On Friday, 22 April 2016 20:05:58 UTC+1, Tim wrote:
On Tue, 19 Apr 2016 21:42:41 +0100, Bernard Burton
wrote:

Slowly recovering from a major loss of files after a hard drive failure.
Still awaiting a part (wrong one came today, so more delay), then can get
the second drive, with much of my data on, back in operation. Its been a
struggle trying to get old copies of XP to work properly, and have had to
reformat and start again 3 times before I could get stable running.
Advice
to any other XP users in a similar predicament., do not attempt in
upgrade
an old XP (SP2 fo instance) to SP3, and turn off automatic upgrades,
otherwise you will get a file from MS that runs every couple of minutes
and
which blacks out the screen for about 5 seconds. B

For what it's worth and probably too late now, you can make your own XP
install disc with SP3 pre-applied. I have done this, but it's so long ago
now I cannot remember the steps. I believe the tool was called "nLite" and
the buzzword for this trick is Tiny XP.
FTFY

Wouldn't it be nice if the makers of weather stations got off their fat arses and produced ISO standard equipment so that the user can have a free choice of operating system.

Or have they already though of that?