OMG! my one and only puter is coming unglued

[Q]

The video card is a SIS (4MB PCI) and it is only about 8 months old.

The mouse is USB wonder what happened to his serial port poker? I know he had one. I looked at mouses at Walmart today. The cheapest one was $12.00. no wheel, what a rip....I might just have to go over to kirks and swipe the IntelliMOOSE for the evening.

I switched monitors and there was no difference, damnit. There is a shitload of extra monitors in the warehouse at the shop. Figures.

 

[Huge]

There are USB -> ps/2 connectors you could probably find at radio shack if you want. Do you have another machine to stick the vid card in to see if that is the cause?

 

[Shadowfax]

Just a wild idea:

Pull out the video card, reboot.
Plug the video card back in and boot again.


That once solved a dot-problem on a computer I had to repair. Very strange, and I'm not sure at all if it'll work for you, but computers can be very strange sometimes


If it isn't the videocard, I would certainly format the HD and do a clean install of windows. It might cost you some time, but at least its better than your current situation

 

[Q]

I just thought of something. Yesterday when I was having the most problems. When I used ctrl+alt+del twice to reboot cuz I had all the wacky numbers and letters and upside down question marks instead of a desktop and then I finally got so aggrivated I shut the power down at the power button. It booted right to windows (twice) without going into scandisk. It has to be a windows problem. The vid card couldn't make it do that.

 

[fury]

Step 1: Insert Linux CD...

 

[Q]

I've been giving that some serious thought.

I'm going to be putting xp on the 40 GB HDD tomorrow. Do you feel like explaining how to partition the drive so I can put Linux on there too? and which flavor of Linux do I want?

 

[s4]

I would not put Linux and XP on the same drive. Just my opinion.

 

[Q]

Ok

What will happen? Will they fight?

What if I get a smaller HDD and put Linux on that?

 

[s4]

They will probably be okay on the same drive, but you will have to use some kind of partitioning program to get them installed. Also, the more memory you have concerning XP, the better. It uses memory like it's going out of style.

My concern with putting multiple os's on the same drive is that unless you have a lot of memory, it could wear the drive out faster than normal. I had to replace a Maxtor drive after I put Windows 98 & Linux on the same drive. I began getting bad clusters after extensive drive thrashing due to a lack of memory. If you don't have physical memory that the os requires, it will create virual memory using your hard drive space as memory. The result is that the drive will wear out faster due to excessive drive activity.

 

[fury]

Drive activity like that shouldn't wear out a drive any faster than having to boot up the damn OS every 5 hours because its system resource management absolutely sucks.

But if you're using it on a somewhat stable OS like XP, or a rock solid OS like Linux, then yes, having more memory (read: 384 to 512 is the sweet spot) is generally nicer to your hard drive.

 

[Q]

That machine has plenty of RAM. The one I'm on now only has 128MB. I could however, put some of the RAM from that machine in this machine and upgrade the other one.

Would it just be simpler to just stick a small HDD in one of the machines dedicated to Linux? Kinda sounds like that might cause the least amount of aggrivation.

 

[fury]

You're probably correct on that one. Managing multiple OS's on the same computer is quite a hassle especially when it's Microsoft vs. Linux