My New Computer!

Well, I couldn't figure out how to fix my computer....so I bought a new one!

Staples was selling it for $664, which I thought was a good deal. Of course I went to a Best Buy store and TigerDirect first, but didn't find as good as a deal.

Here are the specs for other techie people:

• 2.66Ghz Intel Core 2 Dual E7300
  
• 4GB DDR2 SDRAM
  
• 640GB SATA 7200RPM Hard Drive
  
• Supermulti, Double layer, DVD+/-RW, DVD-RAM
  
• nVidia Geforce G100, 512MB add on graphics adapter
  
• 10/100/1000 (Gigabit) LAN
  
• High-definition audio with 5.1-channel audio support
  
• Front I/O ports: Five USB 2.0 ports, multi-in-one card reader, headphone and microphone jacks; Rear I/O ports: USB 2.0 ports, PS/2 keyboard and mouse ports, five audio ports, ethernet (RJ-45) port, D-Sub VGA port (VIA Convertor), Serial port, DVI port (on VGA card), HDMI port (on VGA card)
  
• Microsoft Windows Vista® Home Premium 64bit

I'm really liking it so far!

It's really fast, I can do so many things at once, like run Firefox, a computer game, music on my Winamp player, and my email. Even my old programs still work, there's just a secondary Program Files (x86) folder for them.

Some things I don't like about it:

• Dungeon Siege and Dungeon Siege: Legends of Aranna don't work! Hopefully someone has found a fix for this, I just have to keep searching.
  
• User Account Control - Way too annoying, I've disabled it for now. It would pop up notifications even when I deleted stuff!
  
• You can't customize Vista folders by adding buttons to the toolbar. In Windows XP I used to add the Delete, Cut, Copy and Paste buttons to the top because I use them a lot.
  
• My folders don't stick to the viewing method I want them to. For example, a folder I've changed to tiles view will be details view when I open it again.
  
• The Witcher is still a bit laggy. I was hoping once I upgraded my computer and got a better processor (I had an Intel Celeron chip in my old one) it would run perfectly. But the video is slightly stuttery, and not flowing smoothly.

If anyone has any tips for a newbie Vista User, or if I'm wrong about the above, please leave a comment. Any advice is appreciated. :)

I'm just so relieved and happy that I got a new computer. It's gorgeous and I love it. Now I can get back to posts about computer games, yay!



P.S. I love how tiny it is! It sits right on top of my computer desk and isn't in the way at all. I just won't be able to modify it much as the case is so small, but that's okay.

Computer Issues IV

Well, no longer do I think it's a virus, but now I have no clue what's wrong with my computer.

Let me explain. Last night I reformatted both of my computer's internal hard drives and left the external hard drive turned off and unplugged from the computer. I reinstalled Windows XP on the main hard drive but got the blue screen of death halfway through so the installation restarted. The second installation worked fine, and Windows loaded and activated over the internet and everything seemed fine.

So I started downloading updates, and my anti-spyware programs I use, and Firefox but a lot of programs when I tried to install them said that they were corrupt. So then I figured out that I should update the Windows Installer to 3.1, so I downloaded that and installed it. But I was still having issues with installing stuff because files are corrupt or missing. I couldn't even install my sound driver, cause it said that was corrupt! And I tried to install my nvidia geforce driver from the CD, but then I had to remove it from startup because it kept on crashing the computer. And the one I downloaded from the website didn't work.

I was able to install Firefox, but every time I tried to run it the error message came up that said a serious error has crashed Firefox. I managed to update Internet Explorer to IE7, and that sorta works. Everytime I visited Facebook the browser would crash. The computer just kept on crashing and restarting! And it can't be a virus, cause I did reformat both internal drives. What kind of virus would that be? Maybe's it a hardware issue....I need to get the motherboard checked out.

I tried to install Service Pack 3 but it failed halfway through, and then Windows wouldn't load at all the next time the computer restarted. So I'm using the disks to try to repair the existing Windows installation. I didn't know it had to go all through the process of installing again though, I thought it would just replace a couple of files! At this point I must have installed Windows about 20 times, it's a wonder I don't know the key code by heart!

Anyways, I read a post in a support forum that said maybe Windows Firewall is corrupting the installation files, so I'm going to go home and turn that off and see whether that helps. I would like to be able to install my anti-virus software and run a scan. Wish me luck!

Computer Issues Part III

Alright, so I think I know what's wrong now, in a general sense.

Let me explain further. My coworker had given me the suggestion that maybe just my C drive was corrupted, and I should reformat the second internal drive and install Windows XP on that. So on Monday night I booted from my disk, and reformatted both drives and installed Windows on the second internal drive (I call this my Storage Drive, as it usually has all my pictures, video and music on it). Well, it didn't work at all, in fact it was worse than the previous installations of Windows. I'm not sure why but maybe it was a Master/Slave issue? The C hard drive did have the boot priority (I had changed it in setup but it changed back).

So I wiped out the Windows install on the Storage Drive and re-installed it on the C drive. And it worked perfectly! I was so happy.....the internet was working, Windows looked like it should've looked, everything seemed fine. So I turned on my external hard drive (I had backed up everything from the second internal hard drive to this drive) as I normally keep it unplugged, and that's when I started getting errors, and issues, and Windows crashing and restarting. The internet started crashing and I would download files and they would be corrupted. So I think I have a virus as everything was fine until I turned on the External hard drive. Maybe it was the autoplay feature that released the virus.

Anyways, last night (Tuesday) I started Windows in safe mode with networking and tried to download antivirus software from the internet but they were all corrupted files. I also tried to run Trend Micro's Housecall (online virus and spyware scan) but it didn't work. So then I just turned on my external hard drive and copied and pasted various files into my second internal hard drive. In case I have to reformat my external hard drive, I wanted to save my pictures, music, saved game files, my Sims data, my bookmarks html file and other important documents. I didn't drag over any programs or .exe files.

Tonight when I get home, I will reformat my C drive again and install Windows XP and leave my external hard drive unplugged and turned off. If I still have issues, I will know that the external hard drive managed to infect the secondary hard drive, and I will reformat both internal drives. Then I will make sure Windows Update runs(another thing I wasn't able to do because of the issues) and my anti-virus is running and I have all my maintenance and cleaning tools downloaded from the internet, before I turn on the external hard drive and attempt to recover some of my data.

Wish me luck!

More Computer Issues....

So I tried to fix my computer by reformatting it, but it didn't work. My computer is still messed up!

First of all, I kept on getting errors when installing Windows XP....a couple of times my computer crashed and then restarted while in the middle. Also, other weird things are going on, like my computer not being able to run Themes. It loads with the Windows Classic theme and not one of the shiny XP themes. Another thing is I can change the Desktop Wallpaper but when the computer restarts it's not there anymore.

The kicker? NO INTERNET. Yes, you heard me. I try to add a new Network to the Network Connections area, but it keeps on disappearing on me. It doesn't seem able to tell that I have an internet connection that's always on, and always attached to the computer. I called Rogers to find out whether there was something else I had to do to get the internet working. After they had me run the cmd.exe program out of the Start Menu's run command, they had me type in ipconfig/renew at which point it came back with the message Unable to run this service, RPC Server unavailable. At which point they said my network card is broken and I need a new one. Not very helpful.

I looked up the RPC Server unavailable line in google and found some hints regarding the Administrative Services program and the registry, but it didn't work. I should also point out that my Windows Installer seems to be broken, as I couldn't install a bunch of programs. It kept on saying I needed to upgrade to version 3.1, and some installers would just quit and give me error messages or file corrupted messages. I should note that I made sure the drivers were installed and that none of them had the yellow question marks and they all seemed to be working, even my Ethernet driver (which is for the internet).

So maybe I'll have to replace the motherboard on my computer for it to start working again. Not a hard task, I've done it before, but a pain in the ass nonetheless. A coworker also gave me the idea that maybe my harddrive is corrupted and I should try to install Windows on my other internal harddrive. I'll try that when I get home from work tonight. I had updated my drivers and did something in the registry the week before all these issues, but if that was the problem, it would've been fixed when I reformatted the computer and reinstalled Windows XP.

I've also checked my Hotmail email account and found that I've sent out a lot of spam emails to the people in my address book. Are these issues connected? So many questions....

Well, I'll keep you updated and thanks for reading!

Computer Issues.....

So last night, as soon as I got home from work I opened FireFox to check my favorite sites (my deviantART page, the Spiderweb Software forum, Urban Dead and Facebook). Firefox would shut down the moment I started surfing around, popping up a notification that said "Firefox has encountered an error, please send a crash report to the developers, blah, blah, etc. And then there was two buttons, to Quit Firefox or Restart Firefox. At first I thought it was the Urban Dead website that was causing the issue, as it would crash as soon as I started typing my login and password. But when I restarted and visited a different site, it would crash again. Finally I just chose "Quit Firefox".

I then opened up Internet Explorer and went to Urban Dead (had to log in to spend my action points for the day). I managed to successfully play Urban Dead (leveled up, whooo!) and then tried to visit another site, at which point IE crashed. I went into the Task Manager to find out what was causing the issue, at which point my system restarted without any warning whatsoever (no Blue Screen of Death). When the computer came back on again I got an error message about my logitech driver failing, and then I went into WinPatrol's startup menu to disable that and any other unncessary startup items (like AdAware, Lexmark printer stuff, etc).

At that point, Win Patrol froze along with my entire computer so I had to restart manually. After the restart, I opened up LogonStudio and BootSkin and changed them both back to the default Logon Screen and Load screen, then disabled them from the startup menu as well. At that point, my computer then crashed and restarted again. After the restart, I tried to do some backups of my data in preparation for reformatting my hard drive, but the computer was so slow I had to restart again.

When it came back up again, I quickly pushed the F8 key to get the loading options and I picked safe mode so when the computer restarted, it didn't seem to have any issues. I copied the files on my desktop (two game install packages) to my secondary hard drive so they wouldn't get wiped out (it took a really long time, the computer was still slow even though most processes didn't load), and then opened up my backup program (Karen's Replicator, a great freeware program that I absolutely love!). I had to create some new backup tasks for it for various games and programs (Dungeon Siege LOA, Rocketdock, Geneforge, Geneforge 5, Fatal Hearts, Neverwinter Nights, etc). I also went through my deskop wallpaper folder that was saved in my Windows folder and deleted a whole bunch of images. At this point it was 11:30 at night and I had two pieces of toast with cheese spread for supper. I then started running Karen's Replicator and after it had finished a lot of tasks, I went to the Recycle Bin to empty it out. Then my computer crashed on me again. After I had restarted it again in Safe Mode, I ran Karen's Replicator again and left it running when I went to bed (at 1:30 AM).

When I got up in the morning, it was obvious that my computer had crashed again, so I restarted again in Safe Mode and opened up Karen's Replicator and checked the log of the jobs. The last job (a backup of my secondary hard drive) had not completed so I left that running when I got ready and left for work. Hopefully when I get home it will have completed and I can get started on reformatting the computer. I had so much I wanted to do last night too -- I had to put away Heather's clean laundry, write a new blog post on my favorite freeware games, maybe play a computer game -- but none of that got done. Instead I'm writing a new blog post about my computer issues on my work computer. :(

So, I probably won't be back until Sunday or so....not only do I have to reformat, but then I have to update drivers, update Windows XP to SP3, install my programs and games again, etc. At least I have my setting files and saved game files on my backup drive now. It was hard to come to work today, I just wanted to stay home and fix my computer! You know how it is, when it's broken you just want to get it fixed. And my computer needed a reformat anyways....ever since I tried out Google Chrome my computer has seemed slower, messed up even. So I am going to have a fun weekend. :P Actually, I really do enjoy messing around with my computer, so it won't be all bad.

Anyways, wish me luck!