Windows XP ala' Burger King (have it your way)

I got my Shuttle SN25P XPC on Monday from NewEgg and immediately put it together. The components that I had delivered with it are:


  • AMD Athlon X2 64 3800+ processor
  • 2 GB Crucial pc-3200 memory (2x 1GB)
  • Samsung SATA2 250 GB drive
  • Gigabyte Nvidia GeForce 6600GT 128 MB video card

Then I spent most of the evening installing Windows XP, service packs, and all kinds of hot fixes. Not to mention the drivers needed by my machine (like everything!) Well, to make a long story short, the UN-service packed version of XP doesn't recognize drives over 130 GB or so, so it formatted the drive smaller than it should have been. So now I'm faced with resizing the drive with partition magic or something similar.

I could have saved myself a lot of time using the following utilities and programs:

The Unattended XP CD link has links to everything else that you need, but also is a good reference by itself. However, for casual use, I recommend just using nLite's options along with your own Windows XP sp2 CD and RyanVM's update pack and the DriverPacks.

And of course, once you have minimized the size of the installation, you can also install it from a USB memory stick using a free utility from HewlettPackard

Most excellent!

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