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Agonisingly Slow Windows XP Installation


Guest Raine
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Guest Raine

Ok, I finally got around to buying the Windows XP Professional upgrade to replace my old Windows 98SE. I have had some problems installing it though.

I never had any troubles installing Windows 98 (I did it regularly). But installing XP Professional is causing some pains. Firstly I got a stop error 0x0000006F while trying to install. I turned off BIOS memory caching and that got rid of that error. But (possibly as a result of turning off BIOS memory caching), the installation is taking quite a bit longer than I think is usual.

How long? Well, it took 32 hours for the percentage guage to get to 100% in the "Preparing to install" stage. :blink: It is currently in the actual installation phase at the moment. Basically I'm hoping that it all goes well if it has taken this long. :unsure:

I'm running a P3 866Mhz, 128mb ram, 20Gb HD, unsure of the motherboard type (I'm not at home to check it). As this exceeds the recommended specs by a bit I'm assuming it isn't just a "slow computer" type problem.

So, has anyone else had this problem before, and more importantly, found a solution to it? It may all work out fine in the end as it is actually installing, just very slowly. Nevertheless, it is annoying...

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Hello, and welcome to the Windows Forum!

32 HOURS??? No, I have never heard of such a thing. It takes about 30 minutes on a modern (P4) PC, but it certainly shouldn't take THAT long, even with an older processor!

Sorry, I cannot offer you any help for now, but if you wait a bit, there are lots of knowledgeable people here from all around the globe, so you may get some good advice eventually.

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I think that XP will be straining a bit to install on a machine of that spec, even though it reaches the minimum required.

Are you installing on top of your old W98 setup or doing a fresh install? It is always better to install on to a freshly formatted disc rather than your new O/S struggling through loads of (now) useless junk of your old system trying to load itself.

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I am not that well into the actual workings of computers, but 128mb ram sounds rather low to me. It seems that MOST of the problems experienced by XP users are on upgrades. There seems to be very little bother with new computers. I even found that 128mb ram was slow on my old W98SE computer, and upped this to 256.

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Although the memory is a little on the low side for XP it should not cause this type of problem on installing the O/S. stop error 0x0000006F can be put down to bad memory in many, but not all issues similar to this.

If you have a second CD drive then try loading from that, as it is also a problem with some older CD drives being able to read XP. This can be sorted by using a boot floppy to format the drive before installing XP direct from the CD disk.

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I've ran both Win2000 and WinXP (and Mandrake and Slackware Linux but they're irrelevant) with 128 MB RAM with no issues whatsoever.

But were you installing over W98? :)

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I've ran both Win2000 and WinXP (and Mandrake and Slackware Linux but they're irrelevant) with 128 MB RAM with no issues whatsoever.

But were you installing over W98? :)

This is very true.

I would agree with -pops- on this one, and suggest a clean install.

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Guest Raine

Was installing from a cleanly formatted drive. I'm pretty sure it wasn't a physical memory problem and I'm leaning towards it being a CD drive problem - the CD-ROM drive is far too dependant on BIOS memory caching or something. Next time I'll try using a different CD-ROM...

Anyways, I'm speaking past tense because when setup got to the installing phase I was able to reboot the computer, turn BIOS caching back on and let setup pick up where it left off. The rest went fine from there - 32 hours of "preparing to install" and 20 minutes of actual installation. Lovely. :P

Thanks for the replies. Cheers.

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