Bit OT - WinXP PC locks up!

[Adrian C]

Impressive program. Well worth installing. Thanks.

[Mike Tomlinson]

In article , Adrian C writes

same place as w_tom, presumably. hopefully.

[Invisible Man]

Tiscali!

Probably connection failed and being chased round the block by threatening debt collectors for a non-existent debt.

[John Williamson]

Ask Microsoft and Intel. I don't know. I do know that a re-install gets it back to the original speed and stability.

XP runs with a degree of success on oldish machines with 256 Meg of memory, and various processors.

7 won't even install until the machine has a 1GHz processor and a Gig of RAM, and 15Gig spare on the HD. This EEE (4Gig C: drive, and 2Gig of RAM) will run XP, the twin core 1.6GHz machine will run 7 almost as fast as the EEE runs XP. Which is why all my machines run XP, and will do until M$ withdraw support, at which point, given the way 7 has had stuff moved round, I may well go for Linux.

I've just found an old Toshiba Satellite 1800, which I'll probably end up installing ME on, as I need a particular item of hardware supported, and 98 won't run the drivers. At the moment, it's trying to install Debian, so I can see if that will do the required job.

[Steve Walker]

Personally I don't have any problem with my browser remembering passwords and ids for forums, newspapers, etc. that I visit. It's far easier letting it just get on with it and saves me any effort. If it ends up compromised, there's no great loss.

Passwords for banking, inland revenue, etc. are however, a different matter and I certainly wouldn't let the browser store those.

SteveW

[Steve Walker]

I'm sure I remember a great one from my ZX Spectrum and QL days, but I don't seem to be able to find any reference to it at the moment - "Unprintable Error".

Does anyone else have any recollection of it?

SteveW

[Adrian Brentnall]

Don't know about that - I do have the Dell disks, plus some other WinXP disks that seem to install OK on one or two other 'home-built' machines

Nothing earth-shattering

General w/p / openoffice activities, graphics stuff (Paint-Shop Pro), web authoring (Netobjects Fusion & WYSIWYG plus anything else that takes my fancy). Email & web. Very infrequently editing music files (Goldwave). Runs a set of software to drive a vinyl cutter. Output for two screens..... that's about it

Oh - and not falling in a heap would be a bonus!

Regards Adrian

[Adrian Brentnall]

No - but I remember being subcontracted to write a uP test for some Texas 99000 kit that was to be used in a railway points switching application.

At power-up the system was supposed to run a POST. The Project Manager was a Postgrad Computer 'Expert' on his first job. People skills of a water-cooler, and technical grasp even worse.

Had me writing Texas assembler code that solemnly loaded zero into an internal register, incremented it, checked that it wasn't zero any more but was '1', then incremented it again to see if it was round-about '2'

- and so on. Then we tested the 'decrement' instruction ......

and so on..... and so on .....!

He also wanted the uP to report back up the line if it found errors - using a highly complex comms routine. Tried to point out that if the micro couldn't handle simple maths then it wasn't likely to be very successful at telling the outside world - but was told to get on with it...

I believe they eventually got rid of him!

Adrian

[John Rumm]

I remember a demo to MoD of some bit of kit where they wanted to test how effective the new built in test capability was. One CPU card test was supposed to do a maths co-processor test (8087 hanging off an 8086). So the chap inspecting the demo, pulled the 8087 out of its socket, powered back up, and did the test. It passed!

The engineer who wrote the code in question was always thought of as a prat (although he did have a very high opinion of himself), but this kind of proved it. The test consisted of an expression of the form:

test_result_ok := ( a * b / c ) = d ;

where a, b, c, & d were all defined as constant real numbers.

Needless to say the compiler took one look at that and optimised it to become the equivalent of:

test_result_ok := true ;

;-)

[John Rumm]

To be fair XP *ran* on those machines. But a XP SP3 system fully patched and with AV software loaded and running is not much more than decorative on anything with less than 1GB of RAM these days. (it will boot ok in

512M, but will be paging by the time you have your first app loaded)

[The Natural Philosopher]

browser logs everythng into fragged cache files

it probably will. I have debian so ask if you run into crap

[The Natural Philosopher]

Firefox wont store anything from an https: site.

[John Williamson]

It won't use the built-in display at anything better than 800x600. Apparently, according to t'internet it's a minor change to the xorg.conf file, setting the video driver to "trident" instead of "vesa", and setting the refresh to 60Hz. There are even sample files on varius sites. That I can do, either using mc or Gedit. It would help if the xorg.conf file was in /etc or /usr/bin/X11 or even findable by root.

Debian 6 using Gnome, clean HD install.

When that's sorted, the fun begins with the sound configuration, as I want to use it as a multitrack recorder. People claim that the interfaces I want to use "just work".

[dennis]

I wrote a test for the 8086 while I was at GEC. It didn't really attempt to test instructions at all. It moved data about to test the internal and external buses for stuck bits and shorted bits. It also tested the address busses in a similar way. It also tested the functions like increment but not every value just the boundaries.

It made no real attempt to report errors it just set some bits in a bit of IO hardware at the start of each test and went into a loop if it failed.

[The Natural Philosopher]

There may not be one if its the latest debian Much is now automatically adapted.

I think you may need to make one in /etc/X11..IIRC. That's where it is on lenny..you may have squeeze tho.

sound is a bit of a doss up on 5. Mostly sorted on 6.

ALSA is the better way to go Id say

[John Williamson]

I do. /etc/X11 is where I started looking, but the nly copies I culdfind were commented out copies in a sample directory. I'll have another go next time I'mnear the machine.

ALSA is apparently installed. I'd prefer Ubuntu Studio, but the DVD drive's a bit marginal, and has trouble with recorded discs, and the download version I tried screwed up installing GRUB. Maybe another go at that, as the problem wasn't with the boot CD.

[tony sayer]

So is that it?. Surely something that can be put right without reinstalling?...

ME!, Arrgh!!!, even Vista is better than that pile of cack.

Can't you find a copy of WIN 200 Pro or XP even?..

[Tinkerer]

If the right option isn't there, see my post above in the thread for a way that does work.

[Huge]

*So* much easier than Linux, eh?

[Adrian C]

This practice is admitedly deeply technical, a challenge that end users shouldn't normally find themselves involved in.

In similar hot water in some builds of linux, ye'll be swimming in the seas of the command prompt, wishing ye had google by your side (ye don't) and having a fine time learning/crying about partition tables and grub. And where is/was /home?

Interesting stuff though. I can't live in camps anymore. Skill up on both!!! :)