7 posts tagged “windows xp”

Apart from announcing that I would run for mayor of Wellington, the week was dominated by this:

   This computer belonged to my friend Nigel, who moved to Australia earlier this week. And as he’s very “in” to web development and graphics, he has to have the latest and greatest—which meant that this unit, even though it’s grunty and would put many modern computers to shame, sat in his shed. He generously gave it to me.
   The DVD, hard and floppy drives are mine, which at least explains the mismatched colour of the first. The floppy was originally a gift as well from another friend who was disposing a 1998-vintage PC. Interestingly, despite everything being beige in those pre-Imac days, this one happened to be black, so I took that rather than the one I had used on my old PC.
   I have now a healthy appreciation of what computer-makers do when systems are built. The unit came without the drivers, etc., and with a few faults that Nigel warned me about. When I was in Auckland two weeks ago, he plugged it in and there was no display; prior to that the main fan was faulty.
   Step by step, I (with more than a little help from Dad—who still seems to be more logical brain-wise than a lot of these younger computer types) brought this PC back to life, installed the right drivers (thank goodness for the internet) and the programs. I took the opportunity to upgrade at least one, while I had to ask for new registration numbers for two (which came overnight).
   Things went fairly smoothly other than the motherboard drivers—I put in the wrong ones and replacing them forced the computer to run so slowly that Windows XP took 40 minutes to boot! However, a System Restore fixed that and it is back to normal.
   I’m pretty proud of myself as among the tasks I had was editing a DLL for a 1995 program that would not work on newer computers. I’m certainly no computer programmer (I did take a course in BASIC and LOGO in 1984 though), but the changes (as suggested by a hacker on a forum) worked. In another case, I had a technical issue and found the solution on a forum where I had posted the answer. What was interesting was how long it takes to replace 10 years’ worth of stuff: three days.
   There remains a couple of issues. There is still one entry in the System Devices that has a yellow warning exclamation mark next to it, but the last time I tried fixing that, we had the motherboard driver issue. Secondly, while this baby is on auto-detect for the LAN speed, another computer at the office is going at a mere 10 Mbit/s when I know it is capable of going at 100 Mbit/s. Yet when I put both at the same 100 Mbit/s speed, the transfers go at about a tenth of the speed that they were going at when the settings were 10 Mbit/s and auto. It’s the exact opposite to what I expect, but it would not be the first time that network settings have had me stumped.
   Meanwhile, I have to give props to old faithful, which we used to refer to as Moneypenny (the name assigned to the hard drive):    While I’ve had a few new machines in here, I stuck with my old desktop PC. Thanks to swapping out the DVD drives, what is in here is Nigel’s. And this machine has been very good to me for over 10 years, and if you have accumulated this much stuff, then you’re a bit hesitant to take time out to redo everything on a new system. In fact, I doubt I would have proceeded with the “upgrade” if I went into a store with a couple of grand. I got a bit attached to a very faithful computer. But when you have a unit that is much newer and faster sitting in your office, despite its faults, then you have to act. You almost feel compelled to fix something that is broken.
   Of course, no one can run an international company on a computer if it stayed the same as it was in March 1999. This has been the subject of motherboard, CPU and RAM upgrades over that time, usually done by a real expert, though I did the RAM stuff myself (not that hard). It ran OK, but when I bought the Asus laptop, I found myself on that all the time. And stuff in this family just keeps going—they seem to like being here.
   The new machine does mean greater productivity, so expect to see me work more rather than blog, which was what I tended to do on the laptop because I enjoyed the better speed and, admittedly, the Windows Vista interface.
   It didn’t help that I had early starts on most days this week, after tinkering with the computer at night, attending several functions (including the Montana World of Wearable Art Awards last night) and going to bed at 3 or 4 a.m. So any typos above are mine. Hopefully I can rest up tonight. But for now, a big, public thank-you to Nigel.

Yesterday, the problematic computer at this office decided it would, again, forget what the screen resolution was and set it at a maximum of 1,280 by 768 pixels, leaving large black bands above and below the screen area. There was no way to make it any larger.
   I believe this is related to the Acer AL 1717 monitor as I never had any such issues with my earlier Philips one.
   In December, I documented my fix but this time I may have stumbled across something easier.
   1. Uninstall the SIS driver.
   2. Reboot.
   This time the computer gave me the option of 1,280 by 1,024—the actual resolution of the screen. It also installed one of the SIS drivers for the video accelerator.
   On a second reboot, the computer asked to reinstall the auto-rotate feature, which I let it. I had to relocate the wallpaper, and things appear to be back to normal.

As I always say, the newer the program, the more likely it will be buggy.
   I needed to move to Eudora 6 because of the way version 4.3 could not authenticate properly with our SMTP server.
   I’m kind of OK with it except for certain issues.

• Eudora now longer feeds advertising through its Sponsored Mode, yet there is no way to close the old sponsorship window.
• The ability to preview the last selected message in the inbox through the preview window no longer works when multiple messages are selected.
• More spam gets through, as though McAfee SpamKiller has been rendered useless by the upgrade.
• When marking certain messages as spam (because SpamKiller is less effective now), Eudora reorders the inbox without my permission.

   As this is version 6, and not the current one, there will be no point informing the manufacturer of these problems. However, I am surprised that as it is v. 6.2.5—i.e. it has been through quite a few revisions already—that these very obvious bugs have not been ironed out. And I am unwilling to pay for a program, as I once did with the old Eudora, if it is buggier than something they came up with a decade ago.
   It is typical, sadly, of the way software has developed: some really are worse today, and I am a very good witness to it, having moved from a 10-year-old version of Eudora to a three-year-old one today, and finding the decade-old one more reliable on most counts.
   Here’s the real kicker: according to the Add and Remove Programs dialogue box in Windows, Eudora is by far and away the biggest program ever conceived for general use:

While some big programs take a few hundred megabytes, according to the above Eudora takes some eight gigabytes!
   Incidentally, I have used Thunderbird. It reminds me too much of Outlook, which I find unusable. I declined to upgrade to Thunderbird tonight as a result.

The Windows XP computer which I had a lot of trouble on did another weird thing today: it forgot what resolution it uses.
   This happened after updates from Windows and McAfee.
   I started the day looking at a big monitor, but only the middle part had any graphics on it, like a widescreen movie on a conventional TV.
   The res was something like 1280 by 756, and under Display Properties (the first refuge) the original 1280 by 1024 was missing.
   Reinstalling drivers, which is the advice the experts typically give and which sounds completely right, resulted in two hours’ worth of seeing it at 1024 by 768, 640 by 480 with four-bit colour, 1280 by 1024 followed by a restart and any one of the two resolutions just mentioned on rebooting.
   I am running an SIS VGA 651 display adapter on that machine, so the key, I found, is to make sure that you do not use the latest drivers, and that you do not allow Windows to do an update on the drivers, or find drivers by itself. Do not move missing SYS and DLL files from the installation package into the right folders.
   In short, avoid all the things that logic and reason would tell you to do.
   The solution was to ensure that Windows failed to install the driver automatically or to perform an update, then uninstall the video driver and SIS application. Install them, then, in the wrong order: the SIS accelerated graphics processor’s one first, then the VGA driver, both from the set-up CD. These will be older drivers.
   For now, the machine works at the correct resolution and it looks like it is behaving itself. The moral of the story is, once again, to do the opposite of what help pages tell you.

Some people are having problems getting Twitter to stop updating their Facebook status. I am having problems getting Twitter to start updating my Facebook status. Also, anyone else getting endless error messages when they change their privacy settings?
   I know I have had it in for this site since its founder and management showed themselves to be Boo.com-arrogant, so maybe I am more aware of these problems. Somehow, I don’t think I am being more sensitive to them than I would be toward any other site, however.

Boy, that was lucky. Another thing that went kaput was the computer-to-computer network. File transfer went at a snail’s pace and I could not understand why. Then, today, I could no longer transfer big files back from the new hard drive on to the PC I normally use. The error ‘The specified network name is no longer available’ emerged.
   One of the first things to come up in Google was a CNet page. And I found the solution here, written by a guy called Jack Yan.
   Because the network card settings were lost on reinstallation, things were put back to the defaults, which, of course, never work for a guy who always makes things difficult. It turns out that I went through the same thing in April 2005, when I installed a router in this office. That time, too, it took days to figure out.
   I thought it all was very familiar when the error emerged today. (Goodness knows if it was what caused the problem between AVG and Firefox, but it’s too late now, I’ve switched to McAfee. I doubt it was the cause, anyway.) God bless CNet for keeping its old pages up. The solution was very typical as I re-read what I wrote three-and-a-half years ago. I had been listening to experts’ advice and all of it was dead wrong. Even the manufacturer advised me to take the unit back and exchange it, a fat lot of good that would have done. The solution was to do the exact opposite of what I was told, and this incident in 2005 was the one that really cemented this anti-geek feeling in my mind. Here is what I wrote that time as the solution, pasted here in case I ever need it again:

D-Link tech support was great but their solution was to exchange the unit. I eventually plugged in my laptop and it worked, so I concluded it had to be a set-up thing between Desktop Computer A and Desktop Computer B, both running XP Home.
   I began investigating all the settings again, and strangely, the laptop and computer A (which could talk to one another) had different things installed under ‘This connection uses the following items’—contrary to the advice I had read. So I knew that the differences would not be a major problem.
   Anyway, I went to Configure the network card on B and a message came up saying that if I went in, some of my new settings would disappear. This didn’t happen with either A or the laptop, so I knew something was up.
   The laptop and the B have the same family of network card, yet under the ‘Advanced’ tab, the laptop had ‘Link Speed/Duplex Mode’ on ‘Automatic’ (which is what B was set to).
   However, after I set B to ‘10 Full Mode’ (‘10 Half Mode’ also worked), I could do everything!
   Just for clarity, A has a different type of network card and only has ‘Line Speed’ as the sole property under ‘Advanced’. It’s set on ‘TP Half Duplex’.
   So there you have it: I went against all the rules, have totally different settings between the machines, and it all works!

   Rule of computing: do the opposite of what you are told! (The same applies to playing the stock market and explains why the Toyota Corolla sells so well.)

Let’s see, where was I? Not working, that’s for sure.
   Tuesday: the PC I worked on failed to start, bought new 1 Tbyte hard drive for back-up. Fortunately, the PC eventually started. I can’t really remember what the fault was, but as with most things I did the opposite to what the experts say: I clicked Control-Alt-Delete to start Windows (not restart—start, when it was doing a chkdsk). That has been the story of my computing life: computer geek on the ’net or at the service desk says turn left, and it leads to disaster; I turn right, and all is well.
   Wednesday: seeing as the PC that is used for design and approvals in my office was giving up due to a factory-partitioned hard drive that was running out of space on C, I downloaded a partition manager. Let’s just say this: don’t ever download a partition manager. If you do, don’t run it. The program, from Easeus, did part of it, then gave up, and I spent Thursday midnight to 4 a.m. trying to get it working. I didn’t. So much for its PC Magazine endorsement.
   It said that hal.dll was missing (specifically, for those who are Googling and might need to read about this: ‘Windows could not start because the following file is missing or corrupt: c:\windows\system32\hal.dll’) and Windows, therefore, would fail to boot. The copy on my main PC wasn’t the same size, but the one on my laptop was, as I found out. When it booted up. For some reason, it refused to start as well, just when I needed it desperately. Now I had three computers in this office, all of which were displaying a fault of one type or another.
   In the meantime, I started with Windows XP’s installation CD, and looked at the Recovery Console. Using tips on the internet, I can confirm that none of them work (fixboot, fixmbr and some others). A very good page was at About.com, but steps 1 through 6 did not work at all. A page at Kelly’s Korner gave me no useful resolutions, either. Microsoft’s page was also useless. A chkdsk did reveal problems on C, which was unsurprising due to Easeus Partition Manager failing.
   Nevertheless, I copied hal.dll from the computer that was working on to floppy disk (remember those?), but the other computer wouldn’t read the disk—not sure why, but perhaps those disks were too old. I tried copying it on to a USB stick but let’s just say the U for Universal isn’t quite true. It wouldn’t read my stick. I had to get the laptop on, somehow, and that was achieved by constantly pressing the on button.
   Eventually it booted, around 2.30 or 3 a.m. I confirmed that its hal.dll was the same size. It went on to the stick, and in to the other computer. Problem: there is no way that the windows\system32 folder can be written to. I had tried expanding the hal.dll file from the CD (one of the About.com tips). Nothing. The experts were wrong again.
   But if it couldn’t be written to, why did hal.dll now show it was 0 bytes long? It obviously was written to in some way.
   Thursday morning: I found some emergency boot disks that I had made in 1999 and 2001 and I could finally get into the system and get a DOS prompt. I could have done this the night before but these disks were well hidden and there’s only so much energy one has for looking for 3½-inch floppies at 4 a.m. And windows\system32 could now be written to—no idea why Windows XP Recovery’s prompts forbade it, since that would have been a problematic directory that needed access. I replaced hal.dll and Windows sort of booted, till it got stuck on an AVG system file (avgrkx86.sys) during Safe Mode. I renamed it, but it got stuck on the file that came before. I called Geeks on Wheels at midday.
   I considered reinstalling Windows and found there were conflicting partitions caused by Wednesday night’s misadventure. It said there was a partition I could delete by pressing D. I pressed D. Nothing happened. (The experts posting on the internet also said I could press D. Well, they were welcome to try it. Nothing happens.)
   My friend Eddie in LA gave me a file that I could use to test the disk. It worked, as I could delete the offending partition, but it wasn’t enough to get Windows working again. By now it was around 1 or 2 a.m., and I was technically still working. I had had about 10 hours’ sleep for the last two days by this point.
   Friday morning: the Geeks on Wheels boffin, Chris, arrived, and settled on a full format and install. He did this and it took an hour. I knew how to do it but it was better having an expert there to take the partition off via a full format (and yes, it meant I lost everything, though the critical files were put on to the new drive on Tuesday and Wednesday, luckily, which was the only stroke of good luck I had with technology this week). He also had the latest versions so after he ran my old Windows, he put on Service Pack 3 and put all the drivers back. Very friendly guy and I can recommend his company. I began reinstalling the software, though to his credit he put on Firefox and a few other things for me.
   After about five hours’ installation (there’s a lot of software, and again I had some CD access issues), I noticed something horrible: Chris spelt my name wrong. Let’s say that it was a stupid and embarrassing misspelling, something that his colleague also did when she took my call, and Chris repeated even as I spelt my name out to him. I’m not prepared to hold a grudge against the guy, given that everything else he did was top-notch. It could not be changed in Documents and Settings. I spent the next three hours looking for a fix. I even had to edit the registry. It’s still not perfect but the offending “user” has now gone. (The simplest fix, which I discovered independently of all the bloody “experts” out there, is to set up a new user with the correct name and appoint that one the admin, and delete the other. So much for all the people there who said it either involved registry edits or that it was impossible—plenty of them on the ’net.) The catch was that I had to uninstall everything and reinstall it to be on the safe side. Friday’s working hours were gone.
   Now I noticed Firefox running at a snail’s pace. I don’t know if it did prior to the name change, because I never had time to test it before. Bear in mind it runs fine on the other systems. Facebook would take 62–170 seconds to load one page—that’s far slower than when I was running Internet Explorer 7. Even Mozilla’s own support pages take 30–60 seconds. There were some pages detailing the same error, blaming spyware (have since run a check, and there is none), and let’s again say that all the well meaning advice on the internet was, again, wrong, with my system. Ironically, Firefox ran a lot faster while that computer was on its last legs than now with a fresh Windows XP install. Problem-solving (not really solving) took me to the small hours of this morning.
   The conflict is an anti-virus program, ironically enough, called AVG, from the Czech Republic. As I discovered Saturday. I took it off today and Firefox runs fine. But I would be foolhardy to let it run without protection, so it’s back on that PC again. I’ve fired off enquiries to AVG and Mozilla (the Firefox people) because so far, the online documentation gives no clues about what is going wrong. (There are accusations of the two programs conflicting, but no solution has been posted. Blame is sometimes levelled at viruses, spyware, trojans or the firewall, all of which I have checked, but none of them apply to me.)
   I could uninstall AVG and put on McAfee—Jack Yan & Associates has licences for both—but that conflicts with my nature to be responsible and get to the bottom of a problem, and using that to help people. After all, AVG and Firefox—same versions (Firefox 3.0.4 and AVG 8.0.200)—ran fine on the same machine post-formatting and reinstallation. They run fine on the laptop, when it starts.
   So an average of five hours’ sleep a night, all caused by technology and people developing programs that claim to do one thing but wind up doing another. I have had trouble with computers before, but I think I am saying, without a sense of nostalgia, that it was far easier to deal with it all in the 1990s. One reason was I had more geek friends. Secondly, programs plainly worked better.
   Today, I imagine, with all the variety of computers and what they can have, nothing is ever fully compatible any more. Company A launches one program that works with 99 per cent of computers. Company B does the same. Pretty soon, with so many companies involved, you wind up with a set-up that doesn’t work at all. And I am the sucker who buys those machines.
   Of course, when the computer finally gets back up and running at full capacity some time in the year 2013, I will be amazed at how little hard drive space I have left, and will need to reformat and reinstall.
   Hopefully the above will help someone, which is generally why I believe I get hauled through this stuff. Now to deal with the emails and messages that have come in while I was otherwise occupied.