Chronicles of my struggle to get rid of my old laptops
I hoard things…especially things that I used for awhile. When I finally replaced the items, I don’t get rid of my old items even though I don’t use them. I continue to hoard them, they just sit in the basement and occupied space.
Now I am on my third laptop (finally made the switch from PC to MacbookPro in 2020…it’s a shocker I know), now i am ready to finally get rid of our old Dell laptops (including my husband’s).
Before I drop these to my local BestBuy store for electronic waste recycle program, I need to completely reformat or delete all the data in them. So the main task for the month is:
Reinstall Windows XP on my old laptops.
Step 1: find the power chord to power those bad boys.
So I looked around in the ̶d̶u̶n̶g̶e̶o̶n̶ basement. To my disbelief, we actually dropped those chargers at Bestbuy couple months prior 🤦♀️. So…
Step 1: f̶i̶n̶d̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶ ̶p̶o̶w̶e̶r̶ ̶c̶h̶o̶r̶d̶ ̶t̶o̶ ̶p̶o̶w̶e̶r̶ ̶t̶h̶o̶s̶e̶ ̶b̶a̶d̶ ̶b̶o̶y̶s̶. ask friends see if anyone has any compatible Dell power chord
I messaged my friends on Facebook including my techie friends. Their responses were: “sorry, I used Mac.” , “sorry i can’t seem to find ours.”, “sorry we don’t use Dell laptop.”
Last resort…Amazon.
Step 1: f̶i̶n̶d̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶ ̶p̶o̶w̶e̶r̶ ̶c̶h̶o̶r̶d̶ ̶t̶o̶ ̶p̶o̶w̶e̶r̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶s̶e̶ ̶b̶a̶d̶ ̶b̶o̶y̶s̶ ̶a̶s̶k̶ ̶f̶r̶i̶e̶n̶d̶s̶ ̶a̶n̶d̶ ̶s̶e̶e̶ ̶i̶f̶ ̶a̶n̶y̶o̶n̶e̶ ̶h̶a̶s̶ ̶a̶n̶y̶ ̶c̶o̶m̶p̶a̶t̶i̶b̶l̶e̶ ̶D̶e̶l̶l̶ ̶p̶o̶w̶e̶r̶ ̶c̶h̶o̶r̶d̶ Order the power adapter on Amazon
Before I order on Amazon, I needed to find out the compatible power adapter, to avoid ordering the wrong adapter. After I carefully inspected the sticker on the back of the laptop, I realized the Dell Inspiron requires PA10–PA12 power adapter. I searched on Amazon page, and decided on the following universal adapter which has over 1000 ratings and seems reliable. After matching the specifications, and the PA10-PA12 charging requirements, I placed the order and waited patiently for 2 days (thanks to Amazon Prime).
2 days later, Step 2: Turn on the laptop
I happily opened the Amazon yellow package and found the right adapter and plugged the power brick to the wall outlet. To my surprise, the laptop responded immediately and powered on immediately. I was happy, thought to myself: “it’s going to be easy from now on.”. When the screen turns on:
…I mean…it still workable, what do i expect from a 13 year old laptop. I started Windows XP in safe mode, and was able to get into the Desktop screen and User Account menu. I figured I need to see if there are any data needs to be saved. I navigated through the documents folder, and find out if anything needs to be transferred over. Then I proceeded to delete the user account by following the instruction on Youtube (instructions here). Once the user account is deleted, all the user profile data is deleted. Easy and done. Now onto the most important step…reinstall Windows XP to the laptop.
Step 3: Find a Windows XP ISO file
I obviously no longer have the Windows XP installer CD. Even though Microsoft stopped supporting Windows XP earlier in 2020, I figured probably can get a Windows XP ISO file for free on internet somewhere. I was able to download a copy from Microsoft website.
Step 4: Configure/program a USB drive with the Windows XP iso file
After I found the Window XP ISO file, I need a media to mount the Window XP ISO installer file to. Okay, a bit of disclaimer, I have installed Windows 10 on my husband home built desktop from a USB thumb drive before, so I know I can turn any USB thumb drive to any Windows software installer file, much like back in the old days you need a CD to install software.
So the next step is to load the Windows XP installer file to a USB drive so I can use the USB drive as a boot device to reinstall Windows XP to my old laptop. But I was struggling so much with my USB thumb drive, we have the 32 GB 100 Data Traveler G3, and for some strange reason our Windows 10 desktop just fails to recognize the thumb drive. Or rather, after I restarted my computer, it recognized at first at then failed and gave me error message. It kept giving me an error message: Code 43, but I already updated all the USB drivers on the desktop.
After a few rounds of rebooting my PC and it seems to be stable enough to recognize my thumb drive, so I proceeded using a third party tool — Rufus to move my Windows XP ISO files to the thumb drive. When I was following Rufus instruction to move the Windows XP ISO files, I encountered an error…
It says the Windows XP ISO files can’t be mounted because it’s not a supported ISO file…🤬
Deep breath Natalie…Deep Breath
Okay. So I need to find an appropriate Windows XP ISO file. Back to Google it is.
Step 4: ̶C̶o̶n̶f̶i̶g̶u̶r̶e̶/̶p̶r̶o̶g̶r̶a̶m̶ ̶a̶ ̶U̶S̶B̶ ̶d̶r̶i̶v̶e̶ ̶w̶i̶t̶h̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶ ̶W̶i̶n̶d̶o̶w̶s̶ ̶X̶P̶ ̶i̶s̶o̶ ̶f̶i̶l̶e̶ Find a workable Windows XP ISO file with Rufus
As I googled, I found on Internet Archieve.org that there is a copy of Windows XP Service Pack 3 ISO file available with the product key. I downloaded a copy of the file, and tried it with Rufus, and it worked! 🙌
Step 5: Configure the USB drive with new Windows XP Service Pack 3 ISO file
Rufus recognized the USB drive and then was able to move the ISO files to the USB thumb drive. But half way through the process it failed…
Ugh…my Windows 10 desktop just didn’t like the 32 GB USB thumb drive. So I proceeded to restart my desktop and see if it works again, and it failed to recognized the USB thumb drive. I googled some more…some forums suggested maybe the motherboard bios needs to be updated. 🤯
I NEED TO UPDATE BIOS???
At this point, I already spent like 2 hours googling, restarting my desktop, going to Device Management to uninstall and install the drivers…I am getting a bit exhausted from fighting with the desktop.
So I decided to pull out the big boy — my WD 1TB passport, I wanted to see if the ̶s̶t̶u̶p̶i̶d̶ desktop recognize any external USB drive.
To my surprise, my desktop recognized the 1TB external hard drive. So I concluded that it’s not my Windows 10 desktop USB drivers have issues, it’s most likely it’s the 32 GB thumb drive itself. So after contemplating for few minutes (more like 20 minutes), I am going to use the 1TB external hard drive as the bootable USB drive.
Step 5: ̶C̶o̶n̶f̶i̶g̶u̶r̶e̶/̶p̶r̶o̶g̶r̶a̶m̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶ ̶U̶S̶B̶ ̶d̶r̶i̶v̶e̶ ̶w̶i̶t̶h̶ ̶n̶e̶w̶ ̶W̶i̶n̶d̶o̶w̶s̶ ̶X̶P̶ ̶I̶S̶O̶ ̶f̶i̶l̶e̶ Back up my files from 1TB external hard drive
It took 30 minutes to back up my files in the 1TB external hard drive. Once that is done, I proceeded to use Rufus to create a USB bootable drive with Windows XP on it. And yes it worked! We are getting somewhere…
Step 6: Reformat my laptop
So I entered boot menu on my old laptop:
I realized I need instructions to help me navigate the menu, as I can barely make out the texts on the screen…So I found couple videos on YouTube that was able to help me navigated the options on the screen to reformat my laptop. I deleted my disk partition on the laptop, and an hour later…
I was able to get to the Windows XP installation screen…however, it prompted me for the CD for the Windows XP Service Pack 3 ! 🤦♀️🤦♀️🤦♀️🤦♀️🤦♀️🤦♀️🤦♀️🤦♀️🤦♀️🤦♀️🤦♀️🤦♀️🤦♀️ x100000000
At this point, I already spent over 6 hours on this task, so I called it a night, and retired to my bed.
*Note: I figured at this point I probably downloaded the wrong version of Windows XP Service Pack 3 ISO file from Internet Archieve.Org. I could probably continue with my reformat/reinstall. I admitted defeat at this point, and contemplated for a bit, and I will leave my laptop in this state.
Lesson learnt?
- You should get rid of the things as soon as you replace them, if i have gotten rid of these laptops when I replaced them with my desktop eons ago, I think it would have saved me some headache now, and it might be able to reuse by someone else.
- Basic and Dynamic Disk —as I formatted and reformatted my 32GB USB thumb drive and 1TB external hard drive https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/fileio/basic-and-dynamic-disks. Learnt a bit about the difference between basic and dynamic disk.
- Rufus — It seems to be a handy tool to create bootable USB for the future. I downloaded other tools (e.g ImgBurn etc.) But it seems like Rufus is one of the popular one out there.
- DiskPart command — just simple CMD command to create/delete disk partitions.
- Different OS — My life might be easier if I decided to install different OS instead of Windows XP OS, e.g. Ubuntu
