My windows box is coughing up blood
 

Sorry if I haven't gotten back to some folks... my windows box decided to start its death march.

It started a few days ago when suddenly it would scandisk every reboot. No matter that it had been shut down normally.

Yesterday night I installed Mozilla 1.1 and suddenly the system quit communicating via TCP/IP with the outside world. The system can talk netbios to other MS machines on the network. The system can ping its own network address and localhost. It can't ping other systems, and other systems can't ping it.

Deinstalling and reinstalling the protocol does nothing. All the properties are correct. Deinstalling Mozilla does nothing. I really doubt that it's Mozilla that created the problem; what could it have done? I think it exposed a problem of some sort, but where to go at this point?

This beast has been a win98 upgraded to WinME (sorry), and had remained such for the purposes of gaming, but I think I may have to bite the bullet here and install Win2K fresh on a fresh disk and move stuff over. I remain somewhat ignorant of Win issues, do you think I'll be able to run most of my old applications if I do this?

Re: My windows box is coughing up blood
 

Yes, a ME-2k upgrade will keep most of your software running as well as it ever will be, with some caveats: make sure you simply insert the 2k CD, and it'll suggest an upgrade, holding your hand through the process. There may be driver issues, write down your exact hardware specs prior to upgrading. (exact make of your graphics, sound, and network cards at the very least, ideally also any other non-vanilla hardware, such as SCSI controllers).

Run the upgrade from the Win2k CD. Make sure your network is working. Go to Device Manager, get the Properties of unknown hardware/stuff with question marks next to it, and choose to install new drivers from Windows Update. (which is the easiest way, believe it or not). Install any other hardware drivers, turn off all the flashy transition effects etc., and you'll have a useable system.

Now the caveats: some programs, especially those that rely on hardware to work, may not work like they should. Advanced Soundblaster Live settings (EAX/surround) don't always work 100% on 2k, compared to 98, the same applies for some other high-end sound cards. Similarly, there is some hardware that isn't fully supported, e.g. some scanners. Otherwise, all your programs ought to continue working.

One last thing to try before upgrading or reinstalling, is to remove all your network settings in ME, reboot, and then run the ICW (Internet Connection Wizard). which ought to be somewhere in C:Progra~1/ICW/ . It's the 'internet access for dummies' program, and sometimes manages to straighten out settings that just don't want to be reset.

Good luck.

X.

What are "most of your old applications"?

Is WinXP an option? It seems to have a better "compatibility mode", which allows you to run shortcuts in a not-very-well-defined "emulation layer" that more closely resembles a Win9x machine. YMMV.

The same 'emulation layer' exists in Win2k. I strongly recommend against WinXP, which is merely 2k with some interface candy and sugar-coated shackles. (it also performs more poorly, for a variety of reasons)

X.

Stuff I run includes Eudora, Moz, Photoshop, telnet/ftp clients, vim (always), xnews, realplayer, winamp, cdex, Office, streets and Trips.

Then there are the games, which range from full-blown DirectX etc. to character-oriented simulations to nethack to freecell.

I don't have a DVD player or anything like that. The hardware is pretty much recent, but for instance, would win2k pick up on my latest nvidia drivers?

Check http://www.nvidia.com to find out :)

Win2k comes with 'standard' nvidia drivers (from late 1999), which will power your card to any resolution/colour depth it can do, without any problems. You can get new 'approved' drivers from Windows Update, which will be the latest nvidia drivers that were checked for problems by MS. Or you can download nvidia's latest own drivers from nvidia.com, they have them for Win2k, and they work just fine. Alternatively, your card manufacturer may have their own brand of those drivers, which are nvidia's reference driver with bits thrown in by the card maker to tweak specific aspects of their own cards. Check the manufacturer's website for details. In any case, your card will be supported just fine. I don't think your already installed drivers will be seamlessly transferred over from ME to 2k.

Hardware support for 2k is perfectly acceptable, it's 'odd and unusual' things that may not work. All of the software you mentioned should work without any hassle and without reinstalling the program.

X.

PS: As an example, going to windowsupdate right now, 'Driver Updates' finds one object, "Nvidia Display Driver Version 2.9.4.2
Download size: 4.8 MB, < 1 minute"

OK! Now I've upgraded to Win2K and I have the same thing happening: I can get to other systems on the Windows network, but can't do anything TCP/IP whatsoever. Oddly enough, now ping dies locally but other systems can ping this one, and traceroute indicates that it's reaching the right system by name.

Of course, I can't run a Windows Update because IE insists that it's offline.

Fine, I'm uninstalling the protocol. Reboot. And reinstalling it. No change. Reboot. No change.

Dammit!

Back on the air. I had a spare network card lying around, so I installed that and its drivers, and that did the trick. It's hard to say what the real problem was, but I'm glad I sometimes buy extra parts for spares.

No sooner had I said that than my ISP hit a rough patch in routing and the whole system was off the air. What luck this week!

Regarding your nVidia card, the great thing about them are their unified drivers. You never worry about what card you have, how much video memory, etc.

Just go to their website and install the latest drivers. And it works (well, usually).

The Real Deal
 

Windows XP comes with the Nvidia drivers.

They don't work on 2K. I had a GeForce2 MX on this 2K box, fresh install of 2K, and it went nuts. I always put the Detonator drivers on any box with an Nvidia card (and I have 2 XP boxes with family and one personal 2K box).

What looks like what happened was that Windows "forgot" the drivers was there. I've seen it happen under 98 and 95. Since TCP/IP gets bound to the card, it goes nuts and takes TCP/IP with it if the driver goes. I reproduced this on NT4 a while back also with a PCMCIA network card (note: NEVER use NT4 with a notebook if you can avoid it! When you remove it, you also remove TCP/IP and the ability to even bind to a local interface!). Going into the registry and screwing around has fixed it for me, and it involves getting the PNP string, searching for it, and deleting all relevant occurences under HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE and the other hives.

DVD-ROM drives do this under Windows too, especially when you install Adaptec software.

Do you have a 3Com card? That's one of the cards that did this. The other was some no-name we had 5 years back, when I ran into this issue under Windows 95. In that case, reinstalling the driver worked.

The other thing I've seen happen is that sometimes NT/2K's routing tables get completely messed up. I've reproduced this under 2K and NT. What it'll do is bind the default route to the wrong interface. Pretty wacky. It does that with multiple interfaces, mostly. However, you can mess with those without rebooting :). route -p under Windows is your friend sometimes, since Windows stores routing info with the drivers in the registry, apparently. No text files for that, that I saw.

If you're multihomed, especially, you'll need to bind the routes to your primary DNS servers to the internal interface. Especially if you block traffic on the external interface! This is because any name resolutions on the external interface get borked trying to get them on the secondary interface. NT4 and 2K fall victim to this one.

The best thing to do, regardless, is get 2K on there. Upgrades have "issues" with a lot of DLLs that applications put in for Windows 9x that don't work right under 2K. XP fixes this pretty well, since it's got a better 9x emulation layer. However, 2K has a real TCP/IP stack, which 9x/me does not.

Mitch

I've had older programs that worked better under XP's emulation layer than Win2K's. But it doesn't look like UT is running anything particularly troublesome.

XP Emulation Layer
 

Windows XP's emulation layer can do 95, 98, NT4, and 2000.

I've used it to run Visio 2002, which actually has issues with 2000, flawlessly in XP Pro.

2000 has a few DLL issues, and Service Pack 3 fixes the emulation layer for a few apps, namely Office 97 (which works flawlessly in XP). It does run faster and better than 2000's, which needed 3 patches to work right. It's also much better at running Win 9x apps than 2000 is.

Mitch

Stuff is coming around. Almost everything is better with Win2K, but for some reason Unreal Tournament is sluggish and weird. I have a GF4 Ti4200 so this is unacceptable. I put on the latest Detonators, no effect. I have yet to try any other 3d games.

Tony, have had same issue
 

I had the same issue with 2K and a Nvidia card here when I got the machine running 2K for some reason. I never checked for a patch. Does one exist?

Mitch

Tony, did you upgrade DirectX to the latest? Also, when you say you upgraded to Win2K, did you do a fresh install like you mentioned and then move stuff over/reinstall, or did you just upgrade?

For my money, I'd never upgrade a Windows OS. Fresh install is the only way to go. I'd just never really be comfortable with whatever crap it left laying around, and I'd never be sure that something isn't set like it should be because of something I had installed on a prior OS.

Of course, I'm prolly more anal about this than most people.

I "just upgraded". I know this is likely to cause more problems, but I was trying to solve problems at the time, and at least it has solved my other woes.

I didn't do anything to DirectX because... I should think I've got the latest already? Practically every DirectX game reinstalls it, eh?

There isn't a UT patch but this game is so old that I'm considering just dropping it from my routine and waiting for UT2003, the demo for which is due out "any day now".

I have not yet installed SP3. I guess I should do that.

DirectX - not 2K or XP
 

DirectX has to be installed apart from games.

I am running 8.1 now. However, you SHOULD run SP3. Running Windows 2000 without a service pack is suicide.

Mitch

My wife's Windows 2000 machine has this weird problem where it just takes forever to load certain programs. I don't understand what it could be. It's like, when you try to load IE or Mozilla for the first time, the computer gets so slow while it's loading the program that you can't do anything else. It takes longer to load the program than it should. Then, it goes back to normal speed again. And if you close the program and re-load it, it loads it at normal speed.

Anyone have any idea what this might be? The stats are: Duron 1000mhz, 256mb RAM, ECS K7S5A motherboard, SP3. So, it should be fast. Programs should just pop right up. Instead they practically lock up the machine the first time you try to load them.

Your hard drive is having trouble. It's probably set to spin down way too frequently and so it spins up when it's got to read a program from the disk (load it the first time). This takes a good long time. After that, the program's in memory so it pops right up. I'd check your energy saver settings and see when the hard drive is set to spin down. Set it to "never", reboot and see if you still have the same problem.

Anyway, I'm confident it has to do with reading the program off the hard disk and into memory. I gar-on-tee it!

and since Windows has a System Cache....
 

Windows does reserve a good chunk of RAM for System Cache, where it puts DLLs when they are frequently used.

So therefore, check your hard drive controller drivers, and get the newest ones. Make sure the hard drive is in DMA mode, since some drivers, especially Microsoft's default for Windows 2000, will chuck your HDs into PIO mode.

The reason it loads faster the second time is because Windows 2000 is caching most of the critical DLLs. You are loading less data, so it takes less time.

Mitch

I think you're right that it must be the hard drive.

I checked the energy saver setting and that wasn't it. I suspect the hard drive might not be in DMA mode, although Windows says that it is. I'm going to try looking into that some more when I have time. Perhaps i'll even download a benchmarking program.

Do you have to have a special hard drive cable to get Ultra DMA mode?

DMA Mode
 

It's a combination of an 80-conductor cable and the needed drivers.

I'd first look for the drivers :)

Mitch

What's an 80-conductor cable?

It's a 40-conductor cable with balanced shelding provided by the other 40 conductors. Has better noise immunity and reactve characteristics at high speeds. See http://www.pcguide.com/ref/hdd/if/id...Cable80-c.html

otherwise refered to as EIDE cables or ATA-66/100/133?

You can tell them apart from the older cables because the connector that connects to the motherboard is blue, the one that connects to the master drive is black, and the one that connects to the slave drive is grey.

If you have a hard drive that's been made in the past 3 or 4 years, you need one of those cables.

Don't *need* but its a good idea to have. Worth noting that if you have a CD-ROM on the same cable/bus its going to have the same speed regardless.

OK! I've worked on the box a bit more, still have some weirdness though.

Again, I have a GF 4 ti4200 video card from Abit. I found that when I install Nvidia's drivers, version 30.82, performance in 3d gaming goes completely to shit, like 1 frame per second. When I install a version 29.42, available on Abit's site, performance is excellent at 1600x1200x32 in Ghost Recon and still poor in Unreal Tourney at 1024x768x16.

Do you have the v436 patch for Unreal Tournament?

Also, get Detonator 40. They're supposed to be better.

And make sure it's set to the appropriate hardware renderer and not "software".

Aw yeeeahh boiiiieee - that did it man, the Detonator 40s now earn me 70 fps in UT at 1024x768x32. Which I still thought would be higher, but no matter, it's happenin now.

Check out the multiple desktops in nView and tell me how it is. I'll be down for a few hours tonight as I wipe my 60 gig drive of the filth that is Red Hat 7.2 and install Windows XP.

Spoke too soon. Ghost Recon still bites it. I'm thinking maybe it's an application problem this time. There's talk of work on it from the developers. The 44 Megs of patch (!) I downloaded did NOT fix the problem yet...

w0rd! So I installed XP, and everything's working great EXCEPT sound, which I can't tolerate. I need sound for Q3, and I need Q3 on this computer because until I get the gaming box done, I need to play here.

So my question is this - what could be wrong? Yes, I've been through the troubleshooter. Everything there is fine. I've updated the driver via Microsoft's driver update, the speakers are plugged in, the SB Live! is set as the default device, all that shit. Sounds look like they're playing, I just can't hear anything. No, nothing is muted.

What's up?

This is a contest to see whose system will fail in which different quirky unpredictable ways.

Beats me, Dave. If it were Linux I could probably fix it. :]

Gah! Latest det are ugly! Go one version back, far safer.