if you can figure this one out, you are a computer god

[TrophyHusband 0]

1. i tried firefox and didn't like it

2. not going to happen for a while

"Your scrotum is quite nice" - Skymama
www.kjandmegan.com

[Bolas 5]

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i'm still ready to throw this fucking computer out the window. i can't get ie8 because some entry file is missing. i can't get itunes because i'm running service pack 1. i can't get service pack 3 because some file is corrupt. i'm trying to get service pack 2 right now. we'll see how that goes.

Often times when building a system, if you have errors, it's faster to just start over as things you tried to fix one error may break something else particularly if you were messing with system and config files or the registry.

My recommendations:
Reformat and install XP
Install SP3 before you install the network drivers if possible.
Do all the Windows Updates.
Install any other drivers that may be needed.
Then install your programs.

Stupidity if left untreated is self-correcting
If ya can't be good, look good, if that fails, make 'em laugh.

[ntrprnr 0]

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good time to get a Mac

I love mine.

_______________
"Why'd you track away at 7,000 feet?"
"Even in freefall, I have commitment issues."

[piisfish 135]

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i'm still ready to throw this fucking computer out the window. ... we'll see how that goes.

done for you

scissors beat paper, paper beat rock, rock beat wingsuit - KarlM

[Harmless 0]

psst... that's a monitor... not a computer. But I wouldn't expect you Mac guys to understand the difference

As for OP... why are you running a decade old operating system?

Try http://www.ubuntu.com you might like it. And if not, you wasted nothing but an hour.

"Damn you Gravity, you win again"

[TrophyHusband 0]

sp3 went fine, and once that was installed, sp3 went fine. tons of updates have installed. getting itunes now. things seem to be smoothing out.

"Your scrotum is quite nice" - Skymama
www.kjandmegan.com

[TrophyHusband 0]

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As for OP... why are you running a decade old operating system?

because i already have it and when working properly, it does everything i need it to do so no reason to spend money to get something more up to date when i don't need it. the hard drive just needed to be wiped and the os reinstalled after 6 years of use.

"Your scrotum is quite nice" - Skymama
www.kjandmegan.com

[SkyBastard 0]

Also XP has been proven to be awesome. Vista has proven itself to be shite and as for W7...

Dude #320
"Superstitious" is just a polite way of saying "incredibly fucking stupid".
DONK!

[Harmless 0]

If you finished the rest of my post, you'd have seen I suggested an OS that also requires you to spend no money, and in my opinion (unless you are trying to do something special and specific) provides much less of a headache.

"Damn you Gravity, you win again"

[piisfish 135]

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psst... that's a monitor... not a computer. But I wouldn't expect you Mac guys to understand the difference

1- try and find a picture of a computer flying through a window
2- everything is in my screen, so I would indeed not know the difference

scissors beat paper, paper beat rock, rock beat wingsuit - KarlM

[MarkM 0]

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when working properly

That's sort of the issue though, XP is so old it's a PITA to get working properly. Win7 or Ubuntu you would've just installed it and been done. Everything basically just works out of the box.

[Cornholio 0]

I've downloaded a ton of Dell drivers over the years and they usually come in a compressed form. If you downloaded it to your desktop and then opened it, it should do one of two things. 1. Extract all the drivers to a subfolder on your desktop. You'll have to look on the desktop to see if there was a new folder created.
2. Ask you where to extract. In that case, just type in c:\temp as the easiest path to remember.

Now do 1 of two things:
1. Open the folder where the files were extracted to. Dell usually provides an executable file with their drivers. Run the executable (setup.exe) and it will install the drivers. Reboot.
2. Using device manager, find the device with the yellow exclamation mark or red x probably called "ethernet controller" and right click - choose properties/update driver. Then choose the path where you extracted the drivers. Let windows do it's thing and then reboot.

There's really no other options - it's windows after all. :) If that fails then I would call up Dell and ask them. It would be worth the 50 bucks or whatever their out-of-warranty support call costs to get this fixed rather than buying a new computer.

Edit: Oh and yes, BTW, I own a mac and several PCs, some still running great on XP and no plans to upgrade any time soon.

Butthead: Whoa! Burritos for breakfast!
Beavis: Yeah! Yeah! Cool!
bellyflier on the dz.com hybrid record jump

[TrophyHusband 0]

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There's really no other options - it's windows after all. :) If that fails then I would call up Dell and ask them. It would be worth the 50 bucks or whatever their out-of-warranty support call costs to get this fixed rather than buying a new computer.

i fixed it by looking up the driver on dell support using the service tag rather than model number.

i will never pay dell support. a while back i re-installed the os on my laptop and needed the product key. they wanted my credit card number so they could charge me $45 to tell me the key. i argued with the guy for a while and finally hung up. i then found the key on a sticker on the bottom of the lapop. fuck them.

"Your scrotum is quite nice" - Skymama
www.kjandmegan.com

[Mr.Bill 0]

Just for future reference, if you need a lost product key there is a free program called magic jellybean. Google it, it works great.

[theonlyski 3]

If you have the forward thinking to use it before you wipe the computer, yes, that will probably work...

Although, any computer that has a legit version of windows should have the COA on it. Dell Ive noticed on my new one, likes to hide that under the battery.

"I may be a dirty pirate hooker...but I'm not about to go stand on the corner." iluvtofly
DPH -7, TDS 578, Muff 5153, SCR 14890
I'm an asshole, and I approve this message

[theonlyski 3]

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There's really no other options - it's windows after all. :) If that fails then I would call up Dell and ask them. It would be worth the 50 bucks or whatever their out-of-warranty support call costs to get this fixed rather than buying a new computer.

i fixed it by looking up the driver on dell support using the service tag rather than model number.

i will never pay dell support. a while back i re-installed the os on my laptop and needed the product key. they wanted my credit card number so they could charge me $45 to tell me the key. i argued with the guy for a while and finally hung up. i then found the key on a sticker on the bottom of the lapop. fuck them.

Dell tech support sucks, dell comptuers are pretty good... especially the laptops, I can download the entire service manual for any system and see exactly which screws have to come out to get where I need to go... which makes a hell of a lot of difference on laptops.

Glad you caught on about the service tag, and thats what its for


So, am I the computer god here?

"I may be a dirty pirate hooker...but I'm not about to go stand on the corner." iluvtofly
DPH -7, TDS 578, Muff 5153, SCR 14890
I'm an asshole, and I approve this message

[TrophyHusband 0]

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So, am I the computer god here?

it was your post that made my try my service tag on the dell support site, but you didn't specifically say to do that so i'm not quite ready to label you with that monitor. however, i will annoint you with that if you can fix a few other glitches for me.

1. whenever i'm loading a web page or a program is opening up, the pointer on my screen that moves when i move the mouse locks up or gets choppy.

2. i have another hard drive in the computer, but it doesn't show up when i open "my computer". how do i get this to show up, and can make my computer use this additional space in order for it to run smoother.

3. before reformatting the harddrive, i backed it up on a seagate black armour external hard drive. after i got the os re-installed, i restored my files. now everything appears to be back except for my music. when i open itunes, it looks as if its all there, but when i try to play a song, i get a message that says "the song "name of song" could not be used because the original file could not be found. would you like to locate it?" wtf? is this one of those bullshit itunes things that sees this as me copying the music to another computer and now won't let me use it?

4. during startup, a shitload of processes start. i'm sure i don't need them all to start and they are probably just slowing down my computer. when i turn stuff off and restart my computer, it starts up in diagnostic mode.

5. my external drive is 1 terabyte. can i create a space on it separate from backup section that i can use as another hard drive for storage?

"Your scrotum is quite nice" - Skymama
www.kjandmegan.com

[theonlyski 3]

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So, am I the computer god here?

it was your post that made my try my service tag on the dell support site, but you didn't specifically say to do that so i'm not quite ready to label you with that monitor. however, i will annoint you with that if you can fix a few other glitches for me.

1. whenever i'm loading a web page or a program is opening up, the pointer on my screen that moves when i move the mouse locks up or gets choppy.

2. i have another hard drive in the computer, but it doesn't show up when i open "my computer". how do i get this to show up, and can make my computer use this additional space in order for it to run smoother.

3. before reformatting the harddrive, i backed it up on a seagate black armour external hard drive. after i got the os re-installed, i restored my files. now everything appears to be back except for my music. when i open itunes, it looks as if its all there, but when i try to play a song, i get a message that says "the song "name of song" could not be used because the original file could not be found. would you like to locate it?" wtf? is this one of those bullshit itunes things that sees this as me copying the music to another computer and now won't let me use it?

4. during startup, a shitload of processes start. i'm sure i don't need them all to start and they are probably just slowing down my computer. when i turn stuff off and restart my computer, it starts up in diagnostic mode.

5. my external drive is 1 terabyte. can i create a space on it separate from backup section that i can use as another hard drive for storage?

I will work with you a bit when I get off work today, but all of what your asking should be easy fixes.

The mouse is probably getting choppy cause of low resourses, open taskmanager (start> run> taskmgr.exe) click on performance and you can see your processor and memory usage, youll probably see one high... if thats the case, let me know.

2 Your second hard drive may not be formatted, if there was nothing on there, or you just got it, you can format it by going to your computer management (right click on my computer> manage) go to disk management, you should see the drive on your right side of the screen, if its greyed out (or you get a window that says to initilize the drive) then it isnt formatted, you can right click, choose create partition of some sort, (dont remember exact wording right now) and go defaults all the way thru the screen, it will format it and show up in your my computer.

Itunes isnt difficult, you probably just need to delete everything in there, dont delete the files when it asks, just delete it from the itunes, then have itunes search for music... should be something like file> add folder. put the directory of your music folder in there and you should be good!

youre probably using msconfig to turn the services and such off, there is an option in there to reboot into safe mode (may be on the first page of msconfig, there are 3 options: normal, selective, diagnositc) choose selective, try that.

The drive, you should be able to just make a new folder and put your stuff there... I dont like using software like the seagate or western digital software to back up hard drives, look on the microsoft website for SyncToy... its pretty good at what it does, and can run automatically as often as you want. If you go that route, i would use the second drive in your computer as the backup.

When I get off work, ill give you my phone number and you can call me, Ill tell you what I ALWAYS do with my XP comptuers that saves me ALOT of heartache when it comes to reloading them.

"I may be a dirty pirate hooker...but I'm not about to go stand on the corner." iluvtofly
DPH -7, TDS 578, Muff 5153, SCR 14890
I'm an asshole, and I approve this message

[TrophyHusband 0]

i just looked at the drives, and found something interesting that i already should have known but may have forgotten since i put the extra hard drive in there about 5 years ago. the drive that came with the computer is an 80gig drive. the one that i bought, installed, and forgot about is 160 gig. before doing anything else, should i re-install the os on the bigger drive? if so, should i physically swap the drives around so that the big one is in the "c:" slot, or is it easy to rename? whatever drive i use, it needs to be "c:" so when i do my restore i can just tell it to put everything back where it came from.

"Your scrotum is quite nice" - Skymama
www.kjandmegan.com

[Bolas 5]

I'd leave the OS on the smaller drive unless the bigger one is much faster.

Having your OS and apps on the one drive and all your data on the other bigger one lets you reformat and reinstall apps without effecting your data files.

Stupidity if left untreated is self-correcting
If ya can't be good, look good, if that fails, make 'em laugh.

[Harmless 0]

Quote

i just looked at the drives, and found something interesting that i already should have known but may have forgotten since i put the extra hard drive in there about 5 years ago. the drive that came with the computer is an 80gig drive. the one that i bought, installed, and forgot about is 160 gig. before doing anything else, should i re-install the os on the bigger drive? if so, should i physically swap the drives around so that the big one is in the "c:" slot, or is it easy to rename? whatever drive i use, it needs to be "c:" so when i do my restore i can just tell it to put everything back where it came from.

Seriously no offense meant, but I cannot stop laughing at that.

"Damn you Gravity, you win again"

[theonlyski 3]

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Quote

i just looked at the drives, and found something interesting that i already should have known but may have forgotten since i put the extra hard drive in there about 5 years ago. the drive that came with the computer is an 80gig drive. the one that i bought, installed, and forgot about is 160 gig. before doing anything else, should i re-install the os on the bigger drive? if so, should i physically swap the drives around so that the big one is in the "c:" slot, or is it easy to rename? whatever drive i use, it needs to be "c:" so when i do my restore i can just tell it to put everything back where it came from.

Seriously no offense meant, but I cannot stop laughing at that.

Hrm, 6 year enlistment, Computer knowledge... either a 25b or a 25s... which is it?

"I may be a dirty pirate hooker...but I'm not about to go stand on the corner." iluvtofly
DPH -7, TDS 578, Muff 5153, SCR 14890
I'm an asshole, and I approve this message

[Harmless 0]

Wrong branch 3C0X2

But the vast majority of my computer knowledge comes from personal interest.

"Damn you Gravity, you win again"

[TrophyHusband 0]

i'm pretty ungood at this stuff, but as long as i can be a souce of laughter in the world, all is well.

"Your scrotum is quite nice" - Skymama
www.kjandmegan.com

[TrophyHusband 0]

i hereby annoint the "computer god". you earn this title not just for your superior computer knowledge, but you generosity with your time and your willingness to share said knowledge. i'm very grateful for your help via pm's and email. if you get sent down to the eglin afb area for some reason, shoot me a pm and we'll feed you and provide you with fine libations.

"Your scrotum is quite nice" - Skymama
www.kjandmegan.com