Solved: Help installing a printer

[Cowboy622]

I have my daughters desktop computer because she states that she cannot connect to the internet or print. I thought her hard drive was crashing, but after I cleaned it off, and chkdsk, and defrag, it appears to be okay. I run an ethernet cord from my router to her ethernet card and internet connects okay. It appears that there is no printer installed. I ran MBam and Supraantispyware and found and quarantined 8 trojans and about 486 spyware entries so maybe one of them screwed up the printer as it is not even detected. When I try to "add a printer" I get a message stating : "Operation could not be completed. The printer spooler service is not running." How do I get it running so I can add a printer?

She has Win XP Home, and Office 2000 Professional and 1GB ram. Additionally when I go to the Windows update page, I get a message that it can't load the page so I cannot update anything.

Any help would be appreciated.

I don't mind reformatting the HD as I've backed everything she wants onto an external HD, but the last time I reformatted, we had Win 98. I don't klnow how to reformat in Win XP Home. If that will fix this, please link me to a tutorial for formatting.

 

[Noyb]

What's the Make & Model of the XP computer ??
Do you have the XP recovery CD/DVDs ??

 

[Cowboy622]

No make or model. I think it was purchased from a local computer store who built it. It is old and I'm pretty sure its an ATA harddrive. As far as the disks go, I have Win XP professional, Win XP Home, Win XP Servoce pack 3, Win 7 but no recovery disk that I know of. It is an 1.66 CHz AMD Sempron 2400+ processor and came with 512 MB ram and I added another 512, on;y two ram slots on the motherboard.

 

[Noyb]

Recovery CD/DVDs are for OEM computers.

You should be able to install a new system from your System CDs.
Put the System CD in .. Boot the computer and follow the instructions.
I'd use the same system and windows product code that was previously installed.
If it's an older computer .. I like to start with new Hard Drive

 

[Cowboy622]

I'm trying it now. I'll have to try and price an ATA hard drive (since I usually have a SATA HD) and replace this older one. Says 28 minutes to complete install. Thanks again for your help.

I re-installed Win XP Professional and I installed Office 2003 instead of what was there. Prionter installed easy. Now downloading and installing 89 updates. Thanks for your help.