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HyperHacker

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Posts posted by HyperHacker

  1. 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.

  2. 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.

  3. 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. :)

  4. 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.

  5. Unless he meant that it was a nuisance that Windows was requiring him to log in when he didn't need the extra security. That bugged me for a while too before I figured out how to disable it; there's little point to a password when nobody else in the house knows how to do anything more than browse the web.

  6. A while ago I had my desktop connected to a wireless router, and connected to it on my laptop (both using XP SP2) to copy files back and forth across the network. When I had this setup I would be prompted for a password almost instantly. I had to change some things however, and now the desktop is connected to a router which connects to the wireless router. I can't see the desktop from the laptop at all via wireless now, which is probably a silly configuration error, but I can plug the laptop into the same router as the desktop.

    This shouldn't be a big problem, but for some reason if I have either system try to find the other, it takes nearly 2 minutes to get any response. When it does respond, sometimes it just says "No network provider accepted the given network path" as if the system I'm trying to contact doesn't exist. (Interestingly, it only takes about 20 seconds to respond if the system really doesn't exist.) When this happens I just keep trying to connect over and over, and eventually I get the password prompt. :blink: It's like they're timing out trying to contact eachother, but they're both connected to the same wired router. Once the connection is established files fly back and forth as fast as ever; the only lag is when they look for eachother. I don't understand why...

  7. So the computer just shuts right off, without the "Windows is shutting down" or a "System Shutdown" box with a timer counting down? If it's doing neither of those then it's very likely a hardware problem, though viruses can do this too. You mentioned trying to copy a copy-protected CD, what was it?

    As for opening text/INI files, sounds like notepad.exe is corrupt.

  8. I navigate mouseless all the time. Under Accessibility Options in the control panel is a nice feature called MouseKeys, which lets you control the cursor with the keyboard. It's useful since a lot of XP apps are difficult or impossible to use without a mouse, and it's also a great way to do pixel-precise movements.

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