So last night I’m complaining to my brother about this 3d rendering he has me working on. It requires a lot of source crap (textures, simple models other people have done, and such) from the main computer here at home with the internet connection.. and my computer, which is better to run 3d studio on. I had been using a cd and continually writing stuff on it, but they conk out for whatever reason sometimes and I’m sick of wasting CD’s, so I ask for my brother’s USB keychain, figuring it would be ideal. He doesn’t have it here, but suggests just using a spare router to network the computers, and share the internet.
I was dubious about that plan, since I knew, at least at some point, or in some places, swapping the connection out to a router just didn’t work, MAC address crap and I don’t know enough about routers or the problem to fix it. Well, we try it out, and I do manage to get internet on my computer (which is good since I’ve been part of a lan sharing internet before on that computer), but I couldn’t see the home computer, nor could it see me. Odd, but the home computer wasn’t set up for any of this, so it didn’t have a local 192.168.*.* IP, so we try running something called the Network Setup Wizard… and then *it* started… the it’s that seem to always happen when I try to interact with computers in anything but an “in passing” sort of way… as soon as I actually try to do anything, to alter my “computing experience”, it explodes, from new software, to hardware upgrades, to the simple task of making this damn P3 with XP understand it was now part of a lan.
The first thing that happened, is that we lost all cable…. internet, tv, the lot… and it happened almost as a response to our playing about. I knew that it was impossible, or at least incredibly unlikely, but still, the coincidence was annoying. Further, the home computer, the P3, just didn’t work right at all. When it started up, programs wouldn’t work properly, like, say, the XP image and fax viewer, where it would say it was loading a picture, but would just sit there. And Norton Antivirus was mysteriously disabled, and wouldn’t load it’s main program… almost nothing would, you would run something, and it would pretend to run for a second with the hourglass… and nothing. The task-manager showed it was in there, but using no CPU time… and strangely enough, none of the processes were owned by any user, either the admin account we were under, or the system. And when trying to log into simple accounts set up for our parents usage, it would load them for half a tick, then drop back out to the login screen without any indication of why the fuck it wasn’t logged into the account we wanted.
It all smelled like some sort of virus to me, but why then? Anyway, after some trying, we managed to do a system restore to the point automatically created a day earlier, which was nice, I didn’t know about any of that. And everything seemed to work again… so for some reason, we tried the network wizard again, and again, boom, same symptoms, except this time, the system restore program wouldn’t load like it did last time. We tried lots of things to get the system to let us run it… we tried using msconfig to change the services, disabled norton thinking it was hanging things up, of course, the computer wouldn’t restard gracefully any more. When it said it was saving our settings on logging out for a restart, that was just a fancy way of saying that the computer was just going to hang and that after a few minutes it might be a good idea to hit the reset button. In any case, we managed to boot into a fully fledged and self-marking safe-mode, which did let us, thankfully, run system restore (we wanted to from the CD, but the only thing that offered was the recovery console, something I have had many useful experiences with in the past in the days XP was installed on my P2 and I had to reformat and reinstall everything everytime I booted up the computer)… so now we are back to square one, and I don’t think we want to move further afield than that.
After the computer was thankfully restored back again, I ran the now-working norton and scanned the XP drive, and it got nothing… what the hell, at least a virus would have made sense.
As for Rogers, I don’t like them either, as the TV and the internet stayed down from roughly midnight or so I think, to sometime after 6 am this morning, for apparently no other reason than to do so.
