Alden Bates' Weblog

Continued from here

I removed said card from my PC. On reboot, WinXP still detected the devices and attempted to install the drivers. Utilising Device Manager, RegEdit and System Restore, I aggressively removed said drivers and devices from my system.

Unfortunately after a reboot, Windows XP no longer recognised my CD/DVD ROM drives, and the Sound Blaster Live wasn't working. They appeared in the device manager, but were listed as not working. I right-clicked on each and chose "Uninstall", removing them from the list, then rebooted. Windows detected the devices on bootup and reinstalled the drivers for them, then asked me to reboot again. Tada! Everything fixed.

Now, I don't care whether it was Microsoft's fault or LeadTek's fault, but removing drivers for one device should not frell the drivers for another.

I went to reinstall my Leadtek TV capture device. When I tried to install this the first time after installing XP, attempting to load the driver would reset the PC. I assumed this was for the same reason that Unreal Tournament 2004 would make my computer reset (IE, the CPU was kaputski), but I've just tried to reinstall the thing, and it still resets the computer while trying to load the driver.

XP attempts to install the driver for "WinFast TV2000 XP WDM Crossbar", reports the driver has "not passed the Windows Logo testing to verify its compatibility with Windows XP", and promptly resets the PC if I tell it to install anyway. I even downloaded updated drivers from LeadTek's web site and the same thing happened. These are specific XP drivers too.

This card worked fine under Windows 98. *sigh*

Dear LeadTek, two things:

1. If you put Windows XP drivers on your site, make sure they actually work with Windows XP. Like actually testing them.

2. Adding the drivers to the "Add or Remove Programs" program is all very well, but having it launch the installer to install the drivers instead of the uninstaller to uninstall the drivers is Not. Helpful.

I now have my computer back. The problem turned out to be that the CPU had gone bad, causing it to superheat whenever a load was put on it, and subsequently reboot. That CPU has been replaced with a newer CPU of the same make and speed (AMD Athlon 2000).

To celebrate, I bought Paint Shop Pro 9. I've been using version 6 for ages, so 9 is a pretty big leap. Now I just have to work out what everything dones and I should be set. :)

Every time my computer resets when I have FireFox open, FireFox completely wipes its history. This is only a minor inconvenience to be sure, but still an annoyance.

I can only guess that FireFox keeps the history file open while it's running, and the computer resetting therefore corrupts the file. If so, that's a bit of a sloppy way to do it.

I noticed there was an update to Windows Media Player, and promptly told my computer to fetch it. Of course, partway through the installation, the CPU hit 100% usage and reset, hosing WMP...

The only thing stopping me from taking this heap in to get fixed right now is the fact then I'd be stuck at home without a PC for a week or so. :P

I installed Prime 95, which includes a "torture test", running your CPU at 100% and testing a number of the functions.

My computer reset by itself after approximately 40 seconds of running.

I tried installing ITE Smartguardian, which came on the disks for my motherboard. I think it's broken - it displays "Temp 1" as 201°C all the time. "Temp 2" is a slightly more realistic 48°C, but it doesn't seem to get any hotter while the stress test is running.

I rang the shop from whence the PC came, and they said they couldn't pass a diagnosis without the machine there to run tests on, so I will probably have to bite the bullet and take it in after work starts in the new year.

Edit: Oh, I should add that after my previous entry, I also downloaded a piece of memory testing software from Microsoft's site, and that checked my memory out as fine.

I have occasional problems with my computer just up and resetting in the middle of doing something. This is, naturally, hugely annoying and I worry that one of these days a reset is going to kill something.

I'm pretty sure it's not the AGP/PCI cards I've got installed, so I guess that leaves the memory, motherboard, CPU, power supply, and two of the four storage devices installed.

Theory #1 is that the CPU is overheating, which is why I usually operate the PC with the side cover off. However doing so hasn't stopped the problem.

The resets most often happen specifically during the process of loading a level in Unreal Tournament 2004. Last night I had one occur while playing a Shockwave Flash file. I've also had one while sending an email in Pegasus with a particularly large attachment. This could suggest some arcane problem with the single hard drive in the machine.

Theory #2 is something wrong with either the CPU (an AMD Athlon XP 2000+) or the motherboard. Perhaps some instruction UT2004 executes during the level loading triggers a bug in the Athlon chip which causes the reset. It's hard to say, because sometimes a particular level will work fine, sometimes it will crash the computer when it's loading.

A while ago I kept finding a DLL in my temporary directory, an odd place to store a DLL, and mentioned it in my LiveJournal in a post titled I have a strange thing. So far that's proven to be the most popular post there in terms of comments, simply because there isn't a lot of information about the DLL on the web.

The library appears to be installed with a number of games. I got it most recently from Rollercoaster Tycoon 2. It may be created by other games, and may well be something to do with copy protection which requires you to keep the CDROM in the drive while you play. One person thought it might be preventing the copying of games altogether. CmdLineExt03.dll is likely to be a variant of 02, though so far no one has reported a CmdLineExt01.dll. The file is recreated on bootup if it's deleted.

Other games which may install it include Unreal Tournament 2003 (possibly only before the patch which removes the need to keep the CD in while playing), Grand Theft Auto Vice City, Nascar Racing 2003, Diablo 2, and quite probably some non-game software.

The latest anonymous comment suggests creating a directory with the same name as the file in order to prevent it coming back. Cunning!

So after a bit of messing about with configurations, we now have a wireless network set up here, and the computers can see each other and surf the net via broadband. It's not perfect though. There's a lot of noise along with the signal and a lot of dropped packets. I suspect much of the noise is from the appliances in the kitchen. Is there any reliable way of determining the source of radio noise?

At least now we can transfer files around and possibly even play games...

For various reasons, one of these being Windows 98 was becoming increasingly unstable (e.g. halting the system when I attempted to create directories (or Folders, if you were introduced to computers after about 1995 (but I digress))) I went about installing Windows XP on Saturday. This went OK, and before long I had most of my software reloaded.

Unfortunately, after that, it all went a bit pear shaped.

Continue reading "Adventures with XP"

Hopefully very soon now I'll be getting broadband. Because this is with a different ISP, the web space my LiveJournal icons and stuff is going to go bye bye, so I will probably move them to my main tetrap.com domain. Of course, the fun part will be when my email address changes, and I have to track down every online service I've given my old one to and give them the new one. A bit of a hassle, but hopefully worth it...

Now if only I could stop slacking on BlogShares and do some more work on my web page. :)

Just finished watching the last episode of Farscape season 4. You could probably hear the cry of anguish as it finished. Now I just have to wait until the subsequent mini-series either screens here or comes out on DVD...

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NZ government seems to be very close to voting the civil union bill into law. This will allow same-sex couples to enter into a marriage-like civil union. It's about time.

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It's becoming obvious that at some point I'm going to need to upgrade to Window XP... I attempted to use Yahoo! Chat today in FireFox. This required downloading Java support, which I started doing, until the Java installer announced it was only suitable for newer versions of Windows, and then stalled. So I guess I'll be using IE to access Java stuff...

I downloaded AVG free edition version 7 last night, and was glad to find that it is actuall a lot better than version 6. The email scanner seems to work with Pegasus Mail (It may have done before and just not told me, since it seems to do so transparently) and the interface as a whole looks a lot better.

I'm hoping the new version doesn't crash my PC after doing a full scan, like 6 did... I have yet to do one though.

It's that time of year again, when I become mysteriously unable to get a decent dial-up connection. When I tell my modem to dial in, it re-negotiates twice and I end up with a sub-56K connection. At the moment I'm connected at 28800bps

I'm pretty sure it's not the modem, as I borrowed another modem from work last year and it had the same problem. Besides which, the modem connects at high-speed fine for most of the year - it's just between November and sometime early the next year that it starts becoming a problem.

Perhaps Telecom lowers the quality of their phone lines to "encourage" people over to its highly-expensive broadband "offerings". Perhaps it's just that the warm weather does something to the phone lines to lower the quality. Maybe it's Paradise's modems. Maybe it's solar flares. Whatever it is, it makes the internet surfing experience more painful than it should be.

There's a new version of Firefox out. The only problem I find with updating Firefox is that some of the extensions you've installed and gotten used to will immediately stop working. This time it was Googlebar, and I had to uninstall it then reinstall it to get the toolbar back (And now it's not appearing in the Extensions dialog).

It's still several thousand times better than Internet Explorer, of course.