The New Computer Problems Thread

[Tapewolf]

Run the virus scan from an external boot disk if possible.  If there is a virus it has probably already taken control, and running the AV software from a compromised system will potentially allow it to spread to every single executable on the PC.

[topher chee]

mmmm
that sucks.
ill go ahead and do that now

[GabrielsThoughts]

I have Vista, and I copied ten cd's to the hardrive, but windows media player and Real player both refuse to play the files, and worse still windows media keeps insisting on playing these crappy samplers that came with the system.

[Ryudo Lee]

Do you know if the CD's are DRM enabled?

[Tapewolf]

There's nothing like a good error message:



...and that was nothing like a good error message.

[You don't have to reply to this post, by the way]

[Vidar]

There's nothing like a good error message:



...and that was nothing like a good error message.

[You don't have to reply to this post, by the way]

Uninformative, and not helpful. Yep, that's a standard Windows Error Message, all right. Try deleting the printer, and reinstalling it. If that doesn;t work, try downloading newer drivers from the internet.

Do you know if the CD's are DRM enabled?

Oh, please. DRM on cd's are a joke and/or a mild irritant. If you can't rip a cd, download the mp3's from a p2p network.

Gabe, how did you copy the cd's to your HD?

[Tapewolf]

Uninformative, and not helpful. Yep, that's a standard Windows Error Message, all right. Try deleting the printer, and reinstalling it. If that doesn;t work, try downloading newer drivers from the internet.

I got it going in the end.  I can't remember how.  The difficult bit is going to be figuring out how to send command data to it via the USB link, which does not appear to have created a device node e.g. 'COM9:'

The diagnostic utility bundled with it is for Windows 3.1.  (The printer was manufactured in April this year).  I might have to skip the USB altogether and use a serial cable instead.

[Vidar]

The diagnostic utility bundled with it is for Windows 3.1. 

WTF!? 

(The printer was manufactured in April this year).

Combined with the above:

WTF?! 

I might have to skip the USB altogether and use a serial cable instead.

I think you might want to buy a new, modern printer. One that has utilities for Windows XP and Vista.
That or try to download updates from www.zebra.com.

[Tapewolf]

WTF?! 

Indeed.  On the other hand I'm quite happy that they're still supporting DOS and Windows 3, after all, it's something you don't see every day...

I think you might want to buy a new, modern printer. One that has utilities for Windows XP and Vista.

Not my choice, and the ultimate target device is Windows CE.
Of course CE devices don't generally support USB either, but that's not my problem.  I'm going to write the actual driver logic first on Win32 and worry about the physical transport layer when things are settled.  It could end up being a TCPIP transport anyway, if they get the wireless bridge.

This is more like an actual problem: half a wizard.


http://i89.photobucket.com/albums/k216/tapewolf/scraps/half_a_wizard.jpg

I'll skip past the usual 'why did this happen' because I know it's not worth asking.  Is there anything that can be done to resize it, or am I going to have to kill the process?

[llearch n'n'daCorna]

You could use tab and enter to guess.

Or select the window and hit escape, which -might- match to the cancel button.

Generally, though, the resize functionality can be disabled, so you're SOOL, more or less. At least in unix you can override that, but...

[Aridas]

Ok, this is something I should know, but I can't remember the right course of action. SO.

1. I'm going to be moving hardware.

Board: ASUS A8N-SLI Deluxe --> eVGA 122-CK-NF68
Processor: Athlon 64 3000+ --> Core 2 Duo E6600
And memory to go with it.

Now, I can't remember if I -have- to uninstall all the old drivers or what first, if i migrate all my stuff to the new setup. Keep in mind I'm able to do this without XP complaining.

2. Is there ANY way to upgrade a 32 bit XP installation to the x64 version? I REALLY don't want to have to reinstall everything and the world.

3. Can anyone tell me why my Commodore 64 has 0 bytes of memory? Seriously

[xHaZxMaTx]

1.  My friend actually just did a recent hardware exchange in his computer (pretty drastic) without having to uninstall/reinstall any software or drivers.  He may have just been lucky, though.

[Tapewolf]

1.  My friend actually just did a recent hardware exchange in his computer (pretty drastic) without having to uninstall/reinstall any software or drivers.  He may have just been lucky, though.

Did he also change microarchitecture, though?  Unless I'm missing something, Aridas is hoping to switch from normal 32-bit Windows to AMD64 and run all his software through some kind of emulation layer.  Since he'd have to replace pretty much every byte of the system software, I suspect that kind of migration is just this side of impossible.  I'll admit I haven't tried it myself, mind.
As far as I'm concerned, Windows is for running legacy apps anyway, but that's probably just me 

It might be interesting to try importing the registries from the 32-bit installation into a parallel 64-bit installation.  It will probably just explode, though.

As for the C64 - difficult to say.  I'm not sure how it would boot if the RAM wasn't working.  If it were me, and I couldn't find anything on the 'net, I might try replacing the DRAM chips if you can still get compatible parts.  Probably best to look for some kind of C64 users group. 

[Aridas]

Actually, everything is the same as always, other than the processor, motherboard, and chipset. I just need to find out if moving an XP installation in an entirely different computer setup is a bad thing, especially for the hardware.

[DarkAudit]

Actually, everything is the same as always, other than the processor, motherboard, and chipset. I just need to find out if moving an XP installation in an entirely different computer setup is a bad thing, especially for the hardware.

There are drivers and/or specific software for all of the above, especially the chipset. If you just move things, chances are that a lot of things won't work, like USB ports, network jack, onboard sound, etc. Chances are also good that trying to uninstall old drivers and installing the new ones won't completely work, and may cause conflicts when debris from the old install that couldn't be removed collides with the new stuff.

This is for all intents, a brand new machine. If you really want to get the most out of it, back up your documents and do a clean install. it may take time to replant all your favorite applications, but you won't be tearing your hair out from digging into the guts of the OS to figure out what's not working *this* time.

[Tapewolf]

I appear to have overwritten the first megabyte or so of my main NTFS data partition with GRUB by typing sda11 instead of sda10.  While I have a backup from the 14th, I've made a number of highly entertaining Morrowind savegames which I would like to retrieve.
In any case, NTFS being a commercially-designed filesystem it should just be a matter of locating the backup superblocks and rebuilding the damaged portion, yes?

Currently I'm running the DiskInternal NTFS recovery software to see what it can do.  Does anyone have any other suggestions?

[superluser]

Did he also change microarchitecture, though?  Unless I'm missing something, Aridas is hoping to switch from normal 32-bit Windows to AMD64 and run all his software through some kind of emulation layer.

Didn't he say that he was running Athlon64 before, and Core 2 Duo now?  Both are 64 bit, so that part won't change.

I appear to have overwritten the first megabyte or so of my main NTFS data partition with GRUB by typing sda11 instead of sda10.

I remember doing that.  I found this on NTK, but I've never used it.  It says that it will work on NTFS:

If you want to be truly loved, write a data recovery utility.  We can't imagine there's a day when Christophe Grenier isn't  swathed by offers of beers, steak dinners and marriage for TESTDISK and PHOTOREC, his two open source disk and file recovery utilities. The test TestDisk gives is sort of a final exam for your futzed partition block, quizzing your unreadable drive for tell-tale NTFS, HFS+, Ext3 or what-have-you data, and cribbing the lost partition data from what it finds.  PHOTOREC gives up on such fripperies as a filing system and instead grubs directly on the drive for file data, spotting beginnings for popular file formats and having a stab at where their ends might be hanging. PHOTOREC, as the name suggests, started as a utility for clawing back pictures from bit-rotten flash cards, but can now sniff out files from Ogg Vorbis to Microsoft Powerpoint. Both utilities will run on Mac, DOs, Windows, Linux, and probably vegetable oil for that matter.  Forget about them for now - when you need them, you'll find them.
         http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk_Download
             - though you'll waste an hour searching NTK for "olive oil"

[Tapewolf]

Didn't he say that he was running Athlon64 before, and Core 2 Duo now?  Both are 64 bit, so that part won't change.

He said:

2. Is there ANY way to upgrade a 32 bit XP installation to the x64 version? I REALLY don't want to have to reinstall everything and the world.

...if that isn't an upgrade from Win32 to Win64, I don't know what is

As for the corrupt partition, I went with the DiskInternal thing.  £60 for a bunch of Morrowind savegames and screenshots.  It wouldn't even rebuild the partition, it just copies the recovered files.  Still, it should come in handy if anything worse happens.

New problem.  The damage I caused was part of a 64-bit Ubuntu installation.  I now have that booting in parallel with Windows 2000 and the 32-bit Linux.  The problem is, anything which causes it to go superuser causes the process to deadlock.
That includes anything like 'sudo nano /etc/network/interfaces', and the latter half of the boot process.
It shows up on ps as having a 'D' next to it, which IIRC usually means it's stuck waiting for I/O.  Any ideas?

[superluser]

...if that isn't an upgrade from Win32 to Win64, I don't know what is

Right, but that's software.  You said that he was switching to AMD64.

[llearch n'n'daCorna]

Tape, sadly I don't have any 64 bit installs of Linux anywhere, so I can't say I've run across anything like this. :-/

Sorry I can't be more help.


(I'm only responding because I figure I'm well known as one of the Linux geeks on the forum...)

[Tapewolf]

...if that isn't an upgrade from Win32 to Win64, I don't know what is

Right, but that's software.  You said that he was switching to AMD64.

Yes, I meant the AMD64 version of Windows - as opposed to the regular IA32 version, or the IA64 version.
Switching the CPU is nothing, since it will run in IA32 mode by default.  Upgrading the OS from 32 bits to 64 bits in a somewhat different instruction set is something I haven't seen done before and is a far more interesting question.  In practice I suspect he'll have to do a complete install of the new OS, find that none of his hardware or time-critical software has support for it and then switch back.  It would probably be a lot safer to do a parallel install.

Tape, sadly I don't have any 64 bit installs of Linux anywhere, so I can't say I've run across anything like this. :-/

It was having a very severe adverse reaction to the WiFi stick.  I've gone in and removed the broken drivers and compiled my own.  Last I saw it was working well enough to download the updates from Ubuntu - which probably means the knackered driver will have come back when I reboot...

[Kitsune Ascendant]

toshiba satelite 115 I just got back from repair. 512 megs of memory (just the one thing it came with), and it starts crawling a little before the log-in screen for windows xp. A memory test utility I have pulls up nothing in terms of errors, so I don't think that's the problem. I think they had to replace the motherboard (lucky me my dad bought the extended warrenty for it, so it didn't cost me a penny), if that means anything.

[superluser]

it starts crawling a little before the log-in screen for windows xp.

How do you mean crawling?  Going really slowly?  In that case, I think I'd start looking at swap space first.

[Kitsune Ascendant]

here's a more detailed explaination:
it starts the boot normally, reaching the point just before where it would normally display the login screen, then goes so slow that it literally took two hours to get to a point where it normally would take seconds. then the actual login took another several hours, and when it finally did log in, I couldn't do anything, because I continuously got errors with... I think it was csvhost or something like that. "the memory at ... could not be read" stuff.

now, the damn thing is just getting thirty seconds or so into the boot, flashing a blue screen too fast to read, and restarting

[Reese Tora]

oooh, bad... try booting in safe mode

If it still crawls in safe mode, something hardware may have gone bad.

If that clears it up, you've probably got a crate load of unnecessary programs starting up (virus and spyware included) with your computer.

[Kitsune Ascendant]

One of the first things I tried was booting in safe mode.

edit: Well, after poking around a bit with various things, I finally got it to the point where it's booting up again, and e remarkably faster it's still taking way too long and I seem to be limited in what I can do.

Task manager (pretty much the only thing I'm seeing now) is showing minimal memory and cpu usage.

Anyways, this swap space thing superluser mentioned might be worth looking into. how would I do that?

[Ryudo Lee]

Anyways, this swap space thing superluser mentioned might be worth looking into. how would I do that?

Right click My Computer, hit Properties. 
Click the Advanced tab.
Click the Settings button in the Performance box.
Click the Advanced tab.
The Virtual Memory area is what you're concerned with.  If you hit the Change button, you'll be able to set your swap space there.  As a rule of thumb, and I find that this does work out pretty well in XP, if you set both the Initial Size and Maximum Size to both be twice your RAM, it should help things along (for you it would be 1024).  This is a tweak that helps out Windows 98 more than it does XP, but I've found that it doesn't hurt XP, though more "experts" will tell you that you don't need to do this.

[superluser]

Anyways, this swap space thing superluser mentioned might be worth looking into. how would I do that?

After hearing the other symptoms, I'm pretty well convinced that it's not a swap issue.  It still may be worth looking into your swap just to be sure.

EDIT: A QUICK GOOGLE SAYS THAT CSVHOST MAY BE A TROJAN.

I don't know a thing about XP, so there may be another csvhost that is OK, but you should probably look into it.

[Aridas]

That depends on if you're typoing svchost, as svchost CAN be bad if it's malware under that name, but otherwise it's an important windows file.

Ok, new thing going on. I'm going to move my computerstuff from one to another since I'm not financially fit enough to buy a new, power supply. This is going to give me lots of problems since I won't be able to have this computer on while I'm setting up the other, thus making it impossible to do things right.

So obviously i'm going to need to figure out a few things...

One: The location of IE7 settings and history. I can get the favorites and probably save the more important cookies, but I can't figure out how to save the rest of it, which tends to come in handy if it's a page I don't want to fave. Typed urls are not so important, and I know those are in the registry. I'm mostly kinda in need of the autocomplete stuff, the saved passwords, and whatever else makes me spend less time doing things. I also need to know if there are any changes that make the 32 bit version incompatible with the 64 bit version, since that's where i'm headed with things.

Two: Some info on where Gaim/Pidgin stores its logs and settings, as I still need to find them from back when I used it. (and also, probably Trillian's settings, if they're not in the user profiles. They're a pain to set up.)Solved.

Three: Anyone know if there are any popular programs or things that don't work on 64 bit XP?Solved.

[DarkAudit]

Sigh. If you were running Firefox and Thunderbird, I'd suggest Mozbackup. It saves all bookmarks, settings, cookies, passwords, and mail. I wiped the hard drive and went back to XP from Vista on this machine, and had two files to restore to get all my stuff back just as I had it.