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computer question for computer people

Posted: Thu Aug 19, 2004 6:30 pm
by howdthattaste
hey

computer people, can you help me?

my friend has WinXP pro.
she doesnt have Office Xp.

her other friend, thought that the WinXP pro discs had Office on there... (easy mistake i guess). anyway, they tried installing it and halfway through the computer told them that WinXP was already installed and they cancelled it.

Now, whenever you turn on the PC, it comes to a dual boot screen with two selections: the default being "Setup Winows XP on this machine" and the other just plain "Windows XP"

you have to push the arrow key to select winxp for windows to load correctly, otherwise it defaults to the DOS winxp setup program. gay.

so i think they attempted to install another copy of winxp on the machine, which is fine, but totally not what they wanted. How do i get rid of this half ass attempt, or get rid of that dual boot screen when the computer starts up?

thanks in advance. im fairly good with computers, but i've never had to fix something like this.


-paul

"You should never underestimate the predictability of stuipidity" -Tony

Posted: Thu Aug 19, 2004 7:02 pm
by bluesmiester
One possiblity is to reformat the hard drive and try again from scratch.

Posted: Fri Aug 20, 2004 12:52 am
by GretscGuy
Without knowing what OS the person originally had, it's hard to say if they'll be able to go back. Once a disc is formatted for NTFS, it generally stays that way. Shouldn't be a big deal if she was running 2k, but if she had 98...

I guess the moral of the story is don't pirate software. If I need a program, I go out and buy it. I had PA9 until recently becuase I didn't have the extra $ for Sonar. I moved up to Studio and only recently upped that to Producer. Cakewalk, Office, Photoshop, etc... are very expenisve programs. If people didn't copy them they would be less.