Is to answer questions people may have, with some discussion of computer topics on the side. Perhaps alittle Computers 101?

Anyone got questions?

Don't think that a few geeks are hanging out talking about weird stuff doesn't mean we aren't here to answer questions for others who know plenty about other stuff but are stumped by what the computers are doing.

Sooner or later we're all stumped. "He ain't heavy - He's my brother..."

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Possess a pure, kindly and radiant heart!
They that believe in vain thoughts forsake their own mercy.

I've been having trouble with forced re-boots lately, and when I send an error report (Windows XP version 2) it tells me a driver caused the re-boot, but never identifies the driver. How should I investigate the problem?

Regards,
Scott

Forced reboots aren't pleasant. My experience with Windows, others please chime in here, is that once unstable it only get's worse.

It may be a difficult thing to track down, and it may take some time. The main technique is to check for updates to all hardware, especially third party. An alternative is to disable third party parts and see if the problem goes away. Calling tech support if you can show it isn't from a third party part (for example you bought the computer from Dell but have a personal addition of a IEEE1284 card, but you still have the problem after you pull the card) could be an option.

Another information gathering technique is to review error logs. In the System Preferences (Settings?) there is a control panel for the system logs, and if you can note the time of the error perhaps you can find some comments in the error logs that might connect.

I also think XP has a sort of "snap back" option but I'm not sure of the details of when and how it kicks in or what needs to be done to have something to snap back to. If the problem is fairly recent then perhaps the computer can be set back?

Driver madness is one thing I don't think third party applications can help much with - hard drive consistency, feature maintenance, extra options yes more or less. But combing through drivers... I don't know anything that does that well for you other than the update process and Windows wont update some third party stuff.

__________________
Possess a pure, kindly and radiant heart!
They that believe in vain thoughts forsake their own mercy.

The "rollback" option in Windows is supposed to allow you to return the computer to a previous date when you knew everything was working properly. If you've made any system changes since then, those changes are "rolled back."

For example, if you have recently added a new program/device, the roll-back will remove that program/device.

I used the words supposed to for a reason: I have never found it to work satisfactorily. Problems that existed before I did a rollback continued after the rollback, even when I rolled back 6 months.

Ultimately, I bit the bullet and tried the only cure I've ever found to clean up a messed-up Windows system": I backed up my important files, reformatted my disk and renstalled Windows.

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Self-reverence, self-knowledge, self-control;
these three alone lead one to sovereign power.
Tennyson

I have disabled the W XP rollback thing on my boxes (I tried so many times to no avail), and use Norton GoBack. Interestingly, I have had to use it perhaps once.

[boast]When I can't get a computer back to acceptable performance, it's because of a hardware failure.[/boast]

Two cases of stubborn failures were on 'puters that had two factory installed partitions. After a complete system restore, deleting one of the partitions, one of them worked, but the other one had a critical sector failure. New HD.

[boast]I ran every single version of Apple's OSX as updates on the same box, and as cloned installations across three different machines:

10.0.0, 10.0.1, 10.0.2....10.1.0....10.1.5, 10.2.0...10.3.0....[/boast]

It wasn't until around 10.3.6 that things got gummy so I decided to clean install the OS and pull over the accounts and extra programs. When I hit 10.4 I also started with a fresh install but mostly that was because I wanted to trim my data footprint down.

__________________
Possess a pure, kindly and radiant heart!
They that believe in vain thoughts forsake their own mercy.