Computers; a love hate relationship - PeachParts Mercedes-Benz Forum

dmorrison · #1 04-15-2003, 12:26 AM

Well friday night the computer went south. Operated really slow and I really could not get it to do much.
I called Gateway and they tried to assist me. But we could not get it to operate normally.
I have Norton firewall and systems works. Also Go Back.
Well Go back was allowing me to reset the computer, but it was 1 year ago. and I could not get Norton one stop check up to system. I did a SFC scan and a scandisk. All to no avail.
Sooooo Saturday I sloooowly copied my documents, favorites and E-mails.
I tried re-installing windows 98, I know its an old computer, 4 year old. Celeron 333. Sort of like my old Mercedes. I just keep rebuilding them. Got a new computer last summer. It went to my son for college. This summer I will buy another new one, for my daughter to go to college with. Soooo I will keep this old faithful.
The re-install did not fix the problem. I formatted the hard drive and reinstalled windows 98 and ALL the software I had on the computer. Got the cable modem running again and upgraded everything to the latest version.
Sometimes I really hate these things.

Dave

PS the worst part. I backed up my Internet Explorer favorites onto my ZIP drive but I did not get all the favorites. I lost the "Mercedes favorites" folder that I was making. Bummer

PPS Sometimes I feel its the internet. I have another computer, yes old, a 300 Pentium. That computer I have had for about the same amount of time, and It has never once given me a problem. The one connected to the internet I have re-formatted the harddrive 4 times.
Just my opinion.

blackmercedes · #2 04-15-2003, 12:51 AM

My XP cratered on the weekend, and I barely managed to save my document files. I had to re-install windows and all my apps.

I lost all my e-mail, e-mail addresses and bookmarks.

All my MP3's are on CD, whew...

Zeus · #3 04-15-2003, 09:59 AM

Best bet is to use a second, small hard disk drive for your OS. In addition to your main 10-30+ GB hard disk drive, buy a small 5-7 GB HDD (you can get 'em cheap for about $40) and load your Windows onto this drive. Load all your programs and files on to the other main hard disk drive. This way your OS and data files are on separate physical drives.

This way when you have major Windows problems (approx. every 2 months or so...) you can simply completely reformat the smaller drive and load Windows from scratch. It really is the only way to cleanly reload Windows. You can keep necessary drivers, etc. on the main drive and reload them once the OS is up and running.

This is how I maintain my network of home PCs and it works great! Saves me plenty of headaches...

P.S. Upgrade to Windows 2000 or even XP. Windows 2000 is very solid and works well with any game out there, etc. It has been out long enough now that drivers are available for any peripherals you may have.

jsmith · #4 04-15-2003, 11:38 AM

Your best bet to isolate the problem is to add components one at a time. If you installed a fresh copy of windows 98 on a freshly formatted drive and it was still slow then there is something seriously wrong with your hardware.

dmorrison · #5 04-15-2003, 12:01 PM

When you add windows 98 to a computer that has windows 98 on it. It keeps the old settings. So that is where the problem was. Which one, Gateway and I could not figure out.
I completely erased the harddrive, formatted it, and reinstalled everything as if it was a new hard drive. Now everything is working fine.
I do like the idea of having 2 hard drives. I know some setups have a removable hard drive and everyonce in a while you change out the hard drives.
I have a old 486 upstares with a hard drive. I may see if it will install. Just to have a backup.
I am also going to start putting my "important" Items on my ZIP drive. Actually the Zip program has a "backup" program included with it. Maybe I should start using it!!!!!!!!

Dave

jsmith · #6 04-15-2003, 01:20 PM

you don't really need a separate physical drive - all you need is to partition it into multiple logical drives. on a win98 machine i make a 4G partition for the "c" dirve which is plenty. what i then do is to make a norton ghost backup of that entire c drive and store it on a CD. i do this periodically, usually after a software addition is verified to be ok and things are running smoothly. i install all other software on my "d" drive but usually an install will add stuff to the windows directory. if it ever starts to behave flaky like the way you describe, i just restore the most recent backup of the C drive.

pentoman · #7 04-15-2003, 09:46 PM

If stability and data is important, you can't do better than to run Windows 2000 professional (with the service packs installed, prefereably.

Seriously, it is the most stable of all the Microsoft OS's, while maintaining some ease of use not found in the old windows NT's.

TimFreeh · #8 04-16-2003, 10:05 AM

Being the most stable Microsoft OS in existence does not seem like much of a mark of distinction. I'm constantly amazed at the amount of malfunctions end users of PC products are willing to put up with. I write software for a living (not software that runs on micro computers) and I can tell you that if I delivered code that is as troublesome as 99% of the PC products I'm forced to use my customers would not pay me a dime for my efforts.

My .02

Tim

vrsmith · #9 04-16-2003, 11:38 AM

What gets me are the error messages, (not all of them from
Microsoft). A program will fail and you get either no message,
"Unexpected condition", "No privilege" or something equally
useless. Contacting your program provider is not helpful
since many of the problems are with Microsoft code and they
offer almost no help unless you pay.
If you pay for a problem, have the call handler verify that
it is your problem, (hardware, config, etc), and not something
with Microsoft. If it is a Windows problem, there should be
no charge. (It can be hard to convince the handler that
your call should be free.)

pentoman · #10 04-17-2003, 07:31 PM

The problem with writing stable software, is that though written in a language, when a program runs, it actually runs in 'machine code', basically a load of 1's and 0's.

It's like a molecular level in computers... see it like this:

You build your 240D with a clutch, transmission, diff, wheels, tyres, engine block, glow plugs etc etc. At that point you know what you've got.
But then, when you've made it and actually drive it just becomes a bunch of millions of molecules - which in fact, it is anyway (this is 'Compiling' a computer program). You can look at all the molecules making up your car, but they don't mean anything.. just a load of numbers or letters. If it stops working one day, you can only look at the molecules and go.. hmmm. There's no way of getting it back to its parts, and then looking at the parts to see which one has gone wrong.

So it's pretty difficult and time consuming to write large, stable software, you have to test each individual part, and even then the parts may not go together properly.

later!

Russ

#11 04-17-2003, 07:51 PM

Speaking of software, hard drives and computers. My office server HD was whining like CJ without TLJ so I took quick steps to replace it. The hardware portion is easy the software part sucks. Not wanting to change anything I just wanted to clone my original drive and thought that a simple tucows search would solve my cloning problem WRONG.

The shareware and freeware that I found was crappy at best, after 2 hours of screwing around I purchased Norton Ghost VIA download 15 minutes later I had a cloned drive. Norton makes the partitions and transfers all the data with a click.

Do yourself a huge timesaving favor use ghost and save all your settings, files and partitions in a few minutes. If you have time to spare disregard. Just swap the drive after Ghost does it's thing.

jsmith · #12 04-17-2003, 09:21 PM

norton ghost is the way to go i just max out the compression and my boot drive still fits in a cd. i just wish it could do linux drives so i can upgrade my TIVO drives without fear...