troubleshooting

Troubleshooting intermittent PC problems

Dave Farquhar Troubleshooting , , , , ,

How to troubleshoot an intermittent PC problem. We’ve got an aging P2-233 at work that likes to bluescreen a lot under NT4–usually once every day or two. No one who looked at it was able to track it down. The first thing I noticed was that it still had the factory installation of NT, from about three years ago. Factory installations are bad news. The first thing you should do with any PC is install a fresh copy of Windows. If all you have are CAB files and no CD, don’t format the drive–just boot to DOS, go into that directory, run Setup, and install to a new directory other than C:Windows. With NT, it’s also possible to install from DOS though the syntax escapes me momentarily.

The first thing I suggested was to run RAM Stress Test, from www.ultra-x.com , over the course of a weekend to eliminate the possibility of bad memory. I followed that by formatting the drive FAT and running SpinRite. After six hours, SpinRite gave the disk a completely clean bill of health.

Knowing the memory and disk were good, I built up the system, installing NT, then installing SP5 128-bit, then installing IE 5.01SP1, then installing Diskeeper Lite, then installing Office 97 and Outlook 98 and WRQ Reflection, then running Windows Update to get all the critical updates and SP6a. I ran Diskeeper after each installation to keep the drive in pristine condition–I find I get better results that way than by installing everything and then running Diskeeper.

The system seemed pretty stable through all that. Then I went to configure networking and got a bluescreen. Cute. I rebooted and all was well and remained well for an hour or two.

How to see if the bluescreen was a fluke?

I devised the following batch file:

:loop
dir /w /s c:
goto loop

Who says command lines are useless and archaic? Definitely not me! I saved the file as stress.bat and ran 10 instances of it. Then I hit Ctrl-Alt-Del to bring up Task Manager. CPU usage was at 100%. Good.

The system bluescreened after a couple of hours.

How to track down the problem? Well, I knew the CD-ROM drive was bad. Can a bad CD-ROM cause massive system crashes? I’ve never heard of that, but I won’t write off anything. So I disconnected the CD-ROM drive. I’d already removed all unnecessary software from the equation, and I hadn’t installed any extraneous peripherals either. So with the CD-ROM drive eliminated, I ran 10 instances of the batch file again.

The system didn’t make it through the night.

OK. Memory’s good. Hard drive’s good. Bad CD-ROM drive out of equation. Fresh installation of OS with nothing extra. What next?

I called my boss. I figured maybe he’d have an idea, and if not, he and I would contact Micron to see what they had to suggest–three-year warranties and a helpful technical support staff from a manufacturer who understands the needs of a business client are most definitely a good thing.

My boss caught the obvious possibility I missed: heat.

All the fans worked fine, and the CPU had a big heatsink put on at the factory that isn’t going anywhere. Hopefully there was thermal compound in there, but if there wasn’t, I wouldn’t be getting in there to put any in, nor would I be replacing the heatsink with a heatsink/fan combo. So I pulled the P2-333 out of the PC I use–it was the only 66 MHz-bus P2 I had–and put it in the system. I’d forgotten those old P2s weren’t multiplier-locked, so the 333 ended up running at 233. That’s fine. I’ve never had overheating problems with that chip at its rated speed, so at 100 MHz less, I almost certainly wouldn’t run into problems.

With that CPU, the system happily ran 10 instances of my batch file for 30 hours straight without a hiccup. So I had my culprit: That P2-233 was overheating.

Now, ideally a stress test would tax more system memory than this one did and would force some floating-point operations as well. Prime95 is ideal.

If you have time and parts available, you can troubleshoot a recalcitrant PC by running such a real-world stress test, then replacing possible suspect parts (CPU, memory, hard drive, motherboard) one at a time until you isolate the problem.

Troubleshooting Mac extensions

Dave Farquhar Macintosh , , , , , ,

Troubleshooting Macintosh extensions. An extensions conflict is where you lose your innocence with fixing a Mac. Not all extensions and control panels get along, and certain combinations can have disastrous results.

Here’s my method. Create a folder on the desktop. Drag exactly half the extensions out of System Folder:Extensions and drop them in the folder. Select all the extensions in that new folder and give them a label, so they stand out (it makes them a different color). Now reboot and see if the problem goes away. If it doesn’t, create another folder, move the remaining extensions into it and give them a label. Move the first batch back into the extensions folder and reboot.

Now, add half your extensions back from the folder on the desktop to the extensions folder. If the problem comes back, move that half back into the second folder on the desktop and move the now-known good half into the extensions folder. After each test, remove the labels from the extensions in the extensions folder. Just keep swapping halves until you narrow it down to one bad extension, using labels to keep yourself from getting lost.

I don’t recommend Conflict Catcher because all it does is move the extensions around for you–it’s no easier than this method, and this method doesn’t cost $50.

This is how we build ’em in St. Louis. Neither Gatermann nor I are really in the habit of naming our PCs unless a name is just painfully obvious. In the case of his Linux gateway, the name was painfully obvious. One name and one name only fits: Mir.

This is how we build computers in St. Louis. This is Tom Gatermann’s Linux gateway: a Micronics P75 board with a Cirrus Logic PCI SVGA card, a Kingston PCI NE2000 clone connecting to the Internet, and a Bay Netgear 310TX PCI 10/100 (DEC Tulip chipset) connecting to the local LAN. Yes, that AT case was as cheap as it looks. Maybe cheaper.

Inside the case, there’s an IMES 8X IDE CD-ROM, an ancient 1.44 MB floppy drive of unknown origin, and a 1.2 GB Quantum Bigfoot HD, of which about 1.5 MB is used (booting’s much faster off the HD than off the floppy).

“>

Mir is made from, well, a pile of junk. A Micronics P75 board. A Cirrus Logic PCI SVGA card. Whatever 72-pin SIMMs we had laying around. A Quantum Bigfoot 1.2-gig HD. A really trashed 3.5″ floppy drive. The cheapest-looking AT case ever. But we did skip the Linksys NICs. The NICs are a Kingston PCI NE2000 clone and a Bay Netgear 10/100 based on the DEC Tulip chipset.

We assembled it outside the case because we had so much trouble getting it going correctly–it’s much easier to swap components when they’re accessible. Once we got it going, we never bothered to put everything back inside the case. Maybe we’re trend-setters and this is the next fad in computing. After all, what’s the logical next step after translucency?

02/17/2001

Dave Farquhar General , ,

Fixing an NT server. Or, troubleshooting Ghost on SCSI drives. One of the week’s challenges was figuring out how to Ghost an NT server. I wanted to back up a current configuration of a test server, but when I ran Ghost, it would die about 80 megs into the backup with a sector not found error or some other weirdness.

So I went back into NT, copied a ton of Ghost images to the drive, and watched. No problems. Hmm. So I called in some help. I showed him I could copy effortlessly to the server’s FAT partition. So then I deleted the files, booted off a DOS floppy, and at the command prompt I got ready to fill the disk. First, MD 1 to make a destination directory. Error. Crap!

We thought it over for a while, then he thought of something: what’s that partition’s placement on the drive? So we fired up Partition Magic and looked–it ran into cylinder 1152. Bingo. The 1024-sector limit isn’t a problem with IDE drives these days, but depending on your SCSI BIOS, it can be a problem with SCSI drives. And any self-respecting server uses SCSI drives.

So I deleted the FAT partition, moved the NTFS partition to the end, then created a new FAT partition in the middle of the drive. Bingo. No more complaints from Ghost.

I know it’s tempting to put your FAT disaster-recovery partition at the end of the drive, where performance is slowest, since you’ll rarely touch the thing. Unfortunately, if you cross cylinder 1024, you’ll get burned. So remember this rhyme while setting up servers: Keep FAT before cylinder 1024. You’ll be glad you did.

What, nothing on yesterday? Surely you jest. Of course there’s mail. But after fighting an NT server and Macs yesterday, did I want to deal with mail? Of course not. Look for it tomorrow.

Can’t resist a preview? Fine. One reader quoted The Great Benjamin Franklin: “Those who are willing to sacrifice a little liberty to gain a little safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” Amen, Ben. Were that there were more like you…

Linux. Well, if you’re chasing single-disk Linux projects, you can do much, much worse than to play with Freesco ( http://www.freesco.org/ ), which crams more onto a single floppy than anything else I’ve seen. So dig out your 386, slap in a pair of dusty ISA NICs, disconnect the hard drive to save power, throw in a couple of SIMMs to get it up to 6 MB RAM, boot off the disk, and tell it what you want. You can have an Ethernet bridge, a modem-to-Ethernet router, an Ethernet-to-Ethernet router, Cable/DSL-to-Ethernet router, or a print server. It even includes a DHCP server and caching DNS, if you like that sort of thing. (If you don’t like a caching DNS, it’s obviously because you’ve never seen one in action.)

Even if you have no need for its routing capabilities, it’s nice to be able to take an obsolescent PC, throw in a cheap NIC if it lacks one, and configure Freesco just as a caching DNS. Stick the PC in a corner anywhere you have a free drop and set it up to boot without a keyboard, configure your desktop PCs to use it, and you’ll reduce network traffic. With one caching DNS per subnet, you’ll get speed gains worth far more than it would cost to haul that old PC away. (And trust me, you want one on your local network–it’s worth the effort to get your 386 or 486 working again, even if you have to go buy a $12 ISA NE2000 clone NIC to drop in it.)

If you want a fast boot, you can install Freesco to a smallish hard drive, but if you do that, set it to spin down the drive because as long as you’ve got 6-8 MB of RAM, it’ll never touch the drive after it’s done booting.

Setup is insanely easy. Boot off the floppy, type setup, login as root, and follow the menu options. Even if you know no Unix whatsoever, you’ll be able to configure this. Check it out–you’ll be glad you did.

Unlike a lot of similar projects, Freesco is based on the 2.0.38 kernel, which is smaller than more recent kernels but networking’s not quite as fast. Still, in most cases the inclusion of the caching nameserver more than makes up the performance difference–not to mention the five-minute configuration time. And its network performance is still faster than NT.

01/18/2001

Dave Farquhar General , , , , , ,

A red-hatted worm. Wow. You sure don’t hear about this often.  There’s a worm that exploits a weakness in Red Hat Linux 6.2 and 7.0. Coined the Ramen worm, it defaces Web pages with a tribute to Ramen noodles. This is the first of these that I’ve heard of, and I’ll say it’s an example of why multiple distributions are a good thing. Other distributions aren’t vulnerable to this, so the spread slows. Hardening Red Hat against this isn’t hard–head to securityfocus.com, which anyone who administers Linux boxes for a living needs to be reading anyway. Exploits and fixes are generally documented and fixed long before anything can take advantage of them.

The number of the day is… 114. That’s my IQ, at least according to the 10-minute test I took yesterday in between phone calls while two of my coworkers were arguing about the validity of IQ tests. I popped up, announced my score, fueled the debate and then left. I was feeling vindictive I guess.

Generally, as I understand it, 100 is average. If you’re in the 130s, you’re gifted. I’ve been around some 170s and I keep up with them with no problems. I knew a 190 once. She gave me some problems, partly because I couldn’t understand her when she started spouting off in Latin. Solo hablo ingles y un poco espanol–un muy poco espanol. And I think another part of the problem was I found her boring, too refined.

What’d my coworkers have to say about my score? One of them used me to dismiss all validity of IQ tests–no way that guy’s a 114! His problem-solving ability is too good, and that memory, and and and… Well, slightly above-average people generally don’t write their first book and publish it before their 25th birthday. The coworker arguing in favor of IQ tests blamed my score on environment and poor preparation. I admit, my preparation was awful–I took it on spur of the moment, didn’t check any answers, took a 20-minute test in 10, took a couple of phone calls while I was doing it… So I was hardly scientific.

But what do we mean when we call someone “smart,” anyway?

Good memory? My dad sure had a great memory. I have a pretty good one too. I can probably tell you the starting lineup of every Kansas City Royals team from 1980 to last season. (I’ll spare you). And obscure computer information… don’t get me started. But nobody has a memory as good as a computer. Some would say the only thing dumber than a computer is a toaster, but I wonder, because my toaster sure works a whole lot better than my computer does most of the time.

Intelligence? Intelligence is the ability to reason and analyze. Some people do this really well. Others don’t. Most people who’ve watched me work say I have good troubleshooting and analysis skills, though I often score poorly on tests that measure that. Yet when I took the ACT, I did everything wrong. I went out with my girlfriend the night before. I stayed up late. I decided to come home and study afterward. Then I went in and scored a 30 or 31 on my first try. For those unfamiliar with the ACT, a score of 30 gives you an automatic scholarship from the state of Missouri at any state university. I think 36 is the highest possible score. A score of 26 gets you automatic admission at most state universities. As I recall, I scored in the 98th percentile in social studies, 99th in English, low 80-something in math and high 80-something in science. (Just call me Mr. Humanities.)

Common sense? I guess this is ability to deal with the real world. I’ve run into people who are seriously deficient here. That girl I knew with a 190… She had virtually none. She was always finding herself in situations she couldn’t think her way out of. Some people call this “street smart,” and I think that’s a good description of it. Common sense isn’t as common as it should be.

Wisdom? I think wisdom’s the most important of the bunch. It’s the ability to use what you’ve got. I scored very poorly on one proficiency test that measured my ability to analyze. My biggest beef was that it was heavily slanted towards the mathematically minded, and I don’t have that inclination–my math numbers were what dragged down my ACT score the most–and the last time I had to juggle numbers a lot was in 1994. One time when someone used that score against me, I retorted, “Yeah, so I don’t have as much as some of those guys. At least I know how to use what little I’ve got, and they certainly don’t!” Is it possible that my intelligence and common sense are only slightly above average, and that I use memory and wisdom to compensate? Maybe.

I know someone who doesn’t think she’s smart. And maybe she lacks in one of those areas. I don’t know. What I do know is she knows how to get things done. And I’ve never felt any need to talk down to her. When we’ve talked, I’ve always had the sense she’s understood what I’m talking about–and we’ve talked some pretty heavy subjects at times. Remember my line of work.

When I think smart, I think of those guys I know who had 170-plus IQs and pontificated a lot. She doesn’t do that. But when I think dumb, she doesn’t come to mind either. My former neighbor who believed every conspiracy theory out there and who believed The X-Files is a documentary does. He also tended to overuse profanity and thought very highly of his own intelligence.

I think it was a Supreme Court justice who once said he couldn’t define the word obscene, but he knew it when he saw it. I think the same goes for intelligence. It’s hard to define and even harder to measure, but we know it when we see it.

01/03/2001

Dave Farquhar General , , ,

Mailbag:

Dual Celerons; Chap. 9

Dead ATX power supplies. Yesterday was my first day back at work in a while (I was burning up vacation time most of last week). I “fixed” an ATX power supply first thing that morning by unplugging it and plugging it back in after waiting 10 seconds. I see that problem somewhat frequently on Micron desktop PCs for some reason. If it gets to be a regular occurrance on a particular PC, we get Micron to RMA the power supply.

Mac-PC font conversion madness. We also ran into some problems migrating some documents from Macs to PCs, so the resident Unix guru, who’s also the other resident Mac guru, and I spent all afternoon struggling with it. Finally, we just started converting a couple of the crucial Type 1 (PostScript) fonts manually to get around the problem. He had his Linux laptop with Netatalk configured, so I dumped the fonts to his Linux box, which he then converted and I grabbed on a PC via FTP.

There is no good free way to move fonts between the Mac and Windows, alas. From the Mac to Unix is no big deal. But all the freebie converters have major drawbacks. I went and got the $45 shareware CrossFont from www.asy.com and tried it out. It gave satisfactory results on two of the fonts, but totally mangled the line spacing on the third. We suspect that font has problems, so it may not be CrossFont’s fault, but it would be nice to know for sure.

Speaking of Type 1, Adobe Type Manager Light is now a free download for both Windows and the Mac. Get your copy at www.adobe.com. There aren’t a huge number of free PostScript fonts out there, but there are some.

The Epson Stylus 1520. Today was a Mac problem day mostly. I ended the day by troubleshooting an Epson Stylus Color 1520 that didn’t want to print pure colors. Pushing the clean button didn’t help. I finally just switched over to the printer’s local port (we usually print via the Epson Stylus RIP to get PostScript Level 3 support), opened an application, loaded a file, chose to print, then hit the Utility button from the print dialog box. I do wish there were an easier way to get to the utility function. I cleaned the nozzles and aligned the print heads, and voila, we once again had nice prints.

Too bad Epson hides that utility so deeply, because I spend a lot of time cleaning those stupid printers and that’s really something an end user could do, if they could remember how. (I have a hard time remembering how, which is part of the reason why I’m putting it here. Running a Web site has its advantages…)

The other problem I have with this printer is that because it cost $500, people seem to think it’s a high-volume printer, capable of printing thousands of pages a month. It’s not. It really is a consumer-grade printer. While the print quality is very good as long as you have the right paper, that’s this printer’s appeal, and that’s why it costs so much. Printing thousands of sheets a month is a great way to burn through printheads, and that’s not something that’s user-replaceable. It’s not even something I can do–it has to go into the shop. And no, when you pay $500 for a printer, you don’t get onsite service.

Mailbag:

Dual Celerons; Chap. 9

12/21/2000

Dave Farquhar General , , ,

Athlon and Duron info. Should I buy an Athlon or a Duron? Tough question. Here’s the first good analysis I’ve seen. And Anand has a review of the SiS 730 integrated Athlon/Duron chipset. This won’t be the chipset you choose for your PC, but it might end up in your Aunt Millie’s.

As for motherboards, I’ve read of some people having problems with the Asus A7V; that it’s a decent board once you get it set up, but that it’s very cranky. The number of search engine hits I get with the phrase “Asus A7V” and words like “conflict” and “configuration” lends some circumstantial evidence to this. This troubles me; Asus boards are normally as solid as they come. Yet like I’ve said before, every time I’ve bought something other than Asus I’ve regretted it.

If you’re here looking for help on your Asus A7V, one of Storage Review’s moderators pointed me to the defunct A7V Troubleshooting Board  — I looked there and found no shortage of advice.

I guess if I were going to buy something now — and I admit I’m half-tempted to pick up a Duron and board as a cheap upgrade for my aging K6-2/350 — I’d probably go with a Gigabyte GA-7ZX or GA-7ZX1. The former includes a single ISA slot and built-in Creative audio; the latter includes neither of those. It costs about $35 less than the Asus A7V, and benchmarks nearly as fast. And, for the price difference you can afford to more than make up the performance difference through brute force by buying a faster CPU.

Gigabyte and AMD have a great working relationship lately (AMD often uses Gigabyte boards in their testbed and demo systems), so I have few qualms about going with them.

If anyone out there has some first-hand experience with different current Athlon/Duron boards, I’d love to hear about it — and I’m sure my readers would too. The mail link’s to the left.

We’ll revisit the topic of AMD tomorrow. There’s a lot more to this.

Cloning Mac Hard Drives. I may have covered this before but it bears repeating. From the Finder, drag and drop the old drive icon onto the new drive. It’ll copy all files, including hidden files, to a folder inside the new drive. Open that folder, drag the files out, and you’ve got a perfect clone. I do this very frequently with the Macs I fix at work.
You can also use Apple’s Disk Copy to copy one drive to another, but I find it easier to just use the Finder.

Disk Copy is also capable of saving hard disk images to files, a la Drive Image or Ghost for the PC. So cloning of Macs is possible, though you don’t get the cool multicast facilities of Drive Image or Ghost. But for one-off cloning, Disk Copy works great. You don’t get an exact binary copy of the disk, however, so you’ll still want to rebuild the directory with DiskWarrior and then defragment afterward for absolute best performance.

Presidential questions. Here we go again. I hinted during my previous arguments that I didn’t think Gore necessarily had won the popular vote. Absentee ballots weren’t in, and many of the states that had declared an electoral winner still hadn’t reported 100% of their precincts. It seemed a longshot, but so did a lot of things about this election.

Here’s a story about the wide and varied vote counts (all still putting Gore ahead nationally, but by a margin of as little as 330,000 votes). A coworker sent me the text to another story on the same site that had claimed Bush won by 2 million votes by one total. Unfortunately that story seems to have disappeared.

12/17/2000

Dave Farquhar General , ,

Radio Free Linux? I found these instructions for broadcasting audio with Linux very interesting, though of questionable legality. When you broadcast music, you’re supposed to pay the artist, or the artist’s representative, a cut. That’s how Michael Jackson and Paul McCartney made their money–they bought up rights to songs besides their own. Their record royalties are a pittance in comparison.

I’m guessing we’ll be seeing plenty of Linux-based pirate Radio stations, since the required software’s all free and the system requirements minimal.

Search engine hits. I’ll take these recent search engine queries as questions. Editthispage keeps track of the links people follow to get here. I’m sure some of the privacy people out there are throwing a fit about this, but that’s pretty standard behavior for Webservers. The better you know your audience, the better you can serve them, as I’m going to attempt to demonstrate. (Might as well reward these people if they come back, eh?)

As usual, the difference between good and evil or right and wrong comes down to the answer to one question: What’s your motive?

The built-in memory test. I assume this person was looking for information on the standard POST (Power-On Self Test) built into every PC. What about it? It’s worthless. If the memory module is in really bad shape, it might fail that test. But many of these tests simply count the memory, since fast memory tests give the impression of being a faster board. For a good memory tester, see RAM Stress Test (expensive, unfortunately). For troubleshooting, maybe a local computer store has a memory tester. For preventative maintenance, it’s less expensive to buy quality name-brand memory.

Windows Me DNS cache. Ah, someone’s thinking. A DNS cache is an outstanding way to speed up or optimize Internet access. The only true DNS cache that I know of that runs under Windows is Naviscope , which also does ad blocking but doesn’t do as good of a job as AdSubtract or Proxomitron. Since Naviscope can use a proxy server itself, you could point it at Proxomitron, assuming you have buckets of memory for running Internet utilities.

If you happen to be running a Linux box to route packets to a broadband connection, you can take this advice.

Underground ADSL. No idea what the user meant but I know exactly why it hit. I’ve talked about ADSL, and the site’s name will produce a search hit. Since DSL uses existing underground cable, sites talking about DSL installation will get hits, as will a lot of sites of questionable character (hacking and phreaking sites).

12/16/2000

Dave Farquhar General , , ,

Troubleshooting Windows NT and Outlook. This one had me totally stumped. We have a PC that’s always been a little flaky, but very recently Outlook just stopped working reliably. Access violations every 5-20 minutes, always at the same address, became the norm. In addition, it would claim to run out of memory every time you tried to read anything other than a plain-text message.

I traced the latter problem to a corrupt normal.dot file; he was using Word as his e-mail editor and as his format for fancy messages.

Finally, I coaxed another error message out of it while logged in with an administrative account: Unable to find or register vbscript.dll. Fine. Time to uninstall, run Eraser 97 to get rid of the last of those bits, then reinstall both Office 97 and Outlook 98.

Vbscript.dll still didn’t register, so I grabbed a copy off a working PC, dropped it in WinntSystem32, and issued the command regsvr32 vbscript.dll to register it. It took.I launched Outlook 98, Word 97, and Internet Explorer 5, since that combination seems best able to coax whatever errors out of Outlook I’m going to get. I configured Outlook to go read my mail account via IMAP and waited. Access violation once again.

So I loaded a program we have from Seagate Software, called Modules.exe I believe. It tells you exactly what’s loaded in memory and at what address. Being able to count in hexadecimal doesn’t get you any dates, but it sometimes helps you troubleshoot a problem. Plus it lets you make jokes about how much more fun it makes you at parties. So I sort by memory address, look at the ranges, and find the culprit. I forget the name of the DLL offhand, but the description Modules gave was “Outlook Network Folders.” Net Folders. Net Folders: one of the best but most poorly implemented ideas Microsoft ever foisted upon the unsuspecting masses.

So I copied that DLL over from the properly-working machine, then used the command-line utility fc.exe to compare them–if they’re different, I’ve found my culprit. I compare them, and find they’re identical.

That leaves two possibilities: Either the OS is corrupt beyond repair and just needs a clean re-install from scratch, or we’ve got a hardware problem. I find it suspicious that the problem always occurs at the same address, so I take the address, translate it into decimal using Windows’ calculator, then divide it by 1024 and then by 1024 again to get the address in megabytes rather than in bytes, and I get… 1221-something. Ouch. In a machine with 64 MB of RAM? So I went and found a programmer to confirm whether I was running through the right mathematical process. Indeed I was. He asked what kind of memory translation Intel PCs and Windows NT do (he’s a VMS programmer).   Then I remembered NT uses a 4-gigabyte address space, regardless of how much physical memory is there. So much for getting a number between 0 and 64 that I could use to determine which DIMM in the system was bad.

So instead, I just swapped the DIMMs. The problem went away. A smoking gun! Problem is, which of the two was bad? I can’t just leave it that way, because eventually something else will break.

Popping out RAM Stress Test , from the unfortunately-named Ultra-X, Inc., is the best way I’ve found to conclusively find a bad module. So I ran it for a couple of hours. Nothing. So I left it to run over the weekend. Hopefully that will turn up the problem by the time I return to the office on Monday.

And of course the PC in question is the one on the desk of one of our most important executives. Figures.

A minor change. Seeing as I have a growing number of British readers, still cursed with dialup connections, and since I tend to write really long, I switched to a three-day view rather than the seven-day view I’ve been using. Older pieces are of course accessible through the calendar and through the Best of this Page link, both to the left.

Spinrite, Mac troubleshooting, and elections

Dave Farquhar Macintosh

SpinRite is your friend. Gatermann was telling me about instability with one of his Win98 boxes; he re-installed about 6 times with no better results when he ran SpinRite on his drive. It found tons of bad sectors that Scandisk wasn’t finding. He swapped out the drive and Win98 went back to its normal rate of instability.

Unfortunately, SpinRite doesn’t yet support NTFS, making it less useful for those who run NT or W2K.

More Mac troubleshooting. If your Mac crashes while printing, there’s a decent chance it’ll crash at bootup immediately afterward. I was troubleshooting a startup problem on a G4 and spent a good two hours before I noticed a document in one of the printer icons on the desktop. I rebooted without extensions, opened each printer and deleted any and all documents in them, and rebooted again. Then the G4 went back to its normal rate of instability.

Election “troubleshooting.” If you’re wondering why recounts can be different each time, here’s a perspective you’re not finding in the mainstream media from WorldNetDaily. You probably suspect, like I do, that this is less about recounts than it is about looking for Gore votes. It may actually be manufacturing Gore votes.

These guys are definitely right-leaning, which bothers me about as much as left-leaning, but at least they’re honest and not trying to push leftist coverage off as objective.

I continue to contend that objective coverage is very difficult, if not impossible, but that doesn’t matter because no one even wants to practice objective news coverage anymore. That’s why I left the news business.

Mouse cursor troubleshooting

Dave Farquhar Windows , , ,

Sorry, keyboard secrets will have to wait. No time. But here’s something else.

Case of the disappearing cursor. Maybe you’re lucky and you’ve never seen this, but sometimes the cursor will disappear inside text boxes in Windows NT (and presumably 9x). The solution is to reinstall your video driver — preferably a newer version.

I’ll be back in a bit. I’ve got some cool hotkey tricks. You don’t have to buy a new Microsoft keyboard to have keyboard access to things like the My Computer icon. For that matter you don’t have to buy a new keyboard to get a Windows key either, if you’re an old-timer like me still using an old 101-key PS/2 keyboard (the keyboards of today just aren’t nearly as good as the ones IBM and Lexmark made 12 or 13 years ago–of course, they also cost 10% of what those keyboards cost new).

I’ll spill the beans later this morning.