Yesterday, I installed a fresh copy of Windows XP on my brand new laptop. It is the first time I have eliminated a genuine copy of SP3 to shift to SP2. Although, there was nothing new in this installation except, I did it using a USB flash drive. The HP Mini laptops don't come with a CD or DVD Writer when you but one. But who needs it? The only thing I was afraid of was what would happen if my operating system gets corrupt. And guess what? It did happen due to few viruses when I was working with neglegence last few days. I had one option to use windows backup utility. But it came to be of no use. Then I tried recovering windows by 'Roxio back on track'. But all in vain unless you have an appropriate drive. Then the option I was left with was, buy a portable USB DVD Rom, which could have cost me about Rs 3000.

Now, I tried another way. I took up WinToFlash, created a bootable flash drive. I then, all was smooth, until I got the hal.dll error. Debugging option did not work, even if I tried it 3 times. Then, the selection of 2nd option, i.e. GUI Mode, worked fine, and now, here I am with fully formatted, virus free hard drive with four partitions.

One thing I noticed in this regard was, that my system did not support FAT. The only option I had were NTFS (Quick) and NTFS (detailed), may be due to Intel Atom, whereas, when I tried using the same windows setup in my home desktop with Intel Pentium IV, i could have partitions format in FAT system also.

Now, after I installed all drivers, including LAN driver, it is a feel of relief on using blogger after a long time.