Disaster!!

[dvk901]

Before this thing crashes again and burns, I have to relate that my PC I was using has completely given up the ghost. Deader than a door-nail.
I don't know what happened, but it started blue screening on me and then all of a sudden it just croaked.

I have not lost any data, so not to worry there, but I had to switch the drives to another PC I had which was also problematic to begin with (power supply fan, which I have now fixed), but the Windows install from the old
PC is giving me fits in the switch-over (can't get the sound drivers installed.) So I think I am going to have to bite the bullet here and install Windows 7, which my son-in-law bought for me, as my beloved XP install appears to be on it's way out.

As if I didn't have enough problems......dang. Oh well, so it goes. Hopefully this weekend I'll be able to get this fixed. Fortunately, all my 'good stuff' (including my SVN folder and all my RS installs) are on another drive.

[swhunter]

Sorry to hear DVK. But good you still have the other. On this last update ( SVN) i still cant find what is causing the problem. From reloading everything, and i mean everything. I wonder, can you start from where you left off, from the old svn update before these last two updates which plagued us with CT D's. Could that help you?

[TTRouble]

DVK...

Glad to hear its just the OS getting twitchy and no data loss. Once you start using 7 you'll find it hard going back to XP from usability to performance its a nice step up. Its going to be interesting to see how Win8 shapes up.. its supposed to use even less resources and run faster than 7 on existing hardware. Oh.. and I've only had 2 BSODs in 2 years and both of those were caused by me!

[dvk901]

Well, I'm back up again..in a manner of speaking. I lost my e-mail that had the SVN password, so I'm locked out as of now. Had a lot of issues with my video card and sound.....finally gave up on the sound and went out and bought a new card.
RTW wouldn't even 'try' to run without a sound driver installed. This has been a major pain. Also lost ALL of my research shortcuts for RS2, which makes me want to cry.

[dvk901]

Well guys, I seem to have no luck lately.....my restored PC I was rebuilding died last night...power supply, I think, and I am now without a PC of my own until I get this fixed, or get a new one. Guess my old stuff has just seen better days. I'll get back to this as soon as I can, but not sure what I'm going to do to fix this matter,

[Ybbon]

sell a grandkid for a new PC

Seriously, if you have the drives at least you should be able to get their data off. New PC's especially if you have the time, inclination and $$ to build one yourself are relatively inexpensive these days - my first PC on Windows 95 probably cost in real-terms 3 or 4 times as much as my latest (if not the rest) and had a fraction of the power I've got now.

[Marku]

windows 7 aint so bad; you'll get used to it, it would be hard for me to go back to XP now :-)

[Brusilov]

It was probably a good idea to skip Windows Vista - I've heard that Windows 7 is Vista without the bugs and is a less of a drain on resources (memory).

Having said that I did have Vista on the PC that I bought off Computer Planet in the UK and had to scrap as it was a pile of crap and I wasn't going to pay £130 again for shipping to only get slightly better pile of crap back. My current PC started out with Vista on it....

Two things to do:

1) Turn off UAC
2) Create a folder to install software to and avoid putting games in C:\Program Files (x86).....

[Ybbon]

Windows 7 is fine, again missed out Vista myself. The other thing to watch for is Aero which caused me to have some weird problems (see my first posts in the beta testers) but it is also a resource hog. I use linux (ubuntu 11.04) at work and also have a dual boot linux/win7 for home, but mostly I use win7.

[dvk901]

What is Aero? Anyway, as I suspected, my video card and drives ate my power supplies. One was a 500w, which lasted a year and a half, and the last one was a 400W that was just in the PC when I switched everything to it. I kinda figured it was under-powered, but I didn't realize it would just kick the bucket so fast. But I went out and got a 600W this time, so hopefully that will be sufficient. I hate to get rid of these two old PC's, because they are both P4 3.0ghz dual core processors, and they play RTW really nice BECAUSE they are both 3.0ghz......whereas some of these newer PC's are quads with a slower speed. RTW\BI is the only thing I fiddle with anyway (or M2TW, which I have to reinstall), and these ASUS motherboards are the nicest ones I've ever had.

As you guys say, Win7 is ok.....bit of a learning curve finding everything (thanks Mickey, for moving everything all over the place ). I have it set to behave like XP and it even looks like it, so it's pretty nice. The one thing I lament is that my beloved old WINNT4.0 FileManager will no longer work.....I've used that for so many years the code is faded in the EXE. LOL

[Ybbon]

What is Aero?

Aero is the fancy windowing system that deals with theemes, sounds etc. If you go to personalise and pick a non-aero themed background etc that will diable it. It may be fine, I just disable to play RS as it stops it working but the rest of the time it's enabled.

[tone]

Glad to see you're getting up and running again. I've just lost one of my monitors...tried replacing some of the blown capacitors on the power supply board but unfortunately that didn't fix it, so getting replacement. Working with a single monitor is always a bit of a pain for graphics and multi tasking

[Oberbefehlshaber]

So I think I am going to have to bite the bullet here and install Windows 7, which my son-in-law bought for me, as my beloved XP install appears to be on it's way out.

I also can not part with my XP install, so I have two partitions, one Win7, one XP. Im glad to see that you did not have a total disaster.

[dvk901]

Ah, thanks for the tip....I didn't even see that when I was poking around in there.

I'm right now in the process of moving my Subversion version of RS2 back onto a 'D' drive (where it was before), and then will re-install the SVN client. HoH sent me my user info yesterday.
Hope I don't have to download the whole thing again, as my Internet is none too fast.

[tone]

I hope not!

I've been having serious thoughts about migrating to ubuntu though I'm not sure whether it's compatible with many of the other bits of software I use.

[Ybbon]

I hope not!

I've been having serious thoughts about migrating to ubuntu though I'm not sure whether it's compatible with many of the other bits of software I use.

PM me if you want, I use Ubuntu all the time. I can't think off-hand of anything that just doesn't work in Ubuntu or that doesn't have an equivalent.

You should be able to run RTW etc in Wine as well, personally I don't, I have separate partitions as I have a 1.5TB disk so space not an issue.

[tone]

What's wine?

[dvk901]

What's wine?

Wine is a Windows emulator, yes, but the issues I had with it were akin to configuring software to run in Windows 3.1....yep, that's right, WINDOWS 3.1! There are just too many manual things you have to know, and knowledge you need to know about your software and hardware that make it 'tedious', though not impossible. I just found myself saying: "This is a step backwards for what I want to use my OS for." Nothing against Linux...it's a great OS for Linux based software. It just isn't Windows.

Granted, this was a few yers ago I was into it, but I doubt 'Wine' has changed that much.

[Ybbon]

Windows emulation package that allows you to run windows programs inside Ubuntu. Someone posted a how to use it with RS, can't recall where off-hand but it is on here somewhere but that was ubuntu 10, the latest is 110.04.

[Ybbon]

Wine has improved, it works out most things now but it isn't the best. I have to admit I've never tried RS in Wine myself. For pretty much everything else you can do it in linux, it's more secure and faster. A dual boot though is probably a better compromise. The alternative is a VM but I use one of them for work for the one thing that doesn't work in linux and it can be slow.