Cannot post or reply

[Corley]

Mike,


Turns out I was wrong about my XP install disks, they do not have IE5 on them, they have IE6. No biggy there, but I tried to remove IE6 and created a vegitable, so I reloaded XP and tried again with the same results. I give up on removing IE6 I guess, and am now rebuilding the system. By the way, the vanilla IE6 without any updates at all doesn't work at all with the forum site. The drop down login turns all black and you can't even attempt logging in. Hummmm... Anyway, I'll just go back now to rebuilding the system with XP and IE8 to see what happens. Sorry for the lack of pertinent data, but this MS stuff is just a pain in the butt and often doesn't do what you expect! It takes something like 142 windows updates to make an XP install current, translation - 8 hours of downloads/installs on my 6mb dsl liine. I think I need to create a clone disk copy when I get it completed, what's a good free easy to use hard disk cloning tool that can handle different size hard disks / partitions?

Corley

 

[Mike]

I'm not surprised IE 6 wouldn't work. It can't render the CSS coding that makes up the sliding login function.

I'm feeling your pain. I just stuck a fork in a 64 bit LMDE installation, running a Liquorix kernel. I still have the standard LMDE kernel on the machine, but I managed to grenade that one too. And doing a simple restart wasn't cutting it, because it was trying to drive around GRUB. I finally shut the machine down, did a cold restart and managed to get into GRUB. I'm downloading Mint 10 Julia for that machine as I type this. But I'm not feeling all your pain. I'm doing a torrent download (a tick over 16 minutes to download the entire operating system) and the install won't take much more than 15 minutes. But the aggravation factor is running wide open! :wall:

 

[Corley]

Mike,

As one might expect, after rebuilding this machine back up to XP with IE8 and no other apps, it works fine on the forum. As I add additional apps, I'll keep trying the forum to see if/when it breaks.

The download times for the updates wouldn't be so bad except that MS throttles them so that they come to me slow. I thought I would hurry the process by downloading SP2 and SP3, which should incorporate many of the updates, but that only made it load even more updates (166 all together if I counted right). What a bunch of crap MS has unloaded on us!

Anyway, stay tuned while I load this thing up looking for the failing app...

Corley

 

[Mike]

Windows 7 kicked my tail around the block, trying to burn a Mint Julia DVD. I finally downloaded the .iso to a Linux box and burned it with no issues at all. Go figure. And this machine is now running on Julia and everything is working a treat. I'm dreading the Tweetdeck installation, however. For whatever reason, Tweetdeck and 64 bit architecture just aren't made for one another. It's always a royal pain to get it up and running.

Scarcely over 16 minutes to download Julia, about 6 minutes to burn the .iso to DVD and just under 13 minutes to do the install. Barely half an hour. Within another hour, I had installed all the additional scripts I tyoicaly use and had already added the repos to get the Firefox 6.0 nightly builds streaming into this machine too. While your XP install will take what seems like days to install. And people wonder why I enjoy running Linux?

Corley, it isn't going to break. I'd bet the farm you're going to get that machine all loaded back up and everything will work just fine. It would be nice to see something cause the problem, so we could at least point a finger at it. But I don't think that is going to happen.

 

[Martin72]

Mike,

Just to confirm what Corley and others have seen. I upgraded my home computer (Win7) from IE8 to IE9 and I am able to logon on again. Doesn't help the IE7 and IE8 issue....but updating does the trick.

Martin

 

[Gerry]

Dont know if this helps but I am running win7 with latest Firefox on a 18 month old Compaq laptop and have had no problems at all
Gerry

 

[Corley]

Mike,

The Florence machine is pretty much loaded up with everything it had before I crashed it, and guess what? You were correct, it is all still working fine with the site. I'll just have to keep watching it and testing regularly to see when it craps out I guess... I suppose it could also have to do with the sequence of how the updates / patches / programs got installed, but we most likely will never know if that is the case.



Gerry, et al,

The problem we have with just upgrading to IE9 is that IE8 is as high as MS allows you to upgrade with Windows XP. So, unless someone comes up with a way to further upgrade XP, it's going to be a dieing breed very soon. I see this IE9 issue as the first step by MS in obsoleting XP, and collecting a bunch of cash on Windows 7 upgrades. (Not from me!) At the current rates for new MS products, they are forcing us to consider other alternative operating systems, browsers, office tools, etc. Ready or not, the free stuff is going to become main stream really soon now. I'm not sure how the masses get educated on it, but it will happen, and the newer Linux based distros are getting to be almost turnkey, so not much education is really needed... Probably the most confusing thing for me when I started playing with Linux was the directory structures, since you hardly had to know anything at all about them for Windows, and with Linux it's helpful to understand what is where and how it inter-relates. Oh, and the strange non-intuative names for programs... JMHO

Corley

 

[Gerry]

I am sure I read on the interweb in an interview with the Gates thing that he was obsoleting XP in 2012
Gerry

 

[Corley]

Gerry,

And, that's pretty much when I'll be obsoleting Windows, MS, and Bill Gates profits. With all the great Linux distros coming along, we are on target for splashdown!

Corley

 

[Mike]

I hate to burst anyone's bubble, but mainstream support (i.e. non-commercial support) for Windows XP SP3 ended 2 years ago. 14 April 2009 was D-Day for XP. Microsoft doesn't obsolete Windows releases, it merely stops supporting them. Which means if you're running a Home version of XP, you haven't had support for 2 years.

Microsoft offers support for five years from the date of general availability (XP was released 25 October 2001), or for 2 years after the release of a successor (Vista Home was released 30 January 2007), so the mainstream support was actually extended on XP for about 6 months.

If you do the math, and since Windows 7 has already been released, extended support for Vista will end in another 9 months. And Windows 7 has been with us for 18 months, so the clock on it only has about 42 months left. And since Win 7 is the second successor to XP, that means XP commercial customers will lose support in 7 more months.

Mainstream support (non-commercial) is for 5 years from date of release, or two years after a successor's release, whichever is longer.

Extended support (commercial) is for five years from date of release, or two years after a second successor's release.

The XP machine sitting here on my desk has been updated to SP 3, but has never had a version upgrade. I'm too tight to pay for them. I paid the bloody Windows tax when I bought the machine and enough is enough. However, it has also had Ubuntu Feisty Fawn, Gutsy Gibbon, Hardy Heron, Intrepid Ibex, Jaunty Jackalope, Karmic Koala, Mint 9 Isadora, Linux Mint Debian Edition and Mint 10 Julia installed on it. TEN different Linux upgrades that have cost me exactly $0.00. Try upgrading Windows 10 times and see how much it costs you. Oh. Wait. Never mind. Every other Windows release requires a faster CPU, more memory and more disk space than your computer already has, so forget about that upgrade business. Just go buy another computer.

 

[Corley]

Mike,

I've tried everything I can think of to get this Florence PC back to a failing state, but no success. Maybe that is good, as it would indicate that if you have an XP machine with IE8 and it has the failing condition, reinstalling everything will make it work again (probably), but that doesn't isolate the problem, so I view it as a failure on my part in that isolation atempt. Therefore, having failed miserably, I'm totally depressed, about to eat a worm, and may even shot myself in the foot as punishment for not doing my part. OR, maybe I'll just rejoice in the fact that this PC plays nice with the forum now.

Anyway, I wanted to let you know that no amount of installing all manner of various crap on this machine seems to get it back to the failing condition. (It does slow it down though, as the registry gets bigger and bigger... Thanks MS for this self destructing crappy design.)

Corley

 

[Corley]

Really interesting event here... I was on the forum a few minutes ago, with IE8, and all was well. I then went over to check a different site, and when I came back to this site the problem appeared again. I really didn't do anything in the way of installs or anything else, just went over to my GoDaddy account to check some things, and when I came back it was broke! I'm sorry it took so long to get back to a failure, and I don't know if it had anything to do with going to the GoDaddy site, but??? Oh, and one other thing I did was edit a contact in my contacts folder. No installs at all though... Chrome still works fine, I'm using it now. Anyway, it probably doesn't matter any longer, but I thought you might like to know in case the problem occurs on one of your other forums.

Corley

 

[Mike]

I've no idea. I'm no closer to understanding what could be causing this than I was the first day.