Figure 1-3:

Remove any floppy disks from the floppy disk drive before turning on your computer.
1. Turn on all peripherals attached to your PC, such as your monitor and printer, and any other
connected device that has its own on/off switch.
2. Turn on the main power on the system unit.
3. To ensure that your computer doesn’t attempt to boot from a CD-ROM, open the CD-ROM drive
and remove any CD that might be in there.
4. Wait a minute or so for your computer to boot up (start itself and load Windows XP for you).
You might see some weird, highly technical information whiz by on the screen. That phase of the startup
is called the Power-On Self-Test (POST), and you can pretty much ignore it. What happens next
depends on how your copy of Windows XP is set up. So just continue to read along and ignore anything
that doesn’t appear on your own screen.