Okay, I know I blogged earlier that swapping browsers had fixed my computer problems, but I was wrong. They abated for a while, then started back up in earnest a few days back.
I don't want to violate the TOS here, so I try not to link to my other blogs or websites too often, but I also hate to repeat myself, so it's really more a matter of linking for completeness and/or just more information when I do (as opposed to self-promotion), but I can give you the run-down on the whole thing (along with a bit more technical information, as this is a more technically-inclined site) to save you the time:
Sometime in January, my computer started dying in media-res. It had begun making an odd whirring noise a few weeks earlier, so I thought it was the fan, but the casing was so hot when it did this, that I figured it was the power supply. Finally, it was doing it so often that I took it in for bench-testing, told the guy what I thought it was, and he touched a magic wand-thingy to it and said, "You were right!" (I remember he looked kind of shocked when he said it, as though I were Kreskin or something.) So I bought a new power supply and was off and running again -- for all of about two solid weeks.
Then one day, I turned on my computer to find a black screen with some obscure error message, which I have written down somehwere but don't care to look for right now. It would not let me in my computer, no matter what I did -- not Safe Mode, not DOS, nothing. I searched the web over for the offending message and found only a handful of posts in some tech forums where others had encountered the same problem -- but no solutions. I had had this box networked to another XP box and a 98 box which the grand AOL-provided McAffee AV program had killed a few weeks earlier, so I thought it might be related (still do, in fact), but never got the chance to find out (and, just for the record, none of the work-arounds or solutions to get back into that box worked, either) because I decided I was over it.
The computer being 5 years old, I had never reformatted it, though I'd been saying for months that I was going to burn my docs to CD and do just that. So I went and bought SuSe Linux 10.0, loaded it up, got to my Windows folders through it, burned them to CD, then reformatted the (now much smaller) XP partition. I spent days updating XP and all the drivers, etc., because the box has a WinModem which Linux (of course) simply hates, so I can't just use Linux, much as I want to, until I purchase a Linux-ready external modem (maybe next month).
I then moved upstate in February and when I set up the workstation, the audio no longer worked. I've tried everything but, like I said, it's 5 years old, so I'm not wasting anymore time with it -- I'll just purchase a new audio card when I can. Sadly, neither of the whopping TWO computer stores around here have external modems or audio cards, so I have to wait. Aside from this, I had no other problems -- until a few weeks back.
That's when, suddenly one night, everytime I opened a window, it would scroll to the very bottom and no matter how hard I tried to get it to scroll back up, it would not -- it would just flicker. And not just browser windows, either -- any window, from Explorer directories to the Task Manager itself. I have covered the troubleshooting steps I went through in an earlier post but, suffice it to say, nothing worked. And as I posted in the link above, I searched everywhere for drivers, but was unable to find any for free (and wasn't about to pay for drivers to a piece of hardware that I'd already purchased when they were not provided with the hardware originally!).
So I changed the search terms to exclude the word "driver" and even though the company's site did not come up in the first 100 results, one of the parts-supply stores which did had a link to it, and I found the drivers for free there (after, what, five weeks now?). And since this mouse is plug n PRAY, and I'd never had any problems with it before or on any other computers running Windows (and updating drivers from the Device Manager didn't work), I really didn't think this was the problem -- I was convinced it had something to do with AOL (which I did NOT want to install on here after the reformatting, but had no choice until I moved) or a virus.
An Aside: I removed AOL from my system the other day, but it did not uninstall completely. In fact, it left the entire directory and 90% of the files on there. Even a manual delete keeps giving me Access Denied because the file, SB.DLL, is in use by another program and even in a drop to DOS shows no ATTRIB, aside from A. Good ol AOL.
But I did install the drivers and so far, so good (knock wood).
And I am posting this here not just because I wanted to vent a little and provide others with the direct link to the drivers, but also because it does not function *at all* under Linux, so I thought this little heads-up might help some folks out, as it is a popularly-available mouse (I bought this one at Wal-Mart, in fact) and -- aside from this particular instance (which, again, might turn out to have nothing to do with the mouse and/or drivers -- only time will tell) -- is a very good accessory. I love not having a mouse with a ball; the control is fantastic, there is no jumping of the pointer, no problems until now.
So if everything is working, I can finally get back to blogging about blogging and webmastering, and all the other things I excise from my other blogs due to the fact that readers in non-technical forums rarely bother with such entries.
Now, if only I could find a decent archiver shell...
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