OT: Computer's...gotta hate 'em.

[Alneyan]

Thermodyne said:
Ya....I'll just fireup the ole AS400 and start using vi..........NOT..

Of course you won't. Emacs beats Vi any time of the week. *Ducks*

I wouldn't offend glibc by leaving out of the list, though. That monster of a library can get offended pretty quick, so you should always treat it with all due respect. I'm partial to apt myself. One command, and plenty of programs get reinstalled; configuration files are a little more annoying, though nothing to write home about.

[Suicide Junkie]

Pico forever.

The guys in the OS course thought I was crazy, but it works great.

[Fyron]

Last I heard, weren’t you a CS major?

Computer engineering, but close enough.

With windows XP and to some extent 2K, the whole idea is to gain app performance by integrating applications into the OS.

Which is precisely why IE bugs are such a security problem... integration into the OS. But that's at a much deeper level, into the kernel itself, so bad totally from a technical standpoint rather than aesthetics. Sometimes, marginal performance gains should be sacrificed.

I can’t recall seeing an app come out in the last couple of years that didn’t write to the registry.

Apps that need to be installed to create registry keys and can't just be run after copying the installed folder over (or after wiping and reinstalling the OS) are highly annoying apps. Those are what I try to keep to a minimum. Apps should be robust enough to recreate required registry keys (or stored settings files, however they store their config data) if it is missing.

This is primarily what I was thinking of when I typed about apps I use not needing the registry, rather than not using it at all. I think I mistyped on that bit. A number of the apps I like do happen to keep all of their data locally instead of registry, however.

Just out of curiosity, what apps do you run?

Apps that keep their data locally:
Foobar2000
MPC (though it usually gets reinstalled with codec packs, since those are a pain to set up manually)
bblean
xplorer2
CKRename
Dscalar
Icecast
LAME
Oddcast (though now as a plugin of Foobar2000)
SlimServer
DosBox
Various classic games and emulators

Apps that use registry but are happy to rebuild themselves:
EditPlus (though contemplating migration to Notepad++)
Gaim
FileZilla
SE4
WinSCP
EAC
Spybot
Irfanview

Apps that I reinstall either way:
Kerio
AVG
Driver stuff
K-lite Video codec pack (plus MPC and Quicktime Alternative)
Nero
cygwin
Visual Studio 2003 (stay away from 2005!)
Various poorly written games that don't recover well

Apps that I have only used recently so don't know:
FolderShare
Skype
Psi
VirtualDub

I think that about covers it. Probably miscategorized some things, but meh.

[Renegade 13]

I have another massive problem I hope someone can help me with...it seems I have horrible luck recently.

OK, so here's the deal. I was playing a game tonight, when suddenly it crashed on me. Little dialogue popped up saying the usual "Do you want to report this to Microsoft?" thingy. I clicked "Don't Send" as I always do. Now comes the strange part. My computer then spontaneously rebooted. Only it won't boot up anymore. It gets to the stage where it says "Loading IDE Drives..." or "Detecting IDE Drives..." or something like that, and then it just hangs there. Nothing I can think of will snap it out of this. I need some serious help here if anyone can give it to me, this is not good at all. Computers hate me!

[Thermodyne]

It would seem that you have some additional problems. The system should not have rebooted from a game crashing. Lock up yes, blur screen yes, reboot no. The game is approved for xp, and not an old game that happens to run on it? It could also be related to your PSU problem, or it could be an issue with another part getting ready to die. Is it still under warrantee? If so you might want to pack it back to where you bought it and let them have a look. IIRC, that is the brand that London Drugs carries?

The system not being able to find the drives is not good. Seldom do the cd and hard drive roll over at the same moment. You might take a look and see if they have anything in common, like being on the same power lead, or the same ribbon cable. Check to make sure a jumper didn’t fall off. Then you might pull the power from the cd and see if it will boot. If not then plug is back in and unplug the hard drive, put a bootable disk in the cd and try to boot it again.

You can check the PSU with a VOM, just turn the system on and pin it out.

The last thing that comes to mind is, if the cd reader and the hard drive are on the same ribbon cable, and the board has two IDE controllers, switch it to the other controller.

That’s all I can think of at this time……

[Alneyan]

For what it's worth, I occasionally have lock-ups that force a hard reboot, but I cannot detect my CD/Harddrives or enter the Bios after these sorts of crash. I simply have to shut down the computer and restart it to go back to normal.

I'm not quite sure why it is so, though I have my own idea. One of these days, I guess I'll have to open up the case and try to take care of it... but I'm not really on speaking terms with the hardware part of a computer.

[Renegade 13]

Before anything else, a correction:

After I wrote my post last night, something changed. While I was writing, the screen changed to display this:

NVIDIA RAID IDE BIO 4.76
Copyright (C) 2004 NVIDIA Corp.

Detecting array...

I'm not sure if this is helpful or not.

Thermo: The game is XP approved, not an old game. Yep, Certified Data is the brand London Drugs carries, I was considering taking it to them (yup it's on warranty) and saying "fix it!". But that would mean being without it for quite some time, so I was leaving that as a last resort.

I'll try what you mentioned with the power leads and ribbon cables, though checking the jumpers isn't really an option until I do some research on them since I have little knowledge about them.

You mentioned I can check the PSU with a VOM...by VOM do you mean Voltage Meter?

Thanks for your help, I hope I can fix this problem...

[Renegade 13]

Good news! It seems I just have a temperamental computer...

I killed it via the power switch, left it for a moment, fired it back up and voila! it functions perfectly again. I'm at a loss to explain why any of this happened, but now that it's fixed I really don't care too much.

It is odd though that a reset would not fix the problem (I tried resetting once), but a full power-down would...

Once again I'm in your debt Thermodyne and Alneyan for the help you provided me. I'm just surprised this time it had such a simple solution...

[Thermodyne]

It sounds like the system has an onboard raid chip, and that it is turned on in the bios. IIRC, you are using only one hard drive. If so, you'll need to go to the bios setup and turn the onboard raid off.

VOM = Voltage - ohm meter, or mulitmeter.

[Renegade 13]

Easy enough to turn off. Thanks!