R
richard2
A friend asked me to come over last weekend to fix his wife's computer.
This is not the first time she screwed that thing up. Let me put it
nicely, but honestly. The woman has a few screws loose in her brain.
I'm not just saying this, because she is under treatment for mental
illness. Anyhow, she has a computer with XP, which she only uses to
play the 4 or 5 games that come with XP. That's all she uses it for.
But whne it breaks, she goes into the bios, gets into the system, and
even takes parts out of the computer.
The last time it broke, she went bonkers, and he asked me to fix it to
calm her down because she was pacing the floor and bitching, and
threatening to throw the computer thru a window. That time there was a
legitimate problem, the cpu cooler fan died and was causing it to
overheat and shut down. I replaced the fan and it worked again.
This time I go to look at it and all that appears on the screen is text
that says himem.sys is missing, and several other dos-like messages
complaining about missing memory. Windows does not load. When I type
DIR, all I see is command.com. That's all that it shows is on the hard
drive. I'm thinking that somehow she deleted everything except that one
file. I ask her is she removed or unplugged anything, she says no. I
ask if she did anything in the settings, she says no, and says all she
did was turn off the computer.
I go into the Bios and discover that the settings show no installed hard
drives. I reset them to "Auto" and reboot the computer. It boots up,
XP loads, and everything is fine except that she has a bright red screen
with red text, so nothing can be read. I change the display to the
standard default XP settings and everything works fine again.
Well, obviously she was screwing with the thing to make the screen
unreadable, not to mention she has the START button text-font so large
it's chewing up 10% of the screen.
Anyhow, my question is this:
If the harddrive was not being accessed, due to improper bios settings,
how the heck did it show a DIR of C:\command.com (and nothing more). How
was it reading the hard drive at all?
By the way, I considered the system battery to have failed, but she
insisted she replaced it "around christmas".
I should also mention that this Dell computer is a Pentium 4, dual core,
with 4 gigs of Ram. All that power, just to play the games that comes
with XP. Yet, the computer runs slower than a turtle. My own 1000mhz
Pentium 3 with 500megs Ram, running Windows 98se and Win2000 (dual
boot), runs 50 times faster, and it's loaded with programs. Why her
computer runs so horribly slow is beyond me, but I was not going to mess
with it. As long as she can play her games, she's happy. From what I
saw in the bios, things appear to be set normally, and while I was there
I disabled the password requirement that she had set and did not need or
want.
Just for grins, to show how goofy this woman is, she asked me to install
another game. I told her to give me the CD with the game. She said she
dont have one. So I ask if she has it on a flash stick, or floppy....
NOPE. So I say "how can I install it if you dont have it?" She
replies, "cant you just make it?"...... DUH !!!!!
(And she insists there is no way to get internet, not even dialup,
because her satellite tv company told her its not available)....
This is not the first time she screwed that thing up. Let me put it
nicely, but honestly. The woman has a few screws loose in her brain.
I'm not just saying this, because she is under treatment for mental
illness. Anyhow, she has a computer with XP, which she only uses to
play the 4 or 5 games that come with XP. That's all she uses it for.
But whne it breaks, she goes into the bios, gets into the system, and
even takes parts out of the computer.
The last time it broke, she went bonkers, and he asked me to fix it to
calm her down because she was pacing the floor and bitching, and
threatening to throw the computer thru a window. That time there was a
legitimate problem, the cpu cooler fan died and was causing it to
overheat and shut down. I replaced the fan and it worked again.
This time I go to look at it and all that appears on the screen is text
that says himem.sys is missing, and several other dos-like messages
complaining about missing memory. Windows does not load. When I type
DIR, all I see is command.com. That's all that it shows is on the hard
drive. I'm thinking that somehow she deleted everything except that one
file. I ask her is she removed or unplugged anything, she says no. I
ask if she did anything in the settings, she says no, and says all she
did was turn off the computer.
I go into the Bios and discover that the settings show no installed hard
drives. I reset them to "Auto" and reboot the computer. It boots up,
XP loads, and everything is fine except that she has a bright red screen
with red text, so nothing can be read. I change the display to the
standard default XP settings and everything works fine again.
Well, obviously she was screwing with the thing to make the screen
unreadable, not to mention she has the START button text-font so large
it's chewing up 10% of the screen.
Anyhow, my question is this:
If the harddrive was not being accessed, due to improper bios settings,
how the heck did it show a DIR of C:\command.com (and nothing more). How
was it reading the hard drive at all?
By the way, I considered the system battery to have failed, but she
insisted she replaced it "around christmas".
I should also mention that this Dell computer is a Pentium 4, dual core,
with 4 gigs of Ram. All that power, just to play the games that comes
with XP. Yet, the computer runs slower than a turtle. My own 1000mhz
Pentium 3 with 500megs Ram, running Windows 98se and Win2000 (dual
boot), runs 50 times faster, and it's loaded with programs. Why her
computer runs so horribly slow is beyond me, but I was not going to mess
with it. As long as she can play her games, she's happy. From what I
saw in the bios, things appear to be set normally, and while I was there
I disabled the password requirement that she had set and did not need or
want.
Just for grins, to show how goofy this woman is, she asked me to install
another game. I told her to give me the CD with the game. She said she
dont have one. So I ask if she has it on a flash stick, or floppy....
NOPE. So I say "how can I install it if you dont have it?" She
replies, "cant you just make it?"...... DUH !!!!!
(And she insists there is no way to get internet, not even dialup,
because her satellite tv company told her its not available)....