I swear to GOD I'm going to kill something.

Ever since I installed Win2k on my new box, I've had some stupid problem once a week. Sometimes twice a week.

Just now, I disocvered it has very nicely decided I no longer have a DVD drive, a CD Drive, or a USB Camera. The last one I'm not concerned about. I've had to deal with Windows ****ing that one over every time I go to use it. That one I can probably fix. But when it just hauls off and decides to ELIMINATE my optical drives...

I've rebooted. I've reinstalled drivers. I've uninstalled the drvies and reinstalled them. And now, I'm so damned livid I can hardly think straight.

Good god. I'm seriously doing everything I can to keep from swearing in here right now.



That's the error on the drives. One is a Sony DVD/CD-RW. The other is a generic CD-ROM. I've already tried the always USELESS Windows troubleshooter. It's result? Something must be wrong with my drives because Windows is NEVER wrong. Right. How the hell would both go down at the same damn time? Someone give me an idea to try, or a site with drivers that'll run it... ANYTHING. If I keep searching like this, I'll get nowhere, which will piss me off more.

If building a computer has taught me anything, it's that my Hardware is working fine all the time. It's just the craptacular system it's running under.

Up yours MS.

Oh, and I REALLY don't want to hear a Linux rant right now.

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Put me in the hospital for nerves and then they had to commit me,
You told them all I was crazy,
They cut off my legs now I'm an amputee, God damn you.
============
Frogblast the Vent-Core!

I know where you're coming from

http://forums.massassi.net/html/Forum3/HTML/002220.html

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When guitars are outlawed, only outlaws will have guitars.

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=http://support.microsoft.com:80/support/kb/articles/Q270/0/08.ASP&NoWebContent=1

...

Yeah. That MIGHT apply if I was using Easy CD Creator 5.1. Or if I had just uninstalled it. But I'm using version 6, and haven't gone anywhere NEAR uninstalling it.

-_-

... Might as well try it. God I hate Windows. Why the hell does everything have to run under such a worthless OS?

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Put me in the hospital for nerves and then they had to commit me,
You told them all I was crazy,
They cut off my legs now I'm an amputee, God damn you.
============
Frogblast the Vent-Core!

I dont. None of my friends do.

Noone is forcing you to run to run Windows. Youve always got a choice... you can choose to use Windows, or you can choose to use something else.

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Gonads are useful for their purpose, but they are no substitute for brains.
:wq!

Windows XP. Solves all your problems.

Seriously.

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There is no signature

You must suck at computers.

GBK's right, if you don't liek it, there's other free options. I will stick with what works.
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WOOSH|-----@%

[This message has been edited by BobTheMasher (edited September 02, 2004).]

I have no problems with Windows, guess I'm lucky.

Maybe a cable went bad in your comp, have you tried switching the drives into anoher computer to see if something's wrong with them?

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Hokey religions and ancient weapons are no match for a good blaster at your side

That fix for Roxio got it working for me.

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When guitars are outlawed, only outlaws will have guitars.

XP has always given me more problems than it's been worth. Just trying to get a Sony Digital Camera to work via plug and play USB on XP at school was a challenge. Half the time it never worked.

I'm staying far away from XP. Now, I do have a copy of it now. A free LEGAL copy I might add. My college seems to have some deal with microsoft whereby I can download some of their software for free. XP SP1a was in there. I grabbed it. Nice to have on hand, but it's not going on my computer any time in the neat future.

BobTheMasher, please, just die. Yes, I suck at computers, that's why I built my own, and have troubleshooted problems on everything ranging from a 90Mhz POS running Win98 to a Compaqs running XP that we had to use last year in Yearbook, to the one I'm on know. I'm no newb to troubleshooting. It just really pisses me off when Windows pulls some moronic stunt like that. If that was meant as a very dry joke, none of the above applies.

GBK, I appreciate you not going into a Linux rant. Really, I do. I have a few local friends who babble about it all the time. Frankly, I have gotten to the point where I'll try it at some point. I have a machine laying around I can use to explore Linux, but I can't see it becomming my standard OS of choice anytime soon.

Tofu, I have this tendancy to push my computers. Most of the time I do it subconsciously. That's probably one of the big reasons behind alot of my problems. BUt not this one. The cables are fine. That was the first thing I checked.

FYI: The problem is fixed. CoW, I strongly suggest you try the editing the registry values in the link I posted. That's what did it for me. It might cure your problem.

Now I'm going to go do what I set out to do an hour ago.

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Put me in the hospital for nerves and then they had to commit me,
You told them all I was crazy,
They cut off my legs now I'm an amputee, God damn you.
============
Frogblast the Vent-Core!

Sorry, i wasn't ACTUALLY attacking your skill with computers (truth is, i suck too. I must just be lucky).

Anyway, what exactlyhad you done that caused it to stop recognizing your drives? And don't tell me nothing, because we both know nothing just "happens".

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WOOSH|-----@%

XP is not horrible. I've had Pro Corporate on my computer, and using Firefox--not a single virus, not a single piece of spyware, not a single infraction on my OS' part. In fact it's worked quite wonderfully. The only problems I have had are on the account of WINDOWS itself, not XP.

You really need to use it on a computer that you, yourself use and manage and customize. It makes a big difference.

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There is no signature

You'd be surprised.

... Isn't Windows and XP the same thing? XP being a flavor of Windows.

Plus, you have a corporate edition. Something which quite possibly has an effect on your security. That wasn't up for me to grab. I got XP Pro SP1a. That was it.

Oh, and those computers at school? I had full control over them. I did customize the hell out of it. Still didn't like it.

Bob, I haven't a clue what the hell I did. I burned a copy of JO yesterday for my brother so we can LAN and I can kick his *** . I haven't installed or uninstalled anything that SHOULD have thouched my optical drives. As far as I can tell, Windows did its famous thing of finding a way to corrupt a Registry file.

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Put me in the hospital for nerves and then they had to commit me,
You told them all I was crazy,
They cut off my legs now I'm an amputee, God damn you.
============
Frogblast the Vent-Core!

Windows is crap, but XP is like a gold plating to that crap.

The only difference between corporate and regular windows is the lack of activation.

Also, you didn't care for those computers. When it's your computer, and something goes wrong, it's just...DIFFERENT.

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There is no signature

Even though they were evil Compaqs, I HAD to care for them. If those things were down for a day, we could get two days behind in work. This is not fun when you have to deal with about 5 pages daily to get done by your deadline. So either they work, or everyone stays after school.

Prime example. The computers got hit with Blaster early in the year. They went down. This was the same day that we started compiling the Ads section of the book, which means major scanning as every freaking parent tries to tell their childs life story in PICTURES in a half a page. Scanning is really the best way to go about getting those images on the page.

So, we have no computers. We couldn't do ANYTHING during that 90 minute block of time. School lets out at 2:10. I live 10 minutes away. I got a ride with one of the editors to my house, so the time there was cut in half. I ran in, grabed Norton's, ran out, jumped in her car, and we went back to the school. It's now 2:25 by the time we get back in because of traffic. I start installing software and undoing the damage. Since I have only one disk, I have to do each machine one by one. By 3:30, I'm done. Now the REAL fun starts. The yearbook staff was composed of 20 people. 15 of them needed pictures scanned. Each person has about 10-15 images. 20 time 15 is 300 images. That's a very ROUGH estimate of how many I needed to scan. In most cases, I can do three at a time. So, that's more or less 100 different scan passes I have to do. Not to mention after I have a group scanned, I have to cut them apart, convert to CMYK, and save them to the right folder. I got that down to a system by the end of the year. I could to 15 in about 2 minutes. But right then, it took about 5 for each set. Longer sometimes because I had to deal with Pagemaker screwing up pages. So, do some math. I was there about 8 hours after school. Yeah. I'm NOT kidding you. I stayed there until the damn job was DONE. We had a very VERY important deadline at the end of that week.

So, to make a long story shorter. I DID care for those damned things, because if I didn't it was our *** . After that, Virus Definitions were kept up to date. Norton's System Works was run once a week. About once a month I'd go through and clean off the crap we didn't need anymore.

Did I treat them EXACTLY like how I treat mine? No, not exactly, but I did work like hell to make sure they ran well and were dependable most of the time. That's what you do to your computer. Isn't it? Just not on the same scale. I worked my *** off in that class. As much as I hated crap like that, if given the opportunity to do it all over with the same people, I would. That was the most fun I had Senior Year.

Oh, and our book turned out very nicely. It could have been better, but we ran out of time and didn't have the money to make any more corrections. I should scan some of the graphics I did for it some time and post them. Did I get off on a tangent or what?

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Put me in the hospital for nerves and then they had to commit me,
You told them all I was crazy,
They cut off my legs now I'm an amputee, God damn you.
============
Frogblast the Vent-Core!

<3 pro corporate.

Thats what I'm using.



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I have found that you can transform your character solely by the power of belief: as you believe yourself to be, so you shall become over time.

Your problem was NOT XP. Your problem was COMPAQ. Trust me there.

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There is no signature

<3 XP.

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"I'd rather be hated for who I am rather than loved for who I pretend to be." -Janis Joplin

The problem lay not in the HARDWARE but in the SOFTWARE.

Trust me on that.

I didn't say anything about a HARDWARE problem, thus it isn't the fault of Compaq. The exception being if they stuck really ****ty USB ports on the computers. That's the only time we ever pluged anything aside from the standard crap into them. The HDs were Western Digital, not Compaq.

The simple point is, the hardware for the most part was fine. It was the SOFTWARE that was screwing up. Pagemaker screwing a file up has NOTHING to do with hardware and EVERYTHING to do with software. The computer catching a virus has NOTHING to do with it's hardware and EVERYTHING to do with it's software.

Yoshi, I don't care how much you know about computers, I spent a full YEAR around those things. I think I know what was going on a little better than you do. Especially considering every problem I faced with those damned things I always managed to fix. And NONE of them were ever related to hardware.

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Put me in the hospital for nerves and then they had to commit me,
You told them all I was crazy,
They cut off my legs now I'm an amputee, God damn you.
============
Frogblast the Vent-Core!

as far as I know, corp is the same as pro it just doesn't need a serial.

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<]-[ellequin[]Off> Everytime I think I've hit the bottom, and can't get any lower, someone tosses me a shovel

I've spent the last almost 2 years fixing and working my sister's Compaq, runnning XP Home. I run XP Pro corporate, and...no...problems. Unless it's self-inflicted. Hrmmm.

It's not that the hardware brandnames are faulty, but you forget these are prefabs. Almost all prefabs crap out for one reason or another, and almost always because of the hardware. For some reason prefabs jsut weren't meant for REAL use.

Either way, maybe you're right, maybe it was the hardware, maybe...there's a black hole knocking on my window.

Either way, XP is good, especially if it's Pro, give it another chance. Hell it can't be much worse than the problems Win2k are giving you. Eh?

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There is no signature

I'm not even going to address the computers anymore. I'm saying the same thing over and over now.

XP MIGHT be good after you ditch all the pointless crap they have loading up by default. It's taken me this long to just get Win2k running fairly stable. Yeah, I've had problems, but I had ALOT more in the first week than I do now. It's a process of slowly finding the things that keep bringing my system down and fixing them. I used to be able to maintain an uptime of 10 days. Plus or minus one or two days. Then I had to reboot. The system was eating the remaining HD space alive from the stuff it stored when I placed it in hibernation. On my new system, the largest uptime I've had so far is 4 days.

Now, suppose I move over to XP. It has mountains more crap to unload than 2k. I can probably hit the vast majority in the first day. But it'd probably be even longer until I finally got ALL of it.

I have my reasons for not liking the system. I'm not moving to it until someone can definitively prove to me that it would be worth my time. That it would be worth the effort, and in the long run, it would work substantially better for me.

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Put me in the hospital for nerves and then they had to commit me,
You told them all I was crazy,
They cut off my legs now I'm an amputee, God damn you.
============
Frogblast the Vent-Core!

You and Yoshi both realise Corporate is illegal, right?

(except when in use by corporations of course)

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Hokey religions and ancient weapons are no match for a good blaster at your side

F*** the law. I got ripped off by compaq when my restore Cds wouldn't work the way they were supposed to, so i took what my friend offered me and I didn't ask questions. What would you do? The whole piracy problem could be resolved if Microsoft would lower their prices by at least 75% and sold stuff like office and winxp for $50 for full or less than that for the upgrade. At those prices, warez would no longer be practical, and they would make it up through sheer volume.


compaq tech support is like a trip to pure hell, and i didn't feel like wasting time talking to utter morons that know even less about their own computer than I do. That's why I learned to fix my own machines a long time ago.

Compaq machines are notoriously inferior components-wise. Everything is generic and is hard to find working drivers for. The machines are built by practically slave labor wages overseas, so what would you expect with that kind of workmanship?

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I have found that you can transform your character solely by the power of belief: as you believe yourself to be, so you shall become over time.

[This message has been edited by Pagewizard_YKS (edited September 02, 2004).]

[This message has been edited by Pagewizard_YKS (edited September 02, 2004).]

bootleg wixXP corp uses the devil's own serial number, the infamous FCKGW one, although that can be easily changed post-install so you could get SP1 (back before SP2 came out). The only difference between corporate and regular pro is that corporate doesn't require activation.

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I have found that you can transform your character solely by the power of belief: as you believe yourself to be, so you shall become over time.

[This message has been edited by Pagewizard_YKS (edited September 02, 2004).]

Not if they give you a copy to use. Like my uncle's company gave him.

He already had a copy of windows, so...yeah.

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There is no signature