Windows XP Disaster…

I think I’m experiencing a minor disaster with the Windows XP installation I have on my main machine at home.  For some strange reason it has stopped recognising new devices that i plug into the USB slots.  In fact, I think it’s possibly worse than that as moving existing devices to diferent USB slots on the machine is not a pleasant experience either.

the basic issue is that Windows pops up a dialog informing me that it has found a new device, offers me that chance to let it search for a driver.  If I let it search it fils to find a driver and the device is unuseable.  If I don’t let it search there’s no driver and the device fails to work.  The upshot of it all is that I am currently unable to plug in any device via a USB slot on my PC.

Bummer!

I’ve been searching for a solution to this online but there is nothing forthcoming and I’m fast becoming convinced that I may be going through the re-organisation and re-install phase that I have been avoiding for the best part of 18 months after I did a repair install of Windows.

I have a plan to use software virtualisation this time though and I will defenitely stick to my plan of not installing an application until I first need it.  Hopefully this will all help me to maximise my performance for as long as possible.

Software virtualisation is pretty cool; using the Software Virtualization Solution from Altiris, I can install applications into a virtual layer and turn them on or off depending on my need.  the upshot of this is that when the software is effectively turned off, it’s as if it’s not installed.  The official blurb from Altiris themselves is:

Altiris® Software Virtualization Solution™ (SVS™) software is a revolutionary approach to software management. By placing applications and data into managed units called Virtual Software Packages, SVS allows you to instantly activate, deactivate or reset applications and to completely avoid conflicts between applications, without altering the base Windows installation.

This is defenitely the way I’m going this time.  the bit I’m not looking forward to is not finding my slipstream disk and having to nstall windows from scratch… all the patch updates… Ah well what else is a weekend for?