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Steps 3-5

Step 3: See the Blue Screen of Death. Another troublesome feature is easy to dispatch via the System Properties dialog: On the Advanced tab, choose Settings in the Startup and Recovery area, uncheck Automatically restart, and click OK. Now if XP crashes and shows you the dreaded blue screen, you'll be able to record the error message so you can perform some in-depth troubleshooting. Otherwise, Windows will restart immediately, often leaving you no way to figure out what happened. In a worst-case scenario--which some people encountered when they installed the Service Pack 2 update to XP--Windows blue-screens during the installation process, reboots, blue-screens again, reboots again, and continues ad infinitum. If you ever need to force a restart when this feature is unchecked, just hit your PC case's reset button.

Step 4: Check your drivers. In the System Properties dialog box, click the Hardware tab and then the Device Manager button. A yellow question-mark icon next to an entry indicates that a necessary driver isn't loaded for that device. You may need to load it manually from the CD accompanying your PC or motherboard. Double-click the entry, choose the Driver tab, select the Update Driver button, and follow the prompts, pointing to the folder containing the driver on the installation CD when instructed to do so. (Note that even with a brand-new PC, a more recent version of the driver may be available on the device manufacturer's Web site.)

Step 5: Patch, patch, patch. Now that you have established control over the PC, it's time to hit up Microsoft for the latest Windows fixes. But be warned: Until you download and install all the latest drivers and patches for Windows, the only sites you should open in Internet Explorer are your hardware vendors' page (to download driver updates) and update.microsoft.com (where you can load Microsoft Update, which does the same thing as Windows Update but can also find and load fixes for Office and other Microsoft programs). The two PCs I used as test beds for this story, both preloaded with Windows XP SP2, required 45 critical security patches the first time they connected to Microsoft Update. On my DSL line, the Process took about 30 minutes from first connection to last reboot. At least Microsoft has the patching trick down; I guess lots of practice makes perfect.