I think its time for a new motherboard and bits for the main pc. I can’t even get the stupid thing to boot off a w2k or XP cd. As soon as it switches the screen after the “Press F6 if you have loads of money and own a scsi card” the thing reboots….I’m beginning to wonder if the graphic card is stuffed……
Month: December 2003
Yes it didn’t take long for these to start doing the rounds. Suprisingly I’ve not seen many of these on web pages so here’s one I thought was good and a quick search in Google doesn’t provide the answer….
What were Saddam’s first words when they found him?
Microsoft sent me an email the other day saying that their Software Update Services beta program has been delayed and the *plan* won’t be finalized until January 2004. So goodness knows when it’s actually going to commence. At least this way they won’t need to worry about supporting Win98 (which they didn’t in the previous version either – but now they have a REAL excuse not to)
A Lego version of Homer Simpson is really impressive. What is scary is that this bloke has enough lego to build it. Having said that, if he sells them for $4500 a piece thats enough to build a real house out of lego!
Remember when I posted about my main pc rebooting? Well it’s still happening. It also happened today (consistently) when I took it round PCJunky’s house. This ruled out the usb devices, mouse, keyboard, psu cable (incidentally I had to replace the PSU as it didn’t survive being switched off whilst we were on holiday strangely enough), monitor and sound cables. The system will now consistently reboot (as if I had pressed the reset button) in one of three random places. Either immediately the first w2k loading screen finishes – where the bars go across the screen normally the screen will then clear and the windows backdrop appears, after the pc has (automatically) logged on or when everything in the startup group has finished loading and about 10 seconds of doing nothing. 3 places for it to reboot and then the machine will behave for a while……
We did find out that if the machine is booted without the network card plugged in, on the second and subsequent boot the machine runs stable. Also if I boot to an alternative OS/CD then the system is also stable. I’m going to use the msconfig tool later tonight/this weekend to see if a clean build has the same symptoms.
What is annoying is that there are no bsod or log files generated so I’ve nothing to debug and of course all these reboots dont do the data on the disk much good!
Some quick links as I don’t have to to blog them all individually. Real Underground map (funny), Microsoft’s free/busy service, Interesting Exchange articles, Freeware list
Just downloaded the latest version of popcorn to see if it would stop trying to be the emailserver that I am trying to send to. (when it sends email it sends the command EHLO mail.domain.com if my mail server is mail.domain.com). This causes problems for pipex (unsuprisingly). However the latest versions are no longer freeware, but shareware in that you have to register it if you want to use multiple pop accounts. Thats a big shame as that is what I use popcorn for. So its back to the older 2001 version.
I was listening to a Microsoft technet seminar yesterday and they had some good advice on installing ServicePack4. They said to copy across msconfig.exe from a WindowsXP machine, Boot the w2k machine and run msconfig.exe. Select the services tab and then select Hide Microsoft Services. You are then left with all Non-MS software. Select disable all. Select the startup tab and disable all of these ones too. When you next reboot you will be left with a “clean” install of Windows. You should then be able to install ServicePack 4 (or whatever) without anti-virus or other software clashing or interfering with the install. Hopefully this will help out Barbier who posted a question on my previous post about Service Pack 4 installs.
Microsoft have posted an update to the spam filter in Outlook2003. Hopefully this means they will continue to do so unlike the outlook 2000 one that was never updated! Yes I know its late but I’ve only just got web access.
We were going to stay at a friends house in Indianapolis the day before we flew back to the UK. They had moved to the house two weeks before we were staying so we didn’t know where it was. I put their address into mapquest and got driving directions and printed them off without proof reading the instructions (bad idea!). I also got the co-ordinates for the house and put them into the GPS and we set off.
After a three hour drive we arrived in Indy and started to follow the instructions. Kristen thought there was something wrong when the instructions took us downtime and through the centre of the city among office blocks – she was convinced that there was no way our friends would live downtown. Eventually we got to a T-Junction which totally contradicted the directions we were following and we were stuck. We then checked the top of the page for the directions and realised that it didn’t even have the full address on the page – instead giving directions to 6000- 6999 of the street (and we didn’t know their house number!) The GPS showed that the co-ordinates for the house that I had punched in were about 10 miles west of where we currently were. After a minute or so of arguing and strong words about the uselessness of Mapquest we decided that we would not be any worse of than we currently were and we’d follow the GPS. We eventually got to the area where the house was and circled the neighbourhood going down loads of different roads trying to get near to the house on the gps (we were about 30 feet away at one point!) but we just could not find the road we were looking for. Eventually we decided to go back to a Gas Station, ring home to get their phone number and then ring for directions. Turns out we were less than a mile away and 2 minutes later we were on their doorstep. Looking at the GPS screen we had gone all the way round the house (and the waypoint was spot on) and the screen looked like an etch-a-sketch drawing! Next time I’ll forget mapquest and use waypoints, although I’ll have to find a way of creating a route rather than just a source/destination point.