Recently my HDD on my notebook died and I only got the replacement like 2 days ago. However, due to lack of time and a lot of work piling, I only managed to get to install the thing today. And it was a nightmare for me.

1. Install Microsoft Windows XP SP1 (45 minutes)
2. Install Microsoft Service Pack 2 CD (52 minutes - Puzzled? I truly do!)
3. Install drivers (10 minutes)
4. Install Winzip & Mozilla Firefox (5 minutes)

Now, you can imagine that it took me for about 2 hours just to get the whole thing running only to find that every time I right click on a file, the system will just hang and try to correct itself by closing the explorer.exe and try again. However, if you right click on a system icon like My Computer or My Network Places, it doesn't affect the lockup problem. Trying to scour http://support.microsoft.com for more info and guess what, they're not that helpful as well. I made myself to believe that one of the step above must have gone wrong, so I do another reinstall.

I make sure I observe this time, so every step I did, I tried to right click to make sure it work fine. The thing worked fine but after I restart with the driver, it gives the same issue. So what gives? I went back to Google and found this post.

After I applied from what was suggested, it worked like a charm. Apparently the problem lies in a command that enables the NX (No eXecution) command which prevent Windows getting corrupted in memory by viruses. The problem here is that a processor with NX feature is needed and if such process is unavailable, it will run in emulation mode, which sucks under some processor type like Pentium 4 M... However, I still place my doubt on SP2, so I still keep my guards up and see how it goes...