Well, so much for upgrading my computer's video card easily. The system is one year old, and I did a full uninstall of the old card's drivers and then shut down, installed the new video card, and powered on.
Disaster! Windows XP was in a completely unusable state. Random blue screen of death up the wazoo, all with memory related errors (page faults, IRQL less than or equal and so forth). Safe mode? Exact same problem. Start with last working configuration? Ditto.
So I dig out the XP installation CD and work my way into the text recovery console, which then wants me to log in to the system's XP installation for file access. Instant crash. OK, next option try a "repair installation". Goes OK until it goes to start XP to copy more files. Instant death.
Eventually I figure maybe the memory has gone bad, so I pull out all but one stick (I use 4). Sure enough the system actually boots - but crashes within minues. Eventually with enough playing around with memory I manage to get it to boot long enough to copy all my data to another partition. At that point I try a few windows updates and, eventually, get it working pretty stable. I try installing the new video card driver.
But all is not good - the new video card refuses to start up and when I go to display properties... all of the tabs that are supposed to be there (to configure desktop backgrounds, screensavers, resolution etc) are completely missing. Even with no function card driver *something* should be there! Even trying to get the old video card to work proves pointless. And it turns out it's not completely stable - after 10-15 minutes it continues to crash with various errors. After 6 hours of troubleshooting, I give up. Time to wipe the partition clean and reinstall from scratch.
So far the OS installaton has gone OK, and I sit here right now waiting while it installs the first batch of 89 Windows updates.
