Make Windows XP last longer

If you’re one of these people, you may be more interested in waiting for Windows 7, which promises to be a much leaner and faster rewrite of the Vista operating system and is due to arrive in 2010. So what can you do in the meantime?

Well, much like keeping an older car on the road, you must ensure you have all the parts required for repairing your XP installation, as well as the tools to keep it tuned and the drivers needed to operate any hardware connected to it.

Here, we’ll detail everything you can do to keep your Windows XP PC running reliably until you either upgrade to Windows 7 or decide it’s time buy a new PC.

Driver backups
You never know when disaster may strike, resulting in you having to re-install some or all of your Windows setup. This can leave you without drivers for crucial components, and there’s a good chance you won’t be able to connect to the internet to download them.

To avoid this situation, you should visit Driverpacks. This is an open-source project that aims to provide a local copy of all the drivers XP will need.

On the site you’ll see listed a number of downloads under the headings Chipset, CPU, Graphics, Lan, Mass Storage, Sound and Wlan. You’ll need to download all the files into an empty directory on your hard disk.

The total download size should be about 336MB and all the files will end with the extension .7z. They can be decompressed using the 7-zip program.

Once you’ve downloaded and decompressed all 10 packs, you should move the compressed files you downloaded out of the directory to a safe location. You can then copy the remaining extracted directories and their contents to a 2GB or larger memory key, or burn them to a DVD.

You can use these drivers whenever you have to re-install or repair a Windows XP installation, so it’s worth keeping sufficient backup copies of these driver discs to cover you in all eventualities. What’s more, on page 34 we’ll show you how to incorporate these drivers into a specially customised XP installation disc.

You can also find Windows drivers at the Microsoft Update Catalog site, but it’s tedious if you need more than a handful.