Some Notes on the Machines

If you have a PostScript printer whose manufacturer’s drivers are not available or are questionable, there is another way.  Adobe (inventor of PostScript) has for a long time made a complete alternative printer driver engine available:

http://www.adobe.com/support/downloads/detail.jsp?ftpID=1505

and the OpenPrinting folks have PPDs (definition files) which often work with the above.  In a recently-visited case of Oki C6000 for XP, we have:

http://www.openprinting.org/show_printer.cgi?recnum=Oki-C6000

A good place to find Vista drivers and hardware compatibility information:

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/compatibility/windows-vista/Default.aspx

Occasionally, text will be rendered unclearly in LCD monitors, even with ClearType on, regardless of refresh rate, resolution, et cetera. In these cases, the Microsoft ClearType Tuner PowerToy:

http://www.microsoft.com/typography/ClearTypePowertoy.mspx

is extremely useful. Updated video drivers is the step to test first, however.

There is a weird registry issue which can cause CD/DVD drives to not work, to go yellow-questionmark in the device manager. According to many resources, it exists under both XP and Vista. However, the Microsoft web site standard fix does not always work. Here are steps:

1. Search the registry for the word “UpperFilters”.
2. There are likely to be several matches. Only some of them have to do with CD-ROMs. This will be obvious by context. When you see such a one, delete the “UpperFilters” key only.
3. Do the same for “LowerFilters”.

Sometimes, this happens because registry folders have had permissions changed by antivirus or other software. If the key cannot be deleted, this is the problem. You will need to right-click on the folder and add permissions, and then do the deletion. It is usually most straightforward to add the permission to the user logged in, though you’ll have to play with the dialog box if you’re on a domain.

Here is excellent software, donationware, for hardware detection and analysis. It’s called PC Wizard:

http://www.cpuid.com/pcwizard.php

Just saw this on a new Lenovo laptop. Saw miscellaneous hardware misbehavior, so was checking the BIOS settings.

As with many, there is a PCI IRQ area in the BIOS, with ten or fifteen settings, all of which can be Auto, Disable, or preset to 3, 4, 5, etcetera up to 11. The difference was this: from the factory, this laptop had all of the PCI IRQs set to the same, #11. When in the course of debugging I tried to do something more usual, anything except all-eleven, the laptop crashed on reboot.

I don’t know what this architecture is, but it is a radical departure from everything PCI I have ever seen before. And I will be trying all-eleven in the future, with 2007+ hardware!

Things to check, if a new burner won’t burn:

1. Some motherboards require that an IDE burner be master, not slave. The symptom is that Windows will call it a CD-ROM only, not a burner.
2. Motherboard chipset drivers need to be updated.
3. The Windows XP built-in CD burning library, appears to lack the ability to wait for very fast burners (e.g. today, 52X), to spin down. So when a built-in burn attempt is made on such a burner, the whole machine is hung during the completion process, after the data is put out.  You’ll need to use ImgBurn or something else more current than the XP builtin.

David Childers recently collected the following data specific to Dells, probably relevant to Dimension 2400 and later.

At startup, there are four LEDs on the back of the systems. These function very similarly to the old POST boards for diagnostics that were used in the late 1980’s and early 1990’s. They will flash amber and green as the system initializes the subsystems:

Light A – Represents the Video subsystem

Light B – Represents the RAM subsystem

Light C – Represents the Data Bus (CPU to System Board) subsystem

Light D – Represents the Storage subsystem

Once all of the lights are green, fundamental hardware failures can be ruled out.

To reset the BIOS to factory defaults:

1. Remove the power cable from the power supply. Leave the power switch on the power supply ON.
2. Press and hold down the power button on the front of the case for at least 20 seconds.
3. Replace power cord.
4. Start system.

To clear the parameter RAM (CMOS)

1. At startup, press F2 (or whatever) to enter the BIOS setup.
2. Once you’re at the main BIOS screen, press alt-f to clear the CMOS RAM

A most interesting BIOS option

You can disable BIOS control of the PCI bus, and set it to OS control.

Just saw it today. BIOS gave the option of using the onboard video BIOS, or AGP BIOS, as primary. The machine had a PCI video card, and the motherboard flatly refused to work with it; it gave all sorts of weird behavior, and could be teased into functioning only and occasionally by rebooting to safe mode and then up. On this board and its kindred, therefore, we either go onboard video or AGP video, both, or a replacement motherboard! No PCI, even though there were 6 PCI slots to choose from.

On this page:

http://www.howtogeek.com/forum/rss/tags/acpi

it is reported that Vista requires ACPI, and more importantly, APIC. APIC is a relatively new timing chip. Many motherboards have nonworking APICs.