Davros

Oh man, that sucks! Sorry to hear that. Don't get upset though and rush to sell everything and give up on computers. Everyone that fools with hardware has made mistakes and ruined something at one point or another. I fried a Soundblaster card once when I plugged a powered input into the line out jack, like a retard. A friend of mine was building a brand spanking new box with all the best new stuff, and when he switched it on, it smoked and caught fire because he forgot to put the spacers on the motherboard tray. Consider yourself much wiser than before now. I think you should go to pricewatch.com and find yourself a good amd processor/heatsink/fan bundle. Your hard drive and motherboard are probably still ok, but if you want to check it, the only way now is to get your hands on another cpu. Or maybe just take a break for a few weeks to catch up with school, I know this has been a distraction for a while now. Good luck and try not to be discouraged!

Do you have enough free drivespace on the partition where the swapfile resides? Have you defragged lately?

Type services.msc in the Run box and hit Enter. In the Services window on the right, find "Server." Double click it. In the window that opens, click the Start button and wait for it to start. Also in the Startup Type dropdown menu, change it to Automatic.

Shassouneh, I'm sorry if we made you feel stupid. I don't think you are an idiot, and I totally understand your lack of time to deal with your computer troubles. Some of us (speaking for myself, guys) have lots of free time to screw around with this stuff and are used to resolving problems very quickly (hopefully), especially if it's on the job. You have been extraordinarily patient and polite in this forum, and for that I will try to help you, and hopefully others will follow suit. After re-reading much of this thread, and the one from a few months ago, it is evident to me, as it should be to you, that the cause of your problem is lack of adequate cooling. Upgrade your HSF (HeatSink/Fan) and use Arctic Silver thermal paste. You can find dozens of tutorials on the tech sites about this and many other hardware topics as well. I suggest that you use some of the scarce free time you have to read some of these articles from time to time, just to keep up on current hardware and how to keep it running top-notch. Your CPU is probably damaged beyond repair and may never run at full capacity. I suggest you just chalk this one up to experience and run it at 100/100 until the day you can buy new parts. Now, about your start menu problem, try copying the Programs folder from your Shassouneh profile to the All Users profile and see what happens.

Quote: yes....but dao raw is a writing mode (so i understood). Oh yeah, now I remember. I was thinking of CDRWIN where it will tell you if the drive can read subcodes. DosFreak is right, 90% of the time you will want to use the burner to read your disk to an image, then burn the image to a blank.

I just saw this today, and died laughing. If you have about 10 minutes, watch this little quicktime clip of this internet help desk comedian. It's new to me and I wanted to share it, so if it's old news to you, then congratulations. http://homepage.mac.com/deadtroll/

Did you kill it in the Applications tab or the Processes tab of Task Manager?

It's pretty good at recovering from a crash. I'm never forced to reboot, but I have lost icons on a few occasions. It rarely used to crash until I applied some MS hotfixes about a month ago. And it still takes a lot of stress to cause a crash. I couldn't tell you which hotfixes cause trouble, b/c I qchained all of them at once. Probably should've just waited for the service pack instead. But hey, that's part of the role of this computer, for experimentation, and to find out what things to avoid on the important machines!

Check to see what Clone CD reports the capabilities of each drive. Especially if it can do DAO Raw mode.

No it isn't fixed in XP. I lose tray icons when explorer crashes. It's very annoying when this happens, because you can't get your tray icons back unless you restart the application. I'll probably revert back to W2K next time I need to format or something. It's MUCH more stable imho.

I don't mean to sound harsh, but you've been given tons of ideas, and lists of things to try. Some very logical thinking from everyone participating in this thread, but it doesn't seem to me that you've followed any of the advice yet. You just keep rebooting into 100/100 or 133/133 and then coming here to tell us it still doesn't work. What do you think is going to happen? We can't fix your box over the internet! Print this thread out, get offline, and remove stuff from your comp systematically to see which component is bad. You could have done that 5 times over by now! Again, I'm not trying to insult you or anything, just trying to get the message across. Nothing will change unless YOU do something. So go get to it!

First time was at a friends houst in 1987. We were both 15. We had been drinking his moms rum while she was away, and one thing led to another... Actually all we did was spend hours on the bbs trying to download stuff. I remember it took like an hour to get one "digitized" picture (usually p0rn or fighter jets for us then.) Then we would print it out on the dot matrix and pin it to the wall and stare at it in awe! It was horrible.

I'll go see it to kill time while waiting for Spider Man!

In XP, if you are not in a Domain, incoming connections are forced to use the Guest account by default. Also, the Guest account is disabled by default. To change this behavior to the Win2k way of having the same account on each computer: type secpol.msc in the Run box. In the left pane, select "Local Policies"-->"Security Options." In the right pane, find "Network access: Sharing and Security Model for Local Accounts." Double click on it. Change it to Classic.

It's not defaulting to 100/100 when he reboots, but when he resets the CMOS, as he already stated. This is very common, as a safety factor, to default to the lower system bus speed upon a CMOS reset. Consider it analagous to your video drivers defaulting to 60hz refresh rate. Just because the system ran for 6 months does not mean it should still run. If it was a heat problem, or a voltage problem, it can take a bit of time to damage components. It also could have been a power surge or even ESD. You should consider upgrading your cpu HSF and also adding a fan or better heatsink to your chipset. And get a UPS, they're getting cheaper by the week. This won't make your system run properly again, but may prevent trouble in the future after you resolve the current issue. I'm sorry if your friend is scared to help out. Remember that next time he needs help. I don't know where you work, but look around and see if you can "borrow" some parts for a bit. That's worked for me before, but everyone there assumes I always know what I'm doing. But don't risk getting into trouble. You could buy some dirt cheap memory and a Duron (check if your board supports it) and a cheap PSU for diagnostic purposes. Spend some time following the advice in this forum to narrow down your problem as much as you can before spending any money. Don't worry about posting here a lot, spend the time working on the problem. I don't think there is much more to be said in this thread. Perhaps you should print out all these replies for some reference material. Good luck!

Shassouneh, About a year ago I had the same problems from cheap-a$$ generic memory. I had to underclock the system bus from 133mhz to 100mhz to get it to work for more than a few minutes. Buying good memory (Mushkin) fixed my problem. Another thing that comes to mind is possible chipset overheating, but I know you've heard plenty of that. I beleive your problem is hardware malfunction, so I will rule out software and settings problems immediately. Based on that, here are my suggestion for troubleshooting this headache: 1. Install a floppy drive for christ's sake! You will need it for some testing. You can get one for $15 at a pc chop-shop. 2. Establish a baseline. Set your system bus to the unstable 133mhz, start the computer. Do some big winzip operations or something like that to stress the system. Don't run any type of cd software or games or audio. You want to time this so you know how long it takes for your system to crash. 3. Remove ALL expansion cards (not video obviously). Remove ALL drives except the HDD you need to boot with. Remove printer, scanner, etc. Start the computer, let Windows do it's reconfig thing if it has to, then shut down. 4. Start the computer, run the stress test again. If you have no errors after a while, one of the components you removed is bad. You need to add the components one at a time back to the system and repeat this test for each component until you find the one that is bad. If you still get the error with no components added, it's got to be memory, cpu, vcard, power supply, or mobo. 5. Borrow as much as you can from friends. Memory, cpu, video card, power supply, and swap yours out to test it. Memory first (my prime suspect), try each memory slot, one at a time. Then cpu, then vcard, and so on. This is the best method, and will pinpoint the bad component. If you swap all 4 (mem, cpu, vcard, ps) and still have trouble, it must be mobo, or possibly the hard drive. Swap out a spare drive to narrow it down further. If you can't find spare parts, you have to figure this out the hard way, before wasting money buying stuff. 6. Uninstall your video card drivers, then install the Standard VGA drivers. Do the stress tests. If this fixed the problem, it is the VCARD. Try different drivers, or a new VCARD. 7. Download DocMem and use it to test your memory. If you have bad memory, it will tell you. 8. Monitor your ps voltage with some monitoring software. Make sure it's where it should be, and doesn't waver, especially during stress testing. 9. You should be able to narrow it down to your cpu/mobo at this point. Unfortunately, you will have to find spare parts for these to test them out. So do your best with obtaining them! 10. Destroy everything in sight, then got to bed.

18 years. First was a Timex Sinclair 1000. Anybody remeber that p.o.s.? Then Apples up to Commodore 64, a Tandy, then a used 486, then Packard Bell, then built my own for 4 years now. I may have missed one or 2 in there.

Most of the hotfixes (Qxxxxxx) since Win2k use: -u Unattended mode -f Force other programs to close when the computer shuts down -n Do not back up files for uninstall -o Overwrite OEM files without prompting -z Do not restart when installation is complete -q Quiet mode (no user interaction) -l List installed hotfixes Of course we all know how consistent MS is. Try contacting MS tech support about it, they can be very helpful with stuff like this.

Maybe try removing the desktop.ini file in there. Just move it somewhere safe in case you want to put it back, or if it doesn't work.

Maybe use -u -z -q

This has bugged me too, since Windows 95. I don't think MS will ever fix it because then I'll have one less reason to buy the next version!

Double check that USB is enabled in the bios while you're at it. And try new ASPI drivers from Adaptec. BTW, would you happen to have Roxio ECDC installed?

Make sure the user accounts you use on both computers have the same name and password, and make sure both computers are in the same WORKGROUP.

Only the user who encrypts the files or folders can view or change them, as well as the Administrator. If the disk is put into another computer as a slave drive, the files can't be accessed. It is good to encrypt confidential documents and such. You shouldn't encrypt your whole hard drive, just folders with data you wish to protect. It keeps other users from accessing your files. There's more details, but that's the basics.

Win98 doesn't use NTFS, so you can't set permissions for objects. So the only method I can think of is to set up a new hardware profile with the printer disabled in device manager. You will have a choice at bootup of which profile to use. It's not passworded protected either.