I found out today, to my delight, that I could boot up in Safe Mode, but not in Safe Mode With Networking, alas.
If I could find the missing driver on the net to download, I could download it to a floppy from my laptop, and then walk across the room to my unwell desktop PC. I wouldn't expect to get everything right, though, extrapolating that technique to a full cleanup tool download, which would probably update the registry on my laptop unnecessarily, when it was the registry on my desktop that needed updating, if any.
If it becomes apt, I will use, with gratitude, the ZIP file you attached to one of your postings, but things have now moved on.
Having got in, on my desktop machine, using Safe Mode, I was able to access "Add or Remove Programs", in which I attempted to uninstall McAfee (masquerading as BT Net Protect Plus). Sadly, the said facility thought that McAfee had already been uninstalled, and therefore only offered me the optional removal of the package's name from the list of software "Add or Remove Programs" knew about, which I declined. Clearly, the Win XP Repair process thinks it knows differently.
I am minded to perform a clean install of XP, having backed up everything I recognise as mine to another drive, and to a stick, for good measure. Who knows what perils await me, in the form of suggestions that my clean installation of XP would like me to insert this or that disk I have never had in my possession, containing various parameter files, so that hardware I'd need a screw driver, a magnifying glass, and courage to examine, could be persuaded to talk to other like hardware my last OEM but one made talk to the other hardware.
Thank you for listening. You have tried to be helpful. I hope that the clean install of XP will exorcise the ghost of McAfee. Would you mind marking this thread, just in case this doesn't work, or I chicken out. My main problem is that I was using Word 2000, which came free with Works 2000. I have a few complicated documents that today's free Open Office suite cannot handle as faithfully as Microsoft's most recent free edition of Word. I therefore will want to reinstate Word 2000, after the clean install of XP, and therefore won't go that route lightly.
I am a retired IT professional. How do ordinary people cope with these sorts of problems?
No comments:
Post a Comment