(no subject)

[gwynhefar]

I am beginning to give serious credence to the idea that there is a technology-hating imp living in my apartment. No other explanation makes sense.

My replacement computer from Dell arrived yesterday, right before I left for work. When I got home, I set it up, connected everything the way you're supposed to, and turned it on. I got an AUTOEXEC.BAT Failure after the Alienware logo.

So I call Dell. This time I get a very nice technician named William who listens to my description of the problem and goes "What? That makes no sense." I find that I respond much better to customer service folk who admit when they don't know what's going on, rather than trying to pretend they do when they obviously don't. I like this guy already.

So we check a few settings, all of which are where they should be. Finally he says that while he's never seen this problem before on a customer machine, he thinks that reinstalling Windows will take care of it. So he leaves me to do that and promises to call back today after work.

Reinstalling Windows *does*, in fact, resolve the error issue. However, while I can now get into Windows, it refuses to acknowledge my network connection so I can't get online, and it frequently stalls on various tasks. In trying to get online I tried disabling and reenabling the network adapter, and it stalled on enabling. At another point, it stalled on shut down - spending 45 minutes on the "Windows is shutting down" screen before I gave up and manually turned it off.

So something is still wrong. Here's hoping William lives up to his first impression and proves to be more competent and reliable than the other Dell techs I've worked with. Meanwhile, I'm going to go search for imp-banishing rituals.

Comments

[luis-mw.livejournal.com]

here is a technology-hating imp living in my apartment.

It probably has 4 legs, soft fur, and makes a purring noise.

Computers distract you from important business of paying attention to cats.

[gwynraven.livejournal.com]

Heh - the cats aren't allowed in the bedroom where the computer is, and that's part of the reason :)

[tewok.livejournal.com]

Yow! I hope you can get the new box fixed. This is beyond ridiculous.

[mfree.livejournal.com]

...what's the provenance of the hard drive you're using at this moment?

Something is quite amiss, particularly since NT doesn't use autoexec.bat and you may as well rename it so it isn't seen. If the system *is* looking for it... it may have been for neferious reasons. Neferious as in malware, and the type I have in mind will survive an OS rebuild, and will even survive a quick format because it's initialization code is pointed to by the MBR and held outside the windows partition.

If the drivers are all proper, the OS is fresh, and nothing else has been tampered with, then the only thing that would cause performance and/or networking issues are either hardware or iunanticipated software.

On the network issues.... can you ping localhost? Are you pulling an IP? If you have a network appliance, is it set to recognize the MAC you're using?

[gwynraven.livejournal.com]

The harddrive I got from Dell. The computer is refurbished so who knows where they got it from. It's Windows 7 that's installed on it.

As for the network issues - I have no idea. I know very little about network processes. All I know is that the modem is plugged in and the computer shows a local area connection but it's marked as no network access.

[mfree.livejournal.com]

Ok.. if you'd like, open up a DOS prompt, type the following commands, and reply the results and I'll look at them first thing in the morning.

ipconfig -a
arp -a
net config workstation
nbtstat -r
ipconfig /displaydns
set
sc query (this is a long result, may want to redirect it to a text file)
schtasks (another long one...)

Last long one, optional if you want me to scope out your system drivers...

driverquery /V /FO list

If win7 had the capacity to do so I'd ask to see a copy of clusters 0 and 64 just to verify the MBR, but if it's a fresh refurb it's likely been zero'd.

Heck, yanking the power cord on the modem may set you straight... works for me occasionally when the modem stops talking to the Airport and the DHCP lease expires. I'm sure they've gone over that though.

[mfree.livejournal.com]

And I'm going to ask one single 'dumb' question.

How close is the time on the system compared to reality? Set it as close to the second as possible using a cellphone as reference or some other connected device.

30 seconds off can cause problems in a domain... don't know what kind of offset it takes to whip up on workgroups/netbios processes, but it's not out of the realm of possibility.

[syldath.livejournal.com]

honestly? this makes me glad I don't have a Dell, and also ensures that I probably never will

[kaitouace2750.livejournal.com]

Still problems? That really sucks. I'm sorry. :(

[cissa.livejournal.com]

I've found threatening to sacrifice a cat to the imps works really well. See, the imps don't WANT a cat, and so they hasten to improve performance to avoid getting one.

Or something.

Best of luck!

[curmudgn]

Oh, jeez. ANW drivers are just Teh Evil, and WLAN drivers are more evil than most. Some of my least fondly remembered support calls were trying to deal with WLAN cards that simply didn't want to talk to the base station, no matter what you did.

I'm guessing this is an M15x or an M17x. If it is, what WLAN card do you have in it?