“A satisfactory repair should leave a device in such a condition that the same fix could be repeated”
Kirkheaton’s own Dr Frankenstein moves the brain of an XP laptop into a PC’s body, before explaining the pros and cons of mending laptops with glue
When we unlocked our door in 2003, one of the first customers to open it was Arthur. He’s an amateur filmmaker specialising in social and community history and has been great for business as he’s brought most of his filmmakers’ club to us. In previous lives, Alison and I made TV for ITV, Channel 4 and the BBC, so Arthur’s club had found a computer shop that understood their nomenclature.
We successfully kept Arthur’s plates spinning until last summer, when his XP machine finally died (fear not, security fans, it was offline and purely used for editing). The obvious answer was to supply a modern computer that can cut 4K, share films online with one click – and countless other magnificent features that don’t apply to a man who is 90, nearly blind and driven to, in his own words, “finish what I’ve started”.
Arthur is used to serious changes. In the past two years, he’s lost his wife and both of his legs. What remains is the filmmaking that has been his passion since the early 1950s. The mental and social wellbeing benefits that his archaic XP setup provides cannot be overstated. The emotional value of the repair eclipses all the technical challenges.
Sadly, I’ve seen the other side of this because another club member has stopped making films. He was prolific, winning awards in the 1960s when filmmaking was chemicals and chinagraph pencils. His system died a few years ago and he was advised by his family to purchase an iMac, which he didn’t get on with. The frustration of learning something new quashed his enthusiasm and he gave up, with a negative effect on his wellbeing.
Arthur, then, needed a new computer body to house his Windows
XP installation to continue his work. Luckily, one of his clubmates had an unwanted Fujitsu Esprimo tower with Windows 7. Although the Esprimo is old, its drivers cover Windows 7 back to XP and it also has a hard drive with fewer hours on the clock.
I used Acronis to image Arthur’s XP drive onto an external USB and re-image the Esprimo’s drive using Universal Restore ( kb.acronis.com/ ati2019/aur). This feature attempts to make “the old system bootable on new hardware”, but the reality is different to the brochure’s claims.
I fired up the Esprimo and sighed as an XP splash screen appeared and then promptly vanished. Acronis warns about XP images and, as we were dealing with outdated kit, it wasn’t an unexpected result. XP was notoriously picky about hardware, while Windows 10 seems unconcerned if it shuts down with an AMD CPU and then reboots with an Intel.
A useful utility to add to your toolbox is Hiren’s BootCD PE ( hirensbootcd.org). It’s essentially a Windows Preinstallation Environment (PE) with a bunch of freeware/demo utilities attached to assist in various situations. I have an old copy of Hiren that uses an XP-based PE pre-stuffed with Fix HDC (Fix Hard Drive Controller). This strips the proprietary hard drive controller entries from the XP registry and adds a generic version. I pulled the PE and restarted the system: Arthur’s XP booted and presented the desktop in 8-bit, 640 x 480 low-definition awfulness.
It took a while to remove redundant peripheral drivers before I could introduce software from the Esprimo website. By closing time, XP was running faster than before and so, thankfully, was Adobe Premiere. For the completists reading, Windows activation was waved through (thank you, Mr Nadella) and Arthur’s ancient XP machine completed its vampiric transition into a much younger body.
Stick or switch?
Solving problems like Arthur’s are founded on the assumption that I can take components and move them around. A satisfactory repair should leave a device in such a condition that the same fix could, if needed, be repeated. A faulty laptop presented to me recently had been repaired and the technician had used an unorthodox method to reassemble it: glue.
The machine’s problem was simple enough: the DC socket had broken after the laptop was inadvertently catapulted across a living room by its charging cable. This is a serious issue as breaking a laptop in this way is probably the second biggest cause of divorce in the UK, next to not replacing the toilet roll.
Apple had an awesome solution called MagSafe, which used magnets to connect the power jack to the socket. In the event of a snag, the relatively weak magnetic force
“The mental and social wellbeing benefits that his XP setup provides cannot be overstated”