this is somewhat directed at gary richardson, whose hardware wisdom i trust, but please, anyone, feel free to comment.

my computer has lasted a good long time, probably 4 or 5 years now, but finally blew a gasket...somewhere. it started showing signs a few days ago, at least obvious signs and maybe a few signs, not so obvious for a bit longer than that. it acts like a heat problem, mostly. the machine would boot up ok and everything start up as normal. tonight, it just suddenly turned off. on rebooting it started up again and after only a few minutes, seemed to go into sleep mode, except i couldnt bring it back out. the harddrive light stayed on continuously and i finally had to just kill the power.

now, once or twice prior to tonight, i had similar things happen. i didnt think too much about it since computers do do odd things at times. but tonight it was persistent and i couldnt keep the machine up more than a minute or so and then it would simply turn off, not even a harddrive light on. it would simply shut down.

now, the only thing i've got to go on as a possible cause is dirt. normally, i clean the fans every once in a while and even the heatsinks. but, i'd gotten lazy about this and hadnt done it in a while. when i checked the fan blades they were pretty dirty, but they were working. i cleaned them, both the cpu fan and the power supply one and tried booting up again. still the same problem.

so, i took a closer look at the cpu fan and heat sink and sure enough, the heat sink was filthy, surely blocking air flow. so, i took it off the cpu and thoroughly cleaned it and re-installed it. i tried rebooting again and still the same problem.

so, i'm only guessing here, but i'm guessing something got too hot and has deteriorated to the point where, when it's still cool, it can boot up, but then gets hot too fast and thermal cutoffs then shut things down.

ok, that's all guesses. what i'd like to know, or at least hear about is, is there a way, short of replacing, cpu, motherboard, and/or the power supply to get this machine back up and running? there is still thermal paste between the heat sink and cpu, so that seems ok. i also noticed that some capacitors near the heatsink have something that looks like corrosion on the tops and when i rake a nail across them it comes off in flakes. heat damage to the capacitors? something else?

it doesnt act like a harddrive, at least not a way that i'm familiar with. it does boot up...or did before this got worse. it acts like a heat problem and i'm guessing the clogged heatsinks caused some damage to the cpu or nearby parts. but i guess i'd sort of like some at least semi-confirmation on this before i go out and buy a new motherboard and cpu.

so, any help here would be welcome.

craig

Does sound like a heat issue, but not necessarily a disastrous one (though if it is corrosion then you probably do need an new MOBO - could be burn dirt tho ;)) - have you checked that all the fans are working when the machine is on?
If it boots up cold but then shuts off and wont reboot, almost definately a heat issue - can you get into your bios? It should give you information about fan speeds and temperatures.
My mum had a similar problem with her laptop that went on for ages, took one look at it - CPU fan had bust - was fine with a pastic freezer block on it till she got a new fan, despite running it for months in this condition there was no permanent damage.
You say theres still thermal paste left between the heat sink and the CPU?! thats pretty incredible, I have to replace mine any time I remove the heatsink. Are you sure its in the right place? It might ooze out the sides a little but the CPU generally melts its mark as soon as the two meet. But then again - I'm running an Athlon and they do run a little hotter than pentiums.

It may be worth your while to check and clean your video card and ram slots as well (incl fan/heatsink on vid card if applicable).

Lol Nancy, I used to have an athlon...great as a heat source during winter, but in the summer it turned into a miniature sun, one day it went supernova and left a lovely crater in the motherboard- yay!

start pulling ram chips out and see if there are any changes....faulty ram can mimic anything from a bad monitor to a fried mobo

Hi Craig,

Looks almost certain that its a temp problem.

Easiest way I know to check, is to buy a freeezer spray (available from Radio Shack or that type of store), try cooling processor right down before starting, and see if it takes any longer before the problem recurs.

This should confirm whether its temp or not.

The caking on the capacitors could be due to electrolyte leakage when they got too hot (only the electrolytic capacitors (can type) will suffer this way), though it has to get damned hot to do this. Any scorch marks on the board?

Fan may not be running at full revs if its on the way out, and therefore may not be cooling efficiently (new fan is cheaper than new boards, so may be worth trying).

I had an almost identical problem, and more than one person that should know about such things indicated it was most likely a microscopic crack on the motherboard that opened when things got hot, and even when things weren't hot sometimes garbled data.

But don't be sad, look at it as a wonderful opportunity to finally upgrade to a 21st century machine!

Certyainly seems like a classic thermal shutdown. The only 2 items which have thermal protection are the CPU and Power Supply (former for cost reasons, latter for safety certification). Usually for the CPU the fan dies or the thermal sensor fails. If the sensor goes, freezing it won't help. If you have a freezer, you could freeze the entire box to cool it down enough to give you the extra few minutes req'd to run diagnostics. Particularly to monitor the temp profile of the CPU.
Good luck. Regards, Murray

Craig,

If you have capacitors that are stained on the top and your motherboard is a socket 478, this was a common problem with these boards, ie: leaking capacitors. If you have 3 or more bulging and or leaking capacitors, it sounds like you have a board with the faulty capacitors on it. They bulge and leak and even some explode under heat stress. Eventually this is a death nell for the motherboard. If this is the case, your cpu will be fine, it is only motherboard from my experience.

We have seen this problem with Gigabyte, Asus, MSI, Compaq, HP and many other Socket 478 motherboards.

I personally am nursing one of these motherboards myself, knowing full well that I am eventually saving up for a new one (now will be a cpu and motherboard upgrade). I have taken the side off my computer and this has given greater longevity to the leaking capacitor issue.

From recollection, apparently the cheaper inferior capacitors saved something in the order of cents per capacitor at the manufacturing end which was widely taken up by many of the motherboard manufacturers!

well, thank you all for the responses. that's exactly what i was looking for. i posted this thread last night and checked it this morning and based on the responses here i checked the motherboard again, only closer this time. i particularly looked at those capacitors again and yes, this is socket 478 machine. there are about 10 of the same type capacitor near the heatsink. they are about an inch tall, cylindrical, and about 3/8 of an inch in diameter. almost every one of them had some type of caked-on white stuff on the tops. so, i dont think it was burned dirt. a few had reddish marks like corrosion or rust and one, in particular, had burn marks on the top.

so, after reading the responses here and looking at the board again and those capacitors, i just decided that was the culprit. it may not be, but it was enough that i just decided it was. so, time to go to the store.

i figured i'd get a new motherboard, cpu, case and power supply and that i had a budget of $300. i also like certain things on my motherboards, like 5 pci slots and 4 ram slots. i wanted at least an agp slot but didnt need pci-e but also wasnt opposed to getting it if it fit the budget. i wasnt really worried about dual core or 64 bit processing, but again, ok if it fit the budget.

understand that what i'm coming from, what burned out, was an e-machine computer with oem windows xp home. it was a 1.7 ghz machine with agp onboard graphics and no normal agp slot (that was a mistake when i bought it). at the time this was supposed to be just an emergency machine for another that had died. it ended up being my main machine. i bought a pci video card and disabled the onboard crap and later upgraded the video card to a better pci card....mind you, not pci-e, but pci. surprisingly, i've never really been disappointed with vid card performance, so dont always buy the hype.

at any rate, even if my diagnosis on the now dead machine was wrong, it was about time for an upgrade. i've had that e-machine for 4 or 5 years now.

so, what i got was a new case with 4 bays, will handle a full atx form factor (the e-machine was micro atx), has front side usb's, 1 large fan and all the standard port stuff on the back. the new motherboard is a Gigabyte K8 Triton series with a 939 cpu slot. this is a 64 bit board. model number is GA-K8U-939. the processor is an AMD Athlon 64 processor, ADA3500DEP4AS.

case with 350 watt power supply = $49.95
motherboard = $68.06
cpu = $211.05
2 year extended warranty on the motherboard = $9.50
sub total = $338.56
tax = $19.74
total = $358.30

so, you can see i went a touch over my $300 budget but i almost always do that when buying computers :)

i made sure all this would be compatible with what i can save from the old system. the old was using 1 gig of DDR pc 333 ram and the new uses the same. the old nic will work, the old modem with work (though i rarely use it), the vid card will work and so on.

the biggest problem is going to be with windows. since the e-machine machine had oem windows this is not likely going to work with the new system. it may, or so the store guys said, but they also said 'not real likely. maybe a 5% chance it will.". i already have a full version of windows xp home so the task is going to be installing a new version of windows and transferring or re-installing a LOT of software that was on the old system.

so, if anyone's got any ideas on making that less painful, do let me know. i'm currently thinking i'll make a new partition of the space that exists on the current C: drive and install the new windows on that and change the other part to the D: drive. but the old registry is pretty much going to go bye-bye from what little i know of this. i do have the current C: drive backed up fully on an external harddrive, so i can always borrow things back to the new system...somewhat. again, this is sort of where i get lost in all this; what can i keep intact and what cant i? so, again, any help here would be great :)

anyways, again, thanks for all the help! that was just what i needed :)

craig

When I build a new machine I just stick the old harddrive in the new one and I'm good to go - ofcourse XP changed all that - it doesnt like new CPUs - M$ decided in their infinate wisdom that you buy a copy of windows for your CPU not your computer as a whole - therefore if you get a new cpu you have to get a new copy of windows - but if you dont care about the annoying security alert when you boot up then its fine. But the difference with WinXP is you cant just plug and play the old hard drive - you pretty much have to reinstall. All your software will still be there tho - you just need to reinstall for the stuff that needs the registry entries to work, all your config files and pluigins etc will be intact

I cant believe you would buy an AGP mobo after already making the mistake of getting on-board before.
AGP is dead, they just arent making the cards anymore - by getting a new agp mobo, you're limiting the life of your computer. I game a lot so my gfx card has to be the best I can afford - infact my card costs more than your whole computer (approx £270 - and that was less than I usually pay) but I cant afford a whole new system so I had to buy the best AGP card around - ever, they're just not going to make them anymore. AGP has hit its limit. If you want a machine that will stick around for another 5 years - you need PCI-E. Ok you'd need a new card too, but you can get one for about $40.

Excellent value for the buck, there. Can you recommend a parts source?

As an aside, having recently lost all my PhotoShop customizations (under Prorams-Photoshop-plugins and presets) in a needed XP "Restore", sure wish you could find some way to save yours.

When I start afresh I just reinstall everything...yeah, it's time consuming but most painless option in the long run and gives me the opportunity to do some serious culling :nod: I have two hard drives which makes life so much easier, so the second drive is where I backup all my files(and photoshop scratch and plugins) so my primary (boot) drive mostly has all my installed programs on it so it is not so much a hassle or anxiety to reformat the entire drive. As for agp graphics, yeah they are on the way out especially for gaming and 3d animation/graphics, but if you don't dabble in that sort of thing the later agp cards will be supported for a while yet and if it does what you want it to do then it's all good ;)

thanks guys, but at the moment, all is moot. seems the motherboard has no carraige for the heatsink/fan arrangement over the cpu. the cpu socket is there and fine, but the plastic carriaige that holds the heat sink is missing. so, no way to lock down the heatsink/fan. always fun to find this out when the last thing you do in the assembly is the heatsink/fan. i've got all the other basics in place and just now found this out.

i think i'm going to go back to my old sig, 'I hate Windows'.

craig

Craig, as you have a full backup of the system on another hard drive, you should boot to your Windows CD and it should start the installation processs. Just after the licence agreement part, it should look for an existing installation of Windows and offer you the option of either repair or upgrade. This usually will repair your Windows to be compatible with the new hardware and your existing files and programs should remain in tact. If it does not find an existing installation of Windows to repair/upgrade, do not proceed.

If it cannot find a hard drive at all then you most likely will have to make the driver disk from the motherboard cd and use the f6 option when windows starts its loading process from the cd (it does prompt for this across the bottom of the screen).

well, i had to wait till noon for the computer store to open today, sunday and all, but took the entire system back to the store and swapped out the errant motherboard for new, more expensive pci-e board (all nancyj's doing :) ). that meant stripping everything i had already installed and the board and putting in the new one and setting it all back up again, including my old c: drive with the oem windows on it.

got that all set up and the guys had a testing station there where i could hook up a mouse, keyboard and montitor to test the new rig. no video signal from the pci card (pci, not pci-e... this was my old card). we fooled around with that and finally determined the card was blown. so, i broke down and bought a cheap, $69.00 pci-e card. ok, now we got a video signal.

so, time to test the old harddrive and see if by some longshot that would boot. no signal. bios couldnt see it, even with manual setup. about this time i began wondering if my entire system had had some sort of massive burnout. luckily, the store guys were smarter than me and by changing ribbons and removing ribbons, the drive was finally seen by bios.

ok, getting there, so let's see if the longshot can happen and that maybe, just maybe, windows will actually boot up from my old system. now, this is where things got interesting and surprising. windows began to boot. naturally, since i'd crashed the system so many times, it wanted to do a chkdisk. ok, i let that run and it basically ran through all that and then rebooted itself, which seemed odd. but finally, windows came up to the windows activation screen wanting to know if i wanted to activate now or later. i said later and the system reboot itself again. lol. but it did come up to the activation thing again.

ok, now here, through a bit of trickery the store guy knew, we actually got windows to fully boot up and lo and behold, there was my desktop with all my icons and the whole shebang! ok, i was now pretty impressed. meanwhile, popups for installing devices and drivers are coming up like crazy, most of which werent even attached to the system currently.

well, i'd now been in the store for about 3 1/2 to 4 hours and it was near closing time. so, i shut things down, packed them all up and brought them home. i'm still on the backup machine writing this. there is a ton of stuff i'll still have to do to get the main system back up and functioning fully, but i'm rather amazed they could save that oem on the new hardware!

oh yea, i also had to buy a new keyboard at the store to get the system working there. all they had on the test station was one that used an usb board and mine was set up on ps2. so, $10.50 for a new, cheap board.

so, i've completely blown my original budget of $300. the upgraded board added another $30, the new pci-e card=$70 and a new keyboard for $10.50, plus the fact that i was already over budget by $58. but for what, $470 or so, i've got a new 64 bit mobo, cpu, case, power supply and pci-e card. i'd say that's still a pretty good bang for the buck. and, i saved my old system drives! not bad :)

so, thanks for the help and for putting up my problems :) i'll probably burn the whole thing out finishing all the setup i've got to do yet.. lol. shld have bought a mac ;)

craig

You may be over budget now but it looks like you're set for a fair few years of upgrades there.

Sounds like you had a lot of fun (and that you've got a good computer store), hope you don't have any more problems getting it fully rigged.

Like Nancy said, you may have spent a bit more than you'd budgeted for, but you've got a box that should last you a while.

Now, hows your monitor looking? :devil: :D :D

hehe, the monitor is fine.

but, am having problems getting it fully rigged. at first i had a hard time just getting it see two drives in bios. finally got past that but it's still very dodgy. may yet have to go with a full, new install of windows. whatever the guys did at the store to keep the old oem version going, it seems to be affecting putting stuff back on the system, like drives and printers and other devices. so, i'm not out of the woods yet. it boots up ok and i've even got the new vid card drivers installed and that part was mostly ok and i've got one harddrive and one dvd burner running, but when i put a 2nd harddrive back on it goes through all the bootup, gets to the desktop, loads a few things but no start button or task bar comes up and then it blue screens and crashes.

in fact, even before putting the 2nd drive on it would blue screen about 2 out of 3 times. and it doesnt seem to like cable select. i had to go back to master/slave on the drives to get just the one harddrive and dvd burner up and running.

so, in the long run i may be better off just partitioning the current c: drive into 2 partitions and making one clean one for a new install and make that the master boot partition.

the guys at the store told me this would dodgy, trying to save the old oem version, because of the old master boot record stuff and the M$ activation stuff. well, we seem to have gotten past the activation but maybe not the mbr.

i'm gonna keep playing with it for a while, but the frustration level is rising :mad:

i do have another thing i havent tried yet too. the motherboard came with a cd of drivers and utilities. might be something there that needs installing since this is a different chipset from the last machine.

i did get a nice performance boost when i removed the old ATI drivers. seems that was conflicting a bit and slowing things down.

so, have made a little progress but keep hitting installation bugs on putting back the old devices.

i hate windows.

craig

Craig...

I hate to say this, but the path you're on is a blue one. A very blue one, indeed. Hardware wise, anyway. Trust me. I know... I've been there.

You should bite the bullet and go with a fresh install of the OS on a nice new formatted partition. Otherwise, all those hardware installation issues you're having will continue... along with those blue screens of death (BSOD).

Here's why... When Windows (NT or later) is installed on a machine it examines all the attached hardware, customizes itself, and creates what's call a Hardware Abstraction Layer (HAL). A good analogy might be that the HAL is to the OS what the BIOS is to the motherboard. Without getting into a lot of detail, it tells windows how to talk to and interpret drivers for all your hardware... everything from your ram, hard drives, video card, peripherals, to your CPU. Everything. And you can't see or control it.

Your current HAL was created for your old e-machine. Forcing Windows to use an old HAL with almost all new hardware (only your drives and the ram are the same, right?) is just asking for problems. Just look at all the BSODs and BIOS issues you're having. Even if you install new drivers for your hardware, Windows may be interpreting/applying them to the old hardware that it thinks is still there. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't, sometimes it does but is unstable or has performance issues. A very common result is the BSOD.

A BSOD in later versions of windows (again NT or better) is almost always the result of a hardware driver failure/incompatibility. This is not the foundation you want to build a new system on. Think how difficult it will be to trouble shoot later. Plus, with a fresh install you won't have all that "bit rot" bogging down your system from the start.

A fresh install is a pain, I know, but you will be much happier after it's done and your system is stable and predictable and running as fast and smooth as it can.

--Racc

I've been a Langalist subscriber for some time (several years now). Fred recently had an article from information week concerning rebuilding the HAL (since you have an eMACHINE, you may not be able to do so since you don't have or don't have access to an XP install disk; for those who do, check the attached link). I've actually saved a few customers using this technique (much faster and better then Repair if it works). :)

http://www.informationweek.com/story/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=185301251

boy, not my day. just wrote a whole long message and then wiped it out.

ok, looks like you're right, racc. the more i add and fool with this, the worse it gets. so, what are my options? i have 3 gigs of free space on c: that i could convert to a new partition and install my retail version of windows on that.

the windows cd tells me that it wont troubleshoot my current version because it's a later version than what's on the cd. current version has service pack 1 and updates and so on. it also tells me that it's willing to wipe out the current version and install the one from the cd but that i'll lose all settings like for i.e., email, modem settings and so on.

i do have the current c: drive backed up on an external harddrive using norton ghost. so, not sure, but cant i get back some of those old settings from that without just trying to run the whole back up? can you pull individual stuff from those backups without running the restoring the whole backup?

and, even though i'm quite a bit over budget on all this, i could get a new harddrive and install the new windows on that and set up the old one as a slave drive and pull stuff from that back to the fresh install.

and where the heck is fdisk these days? is it even used any more? if i do the wipe windows with the new windows option, is that going to do a full re-format of c:? i really dont want that if that's the case. or will it just wipe old windows and install new windows?

and trust me, i've thought about taking the whole thing back to the store and just buying a dell. they do sell them there. but i also dont like oem versions for the hassle if windows breaks somewhere down the road.

since i only do this about every 3 to 5 years and since the technology always outpaces me and since i'm just getting tired of fooling with this and not being able to do my retouching and so on, i'm quite open to best suggestions here.

so, i want to avoid a full re-format of c:. i do want a clean install of windows. ok, i'm sorta talking myself into going out for a new harddrive here. a nice, new, 200 gig drive actually sounds kinda nice at this point. lol. the budget is going to hell.

oh, and what about sata drives? this machine has, i think, 4 sata ports. would i be smarter buying a sata drive as the new c: drive or shld i stick to ide ports for now? i've never had a sata so i know next to nothing about them. and no, i'm not really interested in RAID.

lol. this needs to all go away now so i can get back to what i enjoy doing :)

craig

Been there...

A lot of the settings for email etc are in the documents and setting folder you can copy this and reinstate it after you reinstall the OS.

I installed to a different directory name and kept the old one for a while until I had everything working again. The default is c:\Windows but if you have 2 drives there is no reason you can't install on a different one.

Christine

i do have the current c: drive backed up on an external harddrive using norton ghost. so, not sure, but cant i get back some of those old settings from that without just trying to run the whole back up? can you pull individual stuff from those backups without running the restoring the whole backup?
Depends on your backup software. But, usually there is a way to do that.


and, even though i'm quite a bit over budget on all this, i could get a new harddrive and install the new windows on that and set up the old one as a slave drive and pull stuff from that back to the fresh install.
This is what I've always done. It makes retrieving any old files pretty painless. Then once you've gotten everything off of it, you can remove the old drive if you find it's slowing your system down. If you do get a new HD and are going to connect the old one as a second drive, make sure to connect them to different IDE or SATA chains.

and where the heck is fdisk these days? is it even used any more? if i do the wipe windows with the new windows option, is that going to do a full re-format of c:? i really dont want that if that's the case. or will it just wipe old windows and install new windows?.
Fdisk is still in there... somewhere. If you do a fresh install and don't override or repair a previous installation you will be presented with the chance to create and format partitions if the drive is blank or repartition the drive if it's not. Once you select a partition to install Windows on, that partition will be formatted. Any other partitions should be left alone. Even if you install to a completely blank drive that's never been used and create multiple partitions on it, the Windows installation will only format the partition where you're putting Windows. You'll then have to go into the disk management tool and format the other partitions.

In my systems I like to have at least three physical drives and at least three logical drives. How they are divided depends on how much storage there is. But, generallly the first drive/partition (C:) is for the OS only and I usually make it around 10-20 Gb. If I have plenty of HD space left on that physical drive then a partition completely devoted to page files, swap files,the documents and settings folders, and things like Photoshop's temp files is a very good idea. The second physical drive is where ALL applications are installed. The third drive is purely for storage of data and created files.

This provides a very modular way to recover from disaster. All you need to back up is the storage drive and the Documents and settings folders. If the OS or its drive dies, you know it's okay to blow out that partition or replace the drive and start fresh. Sure, you'll have to reinstall the applications and rebuild the registry, but you can usually install the applications over top of themselves. That way, any customizations (like photoshop styles, plugins, etc.) are not lost. If the applications drive dies, you still have the OS and your data. If your storage drive dies, you should have your backup.

oh, and what about sata drives? this machine has, i think, 4 sata ports. would i be smarter buying a sata drive as the new c: drive or shld i stick to ide ports for now?
If you're buying a new drive(s) go with SATA. They are the future. IDE is a fading technology. Kind of like PCI, AGP, and anyone remember ISA? Besides... smaller cables, better air flow for cooling.

and no, i'm not really interested in RAID.
Why not (other than cost)? I've been using RAID 5 setups for almost a decade now and have never lost any data to drive failure.

--Racc

racc,

thank you for all that!

i've pretty much decided it's going to be a new harddrive. i'm taking the day off from work to get this thing going. so, another trip to the store and more $$. oh well, i never liked budgets anyways.

i like how you set things up on your system and have recently been contemplating something similar. seems the best format is o/s, applications, and data, all on separate partitions. i hadnt thought about the swap file option, though. a whole partition for that? seems overly large to me, but ok. and you can put the docs and settings folder separate from the rest of a windows install? i didnt know that and that would be helpful, since some software manufacturers seem to like to store things there. and what's the difference between a page file and a swap file? (i can look that up later).

ok, i've never used SATA but my limited understanding is that it's a bit more like scsi; more versatile and less restricting and a bit faster. but does it work like ide in that you can put two devices on the same port or does it work like scsi in that you can chain the drives or what? and all my current devices are ide, so if i go sata as the new drive, do i just set up the old ones under ide and the system is going to recognize that i've got two different types? dont worry too much about this part. i'm going to the store shortly and will ask the guys there about all this. and as for RAID, i guess my biggest objection is, i dont know a thing about it except back when i was trying to keep up with things, RAID meant dual drives in a parallel hookup for faster data transfers and it seemed dicey to me. if one drive went down, then it would be like both did. so, i put it in the back of my mind, 'not interested in RAID'. but, that was back where there was only one RAID and about all i know now is that there are quite a few. i'll ask the guys at the store about this too, but throw anything at me here on this, particularly since you've got experience with it.

i do appreciate all the responses and help. i always go a bit crazy on this stuff and i'm pretty adamant about trying to keep my old files and data so i appreciate all the advices here. hopefully, by the end of the day, i'll be back on the new system, at least in bare bones mode :)

craig

racc, thank you for all that!
No problem. My pleasure.

i like how you set things up on your system and have recently been contemplating something similar. seems the best format is o/s, applications, and data, all on separate partitions. i hadnt thought about the swap file option, though. a whole partition for that? seems overly large to me, but ok.
and you can put the docs and settings folder separate from the rest of a windows install? i didnt know that and that would be helpful, since some software manufacturers seem to like to store things there. and what's the difference between a page file and a swap file? (i can look that up later).
Well, the OS drive is usually smaller to begin with. Don't need a 200 gig drive for it... not until Vista gets here, anyway. :) So, the partition for the page file, etc. doesn't have to be more than a few gigs really, but I like even numbers and usually allow around 10 for it. A swap file and a page file are the same thing. The page file is the OS's swap file, so I guess they like to have a special name for it. Also on that partition I tend to store things like installers and current drivers that have been downloaded, etc.

ok, i've never used SATA but my limited understanding is that it's a bit more like scsi; more versatile and less restricting and a bit faster. but does it work like ide in that you can put two devices on the same port or does it work like scsi in that you can chain the drives or what? and all my current devices are ide, so if i go sata as the new drive, do i just set up the old ones under ide and the system is going to recognize that i've got two different types? dont worry too much about this part. i'm going to the store shortly and will ask the guys there about all this.
You mentioned that your motherboard had 4 SATA ports on it. I've only recently started buying SATA drives myself. But, my understanding is that each SATA drive plugs into one port. You can get port multipliers that allow each port to control up to 15 drives, but that's usually overkill for home machines.

If your motherboard has both SATA and IDE ports then you can connect both types of drives. If your board doesn't have one type of port or the other, you can get inexpensive add-on cards to give you those ports.

back when i was trying to keep up with things, RAID meant dual drives in a parallel hookup for faster data transfers and it seemed dicey to me. if one drive went down, then it would be like both did. so, i put it in the back of my mind, 'not interested in RAID'. but, that was back where there was only one RAID and about all i know now is that there are quite a few. i'll ask the guys at the store about this too, but throw anything at me here on this, particularly since you've got experience with it.
Sure. RAID 0 mean striping two drives together to make it act as a single drive. This makes reading faster, but writing a little slower. RAID 1 is two drives, but the second drive is a mirror of the first. RAID 3 is striping multiple disks together. RAID 4 stipes together multiple drives but has a dedicated parity drive. If the parity drive fails, you're in trouble. RAID 5 is the way to go. In RAID 5 multiple disks are striped together, but the parity is spread out over all the drives. For example... In a system with 4 drives in a RAID 5 configuration you get the storage space of three drives, the storage space of the fourth drive is used for the parity information. That's the matematical algorithm that keeps all your data intact. However, since all this information is spread across all the drives, any one of the drives can fail without loss of data or parity. Just replace the failed drive and let the computer rebuild the array. The more extra drives you add, the more simultaneaous drive failures you can have without any data loss. So, if you used 5 drives... 3 storage and 2 parity... any two of the drives can fail at the same time while you can still keep working without losing any data.

We use this where I work. I create animation and motion graphics for TV, so I have quite large video type files to deal with. Constantly backing up a terrabyte or two is not practical. RAID 5 lets us not worry about it.

It's a little overkill for home systems, though. But if you work from home or something, it's probably worth the investment.


--Racc

well, the nightmare continues. i bought a new 250 gig sata II drive. i get it home, put it on the machine and the machine doesnt see it, except it does sort of. it doesnt see it well enough that bios can see it but it does see it well enough that the install disk of windows does. but at first i dont notice this. all i see is that windows setup seems to be loading ok. i get to the part where it wants an old version of windows to verify that i have a legitimate system (yes, seems all i have is an xp UPGRADE disk, not the full version). anyways, i put an old windows disk in there and it verfifies it ok.

next, it wants to format and install. but, i dont notice that it's already formatted and partitioned, one big 238 gig c: partition. seems this is what is called an 'open box' drive, meaning, someone had already formatted and partitioned the drive and brought it back to the store and they just restock it and sell it at a discount. i had wondered why i got it so cheaply. anyways, you cant full format over an already formatted drive, at least not in windows setup. so that sits there for a half an hour trying to format and not getting past 0%. cute. i call the store service guy and we finally figure out it's already formatted as one big partition. so, he says just hit the 'D' key and delete that one and you can then put on more partitions and format each of those. and that's what i wanted, smaller partitions. so, i hit D and it wipes the old partition.

now, somewhere in all this mess the store guy also has me disable RAID in bios and that's how the system finally could see the new drive.

so, now i tell it to create new partitions. it does this nicely. i set up one as 10 gigs, the c: drive, one at 50 and split the remaining space into 2 more. so, 4 partitions.

ok, windows setup is fine with that. so, i then go to format the new raw c: drive. same thing happens again; it wont go past 0% complete. what the freak?

call the store guy again and while i'm talking to him i hit 'quick format' and it starts to format and then starts to install the new windows. cool. ok, hang up. windows continues to load stuff up and gets down to 'installing new start menu programs' or something like that and the progress bar moves slowly to the right and the 'time left' is counting down nicely i'm thinking, 'finally!'. hah!

it wont move the countdown past 19 minutes remaining. this goes on for well over 30 minutes so i start playing with the mouse for some stupid reason and suddenly everything locks up. cant move the mouse and some other things like the advertisement window quits refreshing and i know the thing has locked up.

yeah, call the store guy again! while talking to him i get that i need to reboot the system and maybe it'll just start up again where it left off, at least, that's what he thinks. bah! i hit the reset button and this time i cant see the sata drive in the drive detection lines but it keeps going anyways and up comes windows setup from the windows cd, only, it's starting all over again! good lord.

the store guy doesnt understand this and i'm already way past not understanding. so, i F3 out of setup and the machine restarts again, only this time i can see the sata drive again but as soon as it comes to the boot from cd i get a blue screen of death saying something about an 'unmountable drive'.

now, understand here, i'm a pretty easy going guy, but at this point i'm looking for dynamite or a shotgun...either will do.

so, i call the store guy again. i'm sure he hates the sound of my voice by now and frankly, i didnt much care at this point, though i do know it's not his fault. so, he says 'well, i cant tell over the phone. bring it in and we'll run a diagnostic on it.'. ok, so i once again make the 60 mile trek to the store but it's getting near quitting time for the service guy.

i'm now talking to one of the salesman out front and he says sure, we can look at it, just sign this paper for a diagnostic....$35. remember now, they sold me the motherboard, the case, the power supply, the keyboard, the cpu and the sata drive. the ONLY thing that is on this machine at this point is my mouse and one stick of ram and they want ME to pay for a diagnostic! i'm now very near full-blown pissed! but, i as calmly as possible explain to him 'it YOUR parts! you want ME to PAY to diagnose the parts you just sold me over the last 4 days?!?! he finally says, 'ok, if it turns out in the diagnostic that it's any of our parts i'll waive the fee'. gee, how nice. i'm now threatening to return the entire system for a refund and he threatens 'restocking fee of 15%'.

after a bit more 'discussion' i finally let him take the machine, even though this is going to be another overnight thing and there's no chance to get the system checked today. and that's where we left it.

now, why do i feel like i was just raped, run over the coals and had a big tattoo placed on me somewhere that says 'mark' ?

ok, in all fairness to them, it could still turn out to be user error. i know this. i know i dont do this enough to really, truly know everything i probably need to know to build a new system. these things are getting more and more complex and i'm getting less and less complex as i get older.

meanwhile, i'm without a decent system for yet another day, feel like i'm hungover and if i had a 6 pack in the house it would probably be gone by now.

if i wasnt so upset and frustrated this would make a great 'windows' story to circulate around the net and poke fun at microsoft about. as it is.... I HATE WINDOWS!

i just cant wait to hear what they're going to tell me tomorrow. :confused: :rolleyes:

craig

Craig.

It’s nice to see you have not lost your sense of humor (yet)

This appears to be quite a common problem. Did the drive come with a floppy install disk? If so then this may help

http://richandstephsipe.com/2005/05/how-to-install-windows-xp-on-sata-ii.html

Ken.

ken, that definitely looks like the culprit. i believe the motherboard on that page is the one i have. and i know it was a samsung sata II drive. and all that looks very, very familiar. i'll pass that on to the tech guys at the store. i did finally figure out the part about disabling all the raid stuff, but never figured out the drivers part.

thank you!

craig

It also seems to me if the drive had been opened, formatted, and then returned that there may have been something wrong with it in the first place.

I agree with you, Craig. You should not have to pay for the diagnostic. They sold it to you. They should make sure it works.

Hang in there.

--Racc

racc,

thanks. seemed a bit odd to me too that i shld pay to diagnose their parts. the ONLY thing on that setup currently is my one stick of ram.

anyways, i called them this morning and the service guy hasnt gotten to it yet but i did pass on the information ken provided and he said 'yeah, we get a lot of this type of thing where you need special drivers that dont come with the system.'.

so, we'll see. i do feel a bit better knowing that it wasnt completely me; that anyone would have had at least similar problems setting this thing up.

it was kind of funny yesterday talking to the sales guy. i had brought a screwdriver with me to strip out any parts, somewhat anticipating just returning the whole thing. at one point i was standing there talking to the sales guy, somewhat upset by all this and holding the screwdriver and the sales guy says to me something like, 'ummm, you might want to put that screwdriver down.'. lol. i kind of laughed and said 'ok, i'm upset but i'm not crazy' :) i'm not sure he believed me.

craig

Oh dear Craig, what a long, painfull thread of ambiguity and woe! Ask Doug if you can borrow his avatar lol! At the mo I'm frankensteining two 'working' PCs from all the spare bits I have scavenged over the years (my husband calls my collection 'junk'...what does he know!) I'm gonna set one of them up to run linux/wine. Hmmm... sick of @#$^*+! Windows? :dead: Maybe Linux is worth a shot hehe :cool: Anyway, I hope this all starts to smoothe out for you soon.

well, the drama continues. they didnt get to it yesterday. they were supposed to but they got in two 'priority' jobs that bumped me back. 'priority' in this case means someone was willing to pay time and half for the technician's time. blah!

so, today, i was supposed to be first on the bench. i just called. it's almost 1:30 pm here and he was still working on it. the good news is, he tried the drivers on the motherboard disk with the sata ii drive and they didnt work. he tried the windows drivers and they didnt work and he also tried the drivers that racc told me about a few posts back. so, he's pretty convinced the drive is no good and that means i wont have to pay for the diagnostic :)

so, the guy grabbed another drive, unopened, from the shelf and is going to see if he can get that going. he also tested the motherboard and that seemed ok. so, hopefully sometime today i can get the thing back with a working drive.

in the meantime, i've loaded up Paint Shop Pro 9 on the windows 98se machine (psp 10 is NT and xp only) to do work with and some old games i hadnt played in a long while. anyone remember Morrowind? hehe, this is one i used to hack quite a bit. kinda fun. and frankly, i'm begining to wonder if i even need xp with all its activations, M$ spyware (did you ever read the EULA that comes with xp? xp is loaded with little 'call homes' to microsoft. no wonder there are so many security holes in the thing. bah!), and bloated o/s stuff. i'm beginning to think that linux with vmware o/s modules might be the smarter way to go these days. and the rumors on Vista are that, in the current beta version build, it takes 400 megs of ram just for the o/s stuff....that's resident stuff, not just stuff that gets loaded and unloaded.

anyways, 'we' do seem to be making progress on the new system :)

craig

and he also tried the drivers that racc told me about a few posts back. so, he's pretty convinced the drive is no good and that means i wont have to pay for the diagnostic :)
Oops. Can't take credit for that. I did talk about drivers and hardware in general, but it was Ken who pointed you to the specific drivers you needed for your motherboard.

And you'll probably feel better with a new drive, too. Why buy somebody else's problems with such a critical device? At least it sounds like there's light at the end of the tunnel.

--Racc

oops! you're right; it was ken.

ok, well, i finally got to take my new baby home! it was a difficult birth and there's still a few complications, but it's alive and well!

hehehe, what a nightmare. but the worst is over. it was the sata ii drive. he put a new one in and it worked fine. i asked him which drivers he ended up using and he said he downloaded the one's off the nvidia site, the one's ken recommended from that site.

he had also gone ahead and installed the two ide drives i had brought in and both optical drives and installed windows along with all updates and service pack 2. nice, but i hadnt asked for that and it's an $80 charge. when i mentioned this he said he could take it all off again if i didnt want it and that brought me up a bit short. so, i said screw it; leave it on. i'll pay for it. sneaky!

the only thing he didnt do was to format the extra partitions i had him put on the new drive and i'm doing that now as i write.

and one strange thing occurred in all this...well, one other strange thing; my windows partition, the system drive is now K: . it's not C: . it's K: . and i cant change it. well, maybe i can change it but i cant change it with windows running. i dont know if that's going to present problems down the road or not. lots of folks like to stick parts of their programs in c:\documents and settings\whateva . but i would think the registry is smart enough to know this....in most cases. it's those few cases where it's not that worry me a bit. if anyone knows of problems this might cause, please, let me know. i suspect it's because the other drive, the old c: drive still has windows on it and new windows saw old windows and figured old windows was c: and since windows wont allow two copies of windows on the same partition, but will allow the system drive to be something other than c:, it just said, ok, you can keep your c: drive with old windows and i'll put new windows on something else and call it something else. i suspect the tech guy installed the old physical drive before he installed new windows. i wish he hadnt.

so, lots of old stuff to hook up and re-install. still have one physical drive i havent installed yet. yup, i'm gonna end up with 4 physical drives and two opticals. two ide drives on ide ports, one sata ii drive on a sata port and one ide drive on an ide/sata adapter-expansion pci card :) that'll give me about a half a terrabyte of storage.

i'm still writing all this on the old win98 system as i have no firewall, antivirus, anti-spyware, email or internet setup on the new system yet and still that one drive-card to install yet as well. i have started to tweak windows to trim some of the fat off this hog and as soon as i'm up with my internet and net protection stuff, i'll make a visit to blackviper.com and trim windows even further. so, i expect about a year from now i'll have everything back up and running smoothly :)

i'm also accepting donations for my over-budget woes :)

thanks guys for all the help!

craig

ok, got my basic net stuff back up and i'm on the new machine now. all drives installed and working, including the pci expansion card drive :)

still tons to do.

craig

Craig, as you're probably aware BlackVipers site is down (has been for an awful long time now), this is a Mirror Site http://majorgeeks.com/page.php?id=12

For another page with info on services, try http://www.theeldergeek.com/services_guide.htm

gary, yup. thanks. i guess he got burned out or something.

i used to know how to do this; i need to get my old email stuff back. there are a few emails in particular that are saved that i'd like to recover. i used to know how to do this in win98, but no clue in xp.

the same goes for i.e. favorites as well. i'd like to save my rather extensive favorites listing.

i've already lost a ton of plugins. seems Paint Shop Pro doesnt leave that file alone when you install to a prior, same location. but those shld all be recoverable and re-installable since i have most of th original downloads on another partition.

i've put filter forge back on now too. just have to either recover the old cd key or get a new one.

lol. what a mess.

craig

I presume you're using OE as your e-mail client, in which case I'm not much help, as I haven't used it for years. I use Thunderbird.

However, this site http://www.insideoe.com/ is pretty informative.

To export your IE Favorites.

Open Internet Explorer.
Click on File > Import and Export. This will open the Import/Export Wizard, click next.
select Export Favorites, then next again.
Ensure Hiighlight is on Favorites folder.
Browse to folder where you want to save Favorites and click next.
Click finish to export favorites file to folder you chose.


Then Import them to your new IE (pretty much reversal of above).

I use FF, so instructions may not be exact, but you should be able to work it out from them.

Craig...

I think you need to find some new computer techs. They sound pretty shifty to me. We won't charge you the $35 diagnostic, but we'll slip in $80 worth of work you didn't ask for and then blackmail you into paying it. And to top it off, we won't make the installation standard.

If you already hadn't been through so much, I'd almost suggest (now that you know the hardware is working right) formatting the system drive again and installing XP the way you want it.

There is absolutely no reason for them to have made K: your system drive. They shouldn't have installed any of the other drives before getting XP installed as C:. You're right... the registry will know that K: is your system drive when programs want to put things in documents and settings, but some programs don't use the registry to do that, they'll just assume it's C:. You'll have to be on the lookout for stuff like that.

But, at least it's working. You've survived the trial by fire. :hurt: :happy:

--Racc

gary, thanks. i found the old .dbx files for oe and moved them over and that worked fine. still have to do the address book at mail settings and accounts, but that wont be too hard now that i have that web page you gave.

on the i.e. stuff, again, thanks. i forgot i was using mostly mozilla and did find the old favorites from old i.e. so i'll have to find the old settings for mozilla too. lol. i hate windows.

racc, yeah, quite odd about the K: drive. and i'm not real pleased with those guys either. frankly, after selling me two defective devices and forcing me to make 5 hour long trips (30 mins. there and 30 back) and the tech guy had already set the stuff up and did it wrong (or at least non-standardly), i kinda feel like all that extra fee stuff shld have been waived as well. but, like you pointed out, i was so glad to get the machine back and so tired of fighting all this crap, i just said 'fine! gimme my computer!' and ran.

and yes, ideally i shld just re-do it all, but i'm so tired of fooling with all this that i'm just kinda ignoring it....for now. i can change all the other drive letters around; just not the system drive. so, K: pretty much has to stay K: unless i want to uninstall everything and re-format. i hate windows.

besides, i'm too afraid at this point that if i re-did it all that i'd find another device not working or blow something up or hit something with a very large sledge hammer in my ire.

did i mention i hate windows?

:)

craig

did i mention i hate windows?

If you think its bad now, wait for Vista!

Think I'll be looking at Linux (been meaning to for a while now).

Vista makes me shudder.

well, now all the little idiot things are starting to show up. i've got sound but it's very low even with the volume setting at maximum. i've checked everything i know to check, including dxdiag, control panel sound stuff and adjusting settings on something that seems to have come with the motherboard, some sort of sound manager program. i've even added the extra settings to the little sound manager that stays resident in the systray. all devices say working and no trouble. i've got no question marks or red marks in device manager. it's one of those onboard avance 97 sound cards and seems to have all drivers installed and shows up in all the control setting entries.

i havent tried updating drivers yet for the sound card. dxdiag reports everything is fine even though i can barely hear the sounds.

also, my internet is cutting out once in a while, especially if i leave the machine idle for a while. i call up the browser and i get a zone alarm message saying something about zone alarm blocking....ah! i just figured this one out...i think. i havent put the modem software on (the connection was working without it and i kind of put it aside) and my isp is sending a signal to update the connection. it doesnt see the resident software and gets blocked by zone alarm. lol. ok, i think i can fix this one.

but the sound is a mystery so far.

ya know, those new mac commercials keep coming to mind. there's one where the two guys representing windows and mac are talking and the windows guy is sitting in a box while the mac guy is standing. the whole conversation is about mac being already set up and ready to go when you buy it, while with a pc you have a lot to do yet after taking it out of the box before you can really do anything with it. and boy, does that seem poignant at this point. :)

craig

Which version of ZA are you using, there's been quite a few issues with the latest update that haven't been resolved yet.

I'm thinking about going the UBUNTU (http://www.ubuntu.com/) route myself. Vista gets more colorful as it develops (see what the Black Hat (http://news.zdnet.com/2100-1009_22-6102458.html)'s have done to it. lol). :)

gary, the za version is 6.5.731.00. i believe that's the latest and yes, i downloaded it from their site just recently. what issues are you seeing with this?

i also checked my old drives to see if i had an earlier version i could install. cant seem to find one, which is odd, because i usually save all downloads off in a separate location to where i install.

lk, yes, i picked up a cd at the computer store of Ubuntu. i might check this out also.

still havent figured out this sound issue. am seriously thinking of starting over on this mess and wiping their install of windows and my drives. i dont quite understand why microsoft wont let you change the drive letters on the system drive.

also, is there any program anyone knows of that is like the old 'magic mover' that came with earlier versions of partition magic? this program allowed one to move software and keep registry entries intact. like, you could have an installed program and 'move' it to a new location somewhere and it would either change the appropriate registry entries or some how track them and keep the integrity of the program working no matter where you moved it. so, if i had program A sitting on the F: drive and wanted to move it to the E: drive, it would do so such that the program would continue to work regardless of the registry. this may have only been before windows xp and only for win98. i used to have it for my win98 machine and it was very handy. xp being so much more complex may now prevent it and may be the reason that it no longer comes with partition magic. but if anyone knows of such a beast i'd love to know about it.

also, i may as well ask since gary has said the new zone alarm has issues, where can i get an earlier version if i cant find one on my system somewhere?

craig

Hi Craig.


There is an article here that describes how to change the boot drive letter.

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-US;223188

However it is risky. If it goes wrong you will need this

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-US;249321


If you decide to have a go it will be worth printing out these pages before starting.

You will probably need to reinstall all your programs.


I have Zone Alarm Setup_65_722_000_en.exe. If you want it please email me.


Ken.

Hi Craig,

The latest ZA locks out your hosts file which can cause problems if you have any entries there, it also has had a few connectivity issues. They are being very slow with any remedies for the Free version. Also has conflicts with Webroot Spysweeper. (These are reported problems I've seen on the Malware Forums I work on, I don't have personal experience of them, with the exception of the Hosts problem). I re-loaded the earlier version (luckily I do have a copy).

You could try Free version of Outpost http://www.agnitum.com/products/outpostfree/index.php

Kerio also make a good Freeby, (its a 30 day trial, but at the end of the trial it still works but with reduced functionality, read the features on the web page to see if its OK for what you need) http://www.sunbelt-software.com/Kerio.cfm

ken,

i started reading that article and got this far: Warning Do not use the procedure that is described in this article to change a drive on a computer where the drive letter has not changed. If you do so, you may not be able to start your operating system. Follow the procedure that is described in this article only to recover from a drive letter change, not to change an existing computer drive to something else. and decided this didnt apply to me. what i did do was change all the other drive letters back to how i wanted them... a lot less confusing now. i can live with the system drive being K: for now as long as nobody hardwires their paths to C: .

changing the drive letters did mess up a couple of already installed programs but those were easy to re-install.

i called my isp today and found out that their modem doesnt need software to run. it's an ethernet connection. i'd only need software if it was a usb connection. so, seems like it's this version of zone alarm. i'll look more closely on my old drives for a copy. and thanks, ken; i may take you up on that offer if i cant find another earlier version.

and yes, gary, it's the 'Generic Host Process' that za is blocking. and however that works it cuts out my browser from browsing as well. the odd thing is that za says nothing is blocked when i looked the program list. so, definitely looks like a bug.

never heard of those other firewalls, so thank you :)

i also got my main email account set back up and even managed to play a game. quite odd about the sound, though. i mean, i could hear things in the game but it was like at half volume and i couldnt raise it any higher. gotta find that bug. one clue left on that one; seems that realtek, the makers of the onboard sound, included a program called avrack, or something close to that', and when i tried it out a couple days ago it completely locked up. i had a hard time even with task manager in killing the thing. so, that one's real suspect at this point.

every time i go through this process i swear i'm going to go into the o/s writing business and put M$ out of business. this is a very clumsy way to do things.

thanks guys :)

craig

If you have trouble terminating processes, try Advanced Process Termination (http://www.diamondcs.com.au/freeutilities/apt.php), a handy little Freeware tool. (Read the help file before using).

thanks gary :)

craig

ok, i found ver 6.5.722, the one ken suggested. i got it from www.download.com . you'll have to scroll down their list of firewalls to find it, but it's there. they have 731 too. nice to be able to get older versions of software sometimes.

so, i just got it installed and we'll see. if this doesnt do it then i'm going to suspect the service pack 2 'security' interface thing. but, we'll see.

i'll tell ya, though, macs are sure looking good these days :)

craig

You're welcome Craig.

If you've got a copy of HJT, then that also has process termination capabilities in the Misc Tools section. Click on the Config button to access them.

Yep, Macs have definitely got things to be said for them, but I have far too much fun hacking junk off other peoples PCs to ever go over to one.

But if I wanted a box just for working on, I think I'd probably be giving them my money.

but I have far too much fun hacking junk off other peoples PCs to ever go over to one. lol. now you're starting to sound like my oldest brother. his view on all this pc hassle is 'well, what fun would it be if it all worked correctly?'. you have to understand, this is a guy who used to program mainframes by typing in the code directly, byte by byte; no languages (other than machine/assembly) or pre-typed programs; you just typed it in blind.

anyways, this other version of za has now done the same thing as the last one. so, i took a closer look at what it was saying. seems it was blocking outbound via generic host process for win32 services to my modem for some reason. so, i just added my static ip address to the trusted zone and unblocked the generic host process and then it worked again. lol. i hope i havent just opened my entire system up. and it was only blocking it on the server side in the internet zone. not sure why it would even need to be active on the server side in the first place.

i looked at the alert log and it said: ZoneAlarm blocked an outbound communication to a Domain Name Server. The function of a Domain Name Server (DNS) is to convert a domain's IP address, such as 207.25.71.28, into a recognizable name, such as www.cnn.com and it also said: ZoneAlarm prevented your computer from accessing port 53 on a DNS server

ZoneAlarm prevented your computer from sending a message to a remote computer. No breach in your security has occurred.Your computer is safe lol. yeah it's safe. i also cant surf. (well, i can now).

anyways, if i get loaded with virues and spyware i'll know i've done the wrong thing. it's a new system. if i have to wipe the entire thing again, it wont be too awful and i could then just change that stupid K: as system drive anways :)

i'm afraid i'm just smart enough to know i'm stupid on some of this stuff.

craig

You've only opened to outgoing communications, your security will not be compromised.

Can't see why a DNS connection would be blocked in the first place. Generic Host Process (C:\Windows\System32\svchost.exe) is usually enabled for Access to Internet by default in ZA.

On server side usual settings are ? for Trusted and X for Internet. If you try to change them you usually get dire warnings of doom popping up.

I remember back in the old DOS days when every file or dll a program needed to run was installed into the program's folder. If you wanted to move the application somewhere else, all you needed to do was move the folder. And if you wanted to delete it, all you had to do was erase the folder and the program would be gone... no little tendrils permently bound to the OS.

One (of the myriad many) reasons why Windows is so screwy is all in the name of saving you hard drive space. Why should you have to have more than one copy of a dll file on your system? Personally, I'd rather have 40 copies of the same file on this system if it would make applications easier to manage, move, or delete.

--Racc

gary,

i dont know either. only thing i can think, since i've tried this with two versions of za now, is that i installed za with service pack two's firewall already up and running. it seemed to have no problems in doing this, but maybe it screwed something up internally. it didnt do this before on my old system, but there i didnt have sp2 when i installed za originally. dont really know; i'm just guessing here.

anyways, it seems to be acting ok now.

craig

ZA is supposed to switch off Windows Firewall off automatically, but I've seen too many things fail to do what they're supposed to, to be suprised anymore.

If you're wanting to secure your new box, try one of the HIPs programmes (Host Intrusion Protection Systems). I'm currently trying out the free version of System Safety Monitor http://syssafety.com/download/ssm-2.0-free.exe?pid=110 and I'm quite impressed.

Its run as well as a Firewall, not instead of.

racc, someohow i missed your post. yes, the registry probably seemed like a good idea at the time, but it's a real pain in the byte now. give me .ini files and .dlls any day.

gary, thanks for the file. i'm holding off installing anything else until i get some of this other sorted out first, though. sound is still low... gonna call the tech guy that did the install today and see if he knows what he did. and zone alarm is still a bit goofy. it denied itself access to its own server yesterday. lol. thankfully, that one didnt cut out the rest of the net. and when i play wolfenstein et it lets me play online but it pops up at the start telling me it blocked a couple of things. never had all this happen before. could it be because i'm currently running in stealth mode? i think i used to run za in medium, medium before. so, before, folks could see my computer but still be denied access, but stealth hides your computer (mostly) from view. still dont know. at least it's not blocking my net access now.

i think i've mentioned this before, but it's worth saying again, i hate windows.

craig

racc, someohow i missed your post.
:) No worries. By the time I got around to posting it, the conversation had moved on, anyway.

--Racc

I always run with Firewall settings at High for both Internet and Trusted Zone, you should not be having problems by running it in these settings.

I'm intrigued by how it came to block itself access to the internet. Of course strictly speaking a Firewall doesn't itself need access, except when looking for updates, or if an online help file is requested.

Still ZA doesn't normally show up in the Program list in Program Control, so I don't understand how it could be instructed to block. It could of course be added by using the add button and browsing to the ZA folder, but I can't see that being something you can do accidentally, so its not likely you'd forget if you'd done it.

I'd definitely hold out on trying SSM at the moment. It can appear a little complicated (its not, but it can seem so), but with your box in its current state it would complicate things massively when trying to trace faults. I would only ever install this on a system that I knew was stable and clean.

racc :)

gary, yeah, i'll look at it some more (za). for the moment, i can surf so not too worried about it.

ok, called the tech guy who set this computer up. told him about the sound problem. turns out my old speakers on the old e-machine werent the amplified kind. apparently that avance 97 onboard in the e-machine also had a small, built-in amplifier. the new one doesnt. so, the tech guy said, if you've got a pair of amplified speakers (the kind where you have to plug one of those ac converters in), try those. so, i did have a pair of those on my other machine and tried those. after a lot of fooling around with cords and settings and volume switches, it worked. and, it worked as well or better than the old system. nice strong volume now! :)

so, one more glitch solved. lol. ya ever get the feeling that you could have written your own o/s in all the time you've spent in trying to get windows working? ;) ok, in all fairness to microsoft, windows xp is a big improvement over win98 (but maybe not win2k). i mean, it does work, it's more stable, it is faster in most cases (though, that might be more from hardware upgrades than windows upgrades), and it is a tiny bit more seamless and crashes less. my biggest gripe is with the sort of thing i've been going through and that they dont ever fix the current o/s in a big way (updates arent 'big'); they simply scrap the whole thing and write another beast that has to be learned and debugged. vista will likely never be put willingly on any machine i own, or least not until it's almost obsolete ;)

craig

Like all solutions, blindingly simple once its found. Never occurred to me to think about lack of on-board amplification, everything I've ever worked on always had it.

Ditto on Vista, can't think of any way it'll get on my box, unless its pre-installed on the next one (don't have any immediate plans on that front).

I'm in total agreement with your views on the M$ ethic of throwing out the baby with the bathwater. How do they ever expect to have a corps of people who are experienced with resolving problems on their OS's if they keep scrapping them every two minutes.

But of course fixing an existing OS doesn't bring in the $, whereas selling a new shiny, all singing and dancing, wonder OS to the gullible masses has always proven to be a gold mine for them.

gary,

yup. never occurred to me to think 'amplifier' either. i kept looking for a software solution, a switch, a setting, a driver, something along those lines :) sometimes you just have to plug the cord in to make the computer work :)

on the zone alarm stuff, i've had some more blocks. in the 'alerts and logs' tab, i've got two tcp entries, 1 udp, and about a dozen icmp types. i dont even know what icmp is.

the last entry was an outgoing tcp, source ip: 192.168.1.112:1204; destination ip: 208.185.174.66:80; direction: outgoing; action taken: blocked; count 1; source dns: custom1; destination dns: hs2.zonelabs.com . no clue why za would block za. lol. i'm guessing that if i put that address in the trusted zones area that it would then work, though. my guess is that all these outgoing being blocked would work if i put them in the trusted zones area. but again, just a guess based on what worked with the net stuff i managed to unblock.

craig

Presume you're using a router, as the source address is one typically used by routers. Destination checks out as ZoneLabs.

Only reason I can see ZA phoning home is to check for updates, but why its blocking itself is anyone's guess, I've never come across this type of behaviour before.

Is ZA showing in the Program Control list? If so, what are the settings for it?

Any other outgoing signals being blocked, if so which Programs are they, and are they in your Program Control list.

ICMP = Internet Control Message Protocol http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Control_Message_Protocol

A Ping is about the only tool commonly using ICMP . Traceroute also incorporates ICMP functionality within a UDP signal.

ZA has a user Forum http://www.zonelabs.com/store/content/support/userForum/userForum_agreement.jsp

Probably the best place to seek answers.

gary,

no separate router. using dsl modem.

'zone labs client' shows in the 'programs' section of za. but it shows nothing about za in the trusted 'zones' area.

ok, i just checked, that 192.168.1.112 is the nvidia internet networking controller -- packet scheduler miniport. entry type: adapter subnet. in other words, my nic. it's an onboard thing.

and yes, za did try to phone home once when it detected i was using an older version than is available at their site and i said no. but i didnt block it. i just didnt allow that particular time. now all the marks next to the za entry in programs are question marks.

the only other thing showing up being blocked is when i run wolfenstein et, which is in the programs entries, but it doesnt actually block ET. what happens when i run ET is it starts up and when it starts to check connections at startup i get the first icmp message. it's just a popup message. as ET initializes more stuff, i get another icmp, another popup. these dont require any attention other than to click 'ok'. and, ET does work regardless of these. i tried out ET today and got these same as before, two different popups, but there are 5 icmp log entries. these might be pings to check me for being a listed ET server. since i'm not running a server it may be why i can play ET just fine. but i'll bet if i tried to host nobody would see my machine. i do recall having to set up ports and settings before if i wanted to be a server. and that would fit with what you were saying about pings and tracerts using icmp.

and thanks for the za forum link. i'll start looking at things there and maybe post. currently, this isnt really annoying. and in fact, it's somewhat amusing watching za block itself. it seems to happen again about once a day :)

craig

If you left click on the ZA icon in Program Control, you can set it to Allow(tick), Prompt(question Mark) or Block(cross). The same applies for any program. Perform for each Zone.

Or you can right click an item and remove it from the list. Then when the program next tries to go online you'll get the usual pop up window asking you what you want to do.

If your settings have somehow got mucked up, probably easiest to do the 2nd option and remove items from the list that are giving you problems, and set your options when they "pop up" again.

gary,

yes, za is in the program controls listing. they are all set to question mark for za, which is why it seemed strange that za wasnt asking for allow when i'd get the popup. it would just show the popup with an 'ok' telling me that it had been blocked. no prompt was asked for.

i can try removing and see what that does. also, it may want za in the 'trusted zone' and not just on the program controls.

it's no biggie at this point. just sort of odd.

thanks :)

craig

You're welcome.

I've never seen ZA in the Program Control list, so to find it there is curious, but the fact it isn't prompting you when controls are set for it to do so is even more curious.

Afraid I don't have any further suggestions, except to say it may be worth uninstalling and re-installing once you've got your system running stable.

With something as tied into your system as a Firewall (all Firewalls load kernel mode drivers) any irregularities in your system may have unexpected side effects.

Good luck with it!

well, i'm beginning to believe this machine is either cursed or haunted or both. tonight, while watching my favorite friday night line-up on t.v. i heard windows suddenly start up. i tend to leave the computer on when i'm at home even if i'm not using it. so, i walked over to the computer and sure enough, it had rebooted itself. ok, that's odd. there werent any strange popups or weird messages anywhere but all sorts of thoughts are now running through my head...viruses, a truly jinxed motherboard, someone hacked my computer....i didnt know. well, my friday night shows were still on so i left the computer running and about an hour later i heard windows start up again! ok, this is getting spooky. what in the world?? so, i walk over to the computer again and sure enough, it's rebooted itself.

now, this time i happened to notice the time and it was almost exactly an hour from the time of the last automatic reboot. i contemplated this for a bit and the only thing i have set for anything automatic is my screensaver. and, since i had decided to try out a different screensaver on this machine, i decided that might be it. so, i let the computer sit for another hour with no external activity from me. after an hour and 10 minutes i gave up. it didnt reboot. cute.

but, just to kind of be on the relatively safe side, i changed the screensaver back to one i'd use on the other machine. both screensavers were ones included with the installation of windows and not something i'd downloaded or anything. i may have to turn on some log files and see if i cant trace some of this oddball activity.

anyone got a commodore 64 they want to sell me? ;)

craig

When you say Boot Up, do you mean your box was powered down, and switched itself on and did a full boot, or you had just logged off, and it logged you back on?

Or was it that you were still logged on, and your computer started to perform an operation? Windows does perform housekeeping activities if it is switched on and inactive for any long period of time.

To speed up your boot time, Windows creates a prefetcher, and it will edit this and defrag part of your disk to fit this prefetcher in, so the files are in contiguous areas of the disk and it can run faster. It does this about every 3 days if your computer is left inactive (I believe the computer has to be inactive for about an hour before it does this), if you touched anything on your computer, it would immediately stop the process in order to process your requests. If you then left it again, it would resume the defrag after it had been inactive for a further hour.

If it is the third occurrance it is nothing to worry about, however if it is either of the first two, then it needs investigating.

gary, the machine was up and running and i was logged in. it simply, with no input from me, rebooted itself. i had been away from the keyboard for over an hour when the first one occurred. and then it occurred again after another hour, almost to the second. i have never seen windows log itself off and reboot the machine all on it's own like this unless a drive was about to go completely bad.

also, my screensaver doesnt seem to work. i had it on that drawing pipes thing and it never drew pipes. it's just a black screen every time it goes to that mode. i changed it to that flying windows one now but havent had a chance to see if it will go to that yet. i think i'll check that profile (if there is one) that does all the screensavers and energy saving sometime today. i've had trouble with those in the past on other machines.

in addition to all this, i've now had another strange occurrence. i was loading filter forge yesterday and happened to stomp on the floor rarther hard (dont ask :) ) and the machine locked up immediately. it went immediately from the desktop view to a sort of solid, almost black, sort of greenish tinted screen with the harddrive light staying on but nothing happening. filter forge would not load, i couldnt see the desktop any more and i had to shut everything off. i waited a good 30 seconds or more and turned the machine back on and all was fine. i didnt even get a chkdsk come up. filter forge ran fine after that and there was no apparent record that anything odd had occurred. and yes, this is a crt type monitor. and yes, it's quite an old monitor, older than my old e-machine machine. so the stomp on the floor could have done something to an aging electron gun. i'll try to refrain from that sort of thing in the future. it could also be an indication of a loose connection somewhere, either computer or monitor. i'll have a look at this also.

oh, and how do you get rid of that 'windows security monitor' in the systray? i really dont want these annoying popups about 'my computer might be at risk because i've turned off automatic updates'.

and, how do you turn off 'windows messenger'. i remember doing this once and you had to not only uninstall the thing but also something else as i recall.

sorry to be such a pain. i shld really know some of this stuff. but when i only do this every 3 to 5 years, i tend to forget. also, if you know of a REALLY good windows xp manual/book that goes into windows in detail and how to tweak, fix and generally live with xp, i'd be obliged.

craig

Certainly sounds like some sort of dodgy connection, or dry solder joint to make your monitor black out llike that, particularly with all the new build you've been doing lately.

Gonna have to think a bit about the re-boots, not come across that before.

OK, to stop the Windows security pop-ups, do the following.


Click Start > Control Panel > Security Centre
On the left hand side click on Change the way Windows Security Centre Alerts Me
Uncheck Automatic Updates then click OK
Exit out of Security Centre


To stop Windows Messenger starting do the following.


Start Windows Messenger
Click Tools > Options > Preferences
Uncheck Run Windows Messenger when Windows Starts
Uncheck Allow Windows messenger to run in the background
Click OK
Exit Windows Messenger.


Thats enough to ensure you'll never see it again, if you want to totally remove it from your box let me know and I'll post instructions.

gary,

thanks. turned messenger off. heh, that was too easy. we used to wipe it off the disk somehow. i forget now how, but it was one of those things that when you loaded outlook express, even if you'd turned messenger off and even if you'd told outlook not to load it and even if you'd taken it out of your startup, it would load it anyways. it was one of those things one never uses but windows insisted in having in the systray for some odd reason. anyways, it seems gone now :)

did the thing with the alert center too. thanks :)

dont worry about the lockup. i normally dont go around stomping on the floor. the monitor is an NEC multisync 75 and if it is going bad, i'd rather not know about it at this point :) next time i turn off the machine i'll check some of the inner connections to ports and drives and so on. i do recall when setting this thing up that one power connection on a drive was unusually loose. could just be that. normally those connectors are like stakes in hardwood and almost take a prybar to disconnect so it caught my attention at the time. i'll check it again.

also, since i've lost a lot of my old links ( i did get the ones for i.e. back, btw, but not mozilla yet), if you've got some hot sites for this sort of stuff, i'd appreciate it. i recall blackviper and tom's hardware, but that's about it.

craig

These are useful sites for solutions to Windows problems.

Doug Knox (http://www.dougknox.com/) Loads of good stuff here.
Kelly's Korner (http://www.kellys-korner.com/) Excellent for all things XP.
Sandi's Site (http://inetexplorer.mvps.org/) Some good links here, but you've gotta dig a little.
Ramesh's Site (http://windowsxp.mvps.org/) One of the best.

Hardware and General PC stuff

PC Answers (http://www.pcanswers.co.uk/)

These forums are good for hardware advice.

PC Pitstop (http://www.pcpitstop.com )
Virtual Dr. (http://www.virtualdr.com)

Also, you all might try Axcel216's website (well it use to be named as such, but now it's mdgx): http://www.mdgx.com/ (http://www.mdgx.com/)

thanks guys! i've started looking through these.

here's another archive of the blackviper site: http://web.archive.org/web/20041123023608/www.blackviper.com/index.html this one is without all the advertising on some of the others.

also, anyone know how to find and restore or retrieve to i.e. your favorites list from mozilla's web browser?

i also managed to destroy my c: drive. ah, the joys of playing with things you dont really understand. my own fault. thankfully, windows xp managed to restore it with a chkdsk. i basically just make the c: drive unreadable/corrupt by playing around with 'RECYCLER' on the c: drive. since the SID was now different, being that i've got a new SID (security identification) from the one that used to exist, i managed to totally corrupt the drive. sometimes you probably just shldnt 'push the button to see what happens'. lol.

i've also found another culprit that seems to have been making the system unstable. it seems the power usage settings, those things that want to turn off your drives and monitor after a while, have been at least partially responsible for those odd automatic reboots. i've now just turned them off and things seem a bit better.

still lots of things to add back and still lots of housekeeping and clean up to do but mostly getting better :)

craig

Yup; the number one cause for computer problems is end users. lol

To import settings from another browser into Internet Explorer, do the following.


Open IE.
Click on File > Import and Export
A Wizard will open, click Next
Highlight Import Favorites and click Next.
Browse to location where you have Mozilla bookmarks. then click Next
Select where you want to Import them to, then click Next
Click Finish to complete the Import.


To create a file of your Bookmarks from Firefox (not sure if this is the Mozilla browser you're using).


Open Firefox.
Click Bookmarks > Manage Bookmarks.
Click File > Export.
Save the file bookmarks.html created by Firefox, to a location where you can find it.
Exit out of Bookmarks Manager

thanks, gary.

what i'll eventually be doing is putting mozilla back on the computer in working order. but i dont know how mozilla stores its favorites list ... or where, for that matter. it's probably in documents and settings somewhere and i'll look around and have looked around a bit so far, but nothing obvious yet.

craig

For Firefox, the bookmarks are kept in this location (its a html file)

C:\Documents and Settings\(User Name)\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\8d7o2jco.default\bookmarks.html

Where user name = the name of the account that is being used
8d702jco.default = will be a number specific to your installation

oh cool! that worked nicely! thank you! i guess i was looking for something other than an .html file. got em! :)

craig

You're welcome, glad it helped.

ok, an update here on ye olde computer. it's working pretty well now. i still get the occaisional blue screen crash, but not many.

i've swapped out my memory and added 2 gigs of pc 3200, dual channel ram. that's gonna help a LOT.

i'm still adding back software and hardware bit by bit and that's going well also.

but here's a new question. i decided to turn the cpu speed up. the defaults were 200 cpu frequency and 100 clock speed. this is an AMD 3500 processor. so, i thought, what the heck, let's turn the cpu frequency up to 300 and see what happens. not good. when i left saved and exited bios, i got an overclock warning and that i shld hit delete to re-enter bios. i hit delete and it wouldnt enter bios. in fact, it started looping the reboot. the overclock warning would stay on the screen for x amount of seconds and then the system would reboot and come up with the same thing. this is the black screen with white text, the first screen you see when you first boot up. that was a bit disconcerting and i was afraid i was going to have to do a manual reset of the bios.

what i did do was, after this rebooting didnt seem to want to correct itself in any way, was to simply shut the power off and let it sit for 30 seconds. this sometimes clears these things. and, sure enough, when i powered back up, i no longer got the same overclock warning and it acted like it was going to go ahead and boot up. but, i had also hit the delete key again hoping to beat the overclock warning if it came up. so, i was now back in bios and being afraid i was going to lock the system up, i set the cpu frequency back to 200, saved and exited and all was well again.

so, the question here is, how i can turn the cpu speed up if it's going to whine about overclocking and simply loop the reboot cycle?

craig

I'm not an expert, but I do know that there's a lot more to overclocking than just turning up the CPU speed... there's memory speed, bus speed, video card speed, etc. All these things sould be coordinated together. It's not for the faint of heart.

Also, the basic rule when increasing any of these speed/clock values is BABY STEPS. You went from 200 to 300. What you should do is turn it up just a tiny bit and see if everything boots and is stable. Sometimes you have leave the system run a while to see if heat or other processes affect stability and performance. Once you're sure everythings still working as it should, take another baby step. After some time, you'll eventually find the "sweet spot..." the highest you can safely set it.

Also, the more you overclock the system, the more cooling you will need to fight off the additional heat. I once saw on TV where they overclocked a 2GHz machine (state of the art, then) to over 4GHz and using liquid nitrogen to keep it cool enough.

And again, don't forget about all the other areas mentioned above that will be affected by the overclocking.

--Racc

thanks, racc. yes, i think i saw that same show about turning a 2 ghz machine into a 4 and using the liquid nitrogen. wild.

it's not a big deal either. my machine is handling everything i need to. but, i was curious if it would take it ok. i like the baby steps idea. and i do know about things running hotter when you overclock. what i dont know is things like vcore voltages and such. when would you need to turn those up? and that may be why the machine was balking at the 300 vs 200. perhaps it wanted something else turned up to compensate.

there is a separte setting in there for increasing video speeds as well. it has the default, a fast and a turbo setting listed. and, there are some other adjustables in that same bios page which i dont even know what they are. i suppose a little research on those might be in order also.

for now, i'll just leave it at 200. like i say, the machine is working pretty well. so maybe dont fix it if it aint broke might be the best philosophy here :)

craig

Another thing to consider.

How is your PSU coping with the extra heat generated by overclocking?

Not only does the heat affect your CPU, but it will also affect the current demand on your PSU, (hotter components have less resistance, less resistance = greater current flow) and if can't be accomodated then the O/P voltages of your PSU will vary, and then you're into all kinds of fun.

gary, good point.

what is O/P ?

craig

Hey Craig,

I'm not a fan at all of overclocking, but if you are going to overclock, then make sure you have a hefty Photoshop and a good cooling system. Ventilation/heat transfer is very important too (would give you some equations, but I'm very rusty now; lol). Also, take advantage of any CPU cooler software that might be available for XP (I did play with overclocking on my old Win98 machine and used a software program that would turn off the CPU during no activity periods keeping the CPU cool; worked quite well with no performance hits). A better solution (and one that would probably save your current system) is to just be happy with what came with your system (I know AMDs and ASUS MB's have the reputation to be used for overclocking, but I'm now in the PC repair business and can say that if a MB for AMD becomes defective, it can take out the CPU and vice versa; don't know if your system is AMD, but I wouldn't push a Pentium class CPU either). If you really need the speed, Intel promised the Quad Core by November (if you have some dough that is) and an 80 Core processor (and I mean 80) within 10 years (since the current XP Pro can only support 4 CPU's as I recall, I guess Vista or it's offspring will be able to take advance of the mass parallel system (yes, I did my Senior Design project on Parallel Processing; so how did I become a power electronics engineer? lol). I'll believe it when I see it. :)

thanks, lk. you guys have pretty much convinced me (besides my near miss at locking up the system) that i shld just leave it alone. the speed rating and actual operation havent been a problem at all. the biggest problem was lack of ram and i've now handled that nicely. i ran a high end game and then some big files in Paint Shop Pro and got NO swap file lights coming on! so, i'm actually in pretty good shape now.

craig

what is O/P ?

Ooops sorry Craig, get used to using electronics shorthand, forget not everybody else knows it.

O/P = Output
I/P = Input

ah! thanks, gary :)

craig