Category Archives: Administrative

WTF!

Can anyone tell me why I can have video drivers, or a mouse that works, but not both?

Before I left for CA, I started having mouse problems, and machine lockups. I tried changing video cards, but whenever I would install the drivers for it, the mouse would stop working. I just installed a brand-new 128M NVidia card, and the mouse worked fine, until I installed the drivers. Now, it boots and the mouse won’t budge the cursor.

Any ideas?

[Update for more info]

It’s a PS-2 mouse, running on W2K. I repeat. It works fine if video drivers aren’t installed.

[Late afternoon update]

After several reboots, it’s finally working. The ways of Windows passeth understanding.

Back In Florida

I was busy all day yesterday finishing up a job in CA, and flew back on a red eye last night. The day will be spent sleeping, getting caught up on mail and other things here, and fixing my Windows machine, for which I bought a new graphics card, but can’t finish the installation because I broke the CD drive before I left…

Perhaps more substantive posting later.

Minor Disaster

I just got to the airport, and discovered that my driver’s license isn’t in my wallet.

I had to use a company badge for ID, and got a thorough screening in security, and have no idea how I’ll rent a car in LA. Unless Patricia can find it at home and overnight it to me, I may be without a car there. I’ve no idea where it is, though it may be on my nightstand, taken out of my pocket after my last trip.

What a way to start a trip.

[Update in the evening in LA]

Yup. I had taken it out of my shirt pocket, where it resided during my trip home the last time, and put it on my nightstand (where Patricia found it upon getting home from work), and then neglected to put it back in my wallet the next day. She’s Fedexing it to me, so I’ll have a car by Thursday. One useful definition of hell is being in LA sans auto.

The only reason that it was in my shirt pocket, instead of in my wallet, is that under the new idiotic security regime, one never knows when there will be a demand for papers, and it’s more convenient to pull the license out of a shirt pocket than to have to pull the wallet out and dig for it there.

And I don’t currently have a passport because it mysteriously disappeared on a trip shortly after September 11, when I got pulled out of line for a severe screening (for no obvious reason–I’d like to think that it’s because I look sort of swarthy and semitic, but that theory is blown out of the water by the fact that one of my co-screenees was a young blonde woman). I had the passport before the screening–when I got off the plane at the other end, it was gone.

Thanks a lot, Homeland Security!

Wireless Problems

Is there a WPA expert in the house?

I can’t get my (new) Hawking PCI network adaptor to work with it. I’m using WPA-PSK, and I want to use a robust pass phrase, and I do in my D-Link DI-524 router (34 characters), but when I enter it into the client, it lops off everything after the first eight characters. And even when I shorten the phrase to eight characters on the router to get it to match, it still doesn’t work. The options that I have on the PCI adaptor are WPA2 and “Any WPA,” and I have the same problem with both of them. I’d really like to get a wireless network going here, but I don’t trust WEP. (Note, it works fine unencrypted.)

Does anyone have any thoughts?

It’s Always Something

I’ve been spending the weekend getting stuff working after the hurricane.

I had to reaim the satellite dish, which turned out to be a major PITA, because the mast wasn’t (and has never been) vertical. So I had to shim up the base that it was attached to to get plumb, then reattach the dish, and reaim it. It was still tough, because the elevation indicator seemed to be miscalibrated, but if I’d had to do it with a cockeyed mast, it would have been much worse.

Then I started having computer problems. I have a brand new motheboard, Sempron CPU and gigabyte of DDR 4200 RAM in my main (Windows) machine, and it’s been fine until last night, when I got up this morning to find that it woke up dead. I rebooted, and it came up, sans mouse, and after it was on a while, I started to get strange patterns on the screen af which point it locked up again. After trying this several times, it eventually quit booting at all.

Anyone have any theories? The problem is that this is the first mobo of its generation that I’ve bought, so I’ve got no other processors or memory to swap out to see if they’re the problem. The only thing that I can hope is that the video card has died, which I can test with another.

I’m posting this from my Fedora box, if anyone is wondering. I also have a couple laptops, so it’s not urgent–just annoying.

[Update on Sunday]

I finally got around to playing with this. I swapped out the video card, and it booted right up…

It’s Always Something

I’ve been spending the weekend getting stuff working after the hurricane.

I had to reaim the satellite dish, which turned out to be a major PITA, because the mast wasn’t (and has never been) vertical. So I had to shim up the base that it was attached to to get plumb, then reattach the dish, and reaim it. It was still tough, because the elevation indicator seemed to be miscalibrated, but if I’d had to do it with a cockeyed mast, it would have been much worse.

Then I started having computer problems. I have a brand new motheboard, Sempron CPU and gigabyte of DDR 4200 RAM in my main (Windows) machine, and it’s been fine until last night, when I got up this morning to find that it woke up dead. I rebooted, and it came up, sans mouse, and after it was on a while, I started to get strange patterns on the screen af which point it locked up again. After trying this several times, it eventually quit booting at all.

Anyone have any theories? The problem is that this is the first mobo of its generation that I’ve bought, so I’ve got no other processors or memory to swap out to see if they’re the problem. The only thing that I can hope is that the video card has died, which I can test with another.

I’m posting this from my Fedora box, if anyone is wondering. I also have a couple laptops, so it’s not urgent–just annoying.

[Update on Sunday]

I finally got around to playing with this. I swapped out the video card, and it booted right up…