9 year old laptop slow to respond.

Hi Stapp, Thanks for that link. I went through the whole set of instructions and was good until I typed in the password (key). My key has 11 characters. I got a window that said:
"The network password needs to be 40bits or 104bits depending on your network configuration. This can be entered as 5 or 14 ascii characters or 10 or 26 hexadecimil characters."
This is the message I got the first time I tried to sign in after I restored the XP to its out of the box condition. Before I restored XP, I had WiFi connectivity on this computer. As I mentioned earlier, This lap top was a gift from my Brother and was very bogged down. All we did was enter the password from my router and we were in. No problem. Now since I restored XP we have this problem. Do you know how I can solve this? Thanks in advance for any help.

 

Here's the link for SP2:

http://www.microsoft.com/en-pk/download/details.aspx?id=28

and SP3:

http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=24

twl845, for whatever it's worth, if and when you start downloading the Windows updates, I wouldn't install .NET Framework 4 on XP. It causes startups to take forever. If you Google ".NET Framework 4 and Windows XP" you'll find plenty of info if you care to investigate for yourself.

 

Fix for this issue: http://www.vmwareinfo.com/2009/07/did-you-know-mscorsvwexe-tip.html

 

Thanks for that. I got the download pages up, and they say the sp2 and sp3 downloads are for "IT Professionals/developers downloading and installing on multiple computers on a network". I'm a single computer user using XP Home and not a IT professional or Developer. Do you think I should use these downloads any way?

 

Thanks. I don't see the relationship though. They talk about MScorsvw.exe

 

twl845, yeah you can use them. What it's saying in plain English is they're the full installers. For example, a network administrator in a business might want to download the full package and then install it on each computer on the network instead of downloading it for every one.

Normally you would install the SPs through Windows Update, but since you can't access the site until you're running SP3 you'll have the download the full installers and install them, then you should be able to use the website and get the rest of the updates. The first time you try to use the site it'll probably ask you to install to a couple of files first but that's normal and it'll install them for you.

 

OK thanks. So if I'm doing a full install, will that be a full XPsp2 and XPsp3 OS? Will I lose all my apps and settings that I just installed, or will it incorporate everything over the top that I did into the new install of sp2 and sp3?

 

It's not the full operating system, they're the installers for SP2 for XP and SP3 for XP. I call them "full installers" because they're each complete packages as opposed to partial packages you might get from Windows Update. But they'll still only install what you need to upgrade the operating system, to Windows XP SP2 first, then SP3. You won't lose anything, it'll just add to what you already have.

After you download them, copy them to the desktop of the laptop and double-click the file. Then just follow the instructions in the dialogs. It does most of it for you. When everything's done and you've got them both installed you can save the installers to a flash drive or something so you'll have them if you ever need them again.

 

Great! Thanks for the reassurance. I'm on it.

 

Hi Allizomeniz, FYI The upgrades went great and then Microsoft updates kicked in and sent me all the updates available. Thanks again for your time and help.