...and they come with a sore throat and sinus pain to boot. A tiny gremlin is trying to pierce my sinuses with a knitting needle. Ugh and all that. Nothing has actually been put away because I feel so wretched, but all the candles are out of the windows and the trees unplugged (except for the big one; if I'm going to be sick I might as well have something to enjoy). Everything looks dull and sober again.

I have been making steady progress late this afternoon loading more applications on my new hard drive, so that I only have a few left. I finally ran into a roadblock with PowerDVD. The first time I loaded it, I got some odd messages, but completed the load. The moment I put a DVD into the drive the screen started flickering with no way to get back to a menu and I could no longer control the computer. I shut it down, booted it back up, and used the uninstall to remove it. Then I reinstalled it, got no error messages, but again, the same thing: screen rapidly flickering. Had to shut it down again, reboot, and remove.

My poor guess with the screen flicker is that the video card is involved. James didn't have me load my video card driver when we installed WinXP because the computer behaved perfectly well without it. Perhaps it needs loading after all?

PowerDVD loaded perfectly on his machine with no trouble, but he has a different sort of video card and a newer motherboard.

We'll see when he gets home.

Back to trying to breathe...

[Later that night, still 1789 *: James agreed with my assessment—I needed video drivers. I installed what I thought were mine. None of the software matched. James also used to have a Radeon graphics card and had a driver disk for it. Turns out we had each other's disks. I reinstalled the incorrect ones and installed the entire thing. It said it was missing a file. @#$#@$#$! Uninstalled and reinstalled. #$@!#$##@%$! Still missing a file. Okay, I didn't need Hydravision (used if you have two monitors) or the other stuff; just loaded the driver and the DVD bits. Still didn't work. Uninstalled again. It said it was loading WinXP drivers, but I thought it might need newer ones. Downloaded what I thought were newer ones.

Anyway, I got it to the point where I could install PowerDVD, but it only played sound, not video. What the...? #$!@$@#$! Oops, wrong Radeon card. Downloaded correct driver. It wanted me to have Microsoft .NET 2.0 connected. Say what? Turns out when you installed the whole system it connected you to something where you could download games. #$!#$%#%!#$! I just want my damn DVD player to work! Found the right driver. Did a limited install. Still saying my display wasn't right!

I went searching around for a newer version of DirectX, since it said that might be the problem. Found out I had the newest version. In despair, went back into PowerDVD to see what other things it suggested.

It worked.

I will never understand computers. <g>

* Sorry. Start the Revolution Without Me joke.]

Labels: computers, sickness

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. . . . . noted and logged by Linda at 6:38:00 PM

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