Reinstalling Windows

Wednesday, 29 April, 2009

I’ve just completed a fun session of reinstalling Windows XP on to my home machine; I’m a big fan of apps that require no installation and carry all my data and many apps with me. This makes reinstallation much easier. I simply made a brief list of the installed apps on my machine and then (after a backup!) simply ran the install CD for XP. This reinstalls on to an active partition on your machine and simply overwrites the Windows directory and resintalls apps in to “Program Files” (but doesnt delete any files from here). Everything else on the machine remained untouched. I then reinstalled my programs that I regularly use and everything was back up and running relatively quickly.

Except you would never expect anything to be quite so simply and so it turned out. The XP disc had service pack 2 on it, so a 350Mb download later got me service pack 3 which takes a little while to install. I then put on ArcGIS 9.3 (Desktop and Workstation) which takes quite sometime. Add on th service pack 1 and several hours have passed. I then ran ArcGIS to end up in endless dialogs configuring the software. I decided at this point to go back to a system restore point which happened to be before SP3 was installed, so had to go through the whole rigmarole again before I was back at the same point again! So some Googling suggested that a Microsoft XML DLL which ArcGIS uses was the problem; in fact one of the two files (msxml4.dll and msxml4r.dll) was there but in the wrong directory. The other wasn’t (which I simply copied and renamed). Perhaps I’m lucky, but this is the first time I’ve had an install problem, but it does show how frustrating it can be for end users.