The home computer has now been basically scrapped. A new motherboard, which means new cpu, ram,heatsink and fan have now been ordered. On the plus side I should have a pc that will (on paper) be twice as fast. On the downside I have a dent in the wallet – not really want I wanted. I’ve also suffered really slow internet this weekend and this afternoon its been almost impossible to connect, with connections on adsl lasting a minute if I’ve been lucky. I replaced the netgear router with my original conexant one and i’m back to normal. I really hope that the router is not fried too (although that should be under warrenty)
The OS was wiped on the crashing pc after a ghost backup of all the drives (27gb worth!) and XP was installed on the freshly formatted disk. For about 5 minutes it looked like everything was working again, until we went to copy a file across the network and boom – a reboot. Aha! Network card we thought (again), and tried to copy the file again when the machine was back online……swine thing worked this time, and the next two times……..until we clicked on the start button – KABOOM! At this point I almost cried but it was time to leave my patient co-techie to have his lunch and go do the hoovering of our lounge carpet….to be continued 🙁
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……
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!
Trying to install the .net framework 1.1 setup program so I can then install intravnews on the laptop. However when I try to run the program I get the error message “Error 1325.’andrew.helsby’ is not a valid short file name.” The filename referred to is my username on the computer. A search in google does not help as there are lots of similar problems but no definite answer on how to fix it. Ironically the solution in technet is that its a fault in the msi file and that a patch should be installed on the pc of the producer of the msi file!
Update By logging on as another user on the computer I was able to install the patch. The weird thing is that the other user also doesn’t fit the 8.3 username format either.
Had a reply from the makers of DigiAny to my question about the directory structures which was a lot quicker than I expected as I sent the email to them yesterday so well done Will! I’ve asked them about the registration number problem…..I’ve also discovered that passwords get truncated to 10 characters.
I logged a call with Pipex on Sunday @ 7.30pm and had a response back saying they couldn’t find a problem on Monday @ 3.20pm. Sure enough the problem had gone away by then. Annoyingly they asked for a traceroute which I should have given them in the first place but forgot – doh! The support from Pipex has definately improved from that experience!
Not sure whats going on, but for a few days I’ve found certain sites such as yahoo,google, blog.iloaf.com, ggsearch.blogspot.com and others not working. Pages just don’t load for some weird reason. Initially I put it down to the sites being hosted in america somewhere affected by the power cuts. However in ggsearch’s case I can lookup the ip address in dns, and then take the server ip address into a web page and get the main servers webpage ok. Yahoo seems to be behaving at the moment but there is no response from google, although i did eventually get the favicon.ico loaded but no page. The two sites that I need for banking over the net, Halifax Online and Royal Bank Of Scotland are also unavailable, although both these sites stop on a traceroute when the network gets to bt.net (quel suprise!)
Can anyone else get to blog.iloaf.com or ggsearch.blogspot.com
From the Windows and .net magazine is an article providing details about the recent Win2K SP4 Bluescreen Fix; Terminal Server Bug Fix; and Citrix Logon Delay