Mk3 Cavalier Owners Club | Vauxhall Cavalier Dot Com

After having no EPC nor TIS since September 2018, I have at times felt like my throat was cut.

Anyway - since Friday, I have managed to replace the faulty hard drive on my XP laptop with a pukka new-old-stock, still in the wrapper hard drive of the identical model.
I have re-installed XP s/p3, Office, Adobe Acrobat, TIS and EPC 3.





I now feel a whole lot happier, and ready to return to my weird fixation of being able to offer accurate information and answers to forum members' questions.

Amazing how fast the 12 year old laptop boots up and runs programs on a fresh install.

Just need to consider installing all my VauxCom / OpCom, AutoScanner Opel, FORscan, and my various other ELM based diagnostic programs.

Perhaps not. I will probably keep that to my 20 year old clunker netbook.
It is a bit slower but works fine on the cars.
(As they say "don't fix what isn't broke!" )





Amazing as it is mega old, only has a 6Gb hard drive and is battered and tatty, but still soldiers on...

You have just got to love those retro background images on Windows XP.

Old school technology - nothing square about the display then..

Excellent stuff

To be honest XP has always been much easier to repair.

For some bizarre reason, it was always necessary to have VM ware running if I wanted to run almost all my software packages on my Windows 10 laptop.

That thing is still awaiting resurrection and recovery of all my files from the last 3 years. Plus historic files going as far back as 2011.
It just appears to be playing much harder to fix, needing a full operating system re-installation without losing all my photos and files.

Update -
I just had a quick play with EPC3 and TIS2000.
Strange thing is that I got bored and closed them down again within 5 minutes.

I have been without for 6 months, and was desperate to get them back.
Now that I have them working again, I don't have a specific need for them at this moment.

Good work Robsey. I have a desktop with XP Home on it just for music library and some older games. Completely offline. Still nice to use, such a simple and ergonomic operating system.

Cheers Andrei,
To be honest, good work would have been sorting my Win 10 laptop.
But that is still put away in a case.

I did end up putting all my car diagnostic programs on the Elonex.

Although XP is virtually shunned by all modern programs including internet applications, thankfully it is still possible to find “lite” programs that will work with XP platforms.

If I do fix the “newer” laptop, I will probably get Win 7 installed instead.
I had lots of warnings about Win 10, but no issues for the first two years.
Edge kept bogging me about, but was eventually resolved by reinstalling it.

Sadly the current issue is non-repairable. Even tried reinstalling Win 10, but the lap top refused to install it.
Following many online guides has probably gotten me a brick with eight years of work and photos lost for ever.

I will ask Envoy to fix it when my lack of funds and his lack of free time allow.

Just send it up man

I will when I pull my finger out.

Sort of got used to reverting back to using my Elonex XP laptop for everything.

You know what it is like...
You put it down... and before you know it, two years have passed.

Aye, sadly I do.

With the Elonex XP sadly showing it's age, it is starting to lose functionality.

The USB sockets have all stopped working, and the SD card slot only reads cards below a certain size.

Until recently I pushed on with the old girl, but I finally had to face the facts... I need to finally join the 21st century.

After a random Microsoft update caused my Lenovo Win 10 laptop to die, I simply moth-balled the thing in the autumn of 2018.
With the Elonex showing signs of curling her toes up, I finally bit the bullet and bought a few DVDs from the bay of E, with the plan to do a full clean install.

For some reason I did not want to redo Win 10, so the old fart within me installed Win8 Pro instead.
The online blurb identified that as the "standard" O.S. of that model. (It is a B590).

What I didn't realise is that the activation code within the BIOS was actually for Win 8.1.

A few WhatsApp messages and a pm to Gary (Envoy CDX) pointed me in the right direction of the correct official ISO file and a boot stick creator tool.
All foc, which is my favourite price.

Some 7 hours later, I have fully updated to Win 8.1,
The activation code now says yes, and we are good to go.
143 important updates and 7 optional updates later, and I can now organise the pictures, files, spreadsheets.
As if the laptop was never defunct.

Just toying with the idea of installing office for all my finance spreadsheets,
and VMWare for all my old car packages.

So this is where I give a huge Thank You to Gary.
Most people have a personal trainer...
I have a personal IT guru.

No worries, just noticed this one
We'll get some life breathed into the old Elonex at some point if you really want to

The Elonex still runs all the XP software that I use, but it's battery is failing to hold charge (I think I replaced it in 2021, but it fails very quickly - probably a naff chinese replacement).
All of the I/O ports are giving me the two-fingered salute.
Firstly the internal CD began to stop working when it got warm.
Then the USB ports all stopped working completely.
And as said - my SD reader will only read cards of 2GB and below.
Which is nothing these days.

Long gone are the 256 Mb memory card days of my Polaroid 3mp camera. (Circa 2005).

It is scary when you think how much technology has jumped forward in the last 15 years.
__________________________

Returning to the Lenovo.
What is also frightening is how much car rubbish I have researched and spouted over the years...
Many gigabytes of Excel tables, word documents and pdf's.

It will take me a long time to re-organise, and filter through the 160Gb of data that I had amassed.
Yeesh.

I still have a full CavMk3OC forum theme backup on the laptop.
From just before the first incarnation of the Vauxhallcavalier dot com forum died.

Leaving us with the boggo-standard Pro-Silver theme.

Bonkers, it'll sort though. Anything is fixable