I can't believe all these ridiculous figures I'm reading from users in Oz, didn't anybody think of shopping around?
I'm with a smaller I.S.P. for my broadband here in Western Australia and the plans speak for themselves - reasonable monthly fees for realistic traffic levels (given the costs imposed on the I.S.P. by the carriers) - all a bloody sight better than what I'm reading for Telstra and Optus.
Monthly excess can either be charged or a soft cap imposed - but still at higher speeds than dial-up. The other good part of the smaller I.S.P. is you don't get the "customer rep." if you have to phone for tech. support, you get the guys who run the place and can solve the problems without having to R.T.F.M!
Anyone who goes with the big guys down here is a mug - shop around, ask around or just plain Google it, there's plenty of good deals out there to be had.
I recently discovered and changed to UltimateZip (UZ), it would be interesting to see which way they would go if the split occurs. However, only yesterday I had a heap of problems when trying to deal with a spanned disk set from a customer, also generated using UZ.
It refused to detect/acknowledge subsequent disks on one machine, then failed to correctly unpack half the files on another - giving garbled filenames in the errors. Tried the exact same operations with a freshly downloaded copy of WinZip 8.1 - worked perfectly on both machines, so it wasn't the media. Fairly knocked my confidence in UZ, particularly since I had recommended it to the user and I know UZ was used to generate the set.
I'm going to try some more specific tests but this doesn't bode well so far.
"immediately after the completion of the Windows install - before the third party products were installed"
Main Entry: before Pronunciation: bi-'fOr, -'for Function: adverb or adjective Etymology: Middle English, adverb & preposition, from Old English beforan, from be- + foran before, from fore Date: before 12th century 1 : in advance : AHEAD 2 : at an earlier time : PREVIOUSLY
You're right about the hardware, I've had no crashes or reboots of any kind that I'm aware of, perhaps it is the media.
I had considered that briefly but since I got no errors during the installs, nothing else suggested corruption either so I discounted it. I think I'll ask the dealer for a new disk for the next build, if only to discount that possibility.
Ironically, Windows did sort-of warn me not to install the updates! It downloaded them ok but then the update process would freeze, I eventually found that I again had to use safe mode to get them to install - I should have taken the hint and said bugger it.
Oh well. If (when) I do rebuild again, I'm going to do the selective install I originally did (if I can remember the exact options) and see if I can reproduce the IIS console problem or any other again. If so, I'll post the details, see if anyone else can get it... if they happen to want to do a rebuild or two, that is.
"Don't try to teach your mother to suck eggs" is the phrase that springs to mind.
You think I haven't explored the third party issue? If you read what I wrote carefully you'll see that I said that a lot of the problems which occured did so immediately after the completion of the Windows install - before the third party products were installed.
Only in the two most recent cases were third party products installed. In addition, as I later found,it has been reported that one of the XP updates (check ms forums for info) is known to cause performance errors. However, since System Restore had been disabled due to disk space issues (on a 60Gb disk!), I had to manually back out the updates in the right order and that also does not work correctly. Effectively: Removing update A - "Updates X,Y,Z depend on update A, do you wish to remove A?" - answering no still went ahead with the uninstall.
Ok. Four rebuilds in the first ten days. One about a month after, still had some minor twitches but I could live with those... until now!
BTW This is my dev. workstation on which I earn much of my living, I have a total of six games on the p.c. - the five non-internet ones from XP (minesweeper, etc. - I forgot to deselect them the last time) and a triangular minesweeper I wrote myself some years ago. I don't use Kazaa or anything similar, I put the absolute minimum I need on the box, all from kosher sources. New hardware all compat. at Christmas. XPProSP1
IIS not working from new, couldn't get the MMC console to appear. Reload 1. Found the MyComputer icon wouldn't display the properties page, rundll32.exe would load then hang, kill the process, it would then load under my own user id and then work. 2. Decided to install less of XP and add bits after checking functionality. At the end of the process IIS console again wouldn't appear. 3. Did an install-everything-in-sight, too much crap, bells and whistles. Uninstalled the bells and whistles and IIS console went away yet again. Note that this is all happened before I put any third party products on the box. 4. Used my notes to get a good mix of install options and did a stable build (or so I thought) in one hit - everything seemed okay. 5. Discovered that the properties window would not display in the right hand pane of Explorer, only in the left - again connected with the rundll32.exe problem, but this time killing it didn't work. Coped for a while but found it a pain not to be able to easily manipulate properties, etc. at file level. 6 Pending - the good old disappearing dialogs are back, the thing now runs like a dog and all because I thought I might plug a few holes. Needless to say, I can't find my last set of notes just now - either the cat's eaten them or my son's drawing on them. Bugger!
So there you are, all supposedly straight forward installations, each of which managed to cough up its own set of quirks and trip me up. I mean, the installer isn't bloody rocket science damn it, I write software for a living, it shouldn't be that hard, but them's the breaks.
I'm gonna bed now (it's getting late in Perth and I'm up early tomorrow) so don't expect any swift replies.
I presume "the English system" is a specific system which happens to be named English, rather than suggesting the Poms still use imperial measurements.
I took my O and A levels (U.K. 15yr.-18yr. qualifications at that time) in '77-'80 and everything in maths, chemistry, physics and etc. was taught and examined using the S.I. metrics system, country wide.
"Going _whole_hog_ metric means replacing the gallon of milk, or the cup, or the 8x5, or the 2x4 with "metric nears"; changing a lot of stuff, just to get a metric wholenumber..."
Is it really that hard, given that you've already said you're partly converted anyway. Numerous other countries have done it, including currency conversions, it's not as if it's likely to kill you. Hell, the Swedes managed to cope with changing the side of the road they drove on some years back, not something you can implement gradually!
Personally, it seems far more intuative to say that zero is freezing point (H20@STP for the pedantics) and a hundred for boiling point, rather than 32 and 212, and it aligns to the Kelvin a whole heap better too.
Anyway, look on the bright side: 55mph is about 88kph - they're bound to round that to 90kph, so you can drive that little bit faster legally!
That's what I'm going to do (I did say)! However, the whole update process is where my problem started - everything was running fine until I pulled the updates down, that's when it all stopped working properly and slowed down. You really can't say for sure that it's a Norton problem, especially if M$ go and move the goalposts afterwards.
The weird part is that disabling the Norton ones in the Services window myself should (you would expect) be the same as using the msconfig tool and disabling them there - but the results were not the same.
I agree that the DOS tools were great but the Windows ones are still useful, if only they'd move back from the bloody multimedia experience ("requires IE5") interface. God, you only have to move the mouse and it clicks, whistles or farts at you!
All I know is that, having decided to pull down some of the critical updates (not on auto, you understand) I can no longer get the properties window to appear for a directory in Explorer, except in safe mode. Kind of makes it difficult to administer security that does; oh and the performance went down a heap too. Even tried backing them all out too, but the system restore was disabled - too little disk space apparently, nice of it to tell me in time(!).
Only four hours ago, I was on the phone to MS support. If the p.c. is started with only MS services enabled (there's only Norton or MS ones on this machine) via the msconfig utility, everything is fine. If I disable all the non-MS services in the services window though and do a normal restart, everything is broken again - duh!
I'm going to try unloading/reloading all the Norton stuff again but don't hold out much hope. Oh well, looks like I'm up for another rebuild, the sixth in five months... and no, I won't be using the updates in future
Let's face it, the thief who steals it won't have the problem, it'll be the poor sap daft enough to buy it at the end of the chain. Just like the stolen coded (i.e. not-working) car radios which get sold at the local pub/garage sale/car boot sale - who's going to have all the necessary gear to check it at the time of purchase.
By the time the buyer realises, the thief is long gone - it just moves the problem, doesn't eliminate it. Just like the car immobiliser law brought in here in Western Australia - all cars have to have them. So now we get people being attacked near their cars or in the house so the thief can get the keys.
In case the wave sweeps away the earth on top, I'm gonna get buried in a carbon fibre coffin with built-in floatation devices, distress beacon, 2-way radio, snorkle and small tank of air... just in case I happen to wake up just at the wrong time.
...and then we'll all be out of a job. They'll build our cars, operate our factories, control our lives and then... one day they'll realise they don't need us any more! Way to go (not!)
Give me a good ol' blue-screenable robot any day. Even Asimov himself talked his way round his own three laws in one of his short stories.
Bloody right, boycott the lot of them, but write to the rental companies/producers/etc. and tell them you're going to boycott them otherwise they'll blindly continue down that route.
As if we don't already have enough coasters of out-of-date software around the place, what with all the freebies on the magazines, this is just the icing on the cake(!)
I just measured my pile of redundant disks (I refuse to chuck them, though I'm still unsure what to make with them, mobiles are so crass) - the pile is 46.5cm high and that doesn't include the unreadables which I have turned into coasters.
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I can't believe all these ridiculous figures I'm reading from users in Oz, didn't anybody think of shopping around?
I'm with a smaller I.S.P. for my broadband here in Western Australia and the plans speak for themselves - reasonable monthly fees for realistic traffic levels (given the costs imposed on the I.S.P. by the carriers) - all a bloody sight better than what I'm reading for Telstra and Optus.
Monthly excess can either be charged or a soft cap imposed - but still at higher speeds than dial-up. The other good part of the smaller I.S.P. is you don't get the "customer rep." if you have to phone for tech. support, you get the guys who run the place and can solve the problems without having to R.T.F.M!
Anyone who goes with the big guys down here is a mug - shop around, ask around or just plain Google it, there's plenty of good deals out there to be had.
I recently discovered and changed to UltimateZip (UZ), it would be interesting to see which way they would go if the split occurs. However, only yesterday I had a heap of problems when trying to deal with a spanned disk set from a customer, also generated using UZ.
It refused to detect/acknowledge subsequent disks on one machine, then failed to correctly unpack half the files on another - giving garbled filenames in the errors. Tried the exact same operations with a freshly downloaded copy of WinZip 8.1 - worked perfectly on both machines, so it wasn't the media. Fairly knocked my confidence in UZ, particularly since I had recommended it to the user and I know UZ was used to generate the set.
I'm going to try some more specific tests but this doesn't bode well so far.
"...MS-built engine"
It'll never get off the ground - too much bloat!
Shouldn't that be an anonymous writer or an anonymous reader/writer writes...? ;-)
Management never uses its Head. ;-)
Here in Oz the S.E.S. is the State Emergency Service - the people who tidy up the mess and damage after disasters occur.
Hmm... sounds like they have similar agendas, except that ours tackle natural disasters which were not our own fault!
"immediately after the completion of the Windows install - before the third party products were installed"
Main Entry: before
Pronunciation: bi-'fOr, -'for
Function: adverb or adjective
Etymology: Middle English, adverb & preposition, from Old English beforan, from be- + foran before, from fore
Date: before 12th century
1 : in advance : AHEAD
2 : at an earlier time : PREVIOUSLY
R.T.F.A.
You're right about the hardware, I've had no crashes or reboots of any kind that I'm aware of, perhaps it is the media.
I had considered that briefly but since I got no errors during the installs, nothing else suggested corruption either so I discounted it. I think I'll ask the dealer for a new disk for the next build, if only to discount that possibility.
Ironically, Windows did sort-of warn me not to install the updates! It downloaded them ok but then the update process would freeze, I eventually found that I again had to use safe mode to get them to install - I should have taken the hint and said bugger it.
Oh well. If (when) I do rebuild again, I'm going to do the selective install I originally did (if I can remember the exact options) and see if I can reproduce the IIS console problem or any other again. If so, I'll post the details, see if anyone else can get it... if they happen to want to do a rebuild or two, that is.
"Don't try to teach your mother to suck eggs" is the phrase that springs to mind.
You think I haven't explored the third party issue? If you read what I wrote carefully you'll see that I said that a lot of the problems which occured did so immediately after the completion of the Windows install - before the third party products were installed.
Only in the two most recent cases were third party products installed. In addition, as I later found,it has been reported that one of the XP updates (check ms forums for info) is known to cause performance errors. However, since System Restore had been disabled due to disk space issues (on a 60Gb disk!), I had to manually back out the updates in the right order and that also does not work correctly. Effectively: Removing update A - "Updates X,Y,Z depend on update A, do you wish to remove A?" - answering no still went ahead with the uninstall.
Ok. Four rebuilds in the first ten days. One about a month after, still had some minor twitches but I could live with those... until now!
BTW This is my dev. workstation on which I earn much of my living, I have a total of six games on the p.c. - the five non-internet ones from XP (minesweeper, etc. - I forgot to deselect them the last time) and a triangular minesweeper I wrote myself some years ago. I don't use Kazaa or anything similar, I put the absolute minimum I need on the box, all from kosher sources. New hardware all compat. at Christmas. XPProSP1
IIS not working from new, couldn't get the MMC console to appear.
Reload 1. Found the MyComputer icon wouldn't display the properties page, rundll32.exe would load then hang, kill the process, it would then load under my own user id and then work.
2. Decided to install less of XP and add bits after checking functionality. At the end of the process IIS console again wouldn't appear.
3. Did an install-everything-in-sight, too much crap, bells and whistles. Uninstalled the bells and whistles and IIS console went away yet again. Note that this is all happened before I put any third party products on the box.
4. Used my notes to get a good mix of install options and did a stable build (or so I thought) in one hit - everything seemed okay.
5. Discovered that the properties window would not display in the right hand pane of Explorer, only in the left - again connected with the rundll32.exe problem, but this time killing it didn't work. Coped for a while but found it a pain not to be able to easily manipulate properties, etc. at file level.
6 Pending - the good old disappearing dialogs are back, the thing now runs like a dog and all because I thought I might plug a few holes. Needless to say, I can't find my last set of notes just now - either the cat's eaten them or my son's drawing on them. Bugger!
So there you are, all supposedly straight forward installations, each of which managed to cough up its own set of quirks and trip me up. I mean, the installer isn't bloody rocket science damn it, I write software for a living, it shouldn't be that hard, but them's the breaks.
I'm gonna bed now (it's getting late in Perth and I'm up early tomorrow) so don't expect any swift replies.
Normally I wouldn't bother answering Anonymous Cowards...
nah, you're not worth it. Have the guts to register and log in then I'll provide you with a more complete response.
Kilo = 1000, micro = 1/1000000, milli=1/1000!
By the same token you might have a 60GigaMilliKilobyte drive
I presume "the English system" is a specific system which happens to be named English, rather than suggesting the Poms still use imperial measurements.
I took my O and A levels (U.K. 15yr.-18yr. qualifications at that time) in '77-'80 and everything in maths, chemistry, physics and etc. was taught and examined using the S.I. metrics system, country wide.
"Going _whole_hog_ metric means replacing the gallon of milk, or the cup, or the 8x5, or the 2x4 with "metric nears"; changing a lot of stuff, just to get a metric wholenumber..."
Is it really that hard, given that you've already said you're partly converted anyway. Numerous other countries have done it, including currency conversions, it's not as if it's likely to kill you. Hell, the Swedes managed to cope with changing the side of the road they drove on some years back, not something you can implement gradually!
Personally, it seems far more intuative to say that zero is freezing point (H20@STP for the pedantics) and a hundred for boiling point, rather than 32 and 212, and it aligns to the Kelvin a whole heap better too.
Anyway, look on the bright side: 55mph is about 88kph - they're bound to round that to 90kph, so you can drive that little bit faster legally!
That's what I'm going to do (I did say)! However, the whole update process is where my problem started - everything was running fine until I pulled the updates down, that's when it all stopped working properly and slowed down. You really can't say for sure that it's a Norton problem, especially if M$ go and move the goalposts afterwards.
The weird part is that disabling the Norton ones in the Services window myself should (you would expect) be the same as using the msconfig tool and disabling them there - but the results were not the same.
I agree that the DOS tools were great but the Windows ones are still useful, if only they'd move back from the bloody multimedia experience ("requires IE5") interface. God, you only have to move the mouse and it clicks, whistles or farts at you!
Yeah, aw'right - Schnorkel, Schmorkel... we'll all be speaking Esperanto or Dolphin by then.
All I know is that, having decided to pull down some of the critical updates (not on auto, you understand) I can no longer get the properties window to appear for a directory in Explorer, except in safe mode. Kind of makes it difficult to administer security that does; oh and the performance went down a heap too. Even tried backing them all out too, but the system restore was disabled - too little disk space apparently, nice of it to tell me in time(!).
Only four hours ago, I was on the phone to MS support. If the p.c. is started with only MS services enabled (there's only Norton or MS ones on this machine) via the msconfig utility, everything is fine. If I disable all the non-MS services in the services window though and do a normal restart, everything is broken again - duh!
I'm going to try unloading/reloading all the Norton stuff again but don't hold out much hope. Oh well, looks like I'm up for another rebuild, the sixth in five months... and no, I won't be using the updates in future
"the ASRG wants to provide administrators and users the tools necessary"
;-)
Are they going to e-mail everyone with an offer to sign up? Oops!
Let's face it, the thief who steals it won't have the problem, it'll be the poor sap daft enough to buy it at the end of the chain. Just like the stolen coded (i.e. not-working) car radios which get sold at the local pub/garage sale/car boot sale - who's going to have all the necessary gear to check it at the time of purchase.
By the time the buyer realises, the thief is long gone - it just moves the problem, doesn't eliminate it. Just like the car immobiliser law brought in here in Western Australia - all cars have to have them. So now we get people being attacked near their cars or in the house so the thief can get the keys.
In case the wave sweeps away the earth on top, I'm gonna get buried in a carbon fibre coffin with built-in floatation devices, distress beacon, 2-way radio, snorkle and small tank of air... just in case I happen to wake up just at the wrong time.
Hah, comet schmomet.
REDO FROM START
"...and who is Redo" wondered Ponder.
...and then we'll all be out of a job. They'll build our cars, operate our factories, control our lives and then... one day they'll realise they don't need us any more! Way to go (not!)
Give me a good ol' blue-screenable robot any day. Even Asimov himself talked his way round his own three laws in one of his short stories.
Bloody right, boycott the lot of them, but write to the rental companies/producers/etc. and tell them you're going to boycott them otherwise they'll blindly continue down that route.
As if we don't already have enough coasters of out-of-date software around the place, what with all the freebies on the magazines, this is just the icing on the cake(!)
I just measured my pile of redundant disks (I refuse to chuck them, though I'm still unsure what to make with them, mobiles are so crass) - the pile is 46.5cm high and that doesn't include the unreadables which I have turned into coasters.
Nah, but it will all run to the bottom.
I have back problems and use a fitness ball as my workstation chair, where the hell do I fit that in?