Desperation At Work...stupid comp

[Jazzzzz]

Hrm...a little late, but in case it's still bothering you:

It's likely a hardware problem with the optical drive.  It's going to try to boot from that first, unless you manually tell it to boot from the hard drive.  It's probably running into some trouble when it pokes the controller...or (although I assume you checked) there's a bad disk in the drive (i.e., it's trying to boot from a disk that's not really bootable).

Then again...I'm a software guy, not a hardware guy.  :dunno:

trust me, it's the disk controller on the motherboard -- it's a common issue with pavilions and a few other models of HP/Compaq PCs

[TheGoodGuy]

so i dont understand this..

dell certs??

when the f%$k did you need a certification from DELL to work on a machine. Bah.. If you can work on one, you can work ona nother..

<--- Ex Sr. Network System Admin @ Stargate digital.

[RVertigo]

You have to be certified by the specific company to be a warranty dealer...  You pay them so their customers can pay you.

[Onlypastrana199]

Yale has a contract with Dell, all of the computing support supervisors for their queues have to have their Dell certs because a majority of the students here have Dells. That way, we can order Dell warranty parts (we order alot of them) without having to deal with tech support, because by having our certs, we technically are Dell Tech Support. Its nice cause I get Dell employee discounts and can track and order my stuff without answering a bunch of stupid questions like..is the computer on? All of our public access cluster computers are IBM though  :dunno:

[Phaedrus]

Yale has a contract with Dell, all of the computing support supervisors for their queues have to have their Dell certs because a majority of the students here have Dells. That way, we can order Dell warranty parts (we order alot of them) without having to deal with tech support, because by having our certs, we technically are Dell Tech Support. Its nice cause I get Dell employee discounts and can track and order my stuff without answering a bunch of stupid questions like..is the computer on? All of our public access cluster computers are IBM though  :dunno:

I don't have a Dell cert, or any other vendor specific certs. But I do have my A+. I don't have to deal with Dell's crap either; I work for the state and we're on state contract. I call them up and say "A power supply in one of our GX270's went. I need another". They ship it out and we have it the next day. I return the old on in the box the new one come in, and thats it.   Their "is the computer on?" crap is annoying  

[The Buddha]

Yea I'd suggest you get a real operating system ... OK OK ... most of XP is OK, they did steal much of it from Unix ... like TCP/IP stack etc ... but still its windoze ...
OH yea its windoze ... if you haven't rebooted in the last hour you're screwed ... Oh ... rebooting is the problem ... you probably need to reboot for that ...
Cool.
Srinath.

[Badger]

Yea I'd suggest you get a real operating system ... OK OK ... most of XP is OK, they did steal much of it from Unix ... like TCP/IP stack etc ...

I suppose ignorance really is bliss.  

It's probably pointless to open a discussion about the fundimental differences in the kernel, driver abstraction, virtual memory management, i/o processing, thread scheduling, security, resource managment, executable format, process management, window managmenet, graphics processing, or any of the other bits that are almost entirely unlike UNIX.  Or that tcp/ip is a specification, and thus logically all network stacks should work almost exactly the same way (otherwise, what would be the point of having a specification?)  

I'm not trying to open up the debate as to which is better, UNIX or Windows.  People have their preferences, and it's more of a religious debate than anything else...but it's just uninformed to think they are the same.  Almost nothing in Win32 works the same way that UNIX does.

Sorry...I'm being overly harsh, but I'm an OS internals guy (formerly a UNIX OS internals guy, so I do have basis for comparison).  Comments like this just rub me the wrong way.  Sort of like the guy I ran into the other day telling his coworkers: "Windows can only use 3GB of memory anyway...there's no sense in putting 4GB in the box."*  People who don't know what they are talking about shouldn't be responsible for giving advice to other people.  

* Obviously, this guy completely misunderstood the purpose of the /3GB switch