HyperHacker

I think there is actually something wrong with the machine. Windows 98SE installed, but freezes at startup. If I reset when it freezes, it gives me the normal/safe mode/etc menu the next time, and just choosing normal mode, it boots up fine. O_o The DVD-ROM is brand new. I've run Memtest86 several times; this did reveal that one of the RAM slots was faulty which was preventing the installer from copying files. Once I removed that stick it copied the files just fine and Memtest86 ran for 16 hours without reporting any problems. The power supply seems to be doing fine as reported by both the voltmeters in the BIOS settings menu and a multimeter I attached to the 5V and 12V lines. The hard drive has undergone a write test and several full formats without any errors reported, and neither the Windows installers nor any of the text-mode programs I've been using (e.g. to test the RAM and disks, copy files) have acted abnormally. Copying the XP setup files to the hard disk didn't work. When I run winnt.exe it claims it can't find a big enough (just under 600MB) hard disk, even when the setup itself is on a 10GB FAT32 partition. The only PCI card is a network card. The board has onboard video, sound, and USB. Are there any other tests I should try that might catch some RAM or hard drive errors the others missed? Could the CPU be faulty without everything else going haywire? I can disconnect the USB, but the mouse port is also on that board.

Tried 2 different copies now. Wouldn't it complain about corrupt files if that happened?

I'm trying to install XP Pro SP2 on an old machine, and after it gets done with "Installing network, 30 minutes remaining", it reboots and starts the whole second stage over again (39 minutes remaining). I've tested the RAM and hard drives repeatedly, formatted and started over twice, it just never gets past this part. There's no "rebooting in 15 seconds" or whatever prompt either like in the text-mode stage. It just blanks out to a light-blue colour and reboots. The machine is a Pentium 2 (350mhz, but I clocked it down to 233 to see if that would help), 160MB RAM, 10GB hard drive. Maybe a bit old for XP but that doesn't really explain this.

On an article's comment page: "There are 1 comment for this story".

Rootkits made in Java? Now I've seen everything.

Textpad is great, but it's no Notepad replacement. (BTW, it has Block Select Mode which lets you select columns or blocks of text, as someone asked.) Personally, I'm fine with XP's Notepad for simple things; I guess there's no way to use it in Win98?

It's only going to get worse; replace the drive.

I prefer Memtest86 myself.

I regularly browse the Windows XP forum, and it's gotten very popular to the point where threads at the end of the list are only a day old. I have the number of topics per page set to Forum Default and though I haven't counted it looks like only about 30 are shown. For some reason instead of a text input there's only a dropdown box in which I can't select more than 30. I fear peoples' threads might be getting pushed off the first page too fast before anyone has a chance to help them, because let's face it, who actually reads the second page? Setting the forum default higher and allowing more than 30 in the user settings would solve this.

You could solve at least the convenience issue by using Firefox which remembers passwords. Opera might too, I dunno.

You might have defective RAM then. Moving it to another slot will give it a different address, which will solve that problem but create new ones. Give Memtest86 a try.

OK, but why is mine so much higher than theirs?

It depends too how you set up the drives and what you're doing. With IDE you have two disks per channel, and both disks will run at the speed of the slower one. Thus I like to put my fastest HD on its own channel, and the slower ones on the same channel as the optical drive. If you're loading/saving huge files into/out of memory, then the faster disk is going to have to slow down as you'll essentially be copying data from it to the slower one or vice-versa. If you're doing things that use a lot of memory but not big files, then your main HD won't be involved at all, only the swap file.

Nice. BTW, did you guys mean your "System Idle Process" was using 16/28KB, or just "System"? Because the former on my computer is using zero while the latter uses 1,876K.

What exactly does this install? It sounds like some form of DRM. >_>