"What do you want to re-install today?" by Troy H. Cheek on Nov 15, 2004

If you can read this, it means that I've re-installed enough software to have a usable system again. After re-installing Windows again.

Again.

However, I'm going to skip the usual "Bill Gates is the Anti-Christ" rant this time because, in all honesty, it's mostly my own fault.

All too often lately, I'd been seeing the Big Blue Screen O' Death displayed on my monitor. Well, actually, I'd been seeing it flickering across my monitor for a half second before my system spontaneously rebooted. Or I would come back from town and see that, instead of digitally recording my favorite TV show at 3pm, the system had recorded the first 11 minutes and 27 seconds and then rebooted.

Being a computer expert (*cough*) I did my usual routine, checking for viruses and adware and spyware and the like. I uninstalled a few programs I'd recently installed. I updated some drivers. I disable a few programs that ran at boottime whether I asked them to or not. I couldn't quite find the problem, so I did what any self-respecting computer expert would do.

I quit working on it and played a game. Raiden II for PC by Interplay, just in case you're wondering.

I chose a game that played straight from its CD so I wouldn't have to install anything and risk messing up the system any more. It even played music from the CD. Unfortunately, it took a few seconds to locate and load the music tracks every time it decided to change the music. This froze the game. It wasn't so bad when it did it between levels, but it would also change music in the middle of the level, during the heaviest firefight, probably to tell me that I was entering the heaviest firefight. There I'd be, blasting away, lining up for the perfect shot, then... Nothing for three or four seconds. Then right back into the firefight, now with omninous music. Threw off the game flow something serious.

Curiously enough, even turning the CD music OFF entirely from the game menu didn't stop the freezes. The game apparently loads the music even if it has no intention of playing it. In fact, you can't even take the game CD out without the game stopping and complaining about not being able to find the music that it just promised you it wasn't going to play anymore.

Reminds me of the joke about the king going off to battle. He left the key to his wife's chastity belt with his most trusted knight. If the king did not return within three months, the knight was to, shall we say, ensure that there would be an heir to the throne. As the king started to ride off on his horse, he was stopped at the gate by the knight. "Excuse me, you Majesty, but you left the wrong key!"

Yes, silly, which is also my opinion of a program that lets you turn off an option but still loads the data that option would have used.

Anyway, I decided that the game had something against my DVD+RW drive, a checksum mismatch or result code coming back wrong or something like that. No way to fix it short of a lot of work, and putting off a lot of work was exactly what I was doing by playing the game. If only there was some way to trick the game into loading the music off the harddrive...

Then I remembered a program I bought a long, long time ago. CD Copier Deluxe Gamers' Edition Utility, I think it was called. I remember using this to copy several game CDs to my harddrive so that they would load faster and so that I wouldn't have to dig out the original disks every time I wanted to play. I dug through my big pile o' disks and found the installation CD. I installed it, told it to tell my computer that I had a new CD-ROM drive called F:, and let it reboot my system.

About the time I clicked on the "OK" button, I got that old sinking feeling. I may have made a mistake. That old sinking feeling got worse when Windows threw up a blue screen in the middle of loading.

Reboot. Big Blue Screen O' Death. Reboot. Big Blue Screen O' Death.

Hmm. Obviously, the CD Copier software, which the documentation says is meant for DOS/Windows 95, will not function with Windows 2000/XP. No problem. I'll just reboot in safe mode and...

Safe mode. Big Blue Screen O' Death.

Command line mode. Big Blue Screen O' Death.

Emergency boot disk. Big Blue Screen O' Death.

Recovery console. Runs, but can't access the directories I need.

Repair a Windows setup. Big Blue Screen O' Death.

Usually in a case like this, I'd say FIDO (Forget It; Drive On!) and declare that it was time to reformat and re-install Windows anyway. This not a big deal because I keep all my essential drivers and application CDs neatly organized near the computer and keep all my data backed up on CD-RW on a weekly basis.

This time, however, I was loathe to do that. Half my application CDs were nowhere to be found, including a lot of thee once-free stuff that was no longer available for download. At first, I couldn't even find the driver disk for my motherboard, which I kind of needed if I wanted to use the onboard sound. Finally, I'd been lazy about using the CD burner lately and though the biggest part of my most vital data was neatly backed up, it was backed up in another folder on the very drive that I couldn't access because Windows wouldn't load.

About that time, I remembered that I had a second harddrive with plenty of space. I'm sure that installing Windows both on drive C: and drive D: is not recommended. But it did allow me to access all my data backups. Some apps ran when I copied them over to the new drive. Some I was able to download again or download freeware or opensource alternatives. I found that I'd even kept the original installation files for some of my freeware/shareware/open source apps. (I thought I'd kept ALL of them.)

Installed Mozilla. With a little fiddling, was able to copy over my bookmarks, address book, and email. Installed POPFile for email filtering and spam fighting, and was again able to copy over my old data files. Still had the original installation files for the video card drivers, TV capture card drivers, and digital video recorder software. BOINC is back online and searching for extra-terrestrial intelligence from home.

Some things I still haven't found. I can't play DVD movies in my DVD+RW drive yet. This is about my third DVD drive and about my third video card in this system. Between those six devices, I'm sure that I had at least three DVD movie players packed in. I can't find any of those install disks. I think I may have taken all of them with me that time when I installed one of my old DVD-ROM drives in my girlfriend Kitten's computer, which also had one of my old video cards. I remember thinking that one of the players only worked with one particular drive or card, and wanted to make sure she got the right one. I may have to see about getting those back. Not playing DVDs on the main system is really huge loss, as I play most DVDs on my widescreen laptop anyway, but it's the principle of the thing.

The firewall was a big pain in the butt, too. I had been using a particular software package which I can no longer recommend. The personal, student, non-profit organization edition of this firewall used to be free. Now, the personal edition is no longer supported, no longer available for download, and, if this newsgroup item I just read is correct, the company is threatening to sue anyone who distributes it. Oh, but you can buy the pro edition for $80.

I still had the original install files for the last version of the personal edition that I'd downloaded, so I installed from those. Which seemed to work except that my computer suddenly couldn't see the LAN, and the other LAN computers suddenly couldn't use Internet Connection Sharing. I remembered that use in an "internet gateway" computer was something the personal edition wasn't recommended for and was supposed to require the pro edition. Which back then was only $20. I also remembered that I didn't want to pay $20 and I had gotten the personal edition to work just fine anyway. I just couldn't remember exactly what I had done to get it to work. Even copying over the old config files didn't help.

I eventually gave up, did some searching, and am currently trying out GoldTach 1.6 Personal Firewall by MatinSoft. I don't give it a full Cheek.Org recommendation yet, as I've only used it a couple of days and have no idea how well it's going to work out. But I do know that of all the free and trialware firewalls I've tried in the last few days, GoldTach is the only one that instantly recognized my LAN as a LAN, automatically configured it with special privileges, and has not interfered with BOINC. So I'm giving it a shot. If it works out, I might do a full-blown review.

In the mean time, I've got to find my CD/DVD writing software so I can make some backups. Happy Hacking!

Copyright 2004 by Troy H. Cheek. Reprint with prior written permission only. Comments and questions to $mail:theview$