WPA: The Final Stretch

Mr. Chan · Post by **Mr. Chan** » Mon Aug 09, 2004 6:15 am

So I have made it. I have survived 27 days into Windows XP after an odd issue concerning partitions (and the fact Norton Ghost screwed them up, then wanted money to help me).

I enabled the on-board LAN on my computer, for this go-through as I will be needing it when I LAN at my friends house, but I also heard a NIC can allow more device changes on XP. I figure the same applies to on-board.

Either way, I need some suggestions for the remainder of my 3-day grace period to ensure that I do not overlook anything this go around. Any and all suggestions are welcome!

:)

LVCapo · Post by **LVCapo** » Mon Aug 09, 2004 11:09 am

I hate trying to set up wireless connections!!! I got a ASUS board with a built in wireless setup and it configured itself and works flawlessly.
Wish i could help you more, but tell me exactly what you have, what you need, and what you want. i will research it and try to have some answers for you by the end of the day
Rich

Mr. Chan · Post by **Mr. Chan** » Mon Aug 09, 2004 12:07 pm

All I need is to know if I have forgotten to do anything that's important, before activating Windows XP.

That's all, :)

infinitevalence · Post by **infinitevalence** » Mon Aug 09, 2004 1:25 pm

Yeah download linux.

LVCapo · Post by **LVCapo** » Mon Aug 09, 2004 1:28 pm

I have personally found Norton to have horrible customer service policies. i also have found ghost to be a worthless program that causes more problems than it solves. I wish there was a good imaging solution for RAID arrays, but it seems to be quite a problem, at least right now.

alister · Post by **alister** » Mon Aug 09, 2004 2:16 pm

capper5016 wrote:I have personally found Norton to have horrible customer service policies. i also have found ghost to be a worthless program that causes more problems than it solves. I wish there was a good imaging solution for RAID arrays, but it seems to be quite a problem, at least right now.

I love Ghost (or used too), I never had any problems with it. The new version is going to suck because it is nothing but Drive Image renamed to Ghost. Have you ever tried True Image? True Image is much better than Ghost and quite a bit cheaper.

Alister

Mr. Chan · Post by **Mr. Chan** » Mon Aug 09, 2004 3:28 pm

Without turning this into something other than what I meant for it to be, I would like to comment on Ghost.

Great...or was. The truth of the matter is, what I did was set it to ghost my C drive and when it rebooted it stuck on the program in dos. A few minutes later I hit an arrow key and it said System halted, stack overflow blah blah...like WTF? I had run it on the same system at least twice before (before WinXP) and it worked.

Guess what it did? It renamed the C drive to the F partition (which was already taken, bumping my other partitions) and made up another C partition that consisted of about 13 files...Ghost files. The volume name was like SNGVP or something, I figured out it stood for norton's "virtual partition".

Quite a mess it was, I had to delete that and then do some other nasty stuff (installing an operating system to back up my...remaining data) and then format all of it just to clear out my secondary hard drive and properly partition everything. I spent hours talking to Microsoft tech support (for free!) before they ultimately suggested re-installing XP to save my data and then reformat. So ultimately, I already knew how to fix my problem -- just needed the reassurance Ghost had screwed me.

Acronis I have heard, is much better. :) I trust it already because it doesn't live in the DOS age.

Oh I almost forgot to say, when I re-installed XP I didn't know at the time that when you format and it changes the volume serial number that counts as a hardware change. I had done this a few times, over the months (secondary hard drive was from old computer, FAT32 and had data, I eventually didn't need the data, then I decided to convert it to NTFS...long story). Anyways, I restored the backed up WPA files so I wouldn't have to activate, however they didn't work. It would overwrite them (or something like that) and I would still have to activate. I figure I might not have had to, if I had the old volume serial numbers, but oh well. This will be my second activation and I know if you have a NIC then you can perform more hardware changes without having to reactivate (three extra, I believe). So I turned the OBLAN on before I activate, so it won't change anything afterwards.

This brings me to my point, should there be anything else I should do before I have to activate that would warrant a hardware change? I don't want to use my third activation unless I have to in the distant future (upgrading several components, like gfx card and hard drive arrays much later on).

infinitevalence · Post by **infinitevalence** » Mon Aug 09, 2004 3:40 pm

The last time i called Microsoft for techsupport was in 1995-6. Every question i have had since then could be found on the net. I would not worrie about what to do with your last 3 days, if you need techsupport were here, and so is google. As for the activation if you start changing around your system too much, (and even swaping hd's can be too much) then you might as well just say screw it like i did and buy a full version and then use a cracked version so you dont have to mess with activation. They got my money and ill be damned if im going to have to call them every time i swap mobo's.

Mr. Chan · Post by **Mr. Chan** » Mon Aug 09, 2004 4:16 pm

That's what I'm sayin, but I can't download the entire thing (again). I originally did that and well, it didn't work right. The only time I'll need to swap hd is if I buy another 80gb like this to put in raid1+0 and then, ill put this old one back in my old computer.

I hear once you do it once, you can do it as many times as you want (if it counts the hard drive sawp, you can swap the hard drive again as much as you like, or something like that).

The last time, I was unable to get online. I failed to mention, when Norton brings up the menu and you can "Return to Windows" it would also get the stack overflow. There was no way into Windows.

Mr. Chan · Post by **Mr. Chan** » Thu Aug 12, 2004 11:17 pm

I got tired of waiting for the day to end, so the other day I activated it just in case I would have to be offline for activation when the day was over. Although cool the first time, I didn't want to go through with the WPA hotline again.

My southern accent gets pwnd by that hotline, takes too long.