Greetings thecow and thread:
This cool thread has always reminded me of a fish cleaning station situated near a quiet and peaceful tropical coral-reef, where both sharp-toothed sharks and newbie groupers are equally, graciously, welcomed to learn how to rid themselves of pesky PC parasites and other technical impediments and confusions. It's a needed and noble service. Kudos to thecow and contributors!
I'm running W2K on a 1.0 GHz TV Celeron w/768 RAM now connecting on a 56K dial-up to Earthlink [where my son is a phone-in tech rep]. I only recently, and finally thankfully, extracted myself from AOL. Praise the [insert name of deity or deep core belief] for that! I've recently added a TDK indiDVD ±R/±RW/CD burner and a Maxtor 200G HD making the old 40G HD a slave.
Here's the situation: I installed W2K on the new Maxtor then installed the TDK indiDVD burner. I performed a re-boot after the software installation and later tried to shut down the computer for the night. A blue screen zipped by and, instead of shutting down, the computer automatically re-booted. Shuffling around somewhere in a menu option I found a switch that disabled the 're-boot on failure' feature and, as I tried to shutdown again, got a clear look at the blue screen now staying up on the monitor. Says the following:
***STOP: (long string of numbers with lots of 0's with / 's inside -- I'll fetch 'em if they're important)
DRIVER_POWER_STATE_FAILURE
Beginning dump of physical memory.
Physical memory dump complete. Contact your system administrator or technical support group.
The rule of "Duh!" tells me that it must somehow be the burner's fault, but TDK support spent a long time tech-rep to tech-rep talking with my son, who understands much more than I, and came up with nary a clue. A Google search doesn't seem to get anything that's any help except that the D_P_S_F seems somehow linked to W2K. What to do? What to do?
BTW, TC, I'm happy to report you've got a mirrored meatspace site in my friend Gary who, after administrating a much needed verbal dope-slapping, got me finally to bail on AOL then alerted me to the wonderful Mozilla Firebird and helped load and set-up Zone Alarm, SpywareBlaster SpywareGuard, Avast!, Spybot, AdAware, Mail Washer, and Hijackthis. He also made me embarrassingly aware of how much I really don't know that I really do need to know. Man, he scared me silly telling me about that little 28K trojan called Beast. [Shudder] Next up on his to-do task list for me is registry cleaning with RegSeeker and something called VIN/tunneling that he wants us to experiment with.
As a consequence, I've ramped up the creaky geezer learning curve as high as I can crank it, but still there's this nagging realization that I'll never ever be able to catch-up to where Gary and you guys are. Nevertheless, the longest journey…
I feel comfortable knowing that both thecow and my good friend, Gary, tout and use almost exactly the same freeware. This greatly increases my level of confidence in the accuracy of the advice generously tendered by all contributors to this fine forum.
TIA
Jerry in Omaha
PS – I just downloaded WinAmp 5.0 and can't figure how to get rid of the choppy internet radio reception. I searched everywhere to find a way to increase the buffer size or make some other tweak. I have a legacy AWE64 SoundBlaster card. A broadband connection would be nice but not feasible just yet. Any other suggestions? |
