When I bought my new computer I had a major goal, having an reliable system with reliable data. The cheapest way was to use RAID 1 (data mirroring) with IDE hard drives. Installation was simple, it looked fine, it worked great.

After some time I noticed the downgrades: unstableness, long boot times, errors with the file system. USB mouse failed to initialize, the shortcut for the defragmentation and many other accessories and administrative tools loaded the system event monitor.

Finally I I bought serial ATA hard drive, 320 GB, Seagate, and installed Windows XP 64 on the same hardware again. Booting were correctly set, installation seemed fine, but stopped after the first reboot, said it were unable to find the operating system. Indeed the BIOS wanted to load from the IDE RAID 1, although it was told to boot from SATA. Maybe it mixed something up.
Soon I noticed that my old system only will run, when I remove the SATA drive, else it would just reboot. Indeed, the BIOS was set to load from RAID 1 IDE.
At last I connected a 200 GB SATA drive, installed the operating system again and were glad, it worked. The old system will still run but when the new drive is removed. The IDE RAID 1 mirror is working fine as the SATA.

Unfortunately the login on this site was troublesome. Although it’s limited to the local network only, the server stopped responding. All websites went down. Shortly I set the PHP priority to the most isolated one, meaning, it will crash alone but keep other sites running. It seems like that other pages were generating similar results, if the login data was queried.

After clicking on Admin using Firefox browser, the blog failed, displayed an empty page, and generated an error in the system event log. When I tried the same with Internet Explorer, it succeeded.

Finally I deleted the site’s cookies, logged on with Firefox, the problem was solved. I will watch the log files the next days, and see how it works.

Since I upgraded phpbb, I noticed that php will crash, when I try view IP of some posters. The error message was about “Could not get posters information based on IP…” Debug, etc. Therefore I reviewed the IP field in myphpadmin and changed Collation from latin1_swedish_ci to latin1_general_ci. It was an intention, but worked greatly!

Now I can view the IP of any spammer

 Since I bought a new computer, each component separately,  the RAM was incompatible with the mainboard. Although changing the RAM settings in BIOS to manual, what made the system stable, was insufficient for my needs. After reviewing the mainboard book, I found the CL3 version of Kingston 1 GB module being compatible and fast. Soon I ordered it on Amazon online store. My Computer’s performance increased in application loading times and visual movements. The only drawback was the bad smell. However, one day later it was fine, the smell decreased entirely. When I saw the improvement, I ordered one more. Now my system works with two Gigabyte of memory.

Although virtual RAM seemed useless, I thought about a technical suggestion I have read on Microsoft’s MSDN site: Set paging file (virtual ram) to a other hard drive than the Windows installation. Most PCs running Windows however contain one hard drive like mine, RAID 1 mirror. Therefore I bought a cheap external case and mounted one of my hard drives inside, which was dusting in my room.

Finally I removed the page file from the Windows drive and set it to the USB external drive. The improvement was immediately noticed. Actually I disabled Welcome Screen and set the machine to login itself. I have seen the loading profiles message with the old settings, but now the LCD screen disappeared, it said that the screen mode was unsupported, and I was required to power off the screen. When I powered the screen on again, I saw my Desktop already. After changing the LCD to use 75 hertz instead of 60, the issue was solved. Now I noticed right after the Windows XP boot screen my Desktop! What an performance improvement!

I use Besweet, a GUI. It saves your configuration and send the command line parameters to the Lame encoder.  However, recently the command line window disappeared too quickly. It supposed to convert my files within five minutes.

Finally I copied the parameters, pasted it to a new Command Line Window, and received a weird message. Soon I realized Data Execution Protection was blocking the conversion. DEP is intend to protect from worms and viruses and blocked the Lame Encoder. I unblocked the Lame Encoder by selecting “Turn on DEP for all programs and services except those I select” and selected the full path to Lame.exe. The next conversion succeeded.

When I installed the latest stable release of Wordpress, the great and free blog software, it complained about a missing file; however wp-blog-header.php was presented in the home directory. Therefore I edited index.php, removed ./ and it worked.

I installed the latest graphic driver, 6.8. On every boot up I received following message: CATALYST® Control Center will not be fully operational until SMARTGART™ has determined your optimal graphics processor settings. Please wait… 

Although some suggestions recommended to reinstall the driver, I was sceptical and looked for a different solution.

After reviewing the services, I noticed “ATI SMART” disabled. When started, it stopped immanently, and displayed following warning: “The ATI Smart service on the Local Computer started and then stopped. Some services stop automatically if they have no work to do, for example, the Performance Logs and Alerts service.” Therefore I assumed it’s necessary and set to run automatically.

Finally I rebooted and the message disappeared! Hurray, it worked!

My computer had problems after the logon process yesterday evening. This morning a reboot was necessary, the computer hang totally. Later Windows XP reported the corruption of c:\Windows\system32\config\system — it is necessary for the entire hardware database of Windows. I copied the repair file from c:\Windows\Repair to the aforementioned location. It worked fine. Although I reinstalled all major drivers like graphic card, sound card, chip-set, it was done quickly and without data lose.

On my latest computer system I often noticed little instability, when the CPU was using all its resources, meaning hundred percentage. Then I asked some friends, if that is usual with AMD 64. They said no.

Finally I found the problem. It was the NVIDIA Firewall. After removing the software, the issue was solved.

When I run a application like VirtualDub and start compression, the windows, the graphics, even the task manager react slowly. This is frustrating since my old system on INTEL and 1.5 GHz worked smooth at the same task.

I solved this by setting explorer.exe, the task that is running the GUI, to High Priority. This is done by opening Task Manager, switching to Processes, and right click to set High Priority unto Explorer.