R.I.P.: One W2K box

Last Updated on September 30, 2010 by Dave Farquhar

My video editing box bit the dust earlier this week. I loaded a rather large image into Photoshop LE, and it hung. I killed Photoshop LE, and all appeared to be well. Then the desktop and Start menu went away. A few seconds later, they reappeared. They went away again, then reappeared. The cycle continued like a beating drum.
So I did what you should always do when a Windows box starts acting goofy: Reboot. And? After logging in, the problem reappeared.

So I scanned for viruses. The system was clean. I found that if I killed explorer.exe, everything else ran fine. So I could run programs from Task Manager, bring up a command line (just run cmd.exe) or bring up the old Program Manager (remember that from the worse-than-awful Windows 3.1?) and run programs that way. It’s a safe and easy way to save memory, but I really don’t care to subject myself to it on a regular basis. Explorer isn’t perfect, but Program Manager might be the worst shell I’ve ever seen. And I fear that if Explorer is constantly crashing, there’s probably something else wrong with the installation.

I tried doing a recovery install. No go. The installation media couldn’t find a Windows installation on the disk. Figures.

I don’t know if I have a Ghost image of this machine, which is a major pain. W2K got along just fine with all the hardware in the machine, but when I added the Pinnacle DV500, it took me a really long time to get it working right.

So I’m not sure what I’m going to do.

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