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I’d look at the driver first. It may have become corrupted or have an incompatibility with the new software that took a while to show up, possibly in conjunction with another apparently unrelated system change. I’d suggest downloading the latest driver from the manufacturer and see if that helps.

What O/S did you upgrade from, on to what spec machines and what upgrade path did you follow? XP has higher demands for processor power and particularly memory than its predecessors.

I’ll give that a try, before I buy anything else. Thanks.

It doesn’t get that far. ‘Setup is inspecting your hardware configuration…’ appears, just the three dots and it hangs.

From the Hitachi website I found something that seems to suggest that the drive will only work with my card if I use a seperate SCSI terminator, which just leaves me with the question of what kind to use (active or passive)?

This is starting to drive me nuts. Since I started my new job, complete with ~2hr door to door commute, the only real time I have to work on the PC is the weekend – when I can’t buy anything I may find I need. This rebuild has now taken a month and it’s still not working!

Have you tried unplugging and reconnecting the speakers? That’s worked for me in the past.

The one problem I am forseeing with going down this route is how XP will react when I start adding all these bits back in, if I do get it installed successfully (the machine’s at home, I’m at work). Can’t remember: does Win XP let you run it for a while before activating, or is that just Office XP?

Pity I can’t try these ideas now and get back to you. I don’t expect the Dell I am in the middle of rebuilding to be anything other than routine.

The two HDD’s, the controller card, the motherboard and Hercules Radeon 9000Pro All-in Wonder are all brand new. Everything else has been up and running with XP. The best advice I have had so far is to remove the other PCI cards (USB2, Firewire and Soundblaster Live! Platinum 5.1) and try and get the system going before adding them in again. I’d rather not change the slot (Slot 5 of 6), as this is the ideal place in terms of cable (68-pin to 80-pin HDD via SCA SCSI Cable Adapter) management and airflow, but maybe I’ll have to.

I also noticed that the ‘Press any key to boot from CD…’ message didn’t come up, as I am used to seeing; but maybe that is just a quirk of the Asrock BIOS.

The document in question has to be on company letterhead, so is going to a colour printer rather than the default B/W laser. Is there an easy way to make preview correspond to the printer you want to use, without having to change the default printer?

Just installed the printer on new print server today with latest driver for 2000 & XP, downloaded from Oki site.

I’m sure this will have come up before, but since I can’t search…

When printing a large document (100+ pages) from Word 2002 on XP, the printed page breaks do not correspond to the breaks shown in Print Preview (established by carriage returns, rather than inserting page breaks – doh!). If I can’t find a way to fix this for the user (Finance Director, big cheese), then the poor receptionist will spend tomorrow morning inserting page breaks.

I can only think that there is a size difference between the font (Times New Roman) on the users machine and the installed font on the printer (network printer – Oki – on Win2k print server via network card), maybe?

Being still on my 3 month trial of a new job, I think I’ll avoid any potentially career threatening extreme measures!

The Server Administrator has a rather paranoid approach to defragmenting the servers, envisaging the scenario of something going catastrophically wrong in the defrag process and therer being no backup of everything for that day. When I suggested scheduling a defrag after the daily backup, he said, “But what if the backup failed? Would the defragmenter check to see that a successful backup had run before it ran?”

What can you say to that? Basically, the preferred solution (not by me!) is to have me manually defrag the servers. Not sure when this will happen, though, as the backups run after I’ve left and people start work long before I come in (10:00-10:30).

Anyway, thanks for all the input, folks.

Forgot – AD network, 13 Win2k servers, 60-odd clients.

I only really need to cover the servers, but I guess that DiskKeeper will want me to buy 3 5-server, 20-user volume licences. Don’t think I’m going to be able to justify that, just to make my life easier, when the workstations can be taken care of for just a couple of hours effort. I need to find somenhing that installs on a server or has a stand-alone server licence.

Thanks for the documentation links, especially 283080. Since we have all XP clients, that will really come in handy. The changes for XP negate a lot of the Executive Software arguments for having DiskKeeper on the workstations.

Having learnt from SMBP that XP clients can run the Windows defragmenter from the command line, I am not too worried about using the server remote management functions or installing anything additional on the workstations. It’s simple enough for me to schedule the built in installer remotely. The question is, do I have to buy the a special server version (which is probably bundled with workstation licences) on the servers, which are the machines that really need the regular maintenance.

If you already have Speed Disk, it does a pretty thorough job. You can schedule it to run at a regular time when the PC is not busy – although it will run in the background quite happily without too much of a performance hit in general.

I have also used O&O Defrag (came free on a cover disc) on Win2k, which seemed quite reasonable. Anyone else any experience of it?