O.K. guys, I'm a tad bored and thought I'd post up a guide on slipstreaming Service Packs into Windows XP. Also, I found a little gem in the form of Windows Media Player 10
Firstly, as XPSP2 is just a month old, some peeps might want to know how to slipstream it into a bootable XP-CD, so here goes.
What you will need:
1. A copy of Windows XP on CD.
2. A CD-R drive.
3. A CD burning application, capable of burning bootable CD's (in this case I will use Nero 6).
4. Preferably a broadband connection for downloading SP2 and WMP10.
Let's get started.
Step 1. Copy your Windows XP CD to your hard drive (in this case I will use C:\XPCD as the directory).
Step 2. Download XPSP2 for I.T. Professionals
HERE (266MB) and save it to your C:\ drive.
Step 3. Use the Run command box from the Start Menu and type "C:\WindowsXP-KB835935-SP2-ENU.exe -S:C:\XPCD" (without quotes). This will copy all the SP2 files into the XPCD directory.
Step 4. Download Windows Media Player 10 (WMP10)
HERE (12MB).
Step 5. Use WinRAR or Winzip to extract WMP10 into a folder, there should be 132 files in total.
Step 6. Download Compression Bin
HERE, you will need Microsoftâ₠¬â„¢s .NET Framework installed for it to work, you can get that
HERE.
Step 7. Basically what we do next, is select all the files that you extracted from WMP10 and drag and drop that into Compression Bin. This will compress them into cab files for Windows Setup to recognise.
Step 8. Now select all the files that you just compressed and copy and paste them into your C:\XPCD\I386 folder, making sure you overwrite any existing files, that's important!
Step 9. O.K. now were ready to create the bootable CD. I find Nero 6 to be the best, you can get that
HERE.
Step 10. Start Nero and select to burn a bootable CD. Click the Boot tab and select Image File (you can get a Windows 2K/XP boot image
HERE), select the image file and tick Enable expert settings. Select No Emulation, delete the Boot Message and change the Number of loaded sectors to 4.
Step 11. Change the CD label to whatever your Windows XP disk is named, in my case it was WXPCORP_EN. Click the Burn tab, tick Finalise CD and change the Write Method to Disc-At-Once.
Step 12. Now you're ready to burn the CD, so click New and then select all the files within C:\XPCD and click to Burn the current compilation. Just confirm the settings are correct and select Burn.
Step 13. There is no step 13, ha fooled you
That's it, you can now use the CD you just created to re-install Windows XP at your leisure. Only now you'll have Service Pack 2, DirectX 9.0c and Windows Media Player 10 without having to install them