Speaking of freeware/tricks, is there a way to get back the good old ctrl-alt-del on a XP system?
What do you mean? What's it not doing for you?
Sometimes XP locks up and I can't reboot.
I can alt-tab, the mouse works, but that's about it. Alt-f4 doesn't work, ctrl-alt-del doesn't do anything visible. Then slowly the windows start to degrade (they display less and less text). Only an hard reboot works.
On Win9x even if the ctrl-alt-del window didn't display, the second ctrl-alt-del would initiate the reboot.
On XP, a second ctrl-alt-del does nothing normally, even less when it's locked. One has to click Shutdown [no shortcut!] and Restart [no shortcut either!].
Ctrl+Alt+Del on my machine shows me the admin panel thingy where it lets me lock desktop, get the task manager etc etc. I think its time for you to reinstall windows, ne?
Same here.
>>4
I think that's the point he was making. Pressing Ctrl+Alt+Del a second time used to reboot the machine even when the screen was locked/frozen/unusable, but now it just shows the admin panel and there's no way to shut down or restart without clicking with the mouse (which is pretty hard to do when the screen's unusable).
I've had that happen to me several times, particularly when a DirectX app breaks.
I think when my machine is that unstable that its a press of the reset button thats in order.
>I think its time for you to reinstall windows, ne?
No.
Lock-ups often mean low-level buggy drivers, and I have the latest.
I suspect that one of the culprits to be the drivers for my on-board ethernet card, because it sometimes crashes after I stop a download. Reinstalling Windows won't make the buggy drivers become magically debugged. As for buying another one, I bought two and they don't work. They get recognized etc but they dont initiate transfers. At least the integrated one works most of the time.
Another surefire way to lock XP: clicking on the "!>" (eject?) icon of MediaPlayerClassic. Buggy MPC? Buggy DirectX? Dunno. I have the latest versions. I just have to be careful to never touch that icon.
I would have preferred an alt-ctrl-del because I believe that a-c-d can close open files before a reboot. Well, on Win9x it did, I got no scandisk penalty that way. On XP + NTFS I'm not sure - scandisk never kicks in after a hard reboot.
>>9
Newest doesn't mean less buggy, especially when it comes to drivers. Try to make sure all your drivers are WHQL certified, which definitely means no zomg-1-fps-more-detonator ab.yz leaks.
WHQLed drivers DO make a big difference. I used to get Generals' infamous Serious Error all the time until I switched to using WHQL only drivers. Had no problems since.
Windows instability is virtually almost always guaranteed to be a result of a buggy 3rd party kernel mode driver. NTFS is transaction based, so no crazy crosslinked files from a forced reboot. But logging off properly lets Windows save all your data and flush the buffers first. >_>
Since some days I have difficulty to connect to the internet when I have just switched on my computer. Maybe its the ethernet card itself that is on the way out and not the drivers. I should test this theory with another ethernet card.
I recall people in the past telling me about having their ethernet card dying on them. I wonder why, those cards dont have moving parts.
Hairline cracks developing in soldering connections due to thermal expansion and contraction, the electrolyte in the capacitors evaporating, electron migration, electricity surges, a high-energy particle like a gamma ray (lol), and a whole slew of other things.
> the electrolyte in the capacitors evaporating
This one has turned pretty serious these last few years. A japanese company developed a way to make electrolyte capacitors that use water as an electrolyte. This is much cheaper than the older methods, but the reason it hasn't been used is because the process creates hydrogen gas, which builds up inside the sealed capacitor. The japanese company managed to solve this problem.
Now, the taiwanese capacitor manufacturers wanted in on this too, and some industrial espionage later, they got the electrolyte formula for themselves. Or so they thought - they got the wrong one, and nobody apparently realized until millions and millions of cheap electrolyte capacitors had already been sold. These do NOT properly solve the hydrogen buildup problem, and have a tendency to burst open. And now they're in everything. I've personally had one motherboard replaced because of them.
Speaking of soldering, my mobo busted two solders a while ago.
There is that tiny chipset, and on it there is that enormous heatsink clamped on it, held with a spring onto two small U-shaped hooks that are soldered on the mobo. The mobo is placed vertically, and so there is additional strain on the hooks from the weight of the heatsink.
Well, one day the hooks popped out. ^^; And shortly after the computer started to behave erratically, so that heatsink is really needed. I put some superglue on the hooks and reclamped the sink. Lo and below, the glue didnt last long and the sink sank again. I used another brand of superglue and poured a lot of glue this time. It has been holding well since.
And this is from a brand name mobo. I hope that this was the only cheap soldering on this mobo. Maybe they used a crappy compound for the soldering batch of this mobo? Or just the engineers didnt account for the weight of the heatsink?
>>14 errata: swap/lo and below/lo and behold
>>4
Whether you get the old style dialog or the new fangled XP one is a logon policy setting.