Well last nite I must have been more asleep than I thought as I used the wrong command switch to run chkdsk and things got all ed up on my C drive.

No taskbar, start button, sound, IE won't open, event viewer won't allow me to view, . All kinds of fun shit.

So I'll first be trying the Dell resource CD which has all drivers an utils on it, to see if that works. Worse case scenario I'll have to re-install the OS, which is something I'd been wanting to do anyhows. It's been like 5 years since I got this box and it'll do me good to get a nice fresh slate.

In the process of saving files now and then I'll start the repair\re-install process.

Wish me luck!!

Yep, sounds like a fresh install is needed anyway, lol. Good luck!

Back ups all done, re-installing Windows XP Pro as we speak type....got my

Will update as I go along.

Seems the disk has ignore the Vista drive and I'll only reformat the C drive, something Steven says is a lucky break as usually the whole drive gets wiped out.

Saves me some time.

Not sure what you mean. When you install, you should have an option to choose which partition to install on, be it Vista, etc...

According to Steven this is not always the case.

But Windows is installed and I just installed the firewall and have an odd looking blueish(but not Windows bluescreen blue) window, but it does not cover the whole screen, only partially, and it has what looks like a 'seem' running down the middle of it.

Almost time for dinner, will investigate after.

Sounds like something's definitely haywire. Used the wrong switches? Let me guess, you tried to speed up chkdsk ? lol. I have seen a few get corrupted from using switches for chkdsk.
As far as having the problems you do, I would think you are going to have to format your drive if this doesn't work out or you have a bad drive or something is crossed bad.

Was XP on C:? Vista on D:? One reason it may not bring up Vista, is because you can't downgrade so it may not even look at it. The last time I went to reinstall both on the college computers though, it showed Vista C: 30000 mb, blah blah and XP D: 30000 yadda yadda.. what OS's are on there, just XP and Vista?

Just for kicks a very rare occurrence "Personally saw once in 11 years" would be installing over an OS and having them merge. This happened to my son's pc, he had windows xp and ME together, it was just friggin strange. He had My Documents, etc... for both OS's. It ran, ran like sh*t but it ran. I took the liberty to see if 9X games would install but they wouldn't, seems NTFS took over. I brought into the local college so people could see it, and everyone got a laugh but mainly freaked out.

Nah, none of that, was the monitor I had. It's an 20" Acer, swapped to the old 18" Dell and it worked.

Configuring Newtwork now....and BBQing steak.....

good to hear I get those damn coincidences all the time where something happens to go at the same time I'm doing something else, leaves me.. Then it's like, no sh*t ! Yep, happens to me more than I'd like.

Um, got any more of that steak??

Cheers,

Paul

Just got done with another PC myself. She hasn't updated since 2005. Her clock\date was set at DEC 2002 So yah, couldn't update Windows that way. Had 375 spyware applications, 3 viruses, and a few other goodies. Still had the OLD Comodo firewall, etc... 786 MB of temp files I blew the dust off the apps, uninstalled them, put all new stuff on, cleaned, defragged, all is good. Google toolbar gave me the hardest of all , I hate that thing! I remember a couple of years back on Cnet, a guy had a meeting, owned something in Vegas, couldn't access the internet from laptop, I found his wife installed Google toolbar, told him to take it off, all was well. Once again, I hate Google Toolbar

Paul

OK, got this sucker online, updating and installing programs now.

Took a bit to find drivers for ethernet controller, but it's done!

Should be fully operational some time tomorrow I'm sure. I hope.

Another week of Windows updates, you'll be good to go..

Week if I'm lucky.

Already got avast!, Symantec firewall installed and IESpell as well as Great News reader.

LOL. I am just doing some much needed cleaning. Backing up about 40 gigs of stuff. I have about 11 years worth of anything deemed worth keeping. It's not a lot to some but I don't have movie files, not many music files, games, etc... just docs, pics, and more freeware than your average bear. Finally making one more solid backup and clearing it off my drives. So the new 20 gigs of clutter can take it's place...

OK, got the box up and running, pretty much got everything installed too.

Need to get Expression Web installed and Map Point (couldn't find the damn disk MS sent me)

And for some reason my sound disappeared. I had it, then it was gone then I updated some Creative drivers and it's gone again.

We've got Jr's soccer game this morning, then he'll either go to a pals house or they'll come here, either way that'll be when I begin looking for that problem.

It just occurred to me that maybe the Power DVD software buggered something up, pretty sure that's all I installed after I had the sound.

Did you go into device manager and have a peek?

Funny thing, I was about to reply to this and noticed in Audio and sounds that things were indeed now appearing as there. Previously it showed no audio mixer found.

So rebooted expecting to hear something...nada.

Reinstalled from orig disc...still no sound. Then just noticed a problem with one of the SoundBalster drivers. No option to roll back, so I'm 'repairing' the install as we speak.

But on the positive side I found my MapPoint disk, I'm pretty sure I just overlooked cuz it was in the pile I had with all my other stuff.

Well !

I do the 'repair' and at the end I get dialog box saying 'Don't forget to reboot for the changes to take effect'. I reboot, hear the Windows exit music and think

And then it finally reboots(taking like 7 minutes, another issue) and no music!!

When I get home tonite, I'm gonna do a complete uninstall of the SoundBlaster\Creative stuff and be sure there are no remnants laying around reboot and then reinstall everything.

Maybe that'll work.

yer

Well, just from the beginning of this install, it sounded like there was more going on , hopefully your drive isn't bad.

Another thing, I don't know how you set everything up, nor if this will help, but after a fresh install, I do all windows updates first and foremost, even using XP firewall. After that, I install my Anti-virus, Firewall, Anti-spyware, Mbam, etc... then I install whatever.. even sound drivers. Another thing, it's too bad you can't use Realtek drivers, creative wouldn't know their a$$ from a marshmallow.

But anyhow, I have never had a failed install this way but I understand everyone has their own methods. Maybe it will help, maybe not, ,lol. If my sound worked from the Windows updates drivers, I used to simply leave it be and not mess with it for the reasons you mentioned. Unless it was other than creative of course,lol.



Paul

At this point my only issue is the long start up period. I have Proc Explorer with the 'Time Start' column enabled. And from the time that Windows NT logon begins, it's been at least 6-8 minutes until I can access icons ans stuff on desktop. Wallpaper loads quickly, but no icons, mouse works too but cannot do anything with it besides move it around.

I'll be investigating this more tonite.

Now, the sound. I uninstalled the Creative\SoundBalster stuff using their 'uninstall' option....and I now have sound, albeit from only 2 speakers, not the 5.1 surround sound w\sub.

So, I'm going to reinstall the software to see what happens. Also gonna track the install as well.

Another 'issue' if you will is that for some reason, I can't get the welcome screen to choose a user or the XP Pro secure log in to both disappear. But I have it set up on the other machine. Need to look at settings, thus far tho can't find anywhere that it says you can, but obviously there is a tweak, cuz the other box is so.

If you want users, create an admin account if you want admin, create a user account, etc.. this will give you an option. The default admin won't. If I want this on mine, I simply create a new admin account\user account.

Another thing, the slow startup, beginning to sound like bad ram\hardware of some sort. Do a memtest, see what it says Or if you want, pull one stick at a time, change slots. If not, I am leaning toward a lagging drive.

Cheers,

Paul

Since there is no "edit" button in this thread, I clearly screwed up my reply..

What I mean is, if you want user accounts at login option, you will likely have to create one. If you want to enable the welcome screen go into user account options.

Paul

I just want to log directly into my account, are you saying I have to another account?

When I log into safe mode I get an 'Admin' acct, and mine and I recall this being so with XP Home too. This is something I'll have to also look into.

No,in that case you don't have to create an account. I thought you wanted the user account login screen. If you want to log directly into windows as I do automatically, no prompt, make sure use the welcome screen is checked. Some say they had to check fast user switching as well, I have it checked but never made a difference.

So control panel\user accounts\change the way users log on or off\check weclome screen.

Cheers,

Paul

My fresh installs are similar.

Tho I'll usually install fw and a-v before hitting WU, turning off as many processes as I can. Then it's onto whatever I'll be using on the box or if it's for someone else whatever preferences they want.

Yeah, it depends and I forgot to mention, I am behind a router which is why I don't jump at a software firewall immediately. Not that a router is absolute but enough until I get my updates. If I had no router, then yep, firewall first as XP firewall "in my opinion" is next to useless, better than nothing to start but nothing solid. I have had some issues with having the AV installed right away before updates so I typically wait but for others' machines I always put it on first.

Paul

Well it appears the sound problem is fixed.

Even tho, with DM still showing a problem with that driver, I'm not gonna mess with it. I just disabled it and we'll see. Just played some Basia on the thing and all speakers + sub are operational. I don't often play CDs or DVDs anyhows.

I was going top install the Roxio Easy CD creator, but the Creative software has a ripper in it too, so I'll try that this weekend. No sense havin' both if I don't really need it.

Also re-installed the Cyberlink PowerDVD software. Gonna run The Bourne Ultimatum thru it for a bit to verify it works.

Now all that's left is the Expression Web and MapPoint.

On second thought, I'm not 100% sure the rear speakers are working properly.

but I can't turn up volume, Jr's asleep, will test in morning.

Well if you don't mind signing up for Ashampoo , you get a full free version of Burning studio. I keep using the free versions which are just versions prior to the latest which is pay for. Either way,it rips, etc...

Cheers,

Paul

Well the sound issue is fixed for sure.

I had changed my Windows start up sound to the THX .wav and could very well hear all 4 speakers + sub were just fine.

But now I have another problem.

Last nite after looking into the lag problem and viewing things in ProcExplor, I saw one svchost suckin up CPUs, it was DNS client, so I disable it. No problems, and it was a good while before I'd gone to sleep and surfing was good.

This morning, when I treid to run the Bourne movie, Power DVD hung on me and I had to hard boot the box.

Rebooted very quickly, back to operational desktop in like 2 mins, maybe less.

Except no Net. Nuttin. Nada. Zip.

I'm thinking "Ok, maybe DNS thingy needed to be enabled". I enable it. Still nuttin.

I go to Net connections, and I see there are now two extra connections!

1394 Connection 2-bridged and a Network Bridge\MAC bridge minipoort.

How the did those get there??

And my LAN connection now says 'bridged'.

Working on this with Blender.

Well after consulting with Tammy\Blender I wound up deleting those two extra connections and immediately my connection returned.

I downloaded Port Explorer to make sure there were no back doors running anywhere and all looks good. Except for my throbbing neck, which I'm sure is from this damn PC.

I can't imagine how the those two connections appeared, anyone wanna make a suggestion? Any ideas?