First of all, I would like to say "thank you" to anyone who can help me in any way. Here is my problem: I have a desktop running on XP that I want to upgrade to Windows 7 Ultimate. I had the system assembled around '08 by a friend of a friend, whom I have no way to get in touch with any longer. I was quite happy with the XP and had no wish to pay for a windows 7 upgrade. I'm fortunate that I found this forum recently and it prompted me to do a windows 7 clean install. Being a person with zero experience when it comes to computer, I did not make any backup before attempting the clean install. I read that I can revert back to XP as long as I have the windows.old files available and thought that would be enough. Everything went smoothly with the installation process and I now have a running Windows 7 Ultimate 32bit system. I opened the computer and found out that my C drive is out of space! There is only 84MB free of 40GB! I opened the drive and found a bunch of folders along with the windows.old folder. I know the windows.old file would take up a lot of space, but I'm not sure why there are so many other folders (See attached picture). I've also done a clean install of windows 7 64bit on a laptop, but this time I've formatted the C drive before installation, so on my laptop C drive doesn't have a lot of the folders that are present in the desktop. Which makes me wonder...are all those folders from the XP system, and if so, why aren't they inside the windows.old folder? I originally thought if everything works fine with the Windows 7, I can just delete the windows.old folder and continue with the new system, but now that I have a bunch of extra folders lying around the C drive, I'm not sure what would be the best way to delete all the old stuff. Would you recommend me to just perform a clean install again, this time formatting the C drive? My other problem is with device manager. After I finished the installation, I went to nvidia's website and downloaded the driver there. After a successful installation, I opened up device manager and noticed there is a "PCI Simple Communications Controller" under "other devices". Can anyone tell me what that is in general? I have no idea what other drivers I need to update since someone else assembled the whole system for me and everything appears to be working fine. The only things I know for sure are the Intel Core 2 Duo E6750 processor and the Nvidia Geforce 8600GT card. My last question: I have an external HDD that I use to store my pictures and music. Now that I've started paying more attention to computer maintenance, I would like to do regular system backup. However, what exactly am I backing up and how do I go about doing it? Like I said I keep all my data on the external HDD, so I just want to create backup for the operating system in case something went wrong. Is this more ghosting than backup or are they the same thing? Can someone explain to me in dummy language please? And... can I use the same external HDD for backup and at the same time continue to store photos and music on it? Sorry if this is a lot of questions. I'm just beginning to learn about computer and maintenance. Thank you for any help! Happy new year!
1. Click the Start button, and in the search box, type Disk Cleanup. In the list of results, click Disk Cleanup. If you're prompted to choose a drive, choose the drive you just installed Windows 7 on, and then click OK. 2. Click Clean up system files. If you're prompted for an administrator password or confirmation, type the password or provide confirmation. If you're prompted again to choose a drive, choose the drive you just installed Windows 7 on, and then click OK. 3. Select Previous Windows installation(s) and any other categories of files you want to delete. 4. Click OK, and then click Delete Files.
By doing a disk cleanup, would it get rid of all traces of the files? I would have formatted the drive prior to a clean installation. But since I got the desktop assembled by someone and it was a pretty old unit, I was afraid the desktop will stop working if I format the drive. When you say the PCI is a modem, you are referring to something that is used to connect to the internet right? The desktop has no problem connecting to the internet using an ethernet cable, but I'm still getting the triangle with exclamation mark error on the "PCI Simple Communications Controller". Any idea what I can do to make it work? Thank you both for your quick response!
You might have to physically remove the cover from the pc and look inside. You will see your Geforce 8600GT card in a slot. Then check in the othe other slots if there is any other cards present. You have 2 choices both of which involve pulling the card. How to pull the card: 1) Shut down the computer if running. 2)pull the cord from the power supply 3)open the computer case 4)locate the card and disengage the retaining device (either a screw or clip which holds the card in place) 5) firmly grasp the card trying not to grab areas that have the potential to discharge static electricity from your body. pull firmly and card will come out. place it on a piece of paper with the indentifying tags visible. Here are your choices: 1) put a slot blank back in the place of the card you pulled. Close up the case and put back power cord in the power supply. Boot up the computer and see if the uninstalled driver still shows up. 2) identify the tag and google the s/n and go to the website of mfg. and find the driver for your OS. Download the driver to your desktop. Shut down the computer. reinstall the card. boot up. install the driver. Suggestion, start another thread for backup solutions and individually list the remaining problems on individual threads and you will have greater success in getting solutions.
Thanks for the step by step instruction. I just checked the device manager again, and under Network adapters I only have an "Intel 82566DC- 2 Gigabit Network Connection" shown. Before the Windows 7 installation there is another called "1394 Network adapter". So I'm wondering if that is the one giving me the error message, though I can't understand why it would do that when I can connect to the internet fine. But anyways... thanks for your help, and I'll try out your instruction when I have some free time and a better light source. XD
This might not be what you are looking for - 1. How much RAM have you got? You would need at least 2G but 4G would be great to run Windows 7 x86 smoothly. 2. Looks like you got a small hard drive - 40G. It might be a good idea to invest in another bigger hard drive - say 1Tb. Bigger hard drive used to be cheap but with the floods in Thailand they are getting more expensive. Having at least 4G of RAM and a bigger hard drive will make your experience of using Windows 7 x86 more enjoyable. You can also do a fresh install of Windows 7 on the new drive and not worried about running out of space.