How to waste an evening ...

English Soapbox
1

I’ve spent the past 2 hours with my wife, debugging a wireless and blue screen of death problem on winXP. I’m pathetic with winXP. She was having a problem on her old Fujitsu-Siemens Amilo M7400 laptop that her WinXP wireless driver was not running as good as the openSUSE-10.3 Linux wireless driver (Intel 2100 wireless, where Intel custom made the driver for Linux) on said laptop, so she decided to install a newer winXP wireless driver from the Fujitsu-Siemens web site.

A proud windows user can’t have Linux performing better.

The problem is, she mistakenly grabbed on older winXP driver by mistake (she did not realize this at first). After installing, winXP insisted on a reboot, and the end result was a blue screen of death every time she booted to winXP. I took a pix of the blue screen with my digital camera so we could look up the errors. openSUSE-10.3 Linux still booted ok. I recalled one could boot WinXP in a safe mode (by pressing F8) so I had her try that. She booted the safe configuration, and part way thru the safe boot the PC froze again. So I took a pix of the last driver being loaded in the safe mode, so we could look up the errors.

I also had her take me to the web site and point out the driver she downloaded. At that point, she realized it was the wrong driver version. …

I then looked up the winXP errors on the web. Most winXP users simply re-installed at this point, after tearing their hair out for a few hours (or days in some cases).

The conclusion we had was the wireless driver she installed had a problem with her current WinXP version.

We ended up disabling wireless in BIOS and rebooting winXP to her last known good configuration (which is another option when one presses F8 on winXP). That got rid of the bad driver. … She could boot again. :slight_smile: … Re-install not necessary (yet).

But she still has her wireless problem in winXP.

This is 2 hours later. … any plans I had for this evening have gone out the window. My wife is now trying the new winXP laptop driver she should have installed the first time. … I won’t hold my breath.

In openSUSE-10.3 Linux, the Intel 2100 wireless “just worked” … It still “just works”. …

I have a strong dislike for Windows. >:( >:( This just re-inforces it.

Unfortunately this laptop is too old to run WinXP as a virtual session.

2

Well, i’m glad Linux works good but to be honest there are so many hardware configurations that everyone has different experiences with Windows or Linux. In that case you have indeed better experience with Linux than with Windows what can’t be said with other hardware configurations :wink:

I personally never had driver problems (except openSUSE 10.3 where i had to compile a network driver for P35-DS3R) and my experience was always great but hey, i don’t use wireless, no printers, nothing fancy at all :slight_smile:

3

But you have demonstrated to your wife how devoted you are to her welfare …

4

I may even say: “This is true love!”

Others might have thrown her out of the window together with XP.

5

Indeed … :slight_smile:

… and of course the driver update with winXP did NOT work, and winXP wireless still does not work, but wireless does work with openSUSE Linux.

This PC came with Windows XP OEM. That OS has been updated by my wife umpteen times … Why the winXP wireless would suddenly stop working (when it still works ok with openSUSE Linux) is a puzzle to both of us. Of course I have no desire to learn Windows (to help fix the problem) and my wife has no desire to use Linux (to work around the problem) … so we at the moment there is a family impass while we attempt to come up with a way forward …

Stay tuned for the “wireless wars” :slight_smile: …

6

Oldcpu, related to your past problem… I’m solving such problems approximately twice a half-year and what’s worse, it happens not only with wireless cards and laptops but even with regularly used PCI network cards. WinXP (doesn’t matter if it’s SP3 or older) constantly argues with several cards, bad drivers and so on. I’ve encountered so far only one very rare case, when the turning off network card in Control Panel caused system crashing… It was annoying.

7

I can not help to have a lot of *Schadenfreude *here. I struggled to get several wirelesses working with openSUSE (for weeks and sometimes months) and now the world is upside down lol!

8

I have noticed that different Suse versions behave differently on the same hardware; my point being that one anecdote about XP should not condemn XP anymore than the fact that SLED 10 will not install on my Dell laptop, but openSuse 11.x installs flawlessly.

9

In a soap box, as long as we are civil to each other, and civil to the developers (and sadly many complaining users forget that), all is mostly up for grabs and criticism. :slight_smile:

… now to resolve the family dilema, … thats a different kettle of fish.

10

Come off it, I know the real reason for your whinge.

It’s not the wasting of an evening that irks you, it’s wasting an evening and having no fun. It’s much more fun wasting time with Linux, no? Have I got it? lol!

11

Indeed. Right on the money. :slight_smile: …

To make matters worse, the wife phoned me at work 30 minutes ago. After my wife struggling with the PC at home for most the day (while I was at work) now she reports the wired connection also does not work with WinXP (in addition to the wireless not working). Now the wired and wireless still work with Linux, but thats not part of the equation. :cry:

… so tonight I know what I’ll be doing when I get home, … it will be slaving over a computer operating system … and it WON’T be playing with Linux. :frowning:

12

Take at least a good beer with it.

13

oldcpu, I have a suggestion. Just login through Linux and format her Winod$ partition. That will effectively stop all her further attempts to get into that bl**dy OS >:)

P.S. Don’t tell my name, OK?

14

Just do what every good windows user does… reinstall :wink:

–
Cheers Malcolm °¿° (Linux Counter #276890)
openSUSE 11.1 (i586) Kernel 2.6.27.21-0.1-pae
up 20:17, 1 user, load average: 0.25, 0.20, 0.12
ASUS eeePC 1000HE ATOM N280 1.66GHz | GPU Mobile 945GM/GMS/GME

15

The possibility of a winXP re-install is looking more and more likely by the second.

After 2.5 hour more this evening, we were no further ahead with winXP. By the time I got home, the wife had figured out that the winXP wired problem was her finger problem. … but the wireless connection in WinXP remained elusive. After researching the web for the exact error messages (noting that every winXP user with the same problem solved it either by re-installing the driver, rolling back the driver, installing a newer driver, or re-installing windows) we tried all the driver modifications. None worked.

The prospect of an MS-Windows re-install is looking more and more likely by the second.

The last time the wife re-installed WinXP on this laptop was (to my horror) immediately after I installed openSUSE-10.3 on the laptop. That was also the occasion when I discovered the openSUSE-10.3 recovery CD was broken for restoring grub, and I ended up doing my very 1st openSUSE re-install (of the same SuSE version) since moving to SuSE. >:( If my wife does re-install WinXP (which will break grub), I’ll likely put openSUSE-11.1 on the laptop in place of 10.3.

But two evenings gone … what a waste of time.

16

this is exactly why i don’t play with windows without a stiff drink first;)

17

But you can put it down to experience, which may be helpful to you in the future. A less pessimistic view I suppose. Experience does teach us a great deal. How often do you find yourself saying “If only…”.

Me:
“If only I hadn’t bothered re-installing Vista”

I don’t know what made me do it. But it will not happen again. Seriously - we hear that familiar “It works in windows” all the time. Well maybe it does, on your OEM/pre-installed junked up machine. I did a Vanilla Vista install and believe me it does not just work. I spent hours downloading what seemed huge driver files for everything - which in OS 11.1 did “Just Work”. So, yes, at the next opportunity - Vista is going. XP incidentally was fraught with the same driver issues.

18

Winod$ is notorious for their DLL/OCX/driver version mix ups. Also, there are stupid ways of determining how a particular version is loaded/rejected. They don’t have a solid dependency check. And, “registry” is another horror story. OEM versions work because the manufacturer had already wasted enough time fixing all those before shipping their machines. I feel the same with MacOS too. People talk about fast booting/shutdown time of Mac machines but all they have done is to make sure that only limited services are running and they can be started up/shut down quickly. If a Linux guy uses MacOS, he/she will immediately feel the limitations.

19

> … so tonight I know what I’ll be doing when I get home, … it will
> be slaving over a computer operating system … and it WON’T be
> playing with Linux. :frowning:

hmmmm…how about helping her break her MS habit…

i have, for years, told folks that i just don’t know enough about game
systems to help them with their MS problems…and i give them the
nntp address of possibly helpful fora…

for your wife i’d probably recommend comp.os.ms-windows.networking…

but if you do that i’d guess i’d also recommend you do a google on:

divorce attorneys [your city]

–
heartless_bot :wink:

20

An update on “wireless wars” …

My wife may have localized the problem with WinXP … We had 2 possibilities left to try before a re-installation of winXP:

  • install an Intel utility we found for configuring wireless (for the Intel Pro 2100 B3 wireless) or
  • change the memory on the PC. Around 5 days ago, we had swapped out one of the 2x256MB (for old total of 512MB) on this laptop to 1 x 1GB and 1 x 256MB (for new total of 1.256 GB of RAM). It worked ok in Linux. And appeared to work OK in Windows. … Still, there was a possibility this memory swap was the problem for Windows

So today the wife removed the 256MB card, just leaving 1GB card in the laptop (for new total of 1GB of RAM) . Wireless worked !! in WinXP for about 5 minutes, and then failed. It could only be restarted by a reboot. So she then removed the 1GB memory card and restored the laptop to its original hardware with 2x256MB RAM, and wireless worked for 5 minutes and then failed …

So it appears winXP has some sort of problem wrt the laptop’s memory.

Reference the RAM, my wife had purchased a “SO-DIMM 1GB DDR-333 (PC-2700) CL2.5” RAM, where the 2x256MB RAM were PC-2100. Purportedly the PC-2700 was backward compatible … but maybe this is not so with WinXP and wireless (Linux is no problem).

Anyway, we now need to look into what banks the memory was placed into, etc … etc …

… Finally after 2 irritating nights, an interesting development.