Cliff notes: Installing XP MCE without the MCE disk being used. WMI Service was not listed in the Services management screen, and some other oddities. Anybody else done this and had it work?
Yes, this is a Genuine Lord Evermore Post, complete with long-ass highly detailed story.
Just wondering if anybody else tried this and ran into any problems. XP MCE is pretty much just XP Pro with the Media Center software installed, and a file changed to remove certain minor features only useful in a business environment. Nowhere near as crippled as XP Home. It's a bit cheaper than XP too, so it seems like a perfect option. I'd read that the first disc of the install actually was nothing but an XP Pro disk and you could just install from that and not even worry about the MCE stuff. The installer even says it's installing XP Pro, the only reference to MCE is in the license screen.
So I did the install and when it asked for Disk 2 in the GUI part of the install, I just cancelled the dialog, and it went back to installing, and completed perfectly normally. I made a Ghost image backup at this point just in case of problems. Then I went in and proceeded to complete the setup. Did the initial preferences setup to remove all the GUI options that annoy me, installed TweakUI so I could get ALL the options I wanted before having to look at that stuff while I was installing other things.
I installed the nvidia chipset drivers. After the drivers installed it prompted whether I wanted the Network Access Manager installed, which I did since I wanted to play with the TCP/IP acceleration and other options. But the installer for that failed, saying the WMI Service was not running, and it couldn't change it to Automatic startup. I looked at the Services console and I saw "Windows Management Instrum..." was Started, didn't widen the column to see the full name and thought the installer must be flaky, and WMI Service was fine. Ran the installer for NAM again, still failed. So I left that to figure out later. I'd also noticed that the System Properties dialog wasn't showing my new CPU at all, it just showed the memory and Physical Address Extension. I thought maybe completing all the Windows updates as well as installing the AMD drivers might resolve at least the CPU display issue.
Ran through the 59 Windows updates that had to be downloaded on the first run (and that's what's come out SINCE SP2 was released!). Installed video drivers and a few other bits of utility software, before getting into the plain old applications. Then once I knew all the drivers and Windows were updated, I tried the NAM installer again, and it still failed. The network link worked just fine, but I discovered that on its properties dialog, I could not look at some of the tabs, they gave an error that also mentioned WMI. Then I went and found that the WMI Service was in fact not listed in Services. I had seen only part of the name, and it was the WMI Driver Extensions that was there. So I decided to go look on the Net and see what I could see.
Then I noticed, there was no Internet Explorer icon on the desktop. And no shortcut in the Start menu, and nothing for Outlook Express or Windows Media Player either. I could open the Internet Options from Control Panel though, and I could run iexplore.exe from the Start Menu. So I thought something freaky is going on, something about not using the MCE disk made it not properly install everything. I was just about to wipe and reinstall, when I remembered the stupid Set Program Access and Defaults, and thought maybe that would be the problem. So I found that and yes, it was set to Custom for the list of programs to use, rather than to the Microsoft Windows option. I switched it, and everything was fine for Internet and media tools. I was thinking maybe this had something to do with the lawsuits and miraculously they'd decided to make the OEMs make a choice when they did the install.
So I went searching for solutions to the WMI Service problem. There were a few people who'd run into the WMI service failing to start or giving errors, but their solutions all depending on the service actually being available.
So I wiped out the partition and restored the Ghost image from right after installation, in case one of the things I did screwed it up. But WMI service wasn't listed there either. So I reinstalled XP, thinking maybe something happened to make the installation go bad, and I skipped the MCE disk again. WMI was still missing. So I gave up and installed, and let it install the MCE disk. That worked, everything was fine, but of course I had all the MCE software and services to disable, and everytime there's a Windows Update available for MCE it'll probably re-enable anything I turned off, since it already did that once.
Yes, this is a Genuine Lord Evermore Post, complete with long-ass highly detailed story.
Just wondering if anybody else tried this and ran into any problems. XP MCE is pretty much just XP Pro with the Media Center software installed, and a file changed to remove certain minor features only useful in a business environment. Nowhere near as crippled as XP Home. It's a bit cheaper than XP too, so it seems like a perfect option. I'd read that the first disc of the install actually was nothing but an XP Pro disk and you could just install from that and not even worry about the MCE stuff. The installer even says it's installing XP Pro, the only reference to MCE is in the license screen.
So I did the install and when it asked for Disk 2 in the GUI part of the install, I just cancelled the dialog, and it went back to installing, and completed perfectly normally. I made a Ghost image backup at this point just in case of problems. Then I went in and proceeded to complete the setup. Did the initial preferences setup to remove all the GUI options that annoy me, installed TweakUI so I could get ALL the options I wanted before having to look at that stuff while I was installing other things.
I installed the nvidia chipset drivers. After the drivers installed it prompted whether I wanted the Network Access Manager installed, which I did since I wanted to play with the TCP/IP acceleration and other options. But the installer for that failed, saying the WMI Service was not running, and it couldn't change it to Automatic startup. I looked at the Services console and I saw "Windows Management Instrum..." was Started, didn't widen the column to see the full name and thought the installer must be flaky, and WMI Service was fine. Ran the installer for NAM again, still failed. So I left that to figure out later. I'd also noticed that the System Properties dialog wasn't showing my new CPU at all, it just showed the memory and Physical Address Extension. I thought maybe completing all the Windows updates as well as installing the AMD drivers might resolve at least the CPU display issue.
Ran through the 59 Windows updates that had to be downloaded on the first run (and that's what's come out SINCE SP2 was released!). Installed video drivers and a few other bits of utility software, before getting into the plain old applications. Then once I knew all the drivers and Windows were updated, I tried the NAM installer again, and it still failed. The network link worked just fine, but I discovered that on its properties dialog, I could not look at some of the tabs, they gave an error that also mentioned WMI. Then I went and found that the WMI Service was in fact not listed in Services. I had seen only part of the name, and it was the WMI Driver Extensions that was there. So I decided to go look on the Net and see what I could see.
Then I noticed, there was no Internet Explorer icon on the desktop. And no shortcut in the Start menu, and nothing for Outlook Express or Windows Media Player either. I could open the Internet Options from Control Panel though, and I could run iexplore.exe from the Start Menu. So I thought something freaky is going on, something about not using the MCE disk made it not properly install everything. I was just about to wipe and reinstall, when I remembered the stupid Set Program Access and Defaults, and thought maybe that would be the problem. So I found that and yes, it was set to Custom for the list of programs to use, rather than to the Microsoft Windows option. I switched it, and everything was fine for Internet and media tools. I was thinking maybe this had something to do with the lawsuits and miraculously they'd decided to make the OEMs make a choice when they did the install.
So I went searching for solutions to the WMI Service problem. There were a few people who'd run into the WMI service failing to start or giving errors, but their solutions all depending on the service actually being available.
So I wiped out the partition and restored the Ghost image from right after installation, in case one of the things I did screwed it up. But WMI service wasn't listed there either. So I reinstalled XP, thinking maybe something happened to make the installation go bad, and I skipped the MCE disk again. WMI was still missing. So I gave up and installed, and let it install the MCE disk. That worked, everything was fine, but of course I had all the MCE software and services to disable, and everytime there's a Windows Update available for MCE it'll probably re-enable anything I turned off, since it already did that once.
The OS will still be the same, you don't need to use the MCE app.
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