Posts by Chaky

Nope. That is just the way it has been when I got myself banned.

Banned users can register under different name and thus bypass the ban. Only the account gets banned here. There is always an IP ban option, giving that the spammer has a static IP address (which is highly unlikely), but Dani refuses to go that far, because of the possible collateral damage. Here in Croatia, one has to actually pay extra for static IP address. All I need to do to change my IP address is to reconnect to ISP.
But, if the spammer is using my ISP, it is possible, by banning his IP address (in reality, ISP server's IP address), to ban me as well.

There is a bot running around.

This is the account, and it is posting adverts in the troubleshooting dead machines forum.

Since it is newly assembled machine, almost anything can cause short circuit.
If you say that you can duplicate with different monitor, then it leaves 2 things directly related to this problem. Graphic card and PSU itself.

For the graphic card, you can try reproducing the problem with no VGA (if there is no on-board VGA). This is bit far-fetched, since you won't be able to get past the POST process, but there shouldn't be any immediate shutdowns. Only beeps, if you have the beeper installed.

Oh, yes.. DO get a beeper. It is VERY useful tool for troubleshooting. You might be getting beep-codes right now telling you exactly what is failing. All you need is a simple PC speaker. You can salvage one from any old PC.

For the PSU. (Consider this as a last resort)
With 1200 Watts, term "lack of power" can be only used as a punch line. But, it can be faulty and the protection shut-downs could be bogus. My best advice is to try another PSU if possible. I know that replacing PSU is a pain in the neck, but you can't be sure if it is causing the problems or not, unless you eliminate it.

Before you replace the PSU..

As I said, since you are dealing with a possible short circuit, virtually any piece installed can be causing it. From CPU to USB jacks. You will need to double-check all of the wires. Especially fire-wire …

That, my friend, is usual behavior of short circuit protection. Your PSU detects a short circuit, immediately shuts down and refuses to start again, until it is reset. And reseting is done by switching PSU switch off and on.

You should test the machine with different monitor, because it is a prime suspect. I wouldn't recommend trying that monitor on different machine to see if the problem is reproduced there, because it could fry that other machine.

While you are still testing the newly built machine, I would advice you to disable quick POST in BIOS. It will make BIOS run extensive tests on boot-up, significantly prolonging boot time. After couple of successful boot-ups, reenable it, to speed things up.

Word of advice: Don't use DVD-ROM on cable-select and on a same cable as HD. Set it on SLAVE and on a secondary IDE port. Set HD on master (or single drive, if available).

Also, in BIOS, disable auto-detection for unused drive ports. It will boost your booting time.

Now I can't get enough of Morrowind.

That reminds me of "The Oblivion" (a.k.a. "The Elder Scrolls 4") and "Dark Messiah of Might & Magic"... Great stuff.

Polybius

The closest I came to repairing the motherboard was washing it. (It was full of dust)

I used demineralized water. (yes, water.. an advice I got from long-time electrician) I let it dry and it worked afterward.

Well.. it worked before that too, but the dust was covering most of it.

Remeber.. dust + airflow = static charge.

I have this same exact problem on a new HP pentium with a serial (SATA) hard drive.
It looked like the problem might be the drive itself, until you mentioned you got the same problem with a new hard drive.
So maybe something to do with the controller(?).
I wouldn't think bad RAM would corrupt the boot sector, but who knows.
These intermitant problems are hard to fix. Mine may work for 2 weeks, and then crash, with a bad boot sector. Sometimes just fixing the MBR with a bootable utility CD fixes it.
Sometimes the whole drive needs reformatting. But the fact that it's formattable suggests the problem is something else.
None of my other machines does that

One thing that comes to my mind is poor HD cable connection.

I had once a problem like that. It was caused by power failure in a very bad moment. UPS would've prevented that from happening.

You should post more details about your system. Motherboard, HD model and OS being first 3.

Corrupt MBR isn't caused by BIOS boot settings. It can only be caused by some incompatibilities between HD and chipset/motherboard, hardware failure, malicious software or just plain bug in OS.

Yes they are one and the same.

You will need to open the .swf file with internet explorer.
Rightclick, then click "open with" and select Internet explorer. If it is not shown on the cascaded-context menu list, then you will have to select it manually from the list in the next window. If the window pops up asking you to use web service or select the program yourself, choose "select the program from a list". Scroll down and select "Internet explorer" and check "always use ...." below.

Hmm.. bad one.

Do you use firewall?
How exactly do you connect to the internet? Via modem or wlan?
Can you access it via different browser?
What is your network connection status?

You should re-run hijack this and post the log.

Run hijackthis, check

O4 - HKLM\..\Run: [outlook] C:\Program Files\outlook\outlook.exe /auto

and click on "fix checked"

It is a Win32.Worm.VB.DW acording to BitDefender.

Hi. What you can do i use hijackthis and check in the running processes:

C:\WINDOWS\sysockeu.exe
C:\WINDOWS\sysodkcs.exe
C:\WINDOWS\sysoghcx.exe
C:\WINDOWS\sysokuaw.exe

and

O4 - HKLM\..\Run: [1029BB4B-16A9-4E77-AA3D-96930BD68EEC] "C:\WINDOWS\sysockeu.exe"
O4 - HKLM\..\Run: [852EBF20-A95D-4F1F-B9C2-B2CD24350F3E] "C:\WINDOWS\sysodkcs.exe"
O4 - HKLM\..\Run: [756349DC-6D9E-4F2A-9B24-269661F073C3] "C:\WINDOWS\sysoghcx.exe"
O4 - HKLM\..\Run: [2177F056-0AA6-4D6C-A944-13F71F341C29] "C:\WINDOWS\sysokuaw.exe"

and click on "fix checked".

This one is one nasty adware. It eluded hijackthis, Spy sweeper, ad-aware, BitDefender, Malwarebytes' Anti-Malware....

Only refference I came across named it Trojan.in-t-e-r-n-e-t.

It mentions that the author is NicTech Look2Me. Suffice to say that Look2Me-Destroyer (yet another tool I tried) failed to get rid of the thing.

I think I got it via Live Messenger. It manifests by making pop-unders every time you start Internet session and open any of the browsers (firefox or IE7). Really annoying. Only thing more annoying than that is the fact that I didn't know what was causing it.

But... combofix got rid of it and my system is clean once again.

Apparently, it installs this vgaa.sys as a system driver and it boots with windows every time. I'm not sure, but I think that boots with windows even in safe mode. It creates core.cache.dsk in %System32%\drivers folder and it stores some kind of information there. Malwarebytes' Anti-Malware says that that file is trojan trace. That was my first clue, but it still couldn't get rid of it. It could not be deleted. I used tool called "unlocker" to unlock that file and delete it manually, but only until next reboot when it got recreated again. This vgaa.sys apparently uses it to track and store your surfing habits. (my wild guess)
Finally, I ran combofix, and took a look at the log after wards, and there it was... fake system driver.

It took …

Here in good-old Croatia there is no such ban. If there was one, then it would make no sense, since every fisherman, regardless of the tools they use, all use one common material for weight. Led.

It would be real prudent.. baning led in electronics, but saying OK to the tonnes and tonnes of led being soaked (and dumped) into the sea. And we eat fish caught by the same nets that have led weights...

Soldering is the main price-setting factor for any piece of electronics. "Cheap" usually translates to "low quality soldering done here".

16

i split the socket by trying to fit an agp card in it ;)

LOOOL! That one is for the grandchildren.

PCI-E x1 or x16?

Thing I dislike the most with Nero 8 is lack of advanced options. For example, you can no longer make data/audio combo disc. That and interface design are the only real changes between 7 (or 6) and 8.

I've downloaded nero 8 and it also has some burning-related issues. Seems that Nero burning rom doesn't install all the necessary drivers for the burner (if you don't install the whole bundle), while Nero express burns without a problem. And I'm talking about same bundle installment. Weired.

If it is legit copy of OS (ex. HP laptops come with recovery partition, instead of CD/DVDs, making it all depend on HD) then contacting your manufacturer for the recovery disks would be the way to go.

Are you sure that the HD is source of the noise? It could be CPU/GPU fan as well. Especially with the tilting. If it is HD, then saving the data is next to impossible, unless you pay the specialized ppl for the service.

A good deal. You got rid of the junk AND got yourself a laptop. Well done.

Mind you say what did you that made it boot again? Is it a RAM thing, or did it just boot by itself?

There is one sure way to test the CMOS battery. Simply unplug the AC cable and remove the main battery. If the date and time is reseted, then you know that you need new CMOS battery. It doesn't necessarily have to be coin-shaped one. Sometimes they are soldered.

Sounds like an overheating problem to me.
There are lots of temperature monitoring software on the net. You should see your CPU temperature and if it gets over 60 °C on idle (or 70-80°C under load), then you know you have either failed CPU fan or extremely dirty heatsink.

If that is the case, keep in mind that CPU fans are cheap and much cheaper than a whole laptop. You should have it replaced.

e-bay sells allot of cheap ones. They seem perfect for home use.

There are pro-looking analyzers available.

I still prefer beep-codes and screwdrivers. They won't become obsolete ever. Unlike these cards.

Just make sure you got all the manuals and CDs that came with the laptop.

1-3-3-1 is a beepcode for "Autosize DRAM"

If it is Phoenix BIOS, anyway.

If that is the caae, then it is a RAM issue. Either incompatible, faulty or needs to be reseated. If there is more than one stick in it, try running with one at the time. You can't rule out faulty motherboard either.

Have you tried booting without main battery? You didn't mention that combination.

It is possible that the battery is completely dead and that it is draining all of the juice that comes out of power supply, making one big short circuit.

You should also check the motherboard for blown/damaged capacitors.

Once, I had similar issue with one desktop long time ago. It was "collecting dust" for 9 months or so. At first it didn't boot at all. After couple of hours of trying and failing it did boot. Turned out that floppy controller was fried for no good reason. Probably some static discharge or whatever fried it. Maybe same thing happened to your mobo.

How did you know the right timings?

I found a timing formula on the net.

Here is my post here regarding that.

Good to know you took care of the problem. Well done.

I had problems with my PC for a long time. Caused by not-so-compatible RAM and wrong timings set by BIOS as default values. I had to manualy set the timings myself. Otherwise I would get memory-related errors at random.

And this is what I was going to ask you about. Could it solve the problem? I remember that I installed a new mainboard (ASUS P5PL2-E) and it made problems just after a week. The supplier suggested that I update the BIOS

Here you can see if your CPU is listed. You would need to know exact model/revision of the CPU.

Maybe you need healthy AGP card to be able to switch back to on-board VGA via BIOS settings... or simple clearing the CMOS via jumper (that is usually located near BIOS battery) would do the trick, giving that the on-board video is enabled by default.

CPU fan error usually means that the RPMs are too low, or the threshold for the alert is too high. That is changeable in the BIOS setup.

Hmm..
Overclocking failed! Press F1 to enter SETUP or F2 to continue.
Overvoltage failed!

That happens after the machine failed to start after the changes made in the BIOS and the default values are restored. Seems like default values are problematic ones.

There are several areas you should look into.

BIOS/mobo - CPU compatibility.
It is possible that you need to upgrade BIOS.

RAM - Mobo compatibility.
Possibly the RAM is inadequate for this mobo, and/or memory timings are wrongly set. Memory (it's capabilities) is the prime reason for an overclocking failures in general.

Failed mobo or CPU, in case the overvoltage error reoccurs. (after the PSU change)

Faulty BIOS.. Far-fetched, but possible cause for the POST errors. Possibly, flashing the newer or same BIOS version could fix this.

I'll quote UB40:

"Red, red wiiiiiine...."

Try hitting ESC key before the beep or, if possible, disable the full screen logo in BIOS. That way you'll se the POST error message(s), instead of logo design.

Maybe you should set up additional serial port.

Try "add new hardware" in control panel.

Use the warranty and do not mention the yanking.

If the drives spin, then it means that 5V is still being produced by the PSU. That would rule out PSU. My guess is that the mobo is dead.

In theory, any component can cause the no-boot. RAM, VGA, CPU...

All you can do now is reseat VGA and RAM and hope for the best.

If it doesn't boot any more, all you can do is unplug the USB jack directly from the motherboard. That way you will eliminate shorted USB to be the cause. If it still doesn't boot, then the damage is beyond USB. I say it is either mobo or PSU that is fried. Possibly both.

Repairing the USB jack is simple. Replace it.

XP bypasses BIOS HD detection. You can disable it in BIOS (giving we are not talking about primary disk with OS) and it will still be recognized as if it was enabled.

I had similar experience with my machine. The problem was with:

a) lack of legacy SATA drivers for XP setup.
b) nForce4 chipset SATA II mode bug. (it was set on SATA II mode)

What I did was:
(non SP XP)

- disabled HD in BIOS (otherwise it wouldn't format it)
- switched the jumper on HD to SATA I mode
- used (now, get this..) Silicon images f6 drivers. My mobo is ASUS A8N Sli with nForce4 chip. The CD that came with it contained nForce4 and Silicon Images SATA controller f6 drivers. The reason is that the same CD is shipped with A8N 32 Sli mobos that have implemented Silicon Images chip along side with nForce4, unlike mine, but for some reason, I was able to format my HD ONLY with SI drivers. Not NF4 drivers.

My advice to you is to:

- switch to SATA I mode (also called 1.5G)
- then try with regular boot-up. Differences with chipsets might be bypassed by OS. (have the mobo drivers ready)
- if that doesn't help, try disabling the HD in BIOS and then reinstall the OS. Do not format the disk. It might not be possible with the SATA drives vs. XP conflict.

Mark, If you are installing additional brand-new HDs, then bare in mind that you must create partition(s) and those partitions must be formatted in order to be used. Use disk management (right-click on my computer then click on "manage" and select disk management).

Otherwise, unpartitioned drives won't be visible in windows explorer.

I've tried downloading ethereal as you suggested, but somehow ended up downloading wireshark. I think that is the same thing, only different name. Anyway I can see destination IP adresses for each packet. Thanks.

XP pro SP2 up to date with dotnet framework 1.1 2.0 and 3.0

Yes I do, but the traffic occurs when none of them are active. And I keep them all from automatically starting with windows.

The closest I got to figuring out what is causing it was by shutting down processes in task manager. I got listed about 6 svchost.exe and one of them is doing it. As I understand svchost, it is a general service hosting program, part of Windows OS. I just ran TASKLIST /SVC in command prompt and I got this list of hosted services by svchost:

6to4, AudioSrv, BITS, Browser, CryptSvc, Dhcp, dmserver, EventSystem, HidServ, LanmanServer, LanmanWorkstation, Messenger, Netman, Nla, RasMan, RemoteAccess, Schedule, SENS, SharedAccess, ShellHWDetection, TapiSrv, Themes, TrkWks, W32Time, winmgmt, wscsvc, wuauserv, DcomLaunch, TermService, RpcSs, Dnscache, Alerter, SSDPSRV, WebClient, stisvc

I need something that will tell me which one of them is making the traffic. I hope one of you guys can point out the tool that does just that. Googleing around I mostly found tools that monitor traffic and not much else.

I was wondering if there is a tool that can identify which service/application is using network adapter.

Thing is, I am getting allot of network traffic in "idle" mode. All I know is that it is coming from my PC and is sent somewhere on the internet.
As "idle" mode, I mean enabled LAN and no applications running, at least to my knowledge.

My PC is connected to the internet via LAN trough the aDSL modem. (Router, I think)
Firewall is on. There are no suspicious programs allowed in the firewall settings and there are no obvious trojans/spyware active. Windows update is set to notify me of (not download) new updates. There are no 3rd party update services running. Each software that I'm using is set not to check for updates. At least, I think so.

Yet, the internet traffic is still there. I can see it as the LAN tray icon keeps blinking. I have a tool that connects to my ISP to check on the internet traffic used. That is how I know that the traffic is with internet and not LAN (there is another PC hooked to the aDSL modem).

So, a tool that identifies the application that is making the traffic would help me allot.

There could be number of firewalls. Example:

- windows firewall (or Vista firewall)
- AV software firewall (ex. BitDefender firewall)
- Chipset-hosted firewall (like NVIDIA ActiveArmor on some nForce4 chipsets)

It is not likely do be a firewall problem. Badly set firewall would block Internet Explorer altogether. Not just couple of sites.

I do remember having problems accessing the hotmail (or any other https site) before, back in the '98 days. It was caused by corrupt Internet Explorer 6. Solved it by reinstalling it. I had that option because w98 came with IE4. IE6 came separately.

My guess is that IE corruption is causing the problem in your friend's case. I'm not familiar with Vista, but I'm pretty sure that, in order to reinstall the IE, your friend needs to reinstall Vista altogether.

You could do one thing:
Try "synchronizing" IE settings between your and your friend's machine. Especially security section in Tools/Internet Options/Advanced (if it is same as XP).

Try disabling the firewall.

That is normal behaviour.

When there is a single VGA, the PCI-E works at x16 mode, and in SLI mode it is 2x8. No tweaking possible.

Hi.

I use Nokia 447PRO (NOT 447XPRO) and have 4 problems:

1 - There is no driver (inf + color profile) available (I bought it 2nd hand without the drivers & utilities CD)
2 - I've recently discovered that my graphic card isn't happy with my monitor's EDID
3 - All tools but one I found on the net have trouble reading the EDID
4 - I can't flash my monitor's EDID

First problem I have solved by creating custom inf and custom ICC profile.

For the later 3 I'm posting this thread.

I've obtained my EDID from the windows registry, and I have used ViewSonic EDID Editor (I had to type in the values manually, since it can't read from my monitor) and realized that the my EDID's checksum is invalid.

I have verified my monitor's EDID against anther 447PRO EDID dump I've stumbled across and, to my relief, only invalid value is the checksum. Only differences are with the week-year and serial no. and checksum. I've verified that dump too with the viewsonic's tool and the checksum is valid with that one, leaving only trivial values to be actually corrupt in my EDID serial no. and/or year-week and/or checksum (my suspect). I suppose that's why my VGA driver is marking it as "BAD_EDID" in the registry.

This is my EDID:

00 FF FF FF FF FF FF 00 39 EB BD 01 C5 CA 00 …

(This hould've been new thread)

Your new HD needs to be partitioned and partitions needs to be formatted in order to be bootable. Put in a windows setup disk and boot with CD first boot sequence. Partition and format from there.

Kinda Dorky Non-Nerd

If you want your PC to boot from 2.5 HDD, the partition on it needs to be set as active. In order to do so, you first need to boot from floppy with FDISK on it and use FDISK to set the partition active. Other HDDs must be disabled/unplugged at the time, for FDISK will not let you set it as active, if there is already one active partition present.

P.S. Play some music to set the mood, hehe

If I did, mods would shut down this thread.