HyperHacker

I've never seen it either. I don't have a problem with deleting files when this happens, but it'd really be nice if Windows would always tell me exactly which program has it open like that.

Well that got it to actually ask me where the driver was when it detected the device, and even say it was installed and ready to use afterward. That's all it did, though. Honestly I think these drivers just plain don't work, but I don't know what to do about it, especially when reverting to an old version (which didn't work very well either) didn't fix it. The thought of having to buy a separate sound card and use up another PCI slot just because of some stupid driver problem really annoys me, especially since I can't very well afford it. Usually at this point I'd be just taking the card out and putting it back in, but I can't exactly do that when it's built into the motherboard. Possibly related, I noticed after installing the drivers that I have wdfmgr.exe running in the background which is apparently part of Windows Media Player 10? I find that odd, since the version that Windows came with was 8 and I just deleted it. I don't use WMP at all, and I don't remember seeing this process before. It's signed by MS though, and terminating it doesn't do any good. [edit] Well I finally just gave up and did a system restore to 2 days ago. That's got things back to how they were, but that means I'm still using the old driver with that really annoying bug. (Every now and then it just starts playing garbage sound over and over until I reboot.) BTW, the version that I was using before (and again now) is 5.10.0.5760, dated 01/12/2004. I tried installing that one a few times though. As long as we're discussing drivers, is there a way to disable and re-enable devices and/or unload and reload their drivers from the command line? My wireless card stops working after I hibernate, and I have to disable it and re-enable it again; it'd be nice if I could just do this from a batch script instead of going through all the device properties and such every time.

The driver off Windows update, the driver from the motherboard CD, and the driver I had before are all the same thing. >_< Also, MIDIs and audio CDs don't play. (With MIDI the Play button doesn't do anything, and audio CDs give the same driver error.)

Well that's just great. Doing a system restore and reverting to the old driver didn't do anything.

It can vary in size. Mine starts out at ~256MB and increases as necessary.

When I try to delete a file that's open in another program, I just get an "access denied" error. But on my mom's computer it actually says what program is using it: How do I enable this? I've never seen it before.

Do you have Show Hidden Files enabled? Can you still open them from within programs? Can you create a file with the same name as one?

After my sound driver crashed for about the tenth time, preventing any sounds from playing except this annoying repeating garbage, I decided to check the website for updates. (I have an MSI K8T Neo-V mainboard with onboard Realtek AC'97 sound.) Hey, a new version, maybe that'll fix it. Ha! After installing the new driver, I reboot and suddenly have no sound devices. The device manager shows a WDM sound device or some such, so I disable that and install the driver again. That hasn't shown up since and device manager doesn't show any problems, but even after installing it a third time it does nothing. I even (after creating a restore point) tried running the included setup program, despite knowing that it'd dump a bunch of junk on my system (a sound driver does NOT need to be 27MB, does NOT need to install programs that run on startup, and does NOT need to create shortcuts on my desktop, especially without asking. ) I still have no sound devices! Argh! This is the only problem shown in the device manager: OK, so... WHY THE *beep* isn't the driver started? How do I start it? Why was it set to not use audio features on this device by default? Why didn't I buy a Mac? (Oh, right, because I like my arm and leg.) [edit] And why doesn't the preview show me that my thread title is too long? >_>

I don't really have a choice (yay BitTorrent ), nor do I like the idea of just not using foreign characters. That's like fixing a printer by not printing. No other program yet has had trouble with them.

I have several files whose names contain foreign characters, such as é and various Japanese characters. (The Japanese shows up as garbage, since the names aren't in Unicode, but this doesn't cause problems anywhere else.) It seems the command prompt doesn't recognize these characters. For example if I try to copy a file with an é in the name, it says the file can't be found and the é is changed to some odd symbol. Is it possible to fix this without having to rename them all? No other program has problems with these files, but I use batch scripts to move them around and such fairly often and it's annoying having to go in and do the last few manually.

There's all the system files which may be hidden, pagefile, hiberfil.sys, some NTFS hidden files that Windows absolutely will not show, the filesystem itself, fragmentation, etc. It is strange that Size is bigger than Size On Disk though.

Well I already have a pretty nice AGP card, wouldn't want it to go to waste. All the dual cards anywhere near my price range are very low-end. BTW, it seems that it forgets the monitor settings about half the time when I reboot. Sometimes it claims to have found the video card all over again, usually I just have to go to display properties and turn it on, position it, set the resolution etc. At one point when I was closing the screen saver I saw the "Found new hardware" popup in the corner, saying it found the video card again, but then it just disappeared and nothing had been changed.

The BIOS doesn't have a lot of options regarding graphics cards. Setting PCI to primary gets it to start, and setting Suspend Mode (I think that's what it was called) to Suspend To RAM (S3) enabled hibernation, though it just freezes when it starts back up. Windows seems to be a bit confused; Stand By was disabled earlier today but it's there after rebooting. It also didn't forget about the card and settings this time; started up with the monitor correctly placed and everything. I haven't found any drivers because I don't know what brand the card is. (Cirrus Logic Compatible just seems to be a generic name for old cards; I tried two completely different cards and both said that, the other one was defective though.) At some point I hope to buy a better PCI card but that could take a few months. I think this card's age might be the biggest problem (and even if not, 800x600 is weak). Also, I Googled the error message; apparently a lot of people get this, but I didn't see any solutions.

Argh, more problems! Windows will no longer restore from hibernation, and every time I boot up it finds the "new" video card all over again and I have to re-apply all my settings.

Why is this reopened? Anyway I do agree with some of those points, but I still say XP is the best Windows. Let's go over some of these problems, many of them aren't hard to solve. 1) Never happened to me. Sounds like you're OCing too far. Win2K may be able to handle it, but to say X is better because it works better on a faulty system isn't much of an argument. 2) Yes, this is very annoying, but I'm pretty sure you don't need it for every single change. 3) You can disable that, I don't recall how though. It's probably a registry tweak. Use the Search link at the top of the page. 4) Third party and/or hardware firewalls will take care of that, if you're so paranoid. Or you can just turn off error reporting (and the service that goes with it; for some reason it runs even when this is off >_>). 5) Totally agree here. Many warning messages need a "Don't show this message again" option. 6) Totally agree here too, but there's a simple solution. Go to Display -> Appearance -> Advanced, and you can shrink everything way down. 7) Put your taskbar on the side, it's awesome! I never run out of space that way. 8) Agreed, but after doing those changes once, you can export the registry, make an image, or use nLite to avoid having to do a lot of it again next time. 9) XP allowed me to use FAT32 for the system partition, and it worked fine. NTFS is better, though, so I switched it. The bloat does suck though. 10) Yes, people who think newer=better are annoying. I don't find that XP randomly fails and obliterates itself, though. (Now ME on the other hand...) It just kinda wears down, building up a lot of little bugs, then bigger and bigger ones until you reinstall. 11) Could be a driver problem or faulty NIC. 12) Agreed here too. XP will happily let me select a far higher refresh rate than my monitor is capable of. It seems to get the resolutions and colour depths right, though. 13) Agreed. Although my card reader is technically removable, it slides right into a dock and looks as if it were built in. I rarely remove it, and all the cards have disk caching disabled so I don't need to use that safe removal thing anyway, so why have that icon there? (I turned off that icon hiding thing because it always hides the wrong icons. ) 14) Annoying, but I seem to remember a way to turn it off. I just move stuff to DVDs when that happens, though. 15) This is fairly annoying, but it's also kinda nice in those cases where you hit Delete, then realize "oh crap, that's still open". If you're fast enough you can close it before the warning, and it'll delete OK. Basically it's just waiting for the file to be closed instead of failing right away. What'd really be nice is if it kept trying, but displayed a window saying the file is in use, with the options to stop trying or ignore it (close the file manually and delete it). The error message does get on my nerves, the way it pops up and makes noise and I have to go back and try again. 16) I use a program called Console instead, it looks many many times better (translucency!) and you can specify a position for it to start at, the window size, whether it has a titlebar, border etc.

I got a second monitor today, so I decided I'd throw an old PCI video card I had into my computer and plug it in. With a little buggery I can use both, but there are problems. First of all, the hardware info: Monitor #1 is at 1600x1200, 32-bit colour, 75hz. The video card is a Chaintech Volari XGI83 plugged into the only AGP port; it has 128MB and TV/DVI-out. The TV/DVI-out shows up as a third, disabled monitor. I can't use this (except to display the same thing as is on the first, and at a lower resolution) because the driver crashes, which isn't related to this problem (and I really don't care). Monitor #2 is at 800x600, 16-bit colour, 85hz. The video card is "Cirrus Logic 5446 Compatible Graphics Adapter". I can't identify the type but here's some pictures: 1, 2, 3. I couldn't get any decent images with my good camera so I had to use a webcam. It has 1MB and is plugged into a PCI slot. Now if I set things up a certain way, it works, but it's not the way I want it. There's a few problems setting things up the way I do want. 1) In my BIOS I have to set the PCI card to be the primary monitor, which means the BIOS text and Windows startup screen show up on the second monitor, and I don't want that. If I set it to AGP, I can only use one monitor. Windows suddenly forgets about the PCI card and detects it as new. The AGP monitor (which is set as primary in Windows) flashes and nothing happens. In the device manager the PCI card has an error: This device cannot start. (Code 10). 2) When the other monitor does work, the desktop wallpaper is displayed wrong. I use a 1024x768 JPEG set to Stretch. When set up this way, only the middle of the image is shown on the PCI monitor, which looks ugly. When set to Tile mode, the image is tiled on both (which is also ugly) but on the PCI, it has the right half of the image on the left! In Center mode, the image is actually scaled down to 800x600, which looks good on the PCI monitor but bad on the AGP. Is there a way I can select a different wallpaper for each monitor? (Screenshot below) [edit] I forgot about a third problem: 3D doesn't work right. Since such an old card can't do 3D, obviously it won't work on the PCI monitor, but if I run a 3D screen saver (only tried 3D Pipes so far), even when using software rendering on the PCI card, it says it can't create a Direct3D device on both monitors. I have to have it display nothing on the PCI card to work, and that worries me since other 3D apps may not have such an option. Also is there a way to 'jump' the cursor into the range of the second monitor when it's off-screen? What I mean is I have it positioned beside the first, and running at a lower resolution. If I move the cursor to the top of the first monitor and to the right it just hits the egde; to move it onto the second, I have to move it at least halfway down and then right. Can I make it instead, that if it's too high to move to the second monitor, it just moves down to where it can? Here's a screenshot showing both the wallpaper problem and the cursor range. The second monitor is to the right of the taskbar; you can see its display is just part of the wallpaper repeated. The black area at the top is empty space, not displayed on either monitor. The cursor will not enter this area; what I want is when it tries to, to just jump to the top of the right monitor (or just enter it anyway). [edit] I found a hacky way to have separate wallpapers: use a 2400x1200 image in tiled mode (it doesn't work in other modes) and just paste an 800x600 image in the area that's shown on the second monitor. For some reason the colours look bad on the second, though; even though it's in 16-bit colour it looks more like 8-bit. It's also not a very convenient way to have to do things; I'd still like to know if there's a proper way to do this. Also I notice that when I degauss one monitor, the other jumps. (They're both right next to eachother.) Is that bad? [another edit] Found another weird bug. I used to be able to select 1024x768 with 256 colours for the second monitor, but now I can't. O_o I'd like to at least see how that looks. (Can't decide which is better, 800x600 @ 16-bit or 1024x768 @ 8-bit.) When I click List All Modes in the properties window, it says it's capable of that (and even higher resolution, but at 60hz, eww). [yet another edit] Scratch that. I just need to select the desired mode in the List All Modes dialog, then hit OK twice and it switches. And 256 colour is in fact quite ugly.

I don't think it's a hardware problem, since everything works fine when I don't use a proxy. There could be a strange connection with the weather, though. It rained a lot last month and the connection would cut out fairly often, while this month it's been sunny and it happens quite rarely. I guess it could be a hardware thing combined with something Proxomitron is changing? I should emphasize, though, that even though the router has a wireless function this computer is connected directly through an ethernet cable. It has a wireless card, but it's not used for the Internet. (In fact it has custom drivers to do other things and thus isn't even capable of being used for the Internet.)

You have to also make sure you know how your BIOS will react. I suggest you just coat the pins in a non-conductive substance, then if it doesn't work you can just scrape the coating off. I had problems getting Nircmd to turn the monitor off too, since when the screen saver started it'd just turn back on. My solution was just to use a batch file to start the screen saver, wait a few seconds for it to set up, and then turn it off. Sounds like you might have a different problem though, but try turning screen savers off just in case.

You better be absolutely sure. Sounds to me like that'd make it not find your monitor at all. Try using NirCmd to turn it off or put it in low-power mode and see which state it goes into.

Hm, seems the board decided not to tell me about these replies. >_> I have a wireless DSL modem/router combo, but this machine is wired into it. (It has 4 ethernet ports and an antenna, plus the phone jack.) There's one machine (used to be 2) connected wirelessly, plus a few Nintendo DSes that sometimes use it (also wireless). The problem's almost gone away, though. I still get them but it's like once every few days now.

You'd also have to have a program running to catch the keyboard shortcut Win+R. That's what I use to show the Run dialog about 100% of the time.

It just comes and goes at random. I can go a whole day without it happening, then get it 20 times in an hour. Doesn't seem to matter what I do.

...And it's happening again.

Well sure it's possible, but I've never seen it before and I haven't heard anyone else complain about it. I think it's more likely something that was changed or that glitched up that affects the program.

Alright, thanks! That gets it to show up. Still can't imagine why it fails to find files, though; guess a batch file will do. Is it possible to have the computer come out of standby mode at a specific time?