FreeMan wrote:
new install of Win XP Pro all updates.

downloaded the GoogleDrive installer, ran it and it says there are no
updates and that was it. What is it talking about?

My other old laptop has googledrive installed OK.

What do I need to get googledrive working on this "new" laptop ?

I reproduced that. You ran the installbackupandsync.exe 1,130,328 bytes
installer, and that's the dialog it puts up. The "no updates" crap.

One of the things I did, was use the same approach, only in a
Win10 x32 virtual machine. Then, copy the Drive folder over
to the WinXP SP3 x32 virtual machine, and try to run it there.

To make a long story short, the result throws an error. The
keywords in the error dialog, helped me find the picture shown
in this thread. The Google EXE is actually a python loader,
which unpacks into your %temp%, then does some sort of dynamic
library thing (Python aids the loading of some DLL), and whatever
DLL it's looking for, is not present on WinXP. But the error
message doesn't say *what* it was trying to load, so I cannot
say anything more about whether WinXP should have that or not.
We know Google hates WinXP, so what happened isn't a surprise.

https://productforums.google.com/for...ve/oFp6rg8uL28

And then Alex_F in the thread says "Windows XP is not supported".
Well, duh.

The advice is, to go back to a previous version.

https://dl.google.com/drive/3.36.6884.5911/gsync.msi

Virus scan
( https://www.virustotal.com/#/file/d6...90e056/details )

And, it works. I'm using a VM that I keep rolling back,
so when I installed this in WinXP SP3, it had never seen
a Google product. And it seems to work.

Note that, the installer is *really* sneaky. It exits
without saying a damn thing. I went into my C:\Program Files
and yes, there's a Google folder with a Drive folder in it.
I ran the executable in there ("googledrivesync.exe") and
it actually loaded and got past that [Python] problem.

https://s1.postimg.org/1hp75k2mtr/tu..._the_straw.gif

*******

Some background reading material for you.

https://www.theverge.com/2017/9/7/16...p-app-shutdown

"The aging Google Drive app for desktop is officially deprecated as of [Sep 7, 2017]

There's Backup and Sync, the all-encompassing consumer app
that replaces both the standalone Google Drive and
Google Photos Uploader apps. It offers essentially the
same functionality as Drive and works much the same way.
"

But if you go here, it'll feel like a dead end.
Well, it's GoOgle, what else would you expect.

https://www.google.com/drive/download/backup-and-sync/

Can you see a "Supported OS" FAQ entry ? I can't.

Paul