mean you get to mess with the classpath again?

Don't say that word! It scares me!