werecow Posted April 26, 2005 Share Posted April 26, 2005 what is the absolute worst computer nightmare you have ever had???? bugs???? that annoying crash you cannot track down???? the day you took it out on the lawn and blew a couple of holes in it with a 12 guage shotgun???? i know there are some good stories out there .....lets hear them!!!!! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Weyoun Posted April 26, 2005 Share Posted April 26, 2005 My biggest (recent) issue was getting those stupid ntldr missing errors. Probably one for 5 times I would reboot my computer it would actually boot properly. I finally found out that there was a bug in my bios, and even though I was setting the hdd priority a certain way, it was usually ignoring it and going to largest capacity hdd first since I had over 3 hard drives, though I don't know why it cared. Just a bug, I guess. I created a boot.ini, ntldr, ntdetect.com for my biggest hdd and pointed it to the right one. That worked for a couple of months, and then an update was released for my board, and when I flashed my bios, it just changed the problem, and.... To make a long story short, they finally released a good version of the bios for my shizzle about 2 months ago. I am using an ABIT AV8 3RD EYE board, for those who care. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
the6ofpopes Posted April 26, 2005 Share Posted April 26, 2005 Well I started out on Win95 for about a year, moved to Win98 right after it was released then moved to Win98SE. Then along comes WinME, now it wasn't really a nightmare, but it was the most interesting year I ever had working with PC's to date. I only installed it once & even though I crashed it 100's of times, through these crashes I learned Windows inside & out & was able to fix every problem that it could throw at me. I had that puppy tweaked to perfection & I still have a Ghost image of it just for old times sake. Of course having the registry experience from Win98 did help. Windows 2000 & XP are a walk in the park compared to good old WinME. I still have the original CD if anyone wants a copy to try out, you can't have a copy of the tweaked Ghost image I'm hoping it'll be worth some money some day LOL Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
elderbear Posted April 26, 2005 Share Posted April 26, 2005 No "worst nightmares" to speak of - so far (knocking on wood). About two weeks ago a power outage trashed the disk partition on my torrents disk. I used GetDataBack NTFS to restore pretty much everything. None of the partition restoration utilities that I checked out could restore in place - so I spent a week madly burning DVDs and deleting files on other disks to make room for the stuff I was restoring. Anyhow, a week of tedium later I had everything back - and a better organized torrent disk. I sometimes do computer work for my chiropractor. He had decided to get cable. The office staff hooked it up without installing the firewall/router - and they were running Win98 with NO protection. I got there an hour after they'd hooked up the cable. They could no longer boot their computer. That mess took about 12 hours to clean up. I was manually removing virus components and cleaning up the registry. My boss learned the hard way, too. He dialed up the internet on a new computer, and inside of an hour had enough adware, trojans, etc implanted on the Win2K machine to make it unusable. That only took four hours to clean up. OK. There is a nightmare situation. We were up at HAARP for a summer of data taking. I was supporting a guy from AFRL using a data acquisition system I had built about five years before. He had decided to move the hardware into a faster P4 (the original was a PII). But in setting the computer up, they ignored the fact that the bus-mastering DMA acquisition card used the same IRQ as the disk. When the system is running, it streams data to disk, at several MB/s. Once or twice a day the system would crash and the disk partition data would be lost! All the data that they had acquired was being wiped out - and they had no backup!!! My software got blamed - never mind we'd never had a problem like this in five years of running, and that I use the best quality assurance practices available to a small development team. It didn't take long to figure out that the PCI configuration in CMOS had the disk and A/D both using IRQ 10. Aparrently, the IDE controller in that BIOS assumes that it owns the interrupt - and every once in a while, it would take data from the A/D card as data and disk addressing info. Kablooie! The solution was simple - I changed the IRQ in CMOS and no more problems. Except a week or so of data that had already been lost. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Oma Posted April 26, 2005 Share Posted April 26, 2005 Most frustrating: Re-installing XP on my lappy (just on top of the old installation). Weeks previous to the re-install I had created a new User and password protected the old one. Then I install XP again only to find out that my the link to the net is down for the evening - so I can't verify my XP. This in turn means that I can't complete the installation. I now have no operating system. The following day I try all over again installing on top of the old (I had some very important stuff in the user account I had password protected - that's why I didn't format first). I finally get it installed and verified - only to find my previous account inaccessible... anger.... After some frustrating days of innovative thinking and loop-hole'ing I found out that in Safe Mode by right clicking and checking an insane number of boxes it's possible to 'free' the files one by one....that's was 3 enjoyable hours... Most Embarassing Nightmare: Back in '95 I was pretty wet behind the ears. I had this game called 'Ascendancy' which I played a lot - and this game was probably one of the first games that could be played by use of the mouse only. One day when I wanted to name something in the game I find that my keyboard didn't respond. Keyboard was plugged in. Tried 'Wordpad' - keyboard not responsive in plain windows either....getting a bad feeling. Re-booting only to find the keyboard STILL incommunicado. Getting a cold sweat (I'd saved up for this PC ~ 2500$ in todays money). I got my mom to drive me to the store bringing the tower. I explained the situation to the guy at the counter - within 5 seconds he produces a little key and un-locks the keyboard lock on my tower. Now that was how I learned what that lock was for...(had locked some weeks earlier wondering what it did) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
the6ofpopes Posted April 26, 2005 Share Posted April 26, 2005 The office staff hooked it up without installing the firewall/router - and they were running Win98 with NO protection. I got there an hour after they'd hooked up the cable. They could no longer boot their computer. He dialed up the internet on a new computer, and inside of an hour had enough adware, trojans Slashdot had an article several weeks back that said the amount of time it takes for a unprotected PC that connects to the Internet to be infected or hijacked had dropped from 40min in 2003 to just 20min in 2004. That's why I make Ghost images of all PC's I build for others, plus my own. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Antilles Posted April 26, 2005 Share Posted April 26, 2005 Whats annoying me recently is the Norton Recycle Bin keeps trying to delete the 'WINDOWS' directory, obviously I cannot as its protected but the fact that it actually gets in there annoys me. Ive heard its a common problem with recycle bin and its not really dangerous but its happening a lot recently. The only way I can fix it is to reboot. Anyone else suffer from this? BTW Ive scanned for the usual suspects....nothing! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest c4evap Posted April 27, 2005 Share Posted April 27, 2005 Upon boot up, just after the desktop starts to appear, I get a message that there is a problem on my C: drive because there are two directories named Program Files. The message asks me if I want to change one of the names. I click yes. Then check my drive and find an empty folder named Programs. When I try to delete it Windows will not let me saying it is in use by another program. I have to shut down, restart with a DOS disk and then I can delete it. It's happened a few times now. Thought it might be a bug in XP but I run the same OS on 2 other computers and it hasn't happened on them. Not a big deal...but annoying :mad: none the less. c4evap B) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
vystral Posted April 27, 2005 Share Posted April 27, 2005 How about the hellish nightmare I am living right now? My primary IDE chain is dying slowly, causing the random miscommunication between my HD and my motherboard. When the miscommunications occur, the computer dies, with no immediate recovery possible. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Weyoun Posted April 27, 2005 Share Posted April 27, 2005 How about the hellish nightmare I am living right now? My primary IDE chain is dying slowly' date=' causing the random miscommunication between my HD and my motherboard. When the miscommunications occur, the computer dies, with no immediate recovery possible.[/quote'] Fairly obvious, but just to make sure. You are using master/slave jumper configuration on your hdds, right, now cable select? and if you just have one still, make sure it is a single, not cable select. But yeah, other than that, it sucks. Sorry... :( Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
vystral Posted April 27, 2005 Share Posted April 27, 2005 Fairly obvious' date=' but just to make sure. You are using master/slave jumper configuration on your hdds, right, now cable select? and if you just have one still, make sure it is a single, not cable select. But yeah, other than that, it sucks. Sorry... :([/quote'] Yeah, I actually built this computer from pretty much the ground up. My motherboard supports both cable select and master/slave settings. I think the chain is going bad because the tower has been making a mysterious grinding sound on start up for a while now. :( Oh, well. Wish me luck in motherboard shopping!!! btw: like your avvy! picardo is a bad@$$ Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Tolax Posted April 27, 2005 Share Posted April 27, 2005 my cpu started up at 170C and my fan kept jumping between 3800 and 4200 RPM a sorta whir....whir....whir sound. COmp crashed bout 10 times in a row... in the end i left it in the garage overnight to cool off >.< Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
werecow Posted April 27, 2005 Author Share Posted April 27, 2005 my cpu started up at 170C and my fan kept jumping between 3800 and 4200 RPM a sorta whir....whir....whir sound. COmp crashed bout 10 times in a row... in the end i left it in the garage overnight to cool off >.< daaaaanmmmm sounds like you got a booger loose in yours!!! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ZaphodiLe Posted April 27, 2005 Share Posted April 27, 2005 Well, the other day, my 200 gb disc with all my collected sci-fi stopped working. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
GeneralLee Posted April 27, 2005 Share Posted April 27, 2005 How about the hellish nightmare I am living right now? My primary IDE chain is dying slowly' date=' causing the random miscommunication between my HD and my motherboard. When the miscommunications occur, the computer dies, with no immediate recovery possible.[/quote'] You may want to try exchanging your current IDE cables, with new ones. This was happening to me off and on over a year ago (I have seven HD's in this PC as I type), and I replaced many of the IDE cables with newer and longer round ones. Sometimes when the flat ribbon cables get twisted enough off and on and over time, they seem to start to fail (my theory). Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
GeneralLee Posted April 27, 2005 Share Posted April 27, 2005 Whats annoying me recently is the Norton Recycle Bin keeps trying to delete the 'WINDOWS' directory, obviously I cannot as its protected but the fact that it actually gets in there annoys me. Ive heard its a common problem with recycle bin and its not really dangerous but its happening a lot recently. The only way I can fix it is to reboot. Anyone else suffer from this? BTW Ive scanned for the usual suspects....nothing! RSAntilles, I use NIS - Norton Internat Security 2005, and Anti-vurus as well. Just turn off that Norton Recycle bin. I found it to be useless, and in a few days, adds 1,000's of files to the "protected" area, that you never deleted in the first place. Right click on the Icon, select Properties, and disable it from there. I just use the regular Recycle Bin. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
TetsuoShima Posted April 27, 2005 Share Posted April 27, 2005 My worst nightmare was about 18 months ago. At the time I was running a striped disk array (=raid0) of two IBM HDD of 40GB each, they both were no older than 12 months. Anyhow, one of them decides he doesn't like this world anymore and just stopped operating. For me that meant a loss of 75GB worth of music and movies. Just horrible!! :weep: Ever since I don't trust hdd's anymore and I run my storage in mirrored mode (=raid1). I'm thinking of switching to raid5 because I'll have a lower percentage of hdd-space-loss. But those darn hdd's make to much noise to have four of them in one case. So basically I haven't decided yet. As for all data I lost, I never got it back, IBM did send me a replacement, which I promptly sold over e-bay along with the other identical model. I only buy Western Digital and Seagate now. Reliability rules!!! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Weyoun Posted April 27, 2005 Share Posted April 27, 2005 --- snip ---- I only buy Western Digital and Seagate now. Reliability rules!!! I have done the same (wd). I run 74 gb raptor drives(raid 0 is screaming, but I keep an updated ghost image, just in case), I have 2 250 gb wds, a 200 gb wd, and a 160 wd. I just had my 160 gb run into smart failures though, and my 80 gb wd died about a month and a half ago. I have 2 friends that have had drive failures on Western Digital drives as well. So while they are nice, they still have their problems. I am not sure if I would have done anything differently if I knew they would have these problems, but at least it is on my oldest/smallest drives.... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
kyran Posted April 27, 2005 Share Posted April 27, 2005 where do i start ? my son deleting windows .......dun ask me how ..why ? he needed more memory lol that was on win95 i tried me it tried me we clashed lol it crashed i use nearly all msi stuff now and maxtor harddrives my son has lost three harddrives dunno why all inside a year i changed his motherboard seems to have worked my most interesting stuff is customers lol but if the darn things don't go wrong i starve so keep breaking them :) look out for the win xp activation crack there are several that have pretty violent viruses in them but if you find one that works and you still have a harddrive the next day i'm interested lol Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Weyoun Posted April 27, 2005 Share Posted April 27, 2005 look out for the win xp activation crack there are several that have pretty violent viruses in them but if you find one that works and you still have a harddrive the next day i'm interested lol What it sounds like you would want would be a corporate edition of XP pro. Thats what I use. They don't require activiation. Just an optional registration. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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