WhistlinDixie

Bad Luck Computers

Computers seem to have turned against me this past month. First, my laptop stopped keeping time correctly. Started acting up after a night on which I left it to defrag and virus scan. Wasn’t too bad at first, only losing a few minutes a day. It got progressively worse, getting to the point where it would lose around 15 seconds every minute! A little digging revealed that the computer’s BIOS was still keeping time correctly. This was made evident by the fact that the computer never lost time while it was turned off.

A little research online revealed that Windows actually keeps track of time by itself during idle cycles. Since it is a low-priority task, it can be skipped some times when your CPU is under high load, leading to the clock losing time. This description seemed to match my symptoms somewhat (I didn’t seem to have a pegged CPU). Since my computer had been acting up anyway, I went ahead and reformatted and reinstalled XP. Unfortunately, after loading up my normal compliment of programs (virtually the same set that I have been running for years), I noticed that my computer was losing time at the same clip that it was before. Needless to say, I am pretty peeved, especially since my lappy just went out of warranty in mid-June. Next week, I plan to put in my spare hard drive (it’s dying, slowly but surely) with an empty XP install to see if it is also affected. My money says that it will be.

Second issue: my external hard drive, which holds my backups, just started acting up a few days ago. It was accessed every few seconds, and trying to view the contents of at least one folder caused Windows Explorer to hang and the hard drive to have constant access. The only way to stop this without killing explorer.exe was to unplug the drive and then plug it in again. I decided to run SpinRite on the drive since it seems to fix those weird drive issues. Twenty eight hours later, the drive had finished being scanned, so I placed it back in its enclosure and hooked it back up to my lappy. Unfortunately, same results as before. I unhooked the drive to un-hang explorer and then plugged it back in again. For some reason, it didn’t show up. I unplugged it again and plugged it back in. Still, no drive showed up. I popped into the drive management panel to see that the drive itself was recognized, however, Windows claimed that it was unpartitioned. It sure as heck wasn’t a few minutes prior! I decided to call it quits since it was one in the morning at that point.

This afternoon, I got the demo version of Active@ Undelete and ran it on the drive to see what it could find. Disappointingly, it found nothing. I decided to see if it could be read if placed in another computer (testing to see if the enclosure is bad). First computer that I tested it in was a P2-400MHz running XP Pro SP2. Adding it to the computer prevented it from booting. My guess is that the computer’s BIOS is unable to handle 200GB drives. I tried it next in my parent’s new Core 2 Duo E4300 machine running Vista Home Premium. Everything booted fine this time, but it also showed that the drive had no partitions.

Dejected, I placed the drive back in the enclosure and hooked it back up to my laptop. When I went to start running Active@ Undelete on the drive in the Low Level mode (apx 72 hours to complete), I clicked the start button, only to have it report that it had completed a few seconds later. I checked the drive and noticed that it was listed as having a paltry 512 kB capacity. I began worrying that the electronics on the drive had died. I tried unplugging the drive and giving the computer a minute to "readjust" before plugging the drive back in. This time, the drive showed up reporting the correct capacity. When I started running Active@ Undelete on the drive again, it immediately reported that it had found a deleted partition. Joy! I’ll let it run overnight to make sure that everything is found. If it is so, then I’ll fork over $40 so that I can get the version that can recover files over 64 kB in size. (Stupid demo limitations.)

Last issue: project computer. I’m fixing up a computer for my church to be a label printer for CDs. This would be the same P2-400MHz that I used to test my hard drive. Anyway, being the pragmatic techie that I am, the first step that I take in refurbing a computer is reinstalling Windows. I used the Magical Jelly Bean to retrieve the Windows CD key from the install since I did not have the original install media. I wrote it down, then started reinstalling from my custom XP Pro install disc, complete with SP2 slipstreamed in. I got to the CD key screen and typed it in. Invalid key. WTF! I tried it about twenty times, but still got the same error. I decided that I wanted to get the computer up and running, so I typed in my personal CD key, meaning to replace it in the future after I got the original CD key from the previous owner. I finished the install and booted the computer. (XP is surprisingly snappy on this computer.) I went to activate and got a message telling me that I’ve activated this key too many times. WTF! I don’t recall there being a limited number of times that you can activate XP. I decided to give up on the project until I get a good key since you can’t even install updates without having activated.

One last rant for the night. Why does SMC make a USB wi-fi adapter that does not work with XP’s wireless networking app? It forces you to use it’s own app to connect, which is just stupid. Our US Robotics USB wi-fi adapter works just fine, so why not SMC.