The time may come that youll need to reinstall your Windows XP. It could happen. Maybe youll add a new motherboard or hard drive. Maybe youll get constant errors and problems that just wont go away. Or perhaps youre a neat freak who wants to rid yourself of clutter and start fresh with a clean operating system. If you do reinstall Windows XP, then youll need to re-activate it too—that is, unless you keep this tip handy ;-)
See, the first time you activated XP it created a file called "wpa.dbl" that lives in the WINDOWSsystem32 folder. By creating a backup of this file on disk, you can simply put it back into the folder after reinstalling XP and avoid the whole re-activation hassle. Heres how...
Go to My Computer then select your Hard Drive (usually drive C). Go to the WINDOWSsystem32 folder and scroll way down until you find the wpa.dbl file.
Right-click and choose "Send To" then either Floppy Drive (make sure you have a disk in) or CD-R/RW.
Now, when you reinstall Windows XP youll come to the activation screen—decline to activate and let the install finish.
Restart your computer in Safe Mode (keep hitting F8 at start-up then when the Advanced Boot Options menu appears arrow down to Safe Mode).
Find your way back to the WINDOWSsystem32 folder. Its a good idea to rename the wpa.dbl file youre replacing just in case you run into problems, so call it something like "wpa.nothing".
Get the backup disk and copy the old wpa.dbl file back to the WINDOWSsystem32 folder and reboot.
There you go—XP is up and running again.
0 comments:
Post a Comment