Computer Woes

[RoyJackson]

"Startup Cop Pro. It solved some problems for me on Win2000. It is supposed to work on 98SE, Me, 2000 & XP."

I tried that program out. Still have the setup file on this machine somewhere. If I recall, the demo was time limited and I didn't register it. Nice little troubleshooting tool.
You can do similar troubleshooting with Sysconfig (just type "Sysconfig" in your START-RUN window. Do not use the quotes.

Bird, now that you've found Device Manager, just delete the sound card, then reboot. This may or may not work to restore your sound, but it's one of the first things you want to try. That little speaker icon should be on your taskbar. If removing the sound card from Device Manager (and rebooting) doesn't work, then I suggest removing it physically (as described in an earlier post) and re-installing. Even if the card was in use by another program or the sound is muted somewhere, you should still have that icon. I did just find one thing. In CONTROL PANEL-MULTIMEDIA, when you click on the Multimedia icon, a screen pops up with tabs. One of the tabs is AUDIO. At the bottom, there is a check box to Show Volume Control on Taskbar. See if it's checked. Now, I'm on a Win98 machine as I type this, so what you see may be slightly different. Let us know if this works to show the Speaker (volume controls ) icon. If that restores the Speaker icon, then see if any of the check blocks are muted or the volume is turned down.

You know, when Wifey hooked her machine up for an internet connection (she's using dial up, the cable modem is down stairs), she got the Blaster virus within a week. It took her some time to hit the Microsoft sites and to download all the updates to remove this virus. Pretty nasty bug!

I don't think your problems are due to a virus or viruses. I think you may have multiple problems, actually, with software conflicts and compatability issues. I'm really curious to see if removing your sound card and re-installing it works to restore the sound. That "in use by another program" could result from using Real Audio or another media program (I'll guarantee you have more then one on your computer...when you load CD-ROM or DVD drive drivers, they'll add a media program sometimes). But, I think reseating that sound card may do the trick.

 

[Mrwurm]

Bird, your not alone in your frustrations. I have a machine that runs Windows 2000. I cannot install Microsoft Office 2000 on the machine. The install program will run all the way to the end and then bomb out. I took it to an expert and he could'nt figure it out. The solution was to install Office XP which seems to work fine on my Win2000 machine. Go figure.

It should'nt be so difficult ! !

 

[Bird]

Jerry, to add to my woes, since this machine came with Windows ME originally, all the documentation refers to Windows ME and/or Windows 98. Now I could start over downloading my software from the CDs that I have, but I remember that when I upgraded to XP, I then had a printer problem and had to download updates from Hewlett-Packard via the Internet. In other words, if I start over, I'd have an unbelievable number of updates to download from the Internet for my printer, Windows, Norton SystemWorks and Personal Firewall, etc.

Now I could go buy the latest versions of all the software, but that would cost almost as much as buying a new computer. And I REALLY don't want to spend the money to buy a new computer right now. However, I think I'm just going to give the kid where my daughter works another shot at it and if that doesn't work, I may try starting over with the CDs I have, then downloading updates, and if that doesn't work, I may just go ahead an buy a new computer, and cry in my coffee. /forums/images/graemlins/frown.gif

 

[Bob999]

<font color="red"> Now the problem is that it shows to be enabled and working properly, but I still have no sound.
</font>

Bird,

I just went through an identical set of symptoms. It turned out that the small amplifier in the speakers had failed so that the "speakers" were bad. I think the cause of the amp failure was damage to a cord between the computer sound board and the speakers.

Do you have, or can you borrow, a known good set of speakers to try?

 

[looch]

Bird - I understand your frustrations. I'm the sysadmin at my work. I'm pretty good at keeping these machines going, but wouldn't you know that my home PC crashed last week and I just couldn't get the thing to boot up. I had to install a second copy of XP in a different folder (standard is c:\windows - I put it in c:\windows2). Once booted, I burnt all my data files to CD-R's. I then re-installed XP. During the installation, you are asked on what partition you would like to install. I chose to delete all partitions, then created a new one and formatted it (not quick-format, which is one of the options) with NTFS. Kind of time-consuming and generally a pain in the butt.

My PC doesn't have a floppy drive. If yours does, I would highly recommend making an ASR disk which will get you out of trouble if you need to repair your installation in the future. Details on how are available under help from "Start, All Programs, Accessories, System Tools, Backup."

Also, although not endorsed or even mentioned by any operating system or PC manufacturer, an annual, full reinstall of the system seems to me to be a very good idea.

If I really wanted to make this easy for myself, I would buy a second hard drive and use Norton Ghost to put an image of my perfectly functioning system on this drive. A system-restore using Ghost is a beautiful thing - taking anywhere from 10-20 minutes to complete.

 

[OkeeDon]

Will Ghost work on a network drive? Now that the CFO and I have our laptops, I've delegated my Dell Optiplex desktop machine to be sort of a "server" -- it's where the printers and scanner are hooked up, and a good place to store a lot of the "clutter" of downloads and such that don't need to be on the laptops. The laptops and the Dell all have 40 GB drives - I was thinking about installing a 120 GB second drive on the Dell, and storing copies of all 3 of the other hard drives on that one big one. I could probably partition it to look like 3 40 GB drives, and it would be nice to use something like "Ghost" to make it easy.

 

[beagdog]

I agree about using ghost.

I use three different operating systems between home and work (NT, 2K and XP Pro) and since the last time I crashed my NT machine I have been doing weekly ghosts of all of them (2 at work and 2 at home). I've found it worth the time and trouble to always have a backup that is no more than a week old just because of the instability (or maybe that's lack of reliability) of all of the OS's and hardware. I also have pristine ghost CD's of all machines from when they were originally built, not as easy to restore from as the weekly's but will be a good place to start in case of a real catastrophe.

I leave a second drive in all machines, and just make it a part of my early Monday morning ritual to ghost my two machines at work (NT and 2K) then that night I ghost my XP machines at home. Not real fast machines but none takes more than 10 minutes to do (memory is more valuable when ghosting than processor speed).

One crash and the time and dollars I've spent is nothing compared to the frustration I'll save myself. /forums/images/graemlins/cool.gif

 

[Bird]

</font><font color="blue" class="small">( the Dell all have 40 GB drives )</font>

I don't know a thing about Ghosts except for maybe a little bit about Casper the Friendly Ghost. /forums/images/graemlins/laugh.gif But my Dell has a 20 GB hard drive and I'm only using almost half of it. It's got a 250 MB Zip drive, the CD-RW, and the 3.5" floppy drive. I periodically put all my photos on CDs, and almost daily "copy" (instead of backup) my data files to zip disks. But I have no backups of program files except the original CDs for those that came that way.

 

[looch]

OkeeDon, a network drive is only a network drive to the PC's using it as a network drive (D. Rumsfeld impression /forums/images/graemlins/laugh.gif). What I mean is that you could Ghost these partitions from the console of your server - where all the drives are local. However, it is also possible to perform both imaging and restoring from a networked PC using mulitcasting and an appropriate boot disk. It works like this:

You create a boot disk for your server, which is made up of a bootable DOS shell, the appropriate network drivers and configuration for the network card in your server, and the Ghost executable. The PC from where you will be "sending" or "receiving" the image is running the "Multicast Server" and is waiting for clients to connect (in this case, your server). From there it's pretty straight forward.

 

[BillyP]

If you get a new hard drive, use it as primary and use the old one as slave. do a clean install of Win XP. All your downloaded drivers will still be on the old drive. If you need any of the driver, just point Win XP to them. Whenever you get everything you need off the old drive (that you need), reformat it.