WinME is the devil's work
Aug. 27th, 2005 05:22 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
tephraBut we all know that. And really this has less to do with ME than with baby Gateway boxen. I believe I mentioned that I wiped out ME and put 2kPro on my brother's machine. And it was working pretty nice, right up until I managed to download AVG and install it. It found a virus immediately but that wasn't a surprise given how long the machine had been up and online trying to download AVG in the first place. The surprise, and problem, started when I walked away from the machine while it was scanning.
I came back to a black screen with a dump of memory displayed. Remembering that I had not disabled the screensaver before walking away I just rebooted, turned off the screensaver, and restarted the scan. It dumped memory again scanning some ntoskrl file. Great. Rebooted again and sat through some very unsettling noises from the hard drive. Boot failed with a memory dump. It was late, and hot, so I turned it off and went to bed.
Booted up fine today, so I saved the AVG install file to the thumbdrive so I wouldn't have to download it again, and started poking around. Found remnants of the WinME installation. Crud. Started a reinstall of 2k, this time I decided to reformat the partition rather than just opting for a "clean install". Drive failure halfway through the format. I've tried everything but the thing is just not recoverable.
Needless to say my brother is not happy. Note that if he had bothered to call me before taking it into his head to pay someone $300 to "fix" his computer he wouldn't be out that $300 plus the cost of a new PC, he's just be out the cost of a new PC. But he "knows" ME (as in it doesn't scare him silly any longer, just makes me swear at it more) so he was against the idea of a new PC running anything other than ME.
We have a cousin that is continually replacing her PCs, she's got a decent one she's willing to sell. Unfortunately I think $500 is a bit much for it since the one I got back in March was that much and was new, not a year or two old. I'll have to cram some comparison shopping into the next couple hours and a few hours tomorrow. Ideally I'd like to have his replacement here and set up by tomorrow late afternoon at the absolute latest. That way I can set up the dialup connection, email, and his printer and scanner. Gods know that no one else in the family is up to that, and I'd rather he didn't pay the rip-off artist to work on his new PC.
I came back to a black screen with a dump of memory displayed. Remembering that I had not disabled the screensaver before walking away I just rebooted, turned off the screensaver, and restarted the scan. It dumped memory again scanning some ntoskrl file. Great. Rebooted again and sat through some very unsettling noises from the hard drive. Boot failed with a memory dump. It was late, and hot, so I turned it off and went to bed.
Booted up fine today, so I saved the AVG install file to the thumbdrive so I wouldn't have to download it again, and started poking around. Found remnants of the WinME installation. Crud. Started a reinstall of 2k, this time I decided to reformat the partition rather than just opting for a "clean install". Drive failure halfway through the format. I've tried everything but the thing is just not recoverable.
Needless to say my brother is not happy. Note that if he had bothered to call me before taking it into his head to pay someone $300 to "fix" his computer he wouldn't be out that $300 plus the cost of a new PC, he's just be out the cost of a new PC. But he "knows" ME (as in it doesn't scare him silly any longer, just makes me swear at it more) so he was against the idea of a new PC running anything other than ME.
We have a cousin that is continually replacing her PCs, she's got a decent one she's willing to sell. Unfortunately I think $500 is a bit much for it since the one I got back in March was that much and was new, not a year or two old. I'll have to cram some comparison shopping into the next couple hours and a few hours tomorrow. Ideally I'd like to have his replacement here and set up by tomorrow late afternoon at the absolute latest. That way I can set up the dialup connection, email, and his printer and scanner. Gods know that no one else in the family is up to that, and I'd rather he didn't pay the rip-off artist to work on his new PC.
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Date: 2005-08-27 09:56 pm (UTC):)
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Date: 2005-08-28 09:54 pm (UTC)I'm working on setting up the clone to my PC now. I forgot how much junk came pre-installed. O.O