quiz

[Nitestick]

to get things moving again

problem: timmy's computer is starting to get quite a lot slower than it used to be. his hdd is getting extremely fragmented. when he tries to burn dvd's he gets very skippy discs and disc errors. he thinks its due to his fragmented and tired old filesystem so he decides to reformat. after reformatting and reinstalling windows XP he finds that dvd's burn just as bad if not worse than before.

question: what might timmy have forgot to do when he reinstalled windows xp that is causing his problems. sorry i couldn't get to specific with the info otherwise it would be too obvious.

 

[tractorboy]

Forgot to test his RAM first ?

Did he delete the partion and reformat with the xp cd ?

 

[Apokalipse]

disable system restore
set paging file
disable other services you won't need (messenger, indexing)
remove dust inside the case
check that he has 80 wire IDE cables
reinstall drivers for everything

 

[killians45]

chipset drivers for the MBD. Probably using generic, all other listing in bios should be fine (like LBA, UATA, or whatever config he had to begin with).

 

[Nitestick]

apokalipse and killian you are both right. once again sorry i couldn't get too specific. i was thinking that he used the generic drivers for his ide controller. this can cause some pretty big problems. for instance on one of my pc's, a PII i can not get windows xp drivers for my ide controller so i am stuck with the generic and can not enable DMA. thank god i multi-boot. i can encode and burn a video in an hour and a half less using windows 98se.

 

[Nitestick]

timmy installs an old network card. suddenly timmy's printer (connected to LPT1) stops working. what would be the most likely cause of the problem (be specific, i'm talking numbers) and how can this be fixed.

 

[Nitestick]

bump....i thought someone would have got this by now. all you need to know is what is causing the problem and then search for the specifics

 

[kurt2439]

the interrupts are jammed up, buy a USB Printer haha.

Or move the nic to a diff slot, or bust it up in the device manager and get them off the same IRQ, I think lpt lives on 7.

 

[tractorboy]

It also depends how old of a nic it is...if it is the IRQ, multiple devices can use the same irq in plug and play.

 

[Nitestick]

thats it kurt... irq7 is the answer i was looking for. good to see someone new joining in.