computer on the fritz

[Kraellin]

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

[Littlecoo]

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? Maybe Linux is worth a shot hehe Anyway, I hope this all starts to smoothe out for you soon.

[Kraellin]

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 psp 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

[Racc Iria]

Originally Posted by Kraellin

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

[Kraellin]

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

[Kraellin]

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

[Gary Richardson]

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

[Kraellin]

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 psp 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

[Gary Richardson]

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.

[Racc Iria]

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.

--Racc

[Kraellin]

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

[Gary Richardson]

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).

[Racc Iria]

Vista makes me shudder.

[Kraellin]

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

[Gary Richardson]

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