Darned computer problems... again!

[Steve A.]

My main computer isn't working right this morning... Merry Christmas! LOL

I had gotten a delayed write message last night, suggesting that something might have been damaged and now Windows boots up but most programs do absolutely nothing. When I click on My Computer it just hangs with no listing displayed.

I think I need to do the In-place reinstallation from the install disk, but darned if I can't find it! (I just saw it a few weeks ago when I was looking for something else).

Any suggestions would be appreciated (right now I'm using my notebook computer to log on here). Thanks!

Steve A.

Edit: as soon as I posted that my main computer is working again... hooray!

[Don Symes]

You've kept up with the AV and Spybot scans, I'm sure. (I like Spybot Search & Destroy, myself).

Is there a registry tool you trust?

[Sock Puppet]

Steve, it's worth checking the cabling to the hard drives - I had no end of similar bother because of a poor power connector.

S.

[Steve A.]

Originally Posted by Don Symes

You've kept up with the AV and Spybot scans, I'm sure. (I like Spybot Search & Destroy, myself).

Is there a registry tool you trust?

Funny that you should mention that because I keep getting messages that AXLOAD.TO is being blocked from accessing the internet, but why aren't my AV and spyware programs getting that crap off my computer???

My computer had been getting really flakey again so I thought I better review my protection. I'd been using the AVG Free anti-virus program, but with the mandatory new version I keep getting error messages when it tries to get upgrades. And although WebRoot Spy Sweeper was able to clean up my computer last year (when SpyBot S&D couldn't) I have my doubts as to its current effectiveness.

So I got the latest updates from SpyBot and it found and neutralized a dozen threats that WebRoot hadn't caught. And for AV I am trying out the 30 day trial of Kaspersky Anti-Virus 6.0- a scan of my boot drive just found 11 adware and 1 Trojan program (Backdoor.W32.Bifrose.acj).

I *thought* I had disabled Spy Sweeper, but it came back on rebooting, and it got weird with 3 programs trying to control access to the registry... LOL

So we will see how things work... KNOCK ON WOOD!!!

Steve Ahola

EDIT: I just did a full 4 hr scan with KAV last night and it found and removed about 50 problems- some had been quarantined by NAV but many were new and had been missed by AVG. Like some pirated software I had downloaded last summer- it was the Hide IP Professional program that makes it harder for the government to track down people sharing music. (Gee whiz, my parents taught me that sharing was good, so why are people being busted for it??? LOL) In any case Kaspersky Anti-Virus 6.0 seems to be pretty good- I had really gotten tired of the bloated stuff from Norton which is why I switched to the free version of AVG, but I guess you get what you pay for- right? KAV is supposed to be about $10 more than Norton, so I'll complete the 30-day trial before deciding to buy it or not.

More edits: Thunderbird and Nero seem to be running okay, but EAC is still dead in the water. I was just thinking that there was some feature in WinXP where it would examine the files in your Windows installation and compare them to the originals, replacing them as necessary. Or was that just a dream? If I could find the original cd from MS I could do an "in-place" reinstall which would overwrite all of the system files without losing all of my installed programs (I think) but I believe that all of the Windows install files are already on my hard drive along with all of the updates, so it seems to me that there should be a program that will spend a hours examining your Window installation, comparing them to the various install CAB files on your computer...

[dai h.]

might want to peek into the chassis and power supply for bulging electrolytics or any other signs showing of parts failure. Seems to be a problem sometimes.

[Steve A.]

Originally Posted by dai h.

might want to peek into the chassis and power supply for bulging electrolytics or any other signs showing of parts failure. Seems to be a problem sometimes.

I upgraded the power supply a few months ago so don't think that is the problem. Funny thing is that it NEVER shuts itself off when I'm around- it usually happens in the middle of the night although it did yesterday when I was in the other room.

Programs like EAC (Exact Audio Copy) have an option to shut off the computer when they are done and just yesterday I got 30 second countdown which I stopped just in time (I usually have it ripping a disk when I go to sleep at night).

At this time I can run a few programs like IE and Cool Edit Pro, but not EAC or Nero or Thunderbird...

I think I need to get a new computer or a new mobo (this was the one with the broken SATA connector so I got a PCI SATA adaptor). Fortuneately I have all of my programs on a single partition, with everything being data so it should be easy to migrate everything over...

Steve

[Steve A.]

Geez, this computer is getting weirder and weirder! I got a message that the "Upper Limit" for Nero was backwards in the registry, but that it was corrected... Huh??? After that I got a message from Windows saying that the BIOS on my mobo was not approved for my CPU (I've had the same mobo/CPU for a few years now).

This afternoon, I would try to activate EAC, WinAMP and SnagIt, but none of them would open. I leave for an hour and when I come back all three of the programs had opened- WinAMP was playing 3 songs at once!

Help!!!

[Steve A.]

I finally went ahead and did an "in-place" reinstallation of WinXP and it is working better than it has for quite awhile... hip! hip! hooray! for Bill Gates and his minions!

The earlier versions of XP and Win2K did not allow you the luxury of an "in-place" re-install- if you reinstalled the OS in the same folder it would overwrite EVERYTHING so you would have to reinstall all of your programs and drivers. Ugh! You did have the dreaded Repair Console, which would allow you to screw up everything and still not solve the problem.

I'm not sure if it was added in with SP1 or SP2 but you can now select the "Upgrade" option when you run install inside WinXP and as long as your Windows disc isn't from an earlier service pack generation, you are good to go. Just type in your 25 digit product number and let it do its thing for about an hour, with a few well-placed nudges to keep everything running smoothly.

A few complications- I have an add-on SATA card which means that Windows install has to load the drivers from a floppy before it can read the data on those drives. I *thought* I burned a floppy with all of the needed files, but one was missing, but it worked out okay anyway. And with the SATA card I had to pull out the Windows install CD whenever it would reboot since it would cause it to lock up... One final problem- once WinXP had restarted and was stable, it wanted to configure EZ CD Creator 6 and requested that I insert its install CD. I happened to have it handy but the Windows installer did not like the .MSI file it went into an almost endless loop requesting that I insert the proper CD- I fooled it by sneaking around and uninstalling EZ CD Creator (although I had to abort the last part of the install process to do that- I had already rebooted into Windows several times so it was just doing some last minute configuration of programs.) Looking back I wish I had uninstalled it before I started to reinstall Windows (as I had done with Nero and EAC). Live and learn!

Well, I need to go back and make sure everything is running okay... knock on wood!

Steve Ahola

edit: I *FINALLY* saw my computer shut off... I had stayed up all night catching up with projects on my computer and around 6:25AM a small box popped up in the middle of my screen saying "Registry Error" and everything shut down a few seconds after that, with computer turning itself off and not restarting. So that is probably why I'd find the computer off when I'd get up in the morning. I just did a free registry scan and need to see about cleaning things up a bit.

edit #2: I know now *exactly* what program was causing my computer to shut off in the middle of the night- it was a demo version of Replay Radio that I was using to "tune in" streaming audio that I would record using other programs. The demo was limited to 3 stations max and 5 minutes recording time, but it worked great at "sniffing out" URL's which I could then plug into the bundled Creative Audio Stream Recorder or Magix Web Radio Recorder.

I had seen this happen before- the task bar would start to fill up with many many icons from Replay Radio and I would get a dialog box that would say "Registry Error" or maybe "Registry Overflow". So I uninstalled that demo, along with its big brother, Replay AV. Other than having it crash my computer repeatedly, I really was impressed by the program, especially compared to the Magix program, which had a hard time tuning in any internet radio station that wasn't already in its database. (Replay Radio had a "URL Finder" applet which would sniff out the address of practically any window with streaming audio- I never could get Replay AV to do the same with streaming video. )

[bob p]

Steve, just wondering what you do for your "in-place" backups and restorations. Lately I've been using two packages from Acronis for this type of job. The first one, Acronis Disk Director, is a hard disk suite that I've used to replace other partitioning software. The other is Acronis True Image, which I use to create images of my system.

For example, I'll install a system, and then use True Image to back up the system to another drive on the network. (you could also back up to a stack of DVDs if you wanted to.) Then whenever I want to restore a machine, I just re-install from the image files. Works like a charm.

Acronis looks like a Windows program. Even though its actually a linux app, it licenses the Windows "look" and acts like a Windows app for the user. I just thought you might find this helpful.

[TD_Madden]

Bob,

How fast does that Acronis software backup or restore the images? I've been using the last "good" version of DriveImage with my XP/Linux box for a few years. It works very well, but I'm impatient and always looking at ways to speed this process up.

Regards.

[TD_Madden]

by the way, the version of DriveImage I was referring-to was "2002"

[bob p]

Acronis is pretty darned fast. I have all of my PCs on a LAN, and Acronis even allows you to dump your disk image onto a Samba share. I don't even have to mess with physical media. Of course, you can speed it up or slow it down depending upon whether or not you want it to use compression.

All things considered, its fast, probably the fastest thing I've ever come across. I regularly use it for backing up a PC before I go distro-whoring, and returning the PC to its native state is a pice of cake. Its definitely worth looking into.

[David Schwab]

Originally Posted by Steve A.

Funny that you should mention that because I keep getting messages that AXLOAD.TO is being blocked from accessing the internet, but why aren't my AV and spyware programs getting that crap off my computer???

I've seen some trojans disable SpyBot here at work!

I say get a Mac. You will never have another spyware or virus problem ever again!

Plus I haven't had mine crash in four years.

[Steve A.]

Originally Posted by bob p

Steve, just wondering what you do for your "in-place" backups and restorations. Lately I've been using two packages from Acronis for this type of job. The first one, Acronis Disk Director, is a hard disk suite that I've used to replace other partitioning software. The other is Acronis True Image, which I use to create images of my system.

For example, I'll install a system, and then use True Image to back up the system to another drive on the network. (you could also back up to a stack of DVDs if you wanted to.) Then whenever I want to restore a machine, I just re-install from the image files. Works like a charm.

Acronis looks like a Windows program. Even though its actually a linux app, it licenses the Windows "look" and acts like a Windows app for the user. I just thought you might find this helpful.

Can you run Acronis with the linux OS from a boot disc without having to install linux on your computer? Seems to me that would be really slick...

The "in place" installation of WinXP was something that MS added with the first or second service pack- basically it just reinstalls the system files without changing most of your registry settings.

My boot drive is 95GB with usually about 12GB free so it is a b*tch to back it up... I started out with a 32GB boot drive but so many programs want to be on the same drives as the Windows OS so I figured what the heck... The rest of my drives (>2TB including my external drives) are basically just data files.

Steve Ahola

[Guitarist]

mac, yep. But best to use a parallel system with boot options for either. I've done this with great success and you can snag a patched OS via torrent and get the install helps at insanelymac or OSx86.

On this Dell notebook are installed XP twice (everyday, recording) mac OSX 10.6, and SUSE Linux (which I rarely use and then a DATA partition FAT32 (I think). Those imaging apps are REALLY good/smart and that Hiren CD rocks the kazbah!

I know what Steve's has endured as one silly app/driver can screw you perfect install hence imaging your best progress is smart.

[bob p]

Originally Posted by Steve A.

Can you run Acronis with the linux OS from a boot disc without having to install linux on your computer? Seems to me that would be really slick...

yes.

[David Schwab]

Originally Posted by Guitarist

mac, yep. But best to use a parallel system with boot options for either. I've done this with great success and you can snag a patched OS via torrent and get the install helps at insanelymac or OSx86.

On this Dell notebook are installed XP twice (everyday, recording) mac OSX 10.6, and SUSE Linux (which I rarely use and then a DATA partition FAT32 (I think). Those imaging apps are REALLY good/smart and that Hiren CD rocks the kazbah!

I know what Steve's has endured as one silly app/driver can screw you perfect install hence imaging your best progress is smart.

The current Mac OS is 10.4.8 Tiger... there is no 10.6. 10.5 (Leopard) will be out probably in in April.

On the new Intel Macs you can run Windows, either as a dual boot (using Apple's BootCamp), or along side OS X using Parallels Desktop. You can also run various flavors of Linux natively, and since OS X is based on BSD Unix, you can run X11 apps natively. I recompile Linux apps all the time to run on OS X.

One advantage of OS X is no driver issues. XP has some bugs in the driver API's. And you never have to edit your registry to do things like use a different USB port for your interface...

OS X was designed for audio from the ground up. You can't really say that about Windows.

[Steve A.]

Originally Posted by David Schwab

The current Mac OS is 10.4.8 Tiger... there is no 10.6. 10.5 (Leopard) will be out probably in in April.

On the new Intel Macs you can run Windows, either as a dual boot (using Apple's BootCamp), or along side OS X using Parallels Desktop. You can also run various flavors of Linux natively, and since OS X is based on BSD Unix, you can run X11 apps natively. I recompile Linux apps all the time to run on OS X.

One advantage of OS X is no driver issues. XP has some bugs in the driver API's. And you never have to edit your registry to do things like use a different USB port for your interface...

OS X was designed for audio from the ground up. You can't really say that about Windows.

Those $799 Mac boxes look very tempting... can you hook them up to a KVM switchbox? What sort of connectors do Mac's use for the mouse and the keyboard- PS/2? USB? or none of the above. They also make KVM switchboxes with USB connectors. It would be really great to have a PC and a Mac hooked up to the same monitor, keyboard and mouse, and you could switch back and forth between the two as needed! Without having to do the dual boot thing...

I still have my computer shutting off every now and then- usually when I am doing a task like ripping a CD with EAC and converting it to FLAC files. Sometimes there is a reason like running out of disk space, or having too many applications open, but in any case I don't think that the computer should shut off like that. It may have something to do with the broken SATA header- one of the pins had broken off, so I cut off the rest of them and added a PCI SATA card...

I have a new mobo and cpu still unopened- I wasn't sure if I wanted to return them or not, but I think I do need them. (Hopefully I can get WinXP to work with the new mobo without having to call Redmond.)

Thanks for the suggestions!

Steve Ahola

[David Schwab]

Originally Posted by Steve A.

Those $799 Mac boxes look very tempting... can you hook them up to a KVM switchbox? What sort of connectors do Mac's use for the mouse and the keyboard- PS/2? USB? or none of the above. They also make KVM switchboxes with USB connectors. It would be really great to have a PC and a Mac hooked up to the same monitor, keyboard and mouse, and you could switch back and forth between the two as needed! Without having to do the dual boot thing...

The Mac Mini is a great way to get into Macs.. which is what they made them for. The first ones weren't too fast, but the Intel based ones are pretty nice.. they are basically laptops in a box.

Macs use USB for the mouse and keyboard. They have Four USB 2.0 ports, one FireWire 400. They use SATA drives. PC2-5300 RAM. DVI output port with support for VGA, S-video, and composite video connections via adapter. You can use them with a KVM switch box.

I've been running a fairly old Mac at home... originally a PowerMac G4/466 from 2000. I upgraded the processor to 1 GHz. It's not a bad machine, and even though I use a dual 2.7 GHz G5 at work, I never feel like "damn, this thing is slow" when I'm home.

I hear the new Intel Macs are really fast. My wife was a long time Windows user, but now she even got her dad to switch... he has a PPC flat screen iMac, and just got an Intel based MacBook Pro. It's a nice laptop.

[Steve A.]

Originally Posted by Steve A.

... Edit: as soon as I posted that my main computer is working again... hooray!

Ummm... yesterday afternoon my computer gave a short error message and proceeded to die a quick and painless death. R.I.P.

I had picked up a new CPU and mobo a few weeks ago so I was ready to rock!

The "in-place" installation feature once again came in handy, so I didn't have to reinstall and reconfigure all of my programs (as was necessary with W2K and the earlier versions of WinXP). With Windows being the interface between hardware devices and software programs, why should you have to reinstall all of your programs when you change your hardware??? I can see having to reinstall a few hardware-intensive programs like Windows Media Player, or having to reconfigure some of them, but why start over from scratch???

I plan to move to a totally new computer with a completely fresh install, but I need time to transfer all of my settings (there is a wizard that is supposed to do that, so I'll give that a try).

Steve Ahola

P.S. [1/27/07 edit] Darn that Fry's Electronics! After installing their mobo, cpu and RAM I noticed a lot of instabilities. Like Blue Screens of Death while running the WinXP install. And once I got WinXP working to some extent, core programs like Windows Explorer would crash, asking me if I wanted to send an error report to Microsoft. I ran EAC 4 times on one CD because the computer would lock up or crash before it had a chance to save a LOG report... it seemed like programs would crash once you started exercising the CPU.

After doing some experimenting I learned that WinXP would be stable if I removed one of the two 512MB RAM chips- either chip from either slot. So I brought it all back to Fry's to let them sort it out, and guess what, the warranty on the CPU and RAM was 14 days, which had already expired! I knew that you had 14 days to exchange the CPU or RAM if you weren't satisfied with them, but I assumed that you'd have at least 30 days to return them if they were defective! Not so... when I bought them they offered me an extended warranty on the CPU but I turned it down. So I had them exchange the mobo NC (which had a 30 day guarantee), and it looks like that did solve the problem. Whew!

So just a reminder to anyone out there who deals with Fry's- if you still haven't installed your CPU and RAM after *13* days, you might as well bring it back for a refund since your warranty on them will expire within 24 hours. If they give you any crap, just tell them that their 14 day warranty period sucks eggs! LOL