Louie,
Well I’ll be damned, you DO learn something new every day! Fortunately, I’m pretty comfortable with the registry so simple edits like that were no big deal.
I searched Microsoft’s knowledge base for this problem and found it was a known bug. The only fix they offered was the registry edit.
Thanks for the info, I tried it and indeed it did resolve the problem.
One of our printers literally crashed and burned today. When ask by the guy at the shop what was wrong with it, I said with a straight face, “Smoke comes out the back”.
It was cool.
Louie, how much free space do you have on your hard drive?
Have you run scandisk and defrag?
That awful sick feeling when I’m typing away online answering something on a thread and suddenly I look back up and NOTHING IS MOVING, the thing has frozen on me AGAIN!!! Okay, cross my fingers, ctrl + alt +delete…nothing, again…nothing…oh man,…why does THIS happen???
That’s when I KNOW I’m capable of murdering my PC! :mad:
The dang Any key. I can’t find it! Plus, my coffee cup holder is broken.
I have a 6.0 GB hard drive and as of May 1st, I have 1.87 GB filled.
And yes, I use scandisk and defrag every 2 weeks. It’s making this noise for the last 2 years! And it only makes noise in the first 15 sec. when I boot up. My brother says it’s dust that’s making the noise ( dust in hard drive? I hope not! ) but I think the drive is just cold and it’s warming up and making motor noises. Either that or I really do have a motorcycle engine in my PC. 
Anyone else has any problems with their PC? If you do, I might find a solution for you.
The bookmark to http://www.straightdope.com
Studi
Ahahahahahahahahahahah!
(wipes tear from eye)
Took me a while to figure that one out too 
Huh, everyone lost me over the things they hate about their computers.
Mine works. I have no complaints.
I just wish the cup holder were bigger and I had a cd-rom drive.
uh, wait… um…
smack on head
nevermind
Users are a cowardly, superstitous lot.
Hell, I’ve had 98 and NT dual booted before. Aint no big thang. Install 98, install NT, done. Don’t want 98 after that? Kill 98 and edit the boot.ini. Viola! NT only machine.
The only problem I see is NTFS vs Fat32. Which would prevent anything from being installed without a good FDISK, but is hardly more than a few minutes inconvenience.
Y’know… I never figured out where my customers found out about low-level formatting. Don’t they realize that most drives made in the 90’s don’t need to be low leveled, and in fact if the computer let you get away with it (which thank gods it usually doesn’t) it would permanently bork the drive? But yet, they always sound so sage when they try to suggest to me that it might be a good idea to do so, and they always look so sheepish when I put on my most horrified look and plead for them to tell me they haven’t done that already.
Poet,
The long haired man that you are :::::dreamy look on tech’s face::::::…I have successfully done a low level format, course that was using the disk that comes with my mother board
Most people don’t know about fdisk, which is a good thing.
I would hate to think what average users would do if they could do that and dink around in the BIOS, LOL, I know personally that messing with the two in the same session can be disasterous!
I don’t know which one pisses me off more often, my piddly 32 modem, or my 15 years old, desktop reject monitor.
Louie:
That motorcycle noise is probably the fan. And yeah, the fan might have dust in it… that happens. Get a can of compressed air, open the case, and use the air to clean the fan off. Might help, can’t hurt Could also be that the fan is getting ready to go south on you, and if that’s the case, it needs to be replaced.
The most annoying thing about mine is the noise too, but then again, my computer is an overclocked monster with 7 fans in it
What annoys me about my computer is the fact that it keeps on failing me. ARGH! It claimed to have a 32 meg RAM, but that’s only in ‘virtual memory’ so I can’t play any more Age of Empires 2! I can’t take this…its pure torture, not being able to complete my quest for world domination!
And now this worthless thing is freezing up on me. I’d beat it to death with a sledgehammer if only I could get a new one that works…
Raven,
32 MB of RAM is physical memory, virtual memory is a swap file that your computer uses on the hard drive.
How much room do you have on your hard drive? Also, I don’t recommend less than 64 MB RAM for most systems. If you are a gamer you should have absolutly no less than 96 MB RAM.
This computer I’m using right now has this very annoying quirk…first of all, the monitor I’m using takes 4 or 5 seconds to set to a new resolution, during which time it is totally black, then it slowly fades in. Second, at totally random times for no apparent reason it suddenly decides to reload the resolution and make it go black again. It accomplishes absolutely nothing, yet makes my screen go black. I also have programs that run in DOS that won’t let you Alt+Tab to another application, and when that happens and it goes back to the desktop, if I click on the tray to try and restore the program, it says “this application cannot be restored and will be shut down.”
ARRRGGHHH!!!
Tied with that (for 2nd place) is the fact that every time I exit a DOS console window while running in Windows, it freezes and I have to do Ctrl+Alt+Delete in order to get it back…UNLESS I switch it to a window first before exiting the DOS console. Please do not ask me why, I have no idea.
But the #1 thing that pisses me off about this computer is the fact that the power button makes the software shut it down. Who the hell thought of this!? In one of Compaq’s many attempts to make it idiot-proof (i.e. so some moron doesn’t turn it off without going to start->shutdown and ruining the harddrive) they ended up ruining it, because, face it, this is a Win98 computer and it crashes often, and when it does, the power button becomes useless. And there is no reset button. And no analog power button. I actually have to reach around to the back, unplug it, and replug it. If there were 1 thing about my computer that I would change, that would be it. sigh
:eek: Of course! The only part of the computer I never clean is the part that’s making noises. Thanks 
Techchick,
Yeah, I know…I got a bad deal on my laptop, and I can’t really get up the cash to get a new one or even an upgrade at the moment. I have about 1.12 gigs free at the moment. Which according to my pals means I am quite stuck where I am in the computer gaming realms…<sigh>…so I guess I’m high and dry til I can upgrade.
Anybody know how much $ it takes to upgrade RAM on a laptop?
I own a generic piece of crap, but it was free. The thing that pisses me off most it that often when I turn it on, the keyboard fails to activate and then I have to turn it off and on a couple of times – frequently causing WINDOWS to go into safe mode, which causes me to reboot to straighten it out – until the 3 little green lights flicker in the proper order andd the keys work.
The next pain in the ass thing is when I boot up and get an error message concerning some sort of WINDOWS failure, which means I have to restart, and either manually load windows or let it boot to safe mode, hit restart and let it reboot back into normal mode.
The last thing is if I leave AOL loaded but inactive and don’t shut the computer off for a day, the AOL program degrades and causes me problems, which means I hit restart, reload AOL and then things work fine.
My HP Pavilian, when doing a shutdown, needs to physically be unplugged, and then I must wait 15-20 minutes before plugging it back in, or there is no power to the system.
I’ve tried flashing the BIOS, but to no avail. Anyone with ideas?
HP Pavilian 8370: PII 350 mhz, 64 mb, win98 2nd edition
It depends on the computer.
Most of the time you can’t find a notebook RAM chip that is less than 64 MB and those suckers aren’t cheap. Around $150-$200.
If you aren’t computer savy generally you end up paying around $40.00 for installation. Which I don’t understand. Recently I upgraded two Toshiba laptops in under 2 minutes each. It cost my client less than $5.00 in labor for both machines.