Crap. Now what?

[Joelacrane]

I decided to get a legal copy of XP Home for my laptop. It works fine until i start downloading updates... All the sudden, it starts CRAWLING... like, it takes an hour to start firefox. Crap! I still dont know what is wrong. Everything was fine with my illegal copy!

This morning at a friends house, i downloaded Garry's Mod for Half-life 2 along with some recent video drivers for my Radeon 9200se. I copied them over to my 512mb Sandisk SD card with his Mp3 player.

Then, me and a friend went for a motorcycle ride. My bike is a dual-sport, and i use a GPS as a speedo. Except after a couple hours of riding, the GPS dies and wont turn back on... so i have to ride without a speedo. Crap. I get home, take it off, turn it on, and it WORKS FINE. Argh! At least i didnt get any tickets!

So i decide to try getting Garry's Mod off my SD card to play it. Sweet. It wont copy (Using WM5torage). Ok, ill use my camera to copy it. Wait. My camera wont turn on. Oh, no batteries. Here are some fresh ones. It still wont turn on. Wrong polarity? No... Tried it 3 times... Still wont turn on. What the crap! Ok, howabout if i use activesync to transfer the mod? What the crap! where did everything go! The SD card is empty!

Laptop is slow, GPS no-go, Camera dies, SD card fries.

Why? Why? Why? :cry:

[Darius Wey]

Sounds like your day was one big static discharge. Sorry to hear of your troubles. :(

[Joelacrane]

Now my up to date drivers for my Radeon conflict with drivers for my old TNT2 Pro M64, so my third monitor is useless. What next?

[Brad Adrian]

Any recent thunderstorms in your area? What about work being done on nearby power lines? It sounds to me like you've suffered some kind of power surge.

Was any of your equipment connected to a surge protector?

[Menneisyys]

I decided to get a legal copy of XP Home for my laptop. It works fine until i start downloading updates... All the sudden, it starts CRAWLING... like, it takes an hour to start firefox. Crap! I still dont know what is wrong. Everything was fine with my illegal copy!


Are you sure it's a software bug? Notebook hard disks are known for going gradually wrong. If they become less reliable, you may not receive read/write errors, "just" great speed decrease. I had exactly the same symptomps with my old (legal) Win XP Pro with the exception that it was ALWAYS slow, to do anything, not just after updates. The (old) hard disk turned out tobe the culprit: my notebook is flying with the new, 120 GByte 5400 rpm Samsung (system) HDD.

[Joelacrane]

Its an old Toshiba Tecra 8000, P2 366hmz, 128mb of Ram, and a 10 gig hard drive. Now i know it seems like the lack of ram would hurt, but i used to be able to have Firefox, Trillian, Winamp and Outlook Express all running at the same time with no problems. After that, things would bog down. But now, i just try to open Firefox and it takes forever. Disabling visual styles helps, but its still horrible. Do you think sp2 eats more ram or something?

[Menneisyys]

Its an old Toshiba Tecra 8000, P2 366hmz, 128mb of Ram, and a 10 gig hard drive. Now i know it seems like the lack of ram would hurt, but i used to be able to have Firefox, Trillian, Winamp and Outlook Express all running at the same time with no problems. After that, things would bog down. But now, i just try to open Firefox and it takes forever. Disabling visual styles helps, but its still horrible. Do you think sp2 eats more ram or something?

Check it in the Performance tab of Task Manager (Physical Memory).

128M is not much for XP, I think it's really RAM-related.

[Darius Wey]

Do you think sp2 eats more ram or something?

There are a lot more active security monitoring mechanisms in SP2, so that could contribute to your slow performance. As Menneisyys has mentioned, 128MB is indeed not a comfortable amount of RAM for XP. Similarly, with your processor and hard disk - the latter, if you have a large portion allocated to system restores. It doesn't really offer much "breathing room".

[Joelacrane]

I decided to move my documents over to my desktop computer, format, and start over again. I figure i could save myself 30 bucks if it turns out that i have a virus or something. While i was copying over my wireless network, i remember seeing about 40,000kb free. Setup estimates that the process will be complete in about 20 minutes.

I am trying to make this old clunker last until they start selling laptops with Windows Vista bundled. Hopefully perfect timing for when i start college.

Hey instead of posting a new thread, ill just ask here. I was recently given 3 computers with Windows 2000 Professional liscense stickers on the side. No hard drives, but if i can borrow an installation CD from someone, could i install 2000, buy an XP upgrade, and install it? Or is there a way to install Windows XP without upgrading it from 2000? It just sounds messy and time consuming to upgrade each computer.

An update about my videocard woes: I just bought an old ATI Rage Pro 128mb PCI on ebay for like 15 bucks. That old videocard should solve my problems, and i can put the nVIDIA card to use elsewhere.

[Joelacrane]

Well, its up and running. I am currently installing all of my favorite programs (Firefox, Ad-aware, Winamp, etc...) and everything is quick and responsive just like it used to be. Not sure what was wrong, but hey! It works!