Thanks, Harry. I had no recollection of that particular test, but no harm in trying it, so I'll add that to the 'To Do' list.
In case I had not gone into those details, some of the symptoms on the failing XP box included TWO drive letters getting assigned to the same USB port (simultaneously -- which ought to be impossible); if anything was plugged into one of the ports the whole system slowed down considerably, and clicking on any of several basic items on the desktop such as 'My Computer' would hang the system for 10 minutes, before bringing up an obscure System Error message. (I googled that error, and the range of suggested possible causes -- basically everything but the kitchen sink, including HDD failure -- rendered the info close to useless.) If I dismissed all of the USB drive letter assignments in "Computer Management", cold rebooted, then began to add them back one by one, I might get to use a USB connection for a few minutes, before that situation and error returned. As I had mentioned, the Win PE test pretty much proves that those ports worked as they should, in a *different* Win bootup environment.
Without going into more detail than people want to read here, we had a personal referral to a guy who owns a highly respected computer repair shop. (And those may be in the minority ?) I took a detailed written description of the problem and the steps I had taken to him. He has several techs working for him, and is himself highly credentialed as well. His verdict was that this had the earmarks of an aging, troublesome Win XP that was deteriorating -- perhaps in conjunction with aging hardware -- and which should be retired as soon as possible. As to its being repairable, he thought this was highly doubtful. Various computer shops would be glad to bill us many hundreds of dollars attempting to chase this down, but it would in his opinion be a waste of money. He said I had taken the right steps on my own so far, which were pretty much what _they_ would have done. Being a computer hobbyist going back to the original IBM XT, I think I have a good sense of when tech people really know their stuff, and that is the feeling I got from him. Although we offered payment for the half hour of his time that he gave us (standard rate would have been $100./hr. with an hour minimum, according to the posted sign), he declined to accept payment, and along with that advice this basically ices it for me.
For my next efforts with this, I'm going to see if I can adapt that near-twin, spare desktop rig. I can experiment with that most recent Acronis image. If I can get things back to a sort of *working* status quo ante, I can then try to integrate the critical program data that was generated over the last 3.5 years. (It has since occurred to me that I should be able to use one of those Win-PE disc boots to lift that stored material off of the hobbled system, as it's a way to regain temporary use of the USB ports, while having continued access to the system hard drives. Failing that, I could always mount the system's data drive in a disk-duplicator station.) If those procedures work, it would at least buy some time, during which we can try to narrow down the prospects for moving all of this into a contemporary Apple desktop environment -- which I think is what she wants, if she can't keep the old XP regimen going indefinitely. Thanks to the repair shop owner I referenced above, we have a potential referral to another shop that he said can do more complicated or personalized Apple work than we're likely to obtain from the regular Apple Store. They should be able to handle the transfer / VM scenario that the Apple Store said they could not do. But for now, one step at a time.
Jordan
From: Harry Binswanger
To: xywrite@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Sent: Thursday, November 16, 2017 6:54 AM
Subject: Re: OT: some questions for our Apple + Parallels Users
Certainly OS X vs. Win is endlessly debatable. I agree with Carl that,
unless she's already acclimated to the Apple environment, there's less of a
learning curve in going from XP to Win 7 (probably even to Win 10) than in
going to OS X.
But here's a new thought: why not fix her XP software? If all the ports
have failed (yet work as hardware, proven by your test) there must be some
one point of failure. Some Googling would probably turn up the problem.
In fact, have you tried running:
sfc /scannow
-- that alone could completely solve the port problem (ever the optimist, I
am).
Regards,
Harry