mike

Good point pendragon. Thanks.

Thanks for the ideas. I will do some checking and see what we get. The only new stuff on it is sp2. I'll be bock.

My wife has the exact same generic pc as I do with xp home. (She uses quickbooks and proseries for tax clients and I don't.) However her pc has taken it upon itself to just go ahead and reboot all by itself regardless of what she is doing. Ya'll got any ideas on that??????? thanks in advance

Take note of the fact that most anti virus do not catch everything. I personally gave up on Norton after their 2002 system works blistered my xp and forced me to reinstall because norton had a faulty uninstall........ and I even used add/remove instead of theirs. But everyone told me they had the same problem and so now I use AVG or AntiVir

Thanks Raul, I didn't realize that.

Well that's what I did and the only one they suggest is the one that won't install.

Hey guys here's one : I FINALLY got around to installing sp2 on the wifes pc. It notified my right away that I needed a critical update so I said " ok ". But it refuses to install. So I went to internet explorer and the windows update there. It said the same and so did I...... "ok". It won't install. It just comes back with: " the following updates failed to install successfully" windows xp kb886185 Ever see such a deal?

Hey guys. I managed to save everything the folks wanted to save, then simply reinstalled xp home and the system is running fine. I believe I just need to install sp1 and sp2 and all should be well. Sound about right? Thanks for all the help from all of you. I love this TCH place.

Ok, Madman. I believe he has the original XP disk. I will bring 'er home and have at it. thanks.

....and of course now it is time to get myself to work. ( 6:45 am ) so I must you fine gentleman a farewell and I will bring the blistered pc home with me for a new beginning. Thanks so much Madman, Thomas, Raul and Tim. TCH IS the very best place to discuss these things and I sure appreciate the input. I'll take your link to the boot disk place, Madman, and you have a great day. thanks again, Mike

That's pretty much what I thought, Madman. So I had better get a boot disk that lets me have a DOS type access and grab whatever I can, then when I run the xp install disk, won't it go ahead and reformat the disk for me?

I wondered about that myself , Thomas, and had planned to run the antivirus again after the restart, but it won't let me in. They never DID use the "user signin" as I do on mine, they just went straight to windows. Now it comes up with a user ( Steve ) which it never did before. So of course there's no password, but just clicking the icon you get " loading personal settings" , then immediately, "logging off" and it goes right back to giving you the icon choice of "Steve" or " administrator". I tried just entering through administrator, ( as if the password was just blank ) but that didnt let me in either. ..and of course before I did the restart I disabled system restore to "thwart" the bugs that hang out there for re-entry; so at the reboot (f8) options using the "boot with last known good settings" is out.

Madman, I forgot to add that it won't let me in to safe mode. So does that mean I can do a reinstall over everything rather than a clean install; in an attempt to keep existing progs and files? I guess all I can do is try it huh?

I hope someone has run into this or can help: I have a friend that got hit with a bunch of worms and trojans. I ran AntiVir for him and it said it deleted all but about 8 files that would be deleted when we restarted xp. Some of those files ( not sure exactly what they were ) were from win.ini and the registry. Hence, when it rebooted it now goes to the user screen ( which it never did before ) and when you click on the user it says " loading personal settings" then within a second or two switches to " logging off" and it will no longer go to windows at all. I tried running the recovery console to no avail. Question: Can I just reinstall windows over top and not lose pictures they have in Documents folders and will it just keep the programs it has on there or will everything be lost? Thanks in advance for any help / suggestions. I forgot to mention. Nobody knows the administrator password.

Great page. Thanks. However I am still looking . My client wants to have the random number generator incorporated into his database of employees so that he can just click and get 3 or 4 numbers of employees for random drug testing.

Hi TCH gang. I though maybe I could get some ideas from you folks. I have a client that has around 40 employees and he wants a program to input the employees into that will allow him to click a button and get random employee numbers for drug testing. Does anyone know of such a program? Can it be done in Access? Any ideas appreciated. thanks.

Ok, great. So I DID git r done. So I could actually use one for many things then, like sending info or almost anything. thanks alot guys. appreciate it.

Hi guys, Just wondering.... I'm new to autoresponders and I just created a small one in cpanel. Used the backend services tutorial. Problem is .. now that it 's created what do I do with it to use it? Does it have to be put somewhere in a folder or what do I do? thanks.

Ok so the windows firewall is off. Actually it has been because I use ZoneAlarm. I found the motherboard is an MSI , appears to be VT8233, and it has onboard RAID controller. ( hmphh ). I disabled the onboard RAID in bios setup and that problem is gone from device mgr. However still have the host to host bridge problem and can't move files , or even see them, on each others pc's. I downloaded and installed the 4 in 1 updates for the VIA motherboard and got no changes from that. Is there a chance the IRQ steering isn't "steering"? How would I know that? thanks - hope ya'll had a great Christmas. Oh. As long as I can get both pc's on the internet, and neither shows a problem with the nic cards in device mgr, shouldn't that rule out the nic cards?

MERRY CHRISTMAS TO ALL !!!!!! Now that you mention it madman I DID install the xp sp2 disk. I will do some looking on that concept. HG - then it sounds like I would have to reinstall the motherboard because the cards assumably work because we both still get on the internet just fine. Sound right?

Yes, I realize about the yellow ! alright and that's what I kind of thought - ignore it. But we can't share files between our pc's anymore. so there has to be a reason for that. Maybe I just need to remove workgroup and network places and reset them?

Device mgr just says RAID CONTROLLER with the yellow exclamation mark to denote a problem. It says the same thing under components/problem devices in system information. The common factor is that my wifes pc also says it has a problem with the host to host bridge ( yellow in device mgr ) all of a sudden. Yet we both get on the internet just fine.

When I take them both out of device mgr and reboot it just finds them both again and wants drivers .

We have SMC ethernet cards with usb lines to the router. I really didn't think I had anything RAID?????

Hi TCH gang, I need a little help with something and I know this is the right place. I have my pc networked with wifes, both xp home. They have been fine, forever. All of a sudden we can't share files and when I looked at the device mgr it says that my pc has a problem with the RAID controller and the HOST TO HOST bridge. Her pc just says the host to host bridge. Can anyone steer me on this one? thanks in advance. MIke