Ancient Technology wins again

Been quite a while since I've wrote in this blog but that was because I was going around with school, work and other more important things and besides I had nothing really techy to talk about until now.

Just a few days ago I bought a desktop, nicknamed Anubis from now on, from a friend, this is probably the most advanced desktop I've ever owned as I transitioned to laptops quite a while back, and I was surprised by the casing itself which looks like some sort of ship, specs were quite nice actually and once I added a few hard drives, a DVD reader and installed Windows XP, because I wanted to try my hand at something a little bit more flexible for this baby, everything looked great except for the fact that when I tried to turn it on it just wasn't working and playing around with it got it to work but I wasn't 100% sure what the reason was.

Forward two weeks later and it goes completely dead again but this time nothing I do will turn it on and it isn't until the damn things blasts my hand, the PSU that is, that I decide I've had it with the thing and decide to return it although there was the additional solution of trying another PSU but I wasn't sure I had anything for this one, specially since that PSU was 650 watts and had cables going everywhere, but fortunately I found that there was, in between all the trash I keep from old computers that I dismantle when I can't sell them, a PSU that could fit and could work for this mobo.

Two minutes later this baby is running perfectly fine, as a matter of fact it's better than before, and I just got enough cables in it to connect everything without leaving anything flying around which makes me very happy since I hate seeing crap flying around and even though it's a meager 200/300 watts PSU it is just what I needed. All in all it seems investing in ancient technology does serve you in the end!

eMachines keeps trolling me after so many years

I have been doing IT for some 7 years now, like I've mentioned a couple of times, in different fields which range from Call Center Technical Support, the cheapo and fancy version, up to personal support to customers and companies that range between your mom and pops business up to the thousands of employees Corporation, and never have I personally found something as disgusting or annoying as an eMachines Desktop.

Yes I get the point about building affordable systems for the common user but for the love of whatever it is that you praise do it right man and I am dead serious here.

All this comes here for one reason. Two days ago I bought this old L7VMM MOBO from the guy that gives me the old computers I refurbish and let me tell you that these two last days have been terror and horror to me but also they have provoked me to look for answers to things I had previously learned and with that I had forgotten since I never used them.

I couldn't quite remember how to format a PC from a floppy, yes I am serious about the floppy thing and I have a bunch of them stored in a box, and it has been a while since I saw a FAT32 Partition in something that isn't a USB drive. That said it's also been years since I've seen a K7 in use, an AMD Duron @ 650 MHz to be precise, and I wanted to put it to use since... well the codename of the processor is "Spitfire" and using a computer with a CPU named like that sounds killer although it turned out to be a complete bummer.

How did all of this really start?

First off I placed everything in a case, that ironically states outside that it uses a P3 Celeron 600MHz CPU and that this PC NEVER goes obsolete...

Next, I try booting straight from the HDD with no luck and I start working around with it. Then I notice, in horror, that this is one of those PC's that for the life of me won't boot up from the CD-Drive and I am not sure why this is even happening but it has me terrified.

My first alternative turned out to be a Windows 98 boot floppy with CD-ROM support, because maybe you don't know it but back in the day some things weren't supported like CD-ROM drives or Floppy Drives and USB was non-existent.

As mentioned further above it had been a while since I saw a full partition of FAT32 and from there on it just went downhill. I got the CD recognized and I ran the WINNT exe to get the installation going but at first it wouldn't do it mentioning something about not enough swap space. Some ten minutes later I figured that I had to delete the NTFS partition that was occupying 99% of the hard drive... yeah I kept forgetting how the commands work.

Next stop was trying WINNT and it partially worked, then died on me, then worked, then died again, then I decided to go for Nomad, the codename for a 4GB hard drive I got laying around holding Debian 6, and it went into a deep coma state that could only be prevented if I went into the recovery state which meant I had to mess around with it a lot more than I wished for it, openSUSE laughed at me too or cried, not sure at this point, but it didn't work, Windows XP from another machine didn't work either and I've had it with this PC that will only run floppy systems, nothing bad with them but if I try and sell it to the normal customer I won't get much out of it.

Then there's the suspicion that the CPU may be damaged but I have no way to prove this since yet again I have no way to load Hirens or any other tool to test this out, RAM is also an option but that would give me a whole different bunch of errors and from what I've read, seen and understood it seems the culprit is the motherboard which has to be flashed immediately after being bought because of buggy software on the BIOS ROM which can only be done inside of Windows.

Level of Patience, almost null.

One more alternative before I give away and ask for my 10 bucks back... Windows 98 2nd Edition. May work, may not work, I don't know and I don't care but I am not letting this bad boy go out without a battle.

And in the end that also failed... that sums it up after I saw Windows 98 getting stuck several times during the installation and having to force the "restart" physically. At this point I am pretty sure the culprit is the processor and well there's nothing much I can do about this except return it and get my money back and buy a soda or something.

And we're better off now!

Last tuesday drew the final line with Windows 7 and the Microsoft Windows line in general. I've used Windows during my entire life and I've transitioned from Windows 3.1 up to Windows 7, learning a fair amount of tricks, but I've grown tired of bloatware and in general Windows tendency to lose compatibility between versions.

Yeah I'm probably an old dog, not that old though, but those are the little details that piss me off... and the drivers which is what took me to fly into Linux and say good bye to Windows.

This bad boy over here is an IBM/Lenovo T61 running an Intel Centrino Core Duo at 2.0 Ghz, 2 GB of DDR2 PC-6700 and a 500GB Hard Drive, which I got from somewhere else. Even though modest in this time and year, considering these were built back in '05. Interestingly this machine had issues running Windows XP, I somehow felt there was something wrong, and even though I went for Windows 7 it still felt the same way and it wasn't until at work, while trying to fix a T500 I had been assigned, I realized that the T60/61/500 line had SERIOUS problems with driver compatibility. So bad it was that if you tried to format the computer with a Windows XP CD it wouldn't let you and if you didn't have the recovery discs then you were in for an ugly ride until you yet again realize you have to mess around with the BIOS to get it working and then after the install is done you have to mess with it again... not cool Microsoft/IBM/Lenovo. And I'm not going to talk about my experience with Windows Vista and the T500, believe me I have NOTHING good to say about it.

So it all comes down to this, Linux. I had intended to do this transition earlier but for X or Y reason I just wouldn't, OK I procrastinated, but in the end it is a change I don't regret at all. In comparation Debian 6 "Squeeze" is running way smoother with the Gnome interface at a noble 300~ MB when it has completely finished booting up into the Desktop, after 30 seconds, which in no way was happening with either XP or 7. Oh joy, Windows Security Updates, Windows Driver Updates, Windows Something Updates, sorry what's that? 300MB patches? Windows Genuine Advantage Mathingy? Resource Hogs at the turn of every corner?

Things like that always made me cringe in terror but fortunately that's all in the past and if I ever need to run anything I just go for WINE or fire up the Virtual Machine which contains an original version of Windows XP. And for those telling me that's not true remember that all branded PC's contain a label with the key and I'm using mine for the VM XP so Microsoft can go and kiss my ass with their retarded policies.

And as a final note the only issue I had with Linux was the Wireless Driver which took me around 5 minutes to find, which unfortunately with Windows XP was a whole different story because the property drivers are NOT included in the installation disc which literally consists of most components in the laptop except for the motherboard, monitor, keyboard, mouse and the USB hubs... aside from those it could vary and if you weren't using a Windows XP SP3 CD then you weren't going to find the Hard Drive, EVER, since there were no SATA drivers included or if you found 'em it was minimal.

Yes Microsoft, quite a joyful time I had with your operating systems...

Greetings... and some Windows Bug you can easily fix!

Welcome to The Surge Tech Blog!

The purpose here is to talk a little bit about technology and also give out some useful tips to fix really, REALLY, awkward Windows Errors, some interesting projects, Linux and tips, or "pro-tips" and some other random curiosities.

To start this blog I'll post some awkward errors that I've found during my time working at a Medical Disposables Factory. These were a pain to fix but with time and dedication, AKA Google, we easily removed/fixed all the issues.

As a quick side note remember that you MUST be an Administrator to run this commands, no guarantee on power users or limited users here.

Error 0x000022:

This, from what I recall, was caused by not having enough permissions or because the Read/Write permissions on the Windows DLL/OCX files is incorrect for a designated user/group.

CACLS %systemroot%\System32\*.dll /E /G BUILTIN\Users:R

CACLS %systemroot%\System32\*.ocx /E /G BUILTIN\Users:R

shutdown -r

Error 0x80004015:

This error can be the result of a security decriptor error on Windows when trying to use the Windows Updater, usually happens in Windows XP but I recall seeing this on 2000 also though I don't know if it works or not.

Windows Batch:

sc sdset bits "D:(A;;CCLCSWRPWPDTLOCRRC;;;SY)(A;;CCDCLCSWRPWPDTLOCRSDRCWDWO;;;BA)(A;;CCLCSWLOCRRC;;;AU)(A;;CCLCSWRPWPDTLOCRRC;;;PU)"

sc sdset wuauserv "D:(A;;CCLCSWRPWPDTLOCRRC;;;SY)(A;;CCDCLCSWRPWPDTLOCRSDRCWDWO;;;BA)(A;;CCLCSWLOCRRC;;;AU)(A;;CCLCSWRPWPDTLOCRRC;;;PU)"

Windows VBS:

Option Explicit

on error resume next

dim oAU, oBITS, oComputer

dim oCommand, oFSO, oShell

do while lcase(oComputer) <> "quit"

' gather input

oComputer = InputBox("Enter the workstation's name, or type quit to exit")

' stop services

set oFSO = CreateObject("Scripting.FileSystemObject")

set oBITS = GetObject("WinNT://" & oComputer & "/BITS")

oBITS.stop

set oAU = GetObject("WinNT://" & oComputer & "/wuauserv")

oAU.stop

' delete old jobs

set oFSO = CreateObject("Scripting,Filesystemobject")

oFso.DeleteFile("\\" & oComputer & "\c$\Documents and Settings\All Users\application data\microsoft\network\downloader\*.*" & chr(34)), DeleteReadOnly

' set security descriptors on services

Set oShell = CreateObject("WScript.shell")

oCommand = "sc \\" & oComputer & " sdset bits " & chr(34) &"D:(A;;CCLCSWRPWPDTLOCRRC;;;SY)(A;;CCDCLCSWRPWPDTLOCRSDRCWDWO;;;BA)(A;;CCLCSWLOCRRC;;;AU)(A;;CCLCSWRPWPDTLOCRRC;;;PU)" & chr(34)

oShell.RunoCommand

oCommand = "sc \\" & oComputer & " sdsetwuauserv " & chr(34) & "D:(A;;CCLCSWRPWPDTLOCRRC;;;SY)(A;;CCDCLCSWRPWPDTLOCRSDRCWDWO;;;BA)(A;;CCLCSWLOCRRC;;;AU)(A;;CCLCSWRPWPDTLOCRRC;;;PU)" & chr(34)

oShell.RunoCommand

' start services

oBITS.start

oAU.start

loop

Rebuilding the TCP/IP Stack:

Yes, from time to time every solar/lunar eclipse, you may need to use this. Be warned that this should only be used when you've discarded hardware issues and you know Windows is still not a lost cause... heh, right.

@echo off

echo Resetting...

netsh int ip reset resetlog.txt

echo Dumping...

netsh dump

exit