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.
David Farquhar is a computer security professional, entrepreneur, and author. He started his career as a part-time computer technician in 1994, worked his way up to system administrator by 1997, and has specialized in vulnerability management since 2013. He invests in real estate on the side and his hobbies include O gauge trains, baseball cards, and retro computers and video games. A University of Missouri graduate, he holds CISSP and Security+ certifications. He lives in St. Louis with his family.
On a similar note, have you seen http://www.linuxjournal.com/article.php?sid=5817&mode=thread&order=0 ??
Yeah, I saw that earlier this week. I couldn’t track down the software it cited as the successor to Broadcast 2000 though. I ought to look into doing some editing in Linux. I know I can’t do everything I can do in Premiere, but if I can do simple edits, it’s a good thing.
Yeah, strange. I had a hard time finding Cinelerra myself but eventually I found it here:
http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=13554
Even stranger yet is the “official” page for this software is:
http://www.heroinewarrior.com/cinelerra.php3
Go check that out and the link they got on that page. I have found no reasons for that yet but it looks like something from the twilight zone…