Ask MetaFilter questions tagged with WindowsXP and XP

What's up with my music files on my PC?

ishotjr — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 17:12:02 -0800

What is up with my music files' titles turning into nonsensical four-letter titles? Ok, this is a little long, but it's a weird problem that is hard to describe.

I use iTunes on a (Dell) Windows Vista PC laptop. I noticed this issue probably over a year ago, but was too lazy to do anything about it until now.

Thousands of my music files are in files within "C:\My Music" that are named with F and then a number, F00 thru F49. All of my music was originally in "C:\Users\ishotjr\Music\iTunes\iTunes Music," and some of it still is. Within the F-named folders, the files are named/songs titled in three different ways.
1) Most are with four letters in caps, example: AJOM. They are seemingly random and not acronyms of the real titles. Within this, most, in the artist/album, etc. fields in Windows Explorer, have the correct info. A few have nothing at all in those.
In either case, if I choose to play it in iTunes (by clicking the option within Windows Explorer, where I'm viewing the files), it brings me to the song that is properly titled within iTunes (i.e., AJOM takes me to "Levitate Me" by The Pixies in iTunes).
2) A few of the songs are named with their correct name, but with the track number proceeding it (i.e. 01 Debaser)
3) Even fewer are named completely normally, with just the actual song title.

Another weird twist is that in iTunes itself, there are a handful of files that are actually named with the four letter names. Most of these are all from a Velvet Underground greatest hits compilation, but there are a few that aren't.

There seems to be no pattern as to how I procured the music and what's in these weird files. I did bring most of the music onto my computer from my iPod when I got the computer, but some of it I have purchased since owning this computer. The software I used to bring the songs from the iPod to the computer was some free program that I don't recall the name of and deleted to save hard drive space when I was done using it.

The real kicker is that most of these weirdly-named tracks are NOT duplicates, so I can't just delete them. Most of the time, it's one or two songs from a given album that are named weird and in the F-named folder instead of in the folder with the rest of its album-mates.

It seems that I might be stuck consolidating the 49 "F" folders into one (not so hard, just tedious), then trying to rename the thousands of song backs to their proper names by clicking them through to iTunes and manually entering the name of each song into the file name in Windows, then moving all of the songs to the correct place. It's not necessary to do this to be able to listen to the songs, but it's annoying having my files all over the place, especially when I want to delete entire albums off of my hard drive to make space.

My actual question is two-part:
1) Has anyone ever had this weirdo thing happen to their music files before?
2) Does anyone know a better way to fix it than to do everything manually (which will take for-ev-er)?

Multiple versions of IE

kidbritish — Sun, 03 May 2009 10:29:57 -0800

In Windows XP, what is the best way to keep Internet Explorer versions 6, 7, and 8 all installed simultaneously? This is for the purpose of testing websites.
When I say "best", I mean the browsers should function normally, and it should be unlikely to cause other problems with the system.
I've seen Multiple-IE, from 2006, which doesn't seem to go past IE6, and Internet Explorer Collection which looks promising. But I'm hesitant to install strange hacks until I've had some input from people more knowledgeable. Do any of you have experience doing this?

Make XP speak in Chinese!

almostwitty — Sun, 03 May 2009 04:05:17 -0800

How can I make my old laptop speak Chinese? Properly, to the same standard as a laptop from Hong Kong? My Dad bought a laptop in Hong Kong. Unfortunately, it's a Celeron and runs like an old dog.

So I give him my (dual-core) laptop, which runs XP with the Chinese language pack installed. But he still uses the old Hong Kong laptop since it's in proper Chinese, apparently, whatever that is.

So how can I make my American-bought laptop use proper Chinese? Someone's suggested buying Windows XP Chinese, but wouldn't the Chinese language pack do the same thing?

Bonus answers for a Chinese-language anti-virus system that I can also understand (since I don't read/speak Chinese, alas)

Can I link from desktop wallpaper?

Joleta — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 07:37:17 -0800

Is there any way I can create desktop wallpaper that has a link to a specific web site? Our company is launching a new human resources online system. We're going to push new wallpaper with a logo and tag line about the new system to all our Windows XP desktops. I was asked if we can include a link to the HR system login page. I've never seen this done within desktop wallpaper, but I don't want to just say "no" without checking. I do the graphics for all our corporate desktop wallpapers, but I'm not a programmer.

Is there any way to view a list of failed incoming faxes in Windows XP using the built-in fax service?

reddot — Sat, 22 Nov 2008 17:34:23 -0800

Is there any way to view a list of failed incoming faxes in Windows XP using the built-in fax service? A friend of mine uses the built in software on XP to send and receive faxes. Sometimes an incoming fax fails. He'd like to know the fax number of the sending party. However, the only notification that a fax failed is a pop up bubble from the system tray, which seems to disappear after a while. Also, if he has had more than one failed fax (like over night), only the last one is reported in the bubble.

Does Windows XP keep a log of incoming and outgoing modem activity? Is there a way to set that up if it doesn't happen by default? I see that in the Event Viewer there is an event for each failed fax, but it does not report the incoming fax #.

Thanks for the help.

More like WRONG arrow key, amirite?

Rhaomi — Sat, 25 Oct 2008 19:52:28 -0800

My laptop's right-arrow key is remapping itself. Any tips for diagnosis or repair? The right-arrow key on my laptop is behaving badly. It seems to be wildly remapping itself several times per second, varying between a few keys. After a little testing, here's what I found out:

- Inside a text field, pressing it will produce either "n/ " or "b". It varies between the two randomly with repeated keypresses. Example:

n/ bbbn/ n/ / bn/ / n/ n/ bn/

(Yes, I realize it typed "/" twice in the middle there -- no clue why)

- When it does type "b", it also minimizes whatever application I'm using.
- When testing in Notepad, pressing the arrow also displays the little underscores under "File", "Edit", etc. that usually appear when you press "Alt", suggesting this key is getting selected, too.
- To see exactly how the key was working, I brought up a driving game that has an area in the menu to test the controls -- pressing the acceleration key will fill up a bar slowly to the maximum speed, for instance. I mapped this function to the arrow, then pressed it. Instead of filling the bar smoothly, it caused it to jitter around a bit but never increase, as if I was lightly tapping the key over and over again.
- Lastly, and most puzzling: the problem comes and goes, seemingly not tied to any one program or process. It'll be there when I boot up, disappear for awhile, then return for no visible reason.

I thought the problem was rooted in a Windows Update I had recently added that XP had been nagging me to install, but rolling back to the pre-Update (and pre-problem) state via System Restore didn't fix it. Rebooting does nothing, either. And I don't have any spyware or viruses, to my knowledge -- my AV software hasn't given me any warnings lately.

My laptop is a Dell Latitude D820, running Windows XP SP2.

Any thoughts? Are there any Microsoft diagnostic tools I could run to repair this irritating little problem?

May I transfer an XP Genuine Advantage Kit install?

Dave 9 — Mon, 08 Sep 2008 19:13:03 -0800

A Dell PC was originally equipped with Windows ME. Somebody later installed, instead, an unauthorized copy of XP. The machine was given to me, and I legitimated the XP install by paying Microsoft for a "Genuine Advantage Kit." Will Microsoft let me use that kit's CD to install XP on a different machine (perhaps an Apple) if I get rid of the first machine? Thanks.

One version of Windows isn't enough, I need three!

Snyder — Sun, 08 Jun 2008 02:27:12 -0800

Will Windows 98 and XP run and dual boot (or, treble boot, I suppose,) with my new Vista running computer? I'm being given a slightly used computer that is currently is running Vista, but I'd like to bring over my hard drives from my current computer. Right now, I have two hard disks, one with Windows 98 and one with XP, and I have a dual boot setup. The computer I want to move them two is a Dell Inspiron 531S, an ACPIx86-based machine, with an AMD Athlon 64 X2 Dual Core Processor 3800+ 2009 Mhz, 958 Megs RAM, and the BIOS is Dell Inc, 1.0.3 6/15/2007. This is all I can easily find out at the moment, since I didn't buy the computer originally and I'm not used to Vista.

To be brief, can I run a triple boot system with Vista, Win98 and XP with this hardware? My idea is to have the backwards compatibility of 98 with the robustness of XP, while Vista gets itself sorted out. Any adivce in that direction too would be appreciated. Thanks for the help.

How can I turn my old Windows XP desktop into a print server for a wired network with Vista and XP machines?

abkadefgee — Fri, 18 Apr 2008 14:07:01 -0800

How can I turn my old Windows XP desktop into a print server for a wired network with Vista and XP machines? I've tried plugging in an old machine, installing two USB printers, and sharing the printers, but the other machines on the network can't seem to connect. I'm running everything through an old Linksys router. Even with the firewall down on the machines, I still can't seem to connect. Are there compatibility issues with XP print sharing with Vista and should I just install some flavor of linux? And if so, how should I do that? I really appreciate your help!

so. slow.

Pants! — Mon, 24 Mar 2008 13:57:56 -0800

Changing the default Open/Attach location in Windows XP? Due to the way our administrator set up our profiles, it takes about ten minutes to open a open/attach dialog box as it tries to go over our network to discover the contents of "My Documents" - the default folder for this dialog box.

Is there a way to change the default location to my desktop, since this is local, faster, and the primary place I have recent files saved anyway?

Send me to computer jail

snowjoe — Sat, 22 Mar 2008 23:54:07 -0800

PC Help again again. I have an old pc with windows 2000 server installed on a 20gig SCSI drive. I am trying to install a 40 gig IDE drive that has xp on it. I don't need windows 2000 server anymore so I want the computer to boot into xp but it isn't happening for me. What am I doing wrong? It is a D850EMV2 intel motherboard with 512kb of that super expensive ram. A custom built computer, not a brand name.

I removed the scsi card and uplugged the scsi drive and then plugged in the IDE drive. The cd drive was connected to the secondary IDE connector so I moved that to the primary connector and connected the middle part of the connector to the ide hard drive and the end to the cd drive. I also moved the led light switched to the motherboard from the scsi card. I get a failure to boot error message. I did nothing with the bios. I am not a computer guy but i sure would like to make this work. What am I doing wrong?

I put everything back the way it was and it boots into windows 2000 server fine. By the way I also tried to format the scsi drive but the os wouldn't let me.

Shouldn't I be able to do this?

Build Custom Windows XP Install Disc

HC Foo — Sat, 15 Mar 2008 08:03:03 -0800

Can I create a custom Windows XP install disc with all of my favorite applications, drivers, windows updates already installed? If so, how do I do it? I have a tendency to break Windows. I am generally really rough on the operating system. Thus, I like to reformat my drive, and reinstall windows about every year to keep things running smoothly. The worst part about the re installation process is reinstalling all of my drivers, and favorite applications. I would love to be able to create a custom XP installation disc that will, when installed, already have all of my applications on there.

Thanks in advance.

Help me reinstall xp

snowjoe — Sat, 13 Oct 2007 13:26:43 -0800

I want to reinstall Windows xp but I am scared. My computer has become sluggish and I would like a fresh install of xp but am uncertain about several things.

I have a forty gig internal and also a 120 gig internal that all of my data is on. I have a new 160 gig Pata drive. I bought it to replace the 40 gig but now I am wondering if I should just keep the 40 gig for the operating system and get a case for the 160 gig drive and use it as an external drive. The computer has a Pentium 4 2.4 Ghz mother board with a cd drive a dvd drive and a firewire card. Should I replace the 40 gig drive?

I learned about the file and settings transfer wizard here on ask MetaFilter. I am on a cabled home network and am wondering if my network settings will be saved with this wizard. I did not setup the network and the guy that did is long gone. Will my network settings be saved with the wizard?

Will I have to get and reinstall drivers for the printers and scanner and cd and dvd etc. or will they be saved also?

What else am I forgeting?

Now that I have asked these question I have to wonder if this might be more complicated than I though it would be. Darn.

My computer is being locked randomly

bristolcat — Thu, 21 Jun 2007 06:16:09 -0800

Windows XP Pro randomly being locked by unknown users. Is my computer being hijacked? I recently moved halfway across the country and my company kept me on staff as a telecommuter. I brought my work computer with me and connect to their network via a dedicated VPN.

During these last three months I have experienced some odd behaviour with my computer. About two weeks after I set up shop here is when it first started. I was actively working on the computer when everything would suddenly start to shut down and the default blue CTRL-ALT-DEL login screen would appear.

It read: "This computer is in use and has been locked" and then listed computername\guest. It gave me an opportunity to put in my username and password, but I never could get in. I would have to hard boot my computer. Just when I got freaked out enough to call IT, it mysteriously stopped.

Now it's happening again. Sometimes I'll come into work and it's happened during the night (such as last night). I've only been here for a half hour this morning and it already happened while I was in the middle of drafting an e-mail to IT. Things are a little different this time, though. It appears to be adding Windows users. They are usually nonsense names ending with a dollar sign. Today when it locked it displayed computername\xiake$. Indeed, there are several new accounts under control panel. My fiance deleted most of them but a few remain that we weren't sure about, such as "admis" and "HelpAssistent" (sic). Also now I am able to login from the locked screen whereas I wasn't able to before.

I am not running a screensaver and when I did, it was not password protected. I'm on XP Pro. I'm running Norton Antivirus but no firewall (as the request of IT for purposes of the VPN I suppose). AdAware found nothing. There is no consistency with anything I'm doing or running when it happens. It seems completely random. I always turn the VPN connection off when I'm not here.

I hope someone here has an idea what's going on and if I'm at risk. I have recently paid for items with credit cards on this computer and checked my bank accounts. This is starting to freak me out a little!

Thanks!

Any thoughts on reinstalling dell drivers?

TrueVox — Fri, 11 May 2007 18:56:23 -0800

I'm trying to reinstall Windows XP, but I'm running into driver issues. I'm using a Dell Inspiron E1405 that I want to dual boot XP and Feisty Faun on (I want to go Linux full time, but I needs my WoW, and I can't get Wine to be friendly with my Video Card). I'm running into driver issues. I was smart enough to back up all my drivers from my previous installation, but it's not working very well to reinstall them. I run into this issue were even though I saved them all (using a program called DriverMax), they won't reinstall properly. I can get most of 'em, but my sound is still funky, it says my wireless is working, but it won't connect, and there's three unrecognized "System" devices. Do dells have some funkieness with their drivers?

Anyway, I just want to get this right so I can install Ubuntu. I'm sick of swaping out HDD's every time I wanna do something different.

Thanks a lot!

Hope me get my settings back.

dirtynumbangelboy — Sat, 14 Apr 2007 10:08:51 -0800

Had to reinstall XP Home. How do I get all my old settings back? Something inside my computer went all explodey. I'm not sure what happened, but I could not boot at all. Had to reinstall XP Home from the CD.

I had thought that all that would do would be repair whatever was broken in XP. Clearly I was wrong. I've managed to find my old 'my documents' folder, and restore the Start Menu to how I had it before.

What I need to find (if possible) are:

1) whatever file governed how my taskbar was set up, including quicklaunch

2) My Firefox settings, including add-ons and skin

3) Basically, actually, all of my old settings.

Am I hooped?

I want extra large fonts in plum. How hard can that be?

Irontom — Tue, 20 Mar 2007 10:39:14 -0800

WinXP appearance question... Here's what I want: Windows XP Style Windows and Buttons + Plum Color Scheme + Extra Large Fonts. My google-fu fails entirely. Can you help?

Will Vista-Native drivers work in XP Pro? Y/N

SlyBevel — Mon, 05 Mar 2007 10:52:52 -0800

I have a client system that has Vista preinstalled. The client wants XP Pro on the system. It's a laptop, and the manufacturer (HP) only provides Vista drivers. Will the Vista drivers work in Windows XP? Is there a hardware-equivalent HP system that is the Windows XP version that I can get drivers for to use on this one? It's an HP DV6235NR. Thanks!

XP unusably slow after STOP errors and running checkdisk - what's going on?

goodnewsfortheinsane — Sun, 04 Mar 2007 12:29:42 -0800

So it's come to this - I see no other option than to ask a "help me fix my PC" question. After some troubleshooting the STOP errors seem to have been resolved, XP now boots successfully but is excruciating slow to the point of being unusable. Details and specs below the fold. Specifications:
-Intel Celeron 2.4GHz
-1 x 512 MB RAM
-XP Pro SP2
-PCI Firewire card
-onboard: USB 2.0, VIA Gigabit Ethernet adapter

IDE config:

1M: HD Maxtor 80 GB U-ATA
1S: empty
2M: DVD Burner
2S: DVD-ROM

First, the BIOS would occasionally fail to find the boot device (HD). Setting the primary master to "Not Installed" and rebooting, and then back to "Auto" remedied this for the time being.

Then a few days ago the machine started throwing a bunch of BSODs during normal operation. I recorded some of them for your viewing pleasure:

0x000000F4, 0x00000003, 0x829FF020, 0x829FF194 0xc000000E, 0xC000000E, 0x00000000, 0x05357000 0x0000007A (0XC03E1128, 0XC0000185, 0XF844A074, 0X08195860) ACPI.SYS 0x0000008E (0XC0000005, 0X8054AE34, 0XF6505BF4, 0X00000000)

Eventually XP wouldn't boot at all: system32/config was 'corrupted', or something along those lines. I assume this happened as a result of one of the STOP errors.

For some reason CHKDSK wouldn't run on this machine, so I took out the drive and ran CHKDSK on it with the drive attached to another machine. It did find a bunch of errors and corrected them all.

I put it back in its own box, and ran CHKDSK again from the Recovery Console (ran fine this time, and found no errors) and also a FIXBOOT for good measure.

Which brings us to the current situation. The system32/config error is gone, and Windows does boot, *but*:

-The XP splash screen fades in very slowly and seems halted here and there.
-Upon logon, the desktop background loads but no icons or taskbar appear.
-I can load explorer and systray via taskmgr, and sometimes they eventually load on their own without intervention, but this takes a *long* time. Somewhere in the ten minutes order of magnitude.

So technically speaking, Windows now runs, but it's so excruciatingly slow it's basically unusable.

Additional details:
-I have run a Spybot Search & Destroy scan: it found some threats and removed them. No new findings upon further boots and/or Spybot runs.
-I would scan for viruses, but I can't install AVG Free: I just removed the old 7.1 version (had to anyway as it was no longer supported), and the 7.5 installer happily skips from "pick a directory" to "Installation Complete!" but never seems to have touched a file at all! Doesn't even create the specified directory in Program Files.
-Network now also doesn't work. The Network Connections window says "Connected" but the machine receives no IP address nor lease from router. Router and rest of network are running fine.
-I tried System Restore with a variety of restore points from the past two weeks or so, but after going through the process (which also takes very long) it reboots and tells me that restoring to the previous point failed.

In short, I'm confused and could really use your insight. What's causing this and how can I fix it? Thanks in advance for any light you can shed upon this. If you have any questions or need any further details, I'd be happy to answer and provide them.

Fast User Switching is fast, but it won't swtich users

scarabic — Fri, 22 Dec 2006 09:08:39 -0800

Fast User Switching isn't working for me in Windows XP Pro. I'm trying to use multiple accounts in XP to give myself and my gf separate desktops, apps, folders, etc. But once one of us logs in, we have to completely log out before the other person can sign into their account.

If I don't actually log out, for example, she may click "switch user" and see the password-entry screen, but when she enters her password, all that happens is the desktop image flashes on the screen for 1 second and then the password screen comes back.

What I want is to keep all my apps running in the background (bit torrent, for example) while she logs into her account and uses it. That's my understanding of what Fast User Switching should allow under Windows XP. Am I wrong? Logging out completely kills my apps (and my downloads that are running).

This is XP Pro, all the service packs and updates yadda yadda. And I already have a Mac, so please... :)

Comprehensive XP -> Parallels migration

maniabug — Fri, 20 Oct 2006 10:12:27 -0800

What's the most efficient way to transfer an entire functioning Windows XP PC to my new Mac running Parallels? I'm looking to ship over the whole nine yards: files, settings, apps, and appropriate registry entries. The Windows File and Settings Transfer Wizard does not move the apps. I'm going to have to do this on a regular basis, and would prefer to do as little by hand as possible. Do you have a favorite software tool for this?

I considered imaging the hard drive, but I believe Parallels uses a proprietary image format.

How can I transfer pictures to my computer without it crashing in the process?

punishinglemur — Mon, 22 Aug 2005 08:46:11 -0800

I'm trying to transfer pictures from my digital camera to my computer, which is being made very difficult by the constant bluescreens Windows is giving me. In the past I've had no problems copying pictures from my xD picture card to my computer by using the card reader that's in my computer. But I just tried copying over a bunch of pictures and after one was copied, Windows threw up a bluescreen error that said something like "An error has been detected in your system," followed by much more that I was unable to read because the system immediately restarted. I tried again, and after two more pictures were transferred the same thing happened. I tried one more time, and while there appeared to be no problem re-copying the three pictures that had made it over to the computer, as soon as it tried to copy another picture I got the bluescreen again. What's going on and how can I fix it?

(Side question: If I were to use tech support on this, who would I go to? The camera manufacturer? The computer manufacturer? Microsoft?)

Setting up my new HDD

jewishbuddha — Thu, 21 Apr 2005 06:00:06 -0800

What should I do with my new hard drive? I just got a new 80gb drive for my laptop that I'm planning to install in the next few days, and I'm looking for advice on how to set it up. Should I partition? Do you have a good method of organizing/managing your files? Recommended disk utilities? Back-up or maintenance routines?

If it helps, I currently have about 25gb on the 30gb drive I'm replacing. It's 14gb of music, 1.5gb of pictures, another gig or so of misc. documents. The rest is windows bloat and applications. One of the motivations for the new drive is to have storage for higher res pictures. I'm a student (for another month!) and my future employer will be providing me a new computer, so this is just for personal use.

I'm running XP Pro on a Dell Latitude x300. I'll be keeping the 30gb drive in a USB enclosure and can use it for back-ups, emergency booting, etc.

I got some good tips in these threads, but would like to hear more. I figure if I'm starting with a clean slate, now is a good time to pick up some good habits.

Why has my Firefox slowed down?

zorro astor — Mon, 17 Jan 2005 08:49:14 -0800

Why has my Firefox slowed down? It started a few day ago. Sometimes it takes several minutes for a page to load. Some only partially load, then stop. Some don't load at all. Not every page is this way, but I'd say about 20% suffer from one of these problems. IE is zipping right along though. I did a virus check, ran Spy-bot and Ad-Aware and cleaned up my registry. Yet the problem persists. Oh, I'm running 1.0 and XP Pro.

XP install: how do I find my sound card's drivers? And what programs do I really need?

twine42 — Thu, 16 Dec 2004 15:23:50 -0800

Laptop Clean XP Install:
1] My (on board?) sound card is unrecognised. How do I find out what drivers to use?

2] What programs do you really think I need? I already have VNC, VLC, Firefox, Thunderbird and AVG installed. What else should I add? (Freeware/OS appriciated but not needed.) VNC = Remote access program
VLC = DVD player type thing
AVG = AntiVirus