Stardate 20011130.1319 (Crew, this is the Captain): Well, after several days of mortal combat with sundry installers, I have finally gotten everything important to work under XP Pro. At the moment my system has both XP Pro and XP Home installed on it, with the ability to boot either, because I thought I was going to need XP Home to play CDs. I had thought that XP came with a DVD Codec, but it doesn't (a couple of people wrote in to straighten me out on that). So I purchased one which was XP compatible. It's true that I could have paid about $15 and gotten a codec alone and used Media Player, but it has fewer features than I'd like (i.e. slomo, single step, fast forward), so WinDVD was a better choice. Likewise, I found a cable which can connect the laptop to the external FireWire drive (what a hassle), and there are no more unanswered questions.
Which means that the experimentation is now done and I can actually build the system. (Heh). So now actually do an install of XP Pro from scratch and to start installing stuff. Every few hours I'll do a full backup onto the Firewire drive, and in a couple days it will be up to snuff. I haven't had so much fun since the last time I went to the dentist. (discuss)
