I usually make do with my complaining over at Never So Few. That was in the old days. With another site to keep busy I figure to do more of my grousing over here. Unlike grouse — grousing is never out of season. Like many of my rants this one is about computers, but in a rare change of pace does not involve “The Linux.” This time it was my windows machine, the one I do the vast majority of my work on, that started giving me trouble. And then worse, it neared to die!”
A little over a week ago I started getting errors when exiting programs. The error message said that the program, and more than one of them, could not access the memory at a particular location. That was the extent of it and the comp kept right on working as soon as I closed the error window. No big deal as I had installed a very large graphics program recently and thought that it might be the problem. But I was wrong.
Last Monday I went to start working and the machine wouldn’t even boot. It said I was missing a simple PCI bus driver. I try again and it does boot. I try to connect to the internet and the system freezes and I need to hold in the power switch to shut down. This does not look good but I try booting one more time. This time the comp says it recognizes new hardware and asks me if I want to install a driver for it. Sure, why not. I hadn’t added any new hardware so the driver if it was actually required should be on the system. It wasn’t, or at least the operating system couldn’t find it.
Ok, I boot in safe mode and check out what is going on. I go to the device manager and sure enough no PCI bus driver. It knew about the driver but said it was uninstalled. The driver in question came with the system, of that I was certain. I was not sure about what it did other than work with my modem but without it I could not go on the internet. I pulled out the backup system disks and tried to install a driver from the CD. The message said no such driver on the system backup either, Now I am getting worried.
I power up the Linux machine and go to the HP site to find the driver. They don’t have it either. I notice that there are about 90 megs worth of Linux backup files I can install to get the linux system current, after all I had only done that two months earlier, and decide to download all of that before continuing. I did it over night because for me on dialup that takes about 12 hours.
I’m thinking the driver I need might be at the modem manufacture’s site and find out how to read the hardware code so I can tell who that was. I go back to the HP windows machine and now I am having all kinds of trouble booting up. Sometimes I get there but the moment I try to do anything the machine locks. Other times it runs for a minute or two before failing. Booting in safe mode works but I can not use the modem from there.
I tried several different system date restores to no avail and thought about a complete system reinstall. I am backed up pretty well but if I do that I know I have a week of killing the bloatware that comes with a new install and setting all the system parameters to what I am used to. So I hold off go back to the Linux and do some more research.
It seems that the simple PCI bus driver was called on one — and only one — of the sites I visited the simple PCI “Gigabyte” bus driver. And I was getting these unable to read memory errors. Could it be I had a bank of bad ram? I let loose the cover and start pulling ram. After some swapping I can boot up reliably again but I am still getting the hardware found message and am unable to turn on the modem. I can use the system tools though and I get the information I need to go to the modem site.
Back to the Linux and I find what I is the site of the chip maker and that the hardware people are responsible for drivers. That was HP and I already knew they claimed not to have one. But Connextant, hope I spelled that correctly, was kind enough to offer a couple of different generic drivers. I downloaded those onto a flash drive and went back to the win box again. I tried to load the most likely driver and still no luck, then the other and no luck again. I am about to do the dreaded system install when I think to do a manual uninstall of the old PCI driver. After that is complete I boot again and can load the drivers off of my flash drive. Each will load but neither lets me fire up the modem.
In the midst of this with a stable system at least I do a virus scan. A couple more hours, 600,000 files or items and it tells me all is well. I am now really close to that system reinstall but. . . In my searching through the hard drive I find another driver possibility, same name as one of the ones the chipset manufacture provided but with an extra letter – a large X. This was in a folder labeled HP and might be what I was looking for. And it was!!!
I loaded the driver and my modem fired up. I no longer had the simple PCI driver installed but since I am now down to half a gig of memory I guess I do not need it. It seems the mere fact of its presence made it impossible to load the correct driver for a system with less memory. Now I need to go out and buy some more ram but at least the system is working and stable, though noticeable slower than it used to be it is still very usable.
My working theory is that the bad ram was deteriorating and would sometimes work for a while, perhaps only one bit was bad and causing page faults. But now as I say I am on line again. And this was the short version of my rant, I just ran out of steam.