IEEE Consultants' Network of Long Island

High Usage Warnings - John Dunn, Consultant, Ambertec, P.E., P.C.

Just for reference, this PC is a Hewlett-Packard, dual-core machine running 32-bit Windows Vista.

Some while ago, I updated my Adobe Reader 9 to Adobe Reader X. ( I guess the "X" is a Roman numeral. )

I let the update process commence but when it finished, there was an on-screen message that an error had occurred. I looked at the Desktop and the new Adobe icon was there with the new and proper nomenclature and the application itself seemed to be working okay so I just shrugged off the warning.

The Bluest Screen of Death - John Dunn, Consultant, Ambertec, P.E., P.C.

One of our PCs, a Hewlett-Packard model with an AMD processor and 64-bit Windows Vista had a catastrophic failure in which the following screen display kept coming up:  

 

You've heard of and have often seen, I would suspect, the classic "blue screen of death" which comes up in the event of a non-recoverable or "fatal" software error, but this screen was a far worse thing to see because it was indicative of a hardware failure.  

Fortunately, the PC was still under warranty and was repaired by HP.

Your clock battery still matters - by Dave Rost

PC Problem:

On Tuesday, I turned on my computer and was sent to CMOS with a note about the clock. I found the clock a few hours off and an incorrect date. I fixed this and continued on my way with no further problems. I got the same complaint on Wednesday, but after fixing it, I got a complaint about a bad system disk, which certainly gets one’s attention. I stuck in my Windows XP emergency floppy and got a DOS prompt. I have two hard drives; one (“C”) has Windows and several partitions, the other (“D”) has my data in two partitions. A little changing of directory and directory checking revealed that the “C” and “D” drives had become reversed.

I got out my Acronis emergency disk and attempted to change the drive letters. They seemed to change as requested, but when I left Acronis, they reversed again. After several repeats of this, I opened up the computer case. Reseating the cables on the hard drives had no effect. After I unplugged the data disk, Windows loaded normally, and I was able to use my file management program (Ztree). All logical drives on the system disk were present. The data disk was not shown (as would be expected); the interesting thing is that there was no “D” drive; higher lettered drives were not re-lettered; there was a gap between “C” and “E”.

Legacy Software, 32-Bits vs 64-Bits by John Dunn

I got a little surprise the other day, not one to my liking at all.

 

As some of you know, I still like to use GWBASIC from DOS 3.3 and Paintbrush from Windows 3.1 for all kinds of reasons that have arched some number of eyebrows. An older PC purchased late last year uses "Windows Vista Home Premium Edition" and although the GWBASIC wouldn't work on it, at least the Paintbrush program worked.

 

Later, I tried to load Paintbrush onto a newer machine, also with "Windows Vista Home Premium Edition" and there, to my dismay, it did NOT work. I found out why.

 

The first machine had a 32-bit version of the operating system, but the second machine has a 64-bit version. That means that at least some old software which works fine on the one, may NOT work on the other. I don't know if Paintbrush is the only old program to exhibit this behavior, but there is a cautionary tale here if you are trying to bring older programs to later machines.

 

Also, I understand that the new Windows 7 uses 64-bits.

 

John Dunn  -  Ambertec, P.E, P.C.