Originally Posted by Dr. James Reinstall maybe? My XP was giving my jip with HL2 games a while ago. A quick format and graphic card driver update later and its been running smoothly ever since.
I'd reinstall it, but I truly do not feel like doing that. I'm finally re-adjusting to my computer after formating a new hard drive in January.
<rant>
well guess what. by the end of tonight i won't even have a desktop anymore. few days ago, everytime i booted windows from GRUB it would say there were inconsistencies on one of my disks, then proceed to scan, and about .5 seconds later, cancel the scan and boot windows. then i noticed my dvd drive wouldnt read any cds, not even blank ones, nor dvds. so i get on dell tech chat and the dude goes through this process and ultimately calls me up to walk me through rebooting and booting from the vista install disk. so says he that my cd drive works fine, its just fuckin windows thats pissing on it, and i have to do a clean install of vista. only i cant back anything up because the... ahem... DVD DRIVE DOESNT WORK!!! so i had to mickey mouse an old hdd and a old external cd burner case together to form "ghetto external hdd" which is 20 gigs. i hope to god its enough space and this stupid hdd format and reinstall works.
</rant>
i'll have my plain white desktop up in a few hours
Calling Dell to help you fix the problem was your first mistake. To assume that any solution of theres was going to help you, besides reformatting, is kind of silly. I have gone to eMachines over 8 times asking them how to fix a problem, and the only solution I received was "System Restore" and if that doesn't work "Format Hard drive".
What you should do, is try partitioning your hard drive, install Windows again. This way your CD/DVD drive is recognized on a copy of Windows. You will still be able to access all your files on the other partition, so now what you want to do is burn those files over and then reformat and reinstall. If you haven't tried this already though, which I'm sure you have.. just throwing it out there. I lost power to my computer a few weeks ago, something happened, not exactly sure what. Every time I tried to boot, I would lock up just after the Windows logo. I used the Windows Vista disk and I had it check for and repair any problems. Sat back for about 15 minutes, and it seemed to fix everything up.
Another thing you might want to try is, completely uninstall your CD drives. By that I mean, go into the hardware manager, storage devices or whatever, and uninstall them completely. Then when you reboot Vista, it should automatically reinstall them. Maybe what happened is, when something went kooky, something caused the current drivers to remain functional, but not capable of detecting specific hardware.
I'm just blowing smoke out of my ass, but 9x out of 10 when I do it... my computer in one way or another gets fixed without resorting to reformatting.
By now you prolly already formated, but at least my post will still be here for anyone else.
PS:
Oh crap... this was the desktop competition post. I completely forgot, because the topic was so off. Sorry, continue with the competition. (If you want to IM me about what I said above, mail me.)
Tim, is that a 16:10 and 4:3 dual monitor setup? never seen that before! (edit: lol it's not. just my broken perception)
I've disabled my 2nd monitor now. There's something not quite right with XP doing dual monitors (that and the night/day brightness difference between my Dell and iMac monitor ).
Advertisement
Sorry, continue with the competition. (If you want to IM me about what I said above, mail me.
Edited by the Author.
