Lois & Clark Forums Forums General Discussion Off Topic This time I really need to call for...

...heeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeelp! Or at least vent. Apologies in advance for the screams ahead. ) was corrupted, so I asked my computer shop to install XP from scratch. They saved my data (including my emails in OE) to their network, installed XP and partitioned the hard drive. Amazing! Well, I thought so anyway.

Episode 2:
None of my extra devices worked any more (think scanner, external zip drive, external CD rewriter and all). Even my ISP software wouldn't work. Computer-guy installed the correct drivers and it should be good to go.

Episode 3:
On Saturday morning, happy bunny me brings her beloved computer back home. I plug it, set everything, and boot it... everything's okay. So I connect to Wanadoo ADSL, open Outlook Express...and poof! Less than 15 seconds later, the whole thing freezes. My colours, fonts and layouts turn to a weird mode that looked kind of like the 'no failure mode' of Windows 98, Windows tells me that it's detected the misfunctionment of a device, and recommends I switch off the computer. Which, as a sweet little clueless computer-user that I am, I do.

Episode 4:
Testing stuff reveals that the system freezes (without the error message any more) if I connect to Wanadoo ADSL first then open Outlook Express. If I do it the other way around it's okay.

Episode 5:
Saturday night: I test things out in OE, then I want to test another thing to make sure it works now. So I close down mIRC, then the "tools" window in OE. But when I did this, my computer reboots all on its own, and when I go back to Windows, I realise I lost all but the two first names of my notify list in mIRC. I blame it on a temporary glitch...

Episode 6:
I go to the computer shop yesterday, and they ask me to make sure there's no automatic connection set on OE. They also ask me to install the latest XP update, and also to get rid of some weird "reboot" thing that was in start/programmes/start and should never have been there in the first place. I do all that. And yesterday, miraculously, it seems to work.

Episode 7:
Last night, after spending time on irc, I want to switch off the computer, so I start by closing down mIRC, then click on the X to close IE. Poof, computer reboots all on its own. Sigh.

Episode 8:
Today, I start the computer, test out the OE thing. So I connect to Wanadoo ADSL first, then open OE. Conclusion of the test: if I connect to Wanadoo first, then open OE, and don't open any other programme within the next few minutes, the computer freezes.

Episode 9:
Not only did it freeze a few minutes ago, but when I did the "reset" thing, the screen refused to switch on, no matter what I did. Black screen all along. It's only through shutting off the computer (in a non-Windows-friendly way) and unplugging it for a while that I managed to make it start again.

Episode 10:
I realised that mIRC had once again lost data: now it's lost half my notify list (the bottom half again) and also my 'perform' settings. I can easily link it back to last night's weird reboot since it's the same way it happened when I first lost my nofify list the other day. Obviously not a coincidence, then.

So here's the question: what should I do?

Option 1: throw the computer out the window. (don't think it hasn't occurred to me several times over the past week)

Option 2: rant to my computer-guy and truly set him straight on a few facts of life (eg XP is supposed to work better than Millenium and not the other way around).

Option 3: buy a Mac.

Kaethel (oh, and too)

Ouch! Poor Kae. {{{{{{{{hug}}}}}}}}}

Don't have any solutions, unfortunately, but I thought we could get Superman to read through the manual for you at speed and see if he could help:



(I figure that even if you're sceptical that he can find the solution, you can distract yourself by drooling...)



LabRat (who points out it's from HOL too.)

Awwww! Thank you, Rat. You know how to cheer up a girl.

Kaethel (thoroughly distracted )

With no more info about the configuration of the computer and reading the symptoms of the patient, it seems an incopatibility of some kind with the ADSL modem.

But with computer you can't assure that. Here we had been having problems with certain computer, nothing wanted to get installed on it, neither XP or Linux Red Hat 8. We blamed the hard disk, but the truth is that we still aren't sure what it was.


One day I did that and the next morning I only saw a blank screen, not even the bios messages. I had burned the CPU

My computer works better now with XP than before with 98. Both "eat" the same amount of memory, but XP manages it better.

Jose

Buy a mac!!

Seriously, I hope the computer guy takes care of it. If not, I can help you out with the mac.

I've heard that XP isn't very good. Can you switch to Windows 2000? Very stable

Good Luck, Kaethel, I can certainly sympathize with you after a couple of failed harddrives, reinstallations upon reinstallations

But next time, before reading any manuals I'll come here to watch Clark reading

Nooooooooooooooooooo! (and LOL, Karen! I suspected Macs would be your chosen option)

We have XP and haven't had too many problems with it, except for having to buy all new versions of the games we had on CD. 'Course we started using XP with a brand-new computer and didn't try to save any old data except some Word documents on disc. :rolleyes:

To put it nicely, XP sucks. I've had to wipe the hard drive twice this year, and the computer reboots by itself *all the time*. Church calls my name now, but I'll edit if I can think of anything else to say when I get back.

Shadow, if your computer keeps rebooting by itself, it's most likely a driver/hardware problem. There's a way you can turn off the "automatic reboots" so that you get the informative blue screens instead. And yes, they're more informative than the reboots. I had that problem, and kept getting IRQ_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL or something like that, along with a file name. I believe I tracked the problem down to my network card, which wasn't all that compatible with XP. Of course, now I'm having problems with my video card on that machine. *sigh* sometimes, you just can't win.

Honestly, I can't see a monitor being non-compatible with XP. Video card, yes, but not the monitor. But that's just me.

Karen, the Tri-OS person. Windows, Mac, and Linux

Ho-hum. That's really interesting. Do you happen to know how to switch the command to receive the blue screens?

Oh no, Kae! And you were so sure it was fixed.

I wish I had a suggestion, but I'm still using Windows 98.

<<<hugs>>> and good luck!

Karen, thanks for the suggestion. I will ask my computer-guy to check it out when I take it back to the shop on Saturday. It might at least explain the reboot thing, though not the modem problem.

Further tests showed me that it's really a problem of order in which I do things: if I connect to Wanadoo before opening OE, it freezes. If I open OE first and connect to Wanadoo from there, it works.

Kaethel (your computer-challenged FoLC)

Yeah. Although I now under Red Hat 8, this computer has Windows XP installed. When I donloaded the updated graphics card driver, the set up said that it wasn't supported by XP, so I continued on my own risk. It wasn't important, but the graphic card isn't good, I noticed that on Linux, the screen isn't as perfect as it shoud be at 1600x1200. Usually, the graphic card is really better than the monitor.

Well, if the day isn't quiet I wander from Linux Red Hat 8, Linux Red Hat 7.1, TrueUnix64, IRIX 6.3 or IRIX 6.5, and of course Windows 2K and XP, ah, and sometimes I have to read the mail directly on the server, so that implies, VAX/VMS

All right, guys, and update, and a warning to all of you who have been exchanging emails with me (since it seems to be the most likely way for virus exchange :p ).

It seems that my problem comes from a sneaky virus. Haven't found anything about it on Symantec or McAfee, so it's obviously something very new and low profile. However, computer-guy told me this evening that he's found out the same type of problem (mostly the reboot thing) on another computer. So he's resaving my data and reinstalling Windows XP on my computer tomorrow.

I apologise to anyone who got the virus because of me. If any of you experiences the same kind of problem as I do, best is to immediately update your AV software and run a scan. Hopefully your software will be quick enough on the uptake and have a protection against it.

Kaethel