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by jasals

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I'm helping a friend rebuild his Dell PC. He just had a technician reinstall a new hard drive, started reinstalling Windows XP Media edition for him and left. (normal procedure), well after a few hours, the Dell customer service rep called and my friend had to go on line to download the drivers (audio, video, chipset, etc). After I found out that my friend has the exat same model PC that I do, I figured if I went over there and installed the drivers the same way I did mine, it should work. I reinstalled all my drivers from an external USB 80GB drive to my PC without any problems. I have Windows XP, my friend has WinXP Media Edition. This is the first time I've ever seen the WinXP Media Edition platform. Almost all of the drivers I tried installing, the following error kept popping up..."The InstallShield Engine (kernel.exe) could not be launched The RPC server is unavailable" I've reloaded numerous systems from scratch, but can't say I ever remember seeing this error. The PC boots up to the desktop pretty slowly as well, way too slow for a Pent IV / 3.0 Ghz system. Is there anybody out there that might offer some suggestions. The Internet Explorer does not work either. Everythim I hit the "E" icon, the system is asking me what program would I like to view the file in. It sounds like a bad install. I offered to put Windows XP Home Edition on, but he's waiting to hear from Dell. The Dell drivers from their website are exactly like the ones I used on my PC, we both have the same model, speed, processor, etc. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

7 replies

by deadly ernest

I am not familiar with this Win XP media edition of which you sepak. However, it is Microshaft Standard non-operating procedure to have things different in each version of their software.

Any change to the MS OS means a whole new set of drivers specifically for that OS. I suggest you check with Dell if they have any specific Media Edition drivers - bet they will be differnt to the standard XP drivers.

A case in point being that I have MS XP Pro 64 bit Edition on a 64 bit processor and board - not one of the single 32 bit drivers for the hardware from the manufacturer's will work within the MS 64 bit XP - they have limited 64 bit drivers for some hardware but they do not do any of the special extras the manufacturer's drivers do. yet if I lo0ad the Win XP Pro 32 bit edition all the drivers work. If I load a 32 bit or a 64 bit version of Linux the 32 bit drivers will work in either.

by deadly ernest

and you need a totally different set of drives for it. Since my first reply I have been onto the M$ website and looked at a few basic drivers. For their own hardware - MS mice etc - they have different choices of operating system and in the XP range you get to choose if it is for Win XP, Win XP 64, and Win XP Media Edition.

This indicates that Med Ed is a different kernel to XP and the standard XP drivers are not likely to work. You will need new Media Edition specific divers or dump the OS and load a normal version of XP.

by jdclyde

go back to your system, download all the drivers and burn them to a cd.

Remember to do the chipset drivers FIRST!

Burning to CD is better than an external drive, because then he can keep those drivers for the NEXT time he hoses up his system and save you a lot of time the next time!

by deadly ernest

If everyone took that attitude about everything we would still be flying in biplanes, using 1890 model motor carriages, typewriters and slide rules. It is the desire to improve on what you have the has lead to the vaste majority of inventions and technical advancements.

Having said that I am a great believer in 'no change for changes sake' and 'if it does the job perfectly, then leave it alone'.

by deadly ernest

repeated, not because they are true.

I had a car that worked, I fixed it and it worked better with the bigger engine - did that a few times. I have several computers that work, I fix them and they work better - should see the performance improvement when I dumped Win XP from a P4 1.8 Ghz machine and put Fedora Core 4 on it.

The M1 Carbine and M16 both worked well and some one fixed them to become the M14 which works much better. Bet you, like most people nowdays, use an electric carving knife when cutting up a roast - the old manual jobs worked well too, but they got fixed by adding an electric motor.

by louk99

I had the same problem when installing XP Media Centre Edition on a brand new PC. The only way I found to get round it was to install XP SP2 during the installation phase of XP. Whith out this the OS does not intall properly; if you do indeed have the same problem I did you will find that in Services nearly everything is stopped.

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