| Sunday, July 22, 2007 |
| Circle of Life in a Computer's Life |
 Remember the Saga of: Getting That Old PC Up and Running?
Well, it seems as though the circle of life continues on in the world of home computers. When one is reborn, another is passing on to the great computer divide. A place where everyone knows the depths of those dark dreary corners. Where you lose touch with those metal encapsulated minds that once hummed along so beautifully, with undivided attention just beckoning at your finger tips. The beauty descends to be only remembered in moments of time. And yet, out of those depths springs forth a new life. Just as sunsets bring on darkness, so to does the night lead into day, with a beautiful sunrise that can only be entered in by seeing it yourself.
Enter the Circle of Life in a Computer's Life.
My computer finally saw its last moments of life, yesterday when I least expected it. It sure is strange how these situations arise, when you least expect it. Last backup was two weeks ago.
Today started yesterday. The old computer was humming along, with no indications that a catastrophic heart failure was about to happen. The day began with its usual stuff that needed to be done. My good buddy was answering emails, editing pictures, posting information, designing pages, tweaking online brands, and a host of other marketing related items. My good buddy wasn't your typical flesh and blood. This guy was surround by a tin man's heart. In fact at the end of the day, his heart gave out. His mother board would beat no more. His face would no longer shine into my heart, because his video board was also taken out with his heart. The power supply that was recently replaced to give him new energy was not enough to keep him alive, and as with the circle of life, he finally gave up and said enough is enough.
The doctors worked tirelessly, throughout the night and into the early morning hours, to try and bring him back to life. They tried to shock his heart back alive. They pumped him with adrenalin and even tried to place him on a new life support machine, equipped with an even more powerful supply of free flowing electricity, but to no avail did any of these things work. They tried to remove his heart and use it in another PC body, but even these efforts could not bring him back from the dead. His PC heart was not compatible with the new body, even though it had the same internal motherboard. No, his mind was erased in one failing last moment of life. Finally the doctors succumb to the circle of life, when they reached the end of what they could physically do, and they bowed their heads and said enough is enough.
Wisdom is Knowing the Difference
God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things that I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.
Time to move on. Backups have the data, but the XP hard drive will not boot in another PC. Time to update my son's PC even further to make it a full work load computer. His computer was built for gaming speed at the time. But as with all computers, they too lose there edge to the new gamers on the block. If you had a good gaming computer to begin with, but simply want a faster motherboard, faster video card with more memory, and faster hardware for an active gamer, that does not mean the computer is outdated for everything else. So, I inherited my son's old PC, that was substantially faster than my PC.
 My son's old PC was loaded with Windows 2000. I thought, that I simply could use this computer to resurrect my old computer. I'll just install the hard drive from the old computer into the new PC. However, when I placed the hard drive into the chassis as the primary, the system just stared at me in the face and would not boot at all. Actually, it would not even attempt to boot. The disk appeared to be all scrambled. Whatever went out in the motherboard, with the video card failure likely the cause of the cascading effect, made it so that not even the bios would be displayed. The computer just sat there with the hard drive select light on and the CD and DVD drive lights on at the same time. This was after I went to the local Best Buy at 9:00 pm (fortunately Best Buy was open till 10:00 pm) to try a brand new power supply. At least this gave me a head start on discovering what the real problem was.
As is the case with many issues involving computers today, they are total time killers. I decided, that since I had a backup (two backup drives from a couple of weeks prior to this failure) I would see if I could at least access the data. Sure enough, the data seemed to be intact but that still presented a number of technical issues involving all of the programs acquired and installed on the old computer over the years. While there are options available to transfer programs from one computer to another, the assumption is that both computers are working in the first place. With a Windows XP operating system specifically tied to a single computer, or an exact duplicate computer, with all the same drivers and hardware, OR a computer that is running a Windows XP, pre-registered operating system, it is nearly impossible to simply remove one hard drive from an old computer and install it in another, without formating it, and expect it to boot. Mother boards are drastically different from one manufacturer to another, and even same style mother boards may have different hardware revisions along with different versions of the Bios which might have to be Flash upgraded in order for a computer to boot.
So, here I sat with a bunch of hard drives in my hands with good data on them and even a good Windows XP operating system, and I still could not get from point "A" to point "B". Time to bite the bullet. I placed the new, almost 400 GB Seagate hard drive as the secondary drive "D". At this point I decided to load the Windows XP Professional operating system again. However, this was not without complications. The Windows XP Professional operating system that I had purchased sometime in the past was an upgrade version from Microsoft Windows 2000 Professional. I had to first format the hard drive. I decided that it was time to go to NTFS file system formating. All the new computers are formated with NTFS formating. When I proceeded to install the operating system on to the new hard drive (after formating), it said something to the effect, Windows had detected another use of this Windows XP operating system software in the first place. I thought, OH Man, what am I going to do now?! At this point, I was able to get the software to proceed on through that install area (not sure how) and finish loading the system.
When I rebooted, I had an unanticipated situation. I ended up with a dual boot system. One was XP Professional, and the other was System 2000 Pro. I thought, that is kind-of interesting, I'll just swap hard drives between Drive C and Drive D and hopefully the new software will boot on Windows XP. The computer ended up telling me it could not find a certain Boot file. I figured, I could copy the boot.ini file from the one drive to the other, but it still was missing the Ntldr portion that looks at the boot.ini file when booting. So, I left the new drive in as the Master. Using the Windows install CD as the boot disk, I proceeded through the installation. The Microsoft install program needed to see an approved version of a Windows operating system. The software prompt was to place the original CD copy of the Windows 2000 Professional install disk at this time. Once that was completed, and the XP install program saw that it was acceptable, the installer prompt said to place the XP software disk back in. Then it was off to the races, with the rest of the system loading. There were a couple of points along the way to input information at prompts.
Once the software was installed, I now had three sets of operating systems to choose from on the boot menu. This was not actually three, but two, because the XP installer updated the boot.ini file with a third line of code. I had to edit the boot.ini file. If you need to edit the boot.ini file, do a search on Google for edit boot.ini for Windows XP or Windows 2000 for tutorials on this procedure.
Now, once the installation of the software was complete, the message was Windows XP was saying that I only had 30 days left before software registration. But, before I could get online, I had to still load hardware drivers using the motherboard installer disk. Fortunately I had this disk available, though it took awhile to remember which version motherboard drivers I needed to install. With that installed, I now had an Ethernet driver, that allowed me to access the Internet and start a round of Microsoft Updates that still has not ended. I figured I would write this column while proceeding with the various updates.
With some of the critical Microsoft Updates downloaded and installed, I needed to get some important programs from Google that I have come to depend on quite a bit. Google has a program pack that includes various softwares, from Picasa their photo processing and photo cataloging software to downloading of Firefox with the Google Toolbar, plus some other programs such as Google Earth, Google Desktop, Google Talk, Skype and a new one that is really cool, Google Photos Screensaver.
Picasa was critical to finding all of my pictures from both the first disk, and the new hard drive. It was helpful to track down some of the files that I needed to get onto the new C Drive.
During this time of updating the computer, and powering down, I figured I would place another 500 KB memory board in the last open slot on this Abit Motherboard. I pulled the memory board out of the old computer and placed it in the new. I'll use the extra 500 K memory board from this old computer into another spare, which will give the spare PC a total of 1 GB of memory. I now had 1.5 Gigabytes worth of memory in the new PC. That should help when having dozens of programs all open at the same time.
Now it really is back to the drawing board to load all the various programs that I have come depend on over the years. I suspected for sometime, the day would come, when I would have to do this, and was not looking forward to it. I wish there was an easier way of doing it when a catastrophic computer failure like this occurs. I guess the best thing is to at least have backups, so the data can be saved.
So, begins and ends the circle of life in a computer's life.
Jim Warholic Internet marketing specialist.
Remember, don't forget what you were doing.Labels: Computers, PC
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posted by Jim Warholic @ 12:56 AM   |
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| Saturday, June 23, 2007 |
| Getting That Old PC Up And Running |
My son plopped his old PC in the den. "Doesn't work anymore Dad," was what he said to me.
Surely I would not have to load the entire system software. No such luck today. After pulling the PC case open, I found two fans not working. Decided to blow out the case. One big dust storm ensued from the small compressor in the garage. Now I could see the fans. One fan that was not turning was on the mother board and the other was on the video card. Well, I surely can get those working. But, I only got half way there. Pulling the little sticky off the back of the fan, I was able to place a drop of tri-flow, the super lube with teflon on the rotating shaft. Turned the fan by hand and got the one on the mother board running. The other fan on the NVIDIA video card was a little more problematic. I suspect this fan was not turning for quite some time because the fan blades were cracked.
Next Step, Micro Surgery
Not wanting to give up, I decided it was time to do some micro surgery on this fan. After pulling it apart to the point that I had the fan and circular magnet in one hand and the small motor windings in the other, it was time to get out the glue. I thought, I'll just glue the cracked pieces of the fan blade assembly back onto the circular magnetic. We'll see if that holds. The PC should run without the video card fan running, since it wasn't turning in the first place. In the meantime, the rest of the story.
Back To The Computer
Decided to wipe out the old operating system on the hard drive and start with a fresh install. Found the Windows 2000 install disk for that PC and loaded it in no problem. But, I forgot what happened to the mother board installation disk with all the drivers, especially the one that allows the computer to go online through the Ethernet port. I decided to go online on another PC and search for the Abit NF7 mother board. Well, this proved troublesome in that there were too many choices and nothing seemed to match up. Also, I read that "this product is discontinued," or something like that. Gave it my best shot and downloaded a driver. Burned a CD on my PC. Loaded it in the other one. Clicked the install, and nothing. So much for that one.
It's got to be around here someplace. Where the heck is that mother board install disk. After searching the entire office, I finally found it in the box, underneath the other box, underneath whatever that other thing was.
Plopped the installation CD disk in, clicked the load drivers menu, and walla (is that the word) it was loaded. Now I had an Internet connection. Time for the dozens of Windows updates to download. No, OH no, I need Internet Explore 6.0. Internet Explore 5.0 just will not do for the Windows update to work. After searching Microsoft website with a monitor that is 600 resolution, which is much too small to do anything on, I finally found the download IE 6.0. Restart after restart, update after update, it seems to never end. Still don't have those right video drivers yet for the NVIDIA card, which is several years old, which is probably like 40 man years old. More work, let me go hit the Windows update again. Another update that must be installed as a single download, and then restart again. My OH my will it never end!
Thanks to high speed Internet, Comcast is getting a workout today from my location. Good thing my son didn't have anything important on that hard drive. Yep, I could have done a backup, but seriously folks, if you have any teenagers that have downloaded garbage, would you want to keep it? Get rid of that old stuff.
But, the son had long ago turned over to a new laptop PC from Dell (at least two months ago anyways). He knew what he wanted, a powerful laptop. After saving his money from a recent job, he ordered the PC directly from Dell himself. Man, these kids are getting smart.
Now, there are hardware driver updates to be had from Microsoft. Click more to download them and hit the Restart Now.
"Hey Dad, wants up with my computer?" asked my son.
"Let me tell you the story," I said...
Now it's back to the computer once more. It looks like I'll have to search online for that video driver for the NVIDIA card. But before that, let's see what else Microsoft has for recommended software downloads. OH yeah, Windows Media Player. Now a whole round of new security updates for the Windows Media Player. Why didn't Microsoft include those security updates with the Windows Media Player download in the first place? Who knows.
Break time, need some fuel for the body.
Back again, and ready to go. Two more drivers required so I don't see those pesky yellow flags in the hardware profile. Well, I found a trusted source for the NVIDIA graphics driver directly from the NVIDIA website. I just had to determine which driver I needed. I remember what I forgot. I forgot to look at the information as it was loading at the bios level. That's right, I have an FX 5200 card. Good, the website has the driver for the Windows 2000 / XP.
Now when I look at my hardware profile it shows only one pesky yellow flag. Now I remember, that's the add on Sound Blaster card. What was the model number? You mean I have to turn the computer off again? OK, let's take a look at the card. Sound Blaster Model SB0220 with Live 5.1 Digital sound. Time to do a Google Search online. But wait, before I do that, I need my favorite browser.
Download Firefox now. Set this as my default browser. Now I feel more comfortable driving around on the Internet. Time to search Google for that Sound Blaster driver. OK, found a place online. Not sure if it is a trusted site though. Man, the download site is making me look at a dozen ads before I can even begin to download the driver.
STOP RED FLAG TIME
I need an antivirus program. Comcast fortunately provides McAfee antivirus software for free to their customers. Need to load that on this computer before I do anything else.
I think I'll also download the McAfee SiteAdvisor. At least McAfee SiteAdvisor gives me an indication if I can trust the site before I download anything.
Back to the Internet for more searching and acquisitions. But before I do, let me check that pesky fan again. Stuck it in, but not a single turn. Down for the count. I guess I'll see how that video card does without the fan for the moment. Oh yeah, I forgot what I was doing. Now that I got that issue placed on the back burner, it's time to get back online. Research into the Sound Blaster Model SB0220 reveled some interesting information in the online forums. Apparently Creative Labs no longer supports this product. Of course I lost the install CD for this little puppy. After trying several of the download drivers, and seeing the repeated message, no Sound Blaster Card found, I think I'll just revert back to the sound on the motherboard. Hey, wait a minute, I just found the driver install disk. I think I'll uploaded it for everyone else. Download the zip file from the following link for the Sound Blaster Live 5.1 Model SB0220 Drivers. Drivers are for Windows XP, Windows 2000, Windows ME, and Windows 98.
Now for the rundown. Since I did not do a complete reformat of the hard drive, I found many of those miscellaneous files that my son had downloaded. The McAfee virus checking software is having a field day with all these old files. We'll see if we have to go back to square one, and do a complete reformat. I hope not, but if I do, at least I have this detailed analysis to fall back on.
So much for my son's insistence that there were no viruses on the computer. 63 items detected and 3 quarantined so far, and still counting. Good night for now. If I have any other news on this PC, I'll be sure to let the world know. Good luck on your computer project. Don't forget what you were doing.
Jim Warholic the Internet marketing specialist.
For a continuation of this story visit the Circle of Life in a Computer's Life.Labels: Computers, PC
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| posted by Jim Warholic @ 11:01 PM |
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