Volatus

*Cough* Power supply, anyone? *Cough* Have you tried swapping out the power supply? Usually, random lockups and BSODs are caused by either a trashed CPU (not all that common), trashed RAM (in all my time, never seen a RAM-related problem caused by an actual bad RAM stick), or, you guessed it, that power supply. As load increases, older power supplies will start introducing more "noise" (uneven DC current) to the stream, which during that noise may cause circuits to flip their state, or be misinterpreted, causing a whole chain reaction that crashes the system. In my experience, dead/dying power supplies, while not nearly as disastrous, is even more common than a hard drive dying... So if you've got a spare one lying around, snap it in and see if the problems cease

This may just be what this tool was designed for... http://hostfile.org/MGADiag.exe It's a Microsoft tool for displaying all the information about the Genuine system. It should help!

It's part of XPize, an incredibly awesome program that has its own forum here (and is how I learned about it). It's Luna Royale Black. (If I may suggest, though, if you don't have your own opinion on these options, I would suggest disabling "custom icons", "boot screen", "cursors", and "TaskSwitchXP" from the installer - they're kinda annoying) And you're right about Paint... it has its roots in ancient Windows (even pre-3.x - it was around in 1.x, wasn't it?), but it's been totally rewritten since then, especially for Win95. From Win95 to now, though, not much has changed, but it has kept up with the basic functionality (edit: Oh... and because of the crappy .NET Framework it runs on, Paint .NET takes longer to start up than Portable Photoshop CS, which I use for practically everything - opens up in 5 seconds flat from a cold start, and does everything Photoshop can do. Even nLite (another .NET app) takes 6 seconds from cold start. I hate .NET. MSPaint? About 0.25 seconds.)

Strange indeed... I wouldn't suggest printing with Paint at all though - it tends to love doing 72-dpi printings. It's also extremely old and is really shoddy for printing, period. The only thing I really use it for is screenshots (love PrtScrn, Win+R, mspaint, Enter, ctrl+V, ctrl+S, (name), tab, p, enter, alt+F4). But oddly enough, at my even wider 1440x900 resolution, I don't have any problems with that image:

Hey, I'm having a major problem with a server I'm working on. It's supposed to be able to be fully remote managed - able to turn off and on remotely. I have the "turn off" part figured - I just use Task Manager within remote desktop to turn off the computer. Turning on, though, is another problem. I have a router that can send WOL packets within the LAN, so that's no problem, it works perfectly every time since it already knows the MAC and IPs of the computers. The server is actually using a real dual-CPU server board - although a rather old one. I could trigger WOL only when the computer was shut down before Windows booted, or "crash-shut-down" by holding the Power button down. Whenever Windows shut off cleanly, WOL wouldn't work. The problem is, even though the integrated network controller is WOL capable, and always stays on (connected) with the system powered off, Windows somehow convinces the BIOS to ignore the WOL packets and stay off. Windows doesn't believe the card is WOL capable, so it doesn't even provide me with a "Power Management" tab, even though the card is identified by its driver as "Intel 82558-based Integrated Ethernet with Wake on LAN". I try installing Intel's PRO network drivers, which was an exercise in futility... first, it said no compatible devices were installed... then when I "force" installed it by using "Update Driver", it finally installed properly. But the Intel power management tab claimed "this port is not wake-on-lan compatible" (or something like that). It's obvious where the problem lies... To trick Windows into not disabling WOL on shutdown, I installed a shiny new Zyxel GN650T gigabit card in the server (an old N440BX board), which DOES have a "power management" tab and "Allow this device to bring the computer out of standby". I didn't connect it to the LAN though, since I didn't have a WOL cable to connect it to the board. The two ports (the onboard LAN wake-on-lan, and the "external" header) were connected together so I knew Windows couldn't care less about where the signal came from. It worked - I tested it in Hibernate, which wasn't working with WOL before, and I was able to wake the computer up from the router. Success! Right? Not really - I was both out a perfectly good gigabit card, and I later found that shutting down the computer remotely, again, left me with a bricked computer. Okay, now what? If I resume the computer from Hibernate, some of my hardware doesn't work properly (specifically, its TV tuner card locks the computer up when I try to use it - as one mod will remember from my last thread). So I now have to hibernate to turn off the computer, then to turn it back on, I WOL it, then reboot it. Kinda messy, just to beat around Windows' irritating BIOS manipulation! Is there a registry tweak I'm not aware of? I've exhausted all my Google possibilities... everyone seems to want WOL to STOP turning their computer back on, but that's the opposite of what I want...

Sweet, I'll give that a try! I double-checked before posting this that the "auto-reboot" option was enabled, but I didn't know there was a way (beyond the scroll-lock reg-tweak... that requires a reboot!) to trigger a BSOD. Hell, I never thought I actually wanted a BSOD This has to be in the candidates for "strangest Windows requests ever" Thanks!! edit: It worked! The "Do bug" button stayed pressed down (meaning it worked immediately) and about 3 minutes later I was able to reconnect to Remote Desktop and start the stream back up. Thanks!! No more Hibernate for me

I have an interesting problem I'd like to be able to solve before my friend - whose apartment the "server" sits in - gets home and could fix it himself. I remote-control a server that streams TiVo to me via a cheap TV tuner card, a network card in the TiVo to control it, and a DD-WRT router that can Wake-On-LAN the server (after much arm-wrestling with getting XP to stop disabling the BIOS WOL function when it mis-detects that the network card isn't WOL-capable - fixed by adding a newer WOL-capable card but not using it). Problem is, the tuner doesn't play nice with Hibernate. I last put the PC in Hibernate mode, then woke-on-LAN it. I tried to start "Broadcasting" from Windows Media Encoder, and it locked up. The last time this happened, I was left with a locked, but still partially responsive, system that needed to be "remotely" rebooted with the press of the reset button (I hate doing that). The driver locked up and wouldn't time out, so the system was forever waiting on a hung driver in order to use that device again (or shut down the program that hung waiting for it). I'm now encountering that same problem again. WME is locked up, and if I go to "shut down" Windows, I will be left with a completely frozen server I can't do anything with until my friend gets home and resets it for me. I want to watch TV! So, what I need is a program that is capable of crashing Windows - yeah. But crash it in such a way as it actually triggers the BIOS to hard-reset the computer *without* informing Windows. The functional equivalent of a software reset button. Does anyone know of such a beast? Something compatible with an old dual-P3 server from 1998-ish? I can still run a program because the only part of the system that's frozen is anything that tries accessing either the sounds card or the TV tuner (I think). I can still download a program via Remote Desktop's drive access, then run it. I just need to know where I can find that program... I figured this was the place to ask :-)

(edit: Uuhhhh, duh... my stupid. I was reporting a bug in the uninstaller, turns out that the uninstaller for 64-bit windows is different from 32-bit, and in my program-shuffling, the 64-bit version got carried over to my new 32-bit installation (in file copying), and... to "reproduce" the error I accidentally ran that same copy on my clean computer. Stupid! No bug. Just retardation.) (edit edit edit: And no, I'm not uninstalling nLite. nLite rocks. I'm just moving computers. ;-) )

Thank you, goofee691! I was having trouble installing Microsoft Streets and Trips 2007 on my freshly nLitened laptop... turns out I removed Speech, which causes Setup to inevitably fail with a delightfully ambiguous error (to the effect of "Something went wrong, please contact your administrator"). It occurred during the "Installing Text to Speech Components" portion of Setup, so I knew something was up there. I tried locating it via Google but couldn't find any relevant Microsoft results, or anything not trying to sell something. So I went to MSFN. I extracted the INF from the original Windows CD, hit Install, and extracted all those files it was asking for. I guess in retrospect I could have just pointed it to the i386 folder. Ah well. Now it's installing with no problems. Blam Microsoft's lacking installer options. =P

So I was building a really-lite nLitened version of XP for some "slave computers" around my room and I wanted to make an nLite from an RTM version I found a copy of. Processed it all OK as expected, burned it, booted it, but here's what I got on the physical machine as well as a virtual machine I just whipped up... "The following value in the .SIF file used by Setup is corrupted or missing: Value 0 on the line in section [sourceDisksFiles.x86] with key "cabarc.exe." Setup cannot continue. To quit Setup. press F3." (for people searching later) And my last session file... Last Session.ini I integrated RyanVM's addons pack but not the update pack itself. I figure the addons pack only has some neat tools and whatnot, and wouldn't require SP2 or RyanVM's update pack to actually be installed (but I could be wrong?). Any ideas? edit: Never mind, I answered my own question. RyanVM's addon pack does require the update pack. Ugh! Can't they stay separated? *rebuilds without addon pack * I guess we can keep this here for people that end up in this odd situation...

I guess mob mentality really loves blowing crap way out of proportion. HARD DRIVES DON'T HAVE DRIVERS. Going from the title it looks like some n00b is asking for a driver that doesn't EXIST. That's not me being rude, inconsiderate, or anything like that... it's stating the simple fact that people are, in fact, probably strolling in here looking for a lol about someone asking about a hard drive driver, and finding a discussion about disk controller drivers. If you're offended by that, end yourself, because that is in no way possibly "offensive" to anyone except the absolute biggest lamers on the internet. Grow a pair.

I don't understand this sentence and it looks like you're describing what's wrong. What are you saying is happening?

How eerily Vista-esque... T.T Any plans for a more elaborate boot screen? =\

Dude, I'd be glad to host it. I don't want to take credit for, or have control over, the file, so if someone likes (preferrably XPero), they can make an account at http://hostfile.org and upload it there. One thing you'll never get is a "too much bandwidth" error. I'd be glad to host the site too! Domain and all, if you can think of one.

I think many of us are opening this topic just to be curious about what kind of loser would be requesting a driver for a hard drive! Not a hard drive controller which is what the SATA controller driver is.

Did 1.3 final remove some tweaks for some reason? I can't find "Disable driver update internet prompt" and "Disable web open with prompt" under the tweaks section anymore... what happened? Those are pretty useful tweaks... I'm building a CD now without them. Is there a way to apply those later? EDIT: D'oh!! I'm such a stupid! It wasn't until I began the build process that I realized I was using an RTM version, not SP2! Wow. Been a while since I had that problem. Carry on... that also explains why "TCP/IP patch" was "unsupported"!

You're right! For some unknown reason, all these times I had been re-using my Last Session.ini files from one PC to the next, I always had "remove cat files" checked under the integration advanced options. Nuhi should really put those options more out in the open - nobody needs that much space for an integration list! Anywho, looks like I got my question answered. Now the question is, how are so many people having this problem (by a search, it seems really common!) without really knowing about having checked that option? =\

I'd like to know this too, and I'm bumping an ancient topic because 1) it's what I found when I searched, and 2) it's better than starting a whole new topic to discuss this problem yet again. I do seem to have the same problem... it seems nLite almost always causes this problem no matter what I do. Until recently, that is, when yesterday morning I had to repair Windows on my laptop so I made a matching, untweaked/unpatched/un"option"ed nLite installation from which to "repair" my Windows installation. I only removed components I removed on the original installation (using oeminfo.ini to guide me, damnit, why can't nLite include Last Session.ini in the windows folder?), which included no drivers. But nLite still did driver recompression, which worried me that driver.cab wouldn't be "signed" anymore. But sure enough, I go to plug a USB keyboard/mouse receiver in, and it installed all its 5 or 6 components without any New Hardware dialogs. I had those before and it was driving me nuts! So what is it that not-tweaking did, that caused it to work right this time? The patches I usually do on every nLite CD are, 100 connections, no USB polling change, disable SFC, and enable uxtheme patch. I usually leave all drivers in place for my main PC's OS so I can use it as a reference on other PCs, but no matter what I always got the new hardware boxes. I think I'm going to play around with virtual PCs for a while, see if I can't figure it out myself while I wait for the never-coming helpful reply.

Wait, so what does it mean to install XPize first? Does that mean to run Windows through XPize first, then re-run it through this installer? I like the design but I don't get why I need to install one over the other...