Replies

Have you tried sharing any resources on this PC? Even if you haven’t created explicit shares do you have any administrative shares? If so have you tried connecting to them? I’ve got a couple of machines on our network that nobody logs into except for administration. They show up in Network Neighborhood but not otherwise. I haven’t tried pinging them.

Or is it maybe an account/password issue? No-if that were the issue then you should get a signon screen, I think. (It’s been a couple of years since I last had to address that issue.)

Have you tried sharing any resources on this PC? Even if you haven’t created explicit shares do you have any administrative shares? If so have you tried connecting to them? I’ve got a couple of machines on our network that nobody logs into except for administration. They show up in Network Neighborhood but not otherwise. I haven’t tried pinging them.

Or is it maybe an account/password issue? No-if that were the issue then you should get a signon screen, I think. (It’s been a couple of years since I last had to address that issue.)

Just last weekend I discovered a new setting on Windows XP that hides error messages. You might check on yours-I know that Windows error messages are rarely informative, but just in case…

Under System Properties, Advanced, Startup & Recovery Settings, if Automatic Restart is checked then when WinXP encounters a fatal error it will ‘spontaneously’ reboot rather than display an error message. In my case it was occuring on shutdown which made it even more mysterious. The first 2 times I thought I’d hit Restart by mistake. By the 3rd time I’d spotted a pattern but was wondering if it was a virus or a bad driver (I had just reformatted this machine & was reloading everything from scratch). Once I started looking for possible causes I discovered this setting. Turned it off & bingo-there was the error causing the problem.

Just last weekend I discovered a new setting on Windows XP that hides error messages. You might check on yours-I know that Windows error messages are rarely informative, but just in case…

Under System Properties, Advanced, Startup & Recovery Settings, if Automatic Restart is checked then when WinXP encounters a fatal error it will ‘spontaneously’ reboot rather than display an error message. In my case it was occuring on shutdown which made it even more mysterious. The first 2 times I thought I’d hit Restart by mistake. By the 3rd time I’d spotted a pattern but was wondering if it was a virus or a bad driver (I had just reformatted this machine & was reloading everything from scratch). Once I started looking for possible causes I discovered this setting. Turned it off & bingo-there was the error causing the problem.

What is needed is a command to tell the printer to hold all pages in memory & print them sequentially 100 times. This is problematic as a general solution although it would work in the specific circumstances you cite. You can do things like that in specific applications where you’re writing the program & can embed the appropriate printer commands in the header string-but I’ve never seen a commercial program that did it. (And I’m not sure you can do it under Windows-the one time I know of that something like that was done was when a colleague wrote a Postscript program as the print routine for a Basic program that was running under DOS.)

It’s certainly possible. I don’t use a lot of WD drives because I remember a bad run they had several years ago. (1.2GB models, I think) Of course all brands have occasional bad models-and my memory of the WD problem was that it was a problem in the manufacturing, not a design flaw. Whatever it was we had a whole bunch of those drives, all purchased at the same time, go bad very quickly. They were replaced under warranty & WD eventually admitted that the entire batch had problems, but it was too late-I didn’t use another WD drive for the next couple of years.

I started using them again a couple of years ago though when they came out with their Special Edition with the 8MB cache. Haven’t encountered any problems or quirks although I’m still cautious, but currently I tend to regard their problems as being with specific models rather than belonging to the entire brand.

I’ve certainly never encountered the problem you described. In fact there have been times when I’ve wanted to install Win98 on D: and been unable to do so. If I were still using Win98 I’d be real interested in what caused the problem & how I could ’cause’ it when I wanted to.

Appreciate you sharing your experience. Thanks.

disk 0 should be your first drive, i.e. C: and disk 1 should be your second. But I’d start by editing the descriptions so you can tell them apart, then you can see which one does what when you select it at bootup.

disk 0 should be your first drive, i.e. C: and disk 1 should be your second. But I’d start by editing the descriptions so you can tell them apart, then you can see which one does what when you select it at bootup.

FWIW I’ve not found WD to be a ‘quirky’ brand that prefers to be master. Did you maybe mean this specific model? I’ve no experience with that but I’ve got several others (10 & 20GB) running as slaves in various machines with no problems. Like any other drive, I just change the jumper to slave.

I *think* I remember the WD preferring to be on a different cable than the CD-ROM though-but it’s been years since I put HD & CD on the same cable anyway so I’m no longer certain that it was a WD I was using at the time.

FWIW I’ve not found WD to be a ‘quirky’ brand that prefers to be master. Did you maybe mean this specific model? I’ve no experience with that but I’ve got several others (10 & 20GB) running as slaves in various machines with no problems. Like any other drive, I just change the jumper to slave.

I *think* I remember the WD preferring to be on a different cable than the CD-ROM though-but it’s been years since I put HD & CD on the same cable anyway so I’m no longer certain that it was a WD I was using at the time.

The most common reason in my life for WinXP to be installed on ‘strange’ drive letters is because the PC started out as a dual-boot machine, typically while the decision was being made whether or not to switch to XP. Once the switch was made the old Windows installation on C: was deleted, leaving XP on the strange drive letter for no apparent reason. (This was usually D: but I know of one case where the person was trying to decide between XP, 2000, and Linux so he had them all set up on different partitions. Don’t know what he finally settled on-this was a former colleague, not a customer.)

The most common reason in my life for WinXP to be installed on ‘strange’ drive letters is because the PC started out as a dual-boot machine, typically while the decision was being made whether or not to switch to XP. Once the switch was made the old Windows installation on C: was deleted, leaving XP on the strange drive letter for no apparent reason. (This was usually D: but I know of one case where the person was trying to decide between XP, 2000, and Linux so he had them all set up on different partitions. Don’t know what he finally settled on-this was a former colleague, not a customer.)

I don’t know if this will work but you might check running processes in the Task Manager (Ctrl-Alt-Delete, Task List) & see if any are using an excessive amount of CPU. The problem is that 1) I’ve never tried accessing the Task Manager during startup-it’s always been after startup is done & the system is stable and 2) there are likely to be many processes requiring what would normally seem to be an excessive amount of CPU during startup. All I can suggest is that you make a list & check them out-if all of them are legit then it’s hard to say which is the culprit.

If you’ve got an ‘always on’ Internet connection or on a Local Area Network then it’s likely that the delay is something (possibly more than one thing) updating itself via the network.

I don’t know if this will work but you might check running processes in the Task Manager (Ctrl-Alt-Delete, Task List) & see if any are using an excessive amount of CPU. The problem is that 1) I’ve never tried accessing the Task Manager during startup-it’s always been after startup is done & the system is stable and 2) there are likely to be many processes requiring what would normally seem to be an excessive amount of CPU during startup. All I can suggest is that you make a list & check them out-if all of them are legit then it’s hard to say which is the culprit.

If you’ve got an ‘always on’ Internet connection or on a Local Area Network then it’s likely that the delay is something (possibly more than one thing) updating itself via the network.

Found it. The non-standard setting was for a ‘secure’ port. This was with a different email client where the port had to be changed directly. Checking T-bird, the same change can be implemented by checking ‘Use secure connection (SSL)’ in the Server Settings. But don’t just check this-check with your ISP. If they have any special requirements such as this then they should tell you about them, even if they’re not familiar enough with T-bird to tell you exactly how to set them.