Ah, tech tips please

[laurence]

O.k., so I'm trying to ressurect an older computer and put in on the home network for DW. Everything was cool, it was pretty much up and configured, then it started not hitting some common sites (yahoo, etc.) and otherwise just acting flaky. This is a salvage computer from work, so I know it's been put through the ringer. I do a little tweaking, and reboot, and I get the message, "login user interface failed, nwgina.dll failed to load" - crap! This computer is so old it's got remnants of when we ran Netware at work! The netware login was uninstalled a long time ago, but some how a piece of it reared it's ugly head when I was busy patching/updating.

So I can hit the C$ share over the network from my other computer, any tips? Load the registry hive and tweak-what? I'll do some research, but I've been working on various computer stuff for family and friends all day and a little frazzled at this point. Mebe it's cerveza time....

 

[wabmester]

Dude, one word for you: reimage.

BTW, I've been thinking about bringing up deadmoo OS X on a spare box, but I haven't been inspired yet.   Perfect project for somebody with stolen hardware from work. 

 

[laurence]

Yeah, I just went out and paid that #&(#$& Bill Gates his blood money just now to get another license. Stolen Salvage, I swear! I've been advised by my lead that I should get a box with SuSE up at home and get familiar with it. Like securing Irix, Solaris, and Windows wasn't enough....

 

[Craig]

Best advice I received from our IT Manager with a similar situation is to reformat the hard drive (low level), install your preferred version of Windows (assuming you want to stay with MS), and then install your other software. A lot of trouble, but perhaps easier than trying to troubleshoot one problem after the other.

Good luck!

 

[Nords]

O.k., so I'm trying to ressurect an older computer and put in on the home network for DW. 

At your new hourly rate and considering how much time she'll be spending on it when she's working out of the house, how hard would it be to buy a $500 generic reliable Wintel box and get on with your life?

My FIL is running an old Win98 system that I "upgraded" last year from a 28.8 to a 56K modem. The RAM-chip substrates are so brittle that I was afraid of breaking them. It was sheer hell finding a driver for the CD-RW drive I installed for him. The machine is so clogged with adware & other crap that it takes five minutes to boot. He's never put a single icon on the desktop, yet it's filled with the junk that gets added by every website or CD software. I don't think he's ever updated the OS or made a backup, let alone defragged the hard drive. His ISP is Wal-Mart and he's still getting used to IE5.0. When his e-mail account gets too full of spam, he signs up for a new e-mail address, tells the people he cares about, and deletes the old account. While I'm sure that this machine would be a supreme frugal challenge to restore to its original grandeur and full capability, I have other things that I want to do with my time.

So is it a hobby for you? Because it's sure costing a lot of time!

If it's a hobby, have you spent any time with Gibson Research's SpinRite? It's worked wonders for my sick hard drives.

 

[laurence]

Eh, re-image with xp did the trick, it's a P-3 box with 512 RAM, not terrible, and so far (in the couple hours DW has spent on it) it's working great. The monitor was just too crappy, though, so we bought her a viewsonic flat panel.....I only have a viewsonic flat screen crt, I keep finding myself looking over at her desk longingly....how's that for conspicuous consumption?

BTW, say what you will about Microsoft, but XP autodetected every piece of hardware, grabbed an IP from the router and was on it's way without any user intervention. The only thing is, how will Microsoft convince us to buy the next OS? (secret code in patches to make it start to bug out, that's my guess).

 

[Marshac]

The only thing is, how will Microsoft convince us to buy the next OS?

It'll be much more secure, although Win2k3 sp1 and WinXP 64 are almost there- neither will allow kernel-mode drivers

http://www.microsoft.com/technet/pr...SP1/9e18ab61-d4f1-4c71-bade-64ac4d8bfc62.mspx

 

[laurence]

All my programmer buddies just got some more job security!

Customer required us to eliminate all rsh and go secure shell last year, "sure, that'll be $150/hour x 9 bajillion hours to re-write all your code."

 

[cube_rat]

Dude, one word for you: reimage.

Exactly my first thought when reading L's post. I googled the error message and got a fair amount of hits.

 

[laurence]

I know, and I did, but re-image tastes of defeat. Back in my desktop tech days, we would brag about how we avoided the re-image on a user's problem, and then say things like, "huh, johnny's no good, he'd fix an email error with a re-image!".