# What not to do with a windows xp machine...

Category: Geeks r Us

## Post 1 by bermuda-triangulese (Help me, I'm stuck to my chair!) on Wednesday, 19-Oct-2005 5:49:54

Ok, this is a personal trial that I've just been through last week. Check this out. Last Saturday I reoved Jaws 5x and installed jaws 6. Everything worked nicely until the next day, when I began to have a bit of a problem. Jaws decided to crash totally. I restarted and had no narrator either! So I got sighted assistence to tell me that the video intercept decided to bitch. So, I uninstalled jaws after trying to uninstall and reinstall video intercept with no results, and reinstalled jaws from the jaws 5x program that I had. I kept getting, jaws has made changes to your system that requires it to be rebooted message, even after successive reboots! I removed jaws completely, rebooted, no problems, but no screen reader, no narrator. So, I decided, what the hell, I better install supernova, ran the supernova install went off without a hitch, speech during install, everything, but when I restarted...it said that SAM was not installed, though it blatently was so! I reinstalled it, restarted, same problem, Eventually I found that the only way to get supernova to work was to take supernova out of my startup group, restart with no speech, run sam.exe first then run snova.exe. However this took about 10 minutes to get supernova started, literally, no exaduration! clearly this is a bad state for one's computer to be in!

## Post 2 by bermuda-triangulese (Help me, I'm stuck to my chair!) on Wednesday, 19-Oct-2005 5:57:40

Following this, I said, sod this, I'm reformatting this bastard of a laptop. Got the windows xp CD from my school tech and went back to my increasingly impacient sighted assistant. We reformatted, and it asked where I would like to install xp. It said it could not install it on the C: drive because there were temp files on C that were needed for install so obviously it couldn't format it, at this point I'm like, shit. Of course, had I booted from the windows CD and not tried to install windows, from windows, this would not! have! happened! Of course I was half asleep that day, so one should never try to reformat a machine whilst half asleep! Regardless, I said, ok, then it said that there was this 4 gig unpartitioned area, I'm like, ok, fine, we'll put windows there, shall we? Now you tech people should be winsing at the fact that I very blatently formatted a system partition! I told a friend, who freeked out and was like no! dude! stop it1 So we powered off, restarted and the bastard went right back into setup! So we had to let it happen. Now here's the kicker, windows installed perfectly! It ran, but...no sound driver... So, I went, dug up my old external USB soundcard and plugged it in, bing! sound! Perfect! No more sighted assistance needed as narrator worked. But, erm, I had none of the cd's that came with the laptop, I'd lost them or somesuch thing. The trick was, my main harddrive was e:, and my c: drive was still there with all of it's old problems, but it would not be booted from, it refused. So, eventually, we got the audio drivers from C, me and this friend of mine who I owe loads to now. But, we try to install supernova, and get grafics driver intercepter errors! Can anyone guess why? You guessed it, I had a fucking gineric display driver! So I had to dig up those damn drivers as well from my C: drive, which took some doing. Eventually it did work and I'm sitting here using a comp with the oddest configuration in the world! So, do not! do what I did! I was gunna post this on Joke board but figured nah, some people wouldn't see the humour. Anyways, hope you've at least had a laugh. Anyone ever done somehting as messed up as that?

## Post 3 by b3n (I'm going for the prolific poster awards!) on Wednesday, 19-Oct-2005 8:53:16

Lol, thats one fucked up laptop!
I have a hard time finding the drivers for my laptop, seen as its all cheap crap, so there really un comon.
BEN.

## Post 4 by season (the invisible soul) on Wednesday, 19-Oct-2005 9:13:02

well, i guess you did experience and learn something on it. cheer up!

## Post 5 by blake (Zone BBS Addict) on Wednesday, 19-Oct-2005 21:34:11

I once did something really stupid with the computer. I ran windows update once. After the scan was done, I noticed a updated driver for my sound card. so, what do you think I did? That's right, I downloaded the driver. The problem was, the new driver crashed my sound card, so jaws couldn't talk. I was like, "Dad, I downloaded a new driver for the sound card from microsoft, but now jaws doesn't talk! Help!"
Well, Dad installed the driver that came with the sound card, and everything has worked right ever since. the moral of the story? If the sound card works great, don't install updated drivers.
Blake

## Post 6 by bermuda-triangulese (Help me, I'm stuck to my chair!) on Thursday, 20-Oct-2005 3:52:36

lol~yes indeed! soundcards should not be messed with unless you have a spare one! hshsh

## Post 7 by audioadict (I'm going for the prolific poster awards!) on Sunday, 19-Aug-2007 2:59:25

There's some things I did that messed up the internet. I changed my email password so mom wouldn't hack into my email. A few weeks later, My internet was down and has been down for weeks. My mom called my ISP, and I found out that when I changed my password, it was the password to connect. It's up to you, but when I have computer problems, I don't use sighted help because when I live alone, that won't be available and those who decide to help may be unwilling to do so. I'd just try it on my own and if you fail, tough! If you can't fix a computer problem yourself, than I believe it can't be fixed at all.

## Post 8 by battle star queen (I just keep on posting!) on Sunday, 19-Aug-2007 21:47:58

I installed msn messenger and the computer worked fine until I shut the thing down. Then when I turned it back on my screen reader wouldn't start. So I'm sitting there thinking what the fuc is wrong with this dam thing. So I unpluged my adapter to the internet and my screeen reader came up. Well I shut down and the same thing happened. The next day my uncle was ready to kkill the computer because it took him over an hour to figure out what was wrong with the darn thing. Then I checked and found that I had a windows messenger just like msn. So the ending to this story is check to see if you have a messenger before installing one.

## Post 9 by audioadict (I'm going for the prolific poster awards!) on Tuesday, 21-Aug-2007 12:01:16

I remember you telling me about windows messenger over the phone treky4, and I installed msn, and the computer worked fine.

## Post 10 by chocolab (move over school!) on Tuesday, 21-Aug-2007 13:16:06

I haven't had problems like that, though I killed jaws seven one so bad eight would install on the old deskto but not work right, so I bought a laptop, have it covered for the next four years and if t breaks some tech moron can fix it or buy me a new one, Imean replace it.

## Post 11 by Big Pawed Bear (letting his paws be his guide.) on Tuesday, 21-Aug-2007 13:54:39

I've had strange things happen with upgrades of jaws, jaws seven point zero five double zero works fine, then I installed eight, which wouldn't work, then an update to eight wouldn't work, but the jaws seven would, it took three updates of jaws eight to work on my pc, but why wouldn't it work in the first place? I'd not done anything to the pc. arhrhrhr to jaws!

## Post 12 by audioadict (I'm going for the prolific poster awards!) on Tuesday, 21-Aug-2007 20:45:26

Well, two words. Window eyes. I haven't used it, but I have a best friend who does. I hear and believe it's better than jaws.

## Post 13 by jrimer (Please visit my home page at http://personal.wbby.us.) on Thursday, 23-Aug-2007 21:09:56

That happened to my hard drives here on a desktop. I had to reformat for some reason, we forgot to unplug the drives, and I had E as my bot drive. Pretty fucked up.

## Post 14 by louiano (I'm going for the prolific poster awards!) on Thursday, 06-Sep-2007 21:37:27

Oh well, lets not get started with the "window eyes" and jaws ramble rant (grumble). Many of them will claim that one is better than the other for an endless number of reasons, true r fake. Anyway, I did something that costed me quite a long time to fix. First, I decided that since this laptop needed a longer battery life, I shlud maybe disable the screen drivers for my computer. Seeing that most hardware installations use drivers only to tell the computer what messages, controllers or information to send or get from the device to operate efficiently, I just went on and disabled the screen hardware. I finished installing python and other stuff on that box. just finally guessed it was time for a restart so i just let it go and reboot. At the login prompt, jaws would not come up. i ran narrator by hitting windos plus u, but nothing. I then decided to take this a step further. i just let it reboot into dos mode. Wth sighted help I found out that windows would not let me get in... Ok, so I decided to boot from the emergency boot disk that i have, which in a lot of times is really really, handy and practical to have around. I took the SAM file and replaced with one in which there was no password that i got from a friend's computer. Ok, after that i could log in all right, although the screen did not work after the person saw the log-in prmopt. So damn, well, I just had to use the whole blind techinque (lets his this and this and see what we get). It took me about 2 hours to get something finally displaying. After that i could use narrator with lots of issues but got to re-install jaws, since for some reason the video drivers also screwed up! Well anyway, if you have a laptop, lower the lights all the way down and set your time to the least amount of minutes that it allows before it turns of the screen or monitor... but never, never disable the monitor just because intuition tells you that it will save you power.

## Post 15 by morgoniousmonk (Generic Zoner) on Wednesday, 05-Dec-2007 11:46:23

as a devoted Mac user, i think that there is nothing you should do with windows xp, but hey, to each his own, right??? Peace out!

## Post 16 by skpoet711 (Zone BBS is my Life) on Wednesday, 05-Dec-2007 16:26:20

hehe, jaws uses a video intercept manager to capture and output messages. Thus when the graphical card is disabled, such can be expected :)
there's simply nothing to "intercept".

## Post 17 by louiano (I'm going for the prolific poster awards!) on Wednesday, 05-Dec-2007 23:46:58

yeah, which is why I had to do a reinstall and all of the sudden my monitor enables. Unfortunately that same video intercept is what causes unreliable output.

## Post 18 by cattleya (Help me, I'm stuck to my chair!) on Sunday, 09-Dec-2007 8:23:44

Hmm, know the one on post13. LOL, in my case I had 3 harddrives hooked up and forgot to unhook all but the main one, so, when we reformatted it did so to my drive where all my music and other crap like that was stored...Lost it all, then it installed Windows there, and then it only booted using that drive and then would switch to the old drive after bootup was complete. Freeky. We unhooked the other 2 drives and tried to force the installation disk to reformat C, and it absolutely refused, and so, we had to stick with an overlay, and now we've finally got it all working right, and finally I'm getting my crap back, you know ripping cd's, etc.

## Post 19 by Gilman Gal (A billy Gilman fan forever and always!!) on Monday, 10-Dec-2007 6:03:02

wow. well I never mess with something I know nothing about. if I want something done and someone like my mom knows more about it then me, I'll have her help me get stuff straight.