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October 08, 2002
It's The Little Things
That I have time to even consider the little things is probably a very good sign, generally speaking. At lunch today, my fortune cookie said that my luck had just changed. I was disappointed to hear that, because things have been going well.
I've been having some really minor computer trouble, but it's starting to annoy the hell out of me. Far as I can tell, it's nothing wrong with the hardware (the X200 is slick stuff). Uninstalling and reinstalling XP Service Pack 1 (bloatware edition) didn't solve it. So if any of you have suggestions, just give me a holler.
1. Right after Windows boots up, and after all the startup programs launch, the screen switches from 1024x768 32-bit color to 800x600 16-bit color. No clue why. The screen works just fine. It starts at the proper level, and after it does it's thing, I can reset it the way I want it. I just can't make the setting stick. By the time I realized I couldn't figure this out, the time when it was working properly had already passed out of my system restore utility.
2. In new Explorer windows (either Windows Explorer navigating my drive or IE on the web), the status bar doesn't show by default.
Other than that, life is good.
Posted by buddha at October 8, 2002 05:38 PM
Comments
a) sounds like a driver conflict. (likely video) Sounds like your service pack overwrote a specific OEM driver for the video card. Don't you have a dell? Call the bastards. You paid for their "award winning" customer support.
b) Isn't the status bar in the View menu? Are you on XP? Jeff's machine had this problem and all I did was View -> Status (or something like that). It was annoying the hell out of me so I can sympathize with your frustration.
Posted by: shoop at October 8, 2002 06:52 PM
drivers, huh? you know... i did a very cursory check and because windows says i have the current driver, i was dumb enough to trust that "current" and "correct" are related. i'll look into that.
i can get the status bar on any individual window easily. i can't make it stay. it appears on new instances of IE (double-click IE), but not of Windows Explorer (double-click My Computer, for example). Except it doesn't wotk if the new instance of IE is the result of right-click-open-in-a-new-window, which for some reason is how i do a lot of browsing. Like the video settings, it's easy to change, but annoying to have to change.
Posted by: buddha at October 8, 2002 08:59 PM
You didn't go installing any silly browser toolbars did you?
Posted by: Ben at October 10, 2002 03:45 PM
No silly toolbars. Just Google. A while back, I installed a toolbar on my old computer that friend of mine wrote, and it was bad news. He forgot to remove the call to FuckUpDansComputer() in one of the subroutines. No more alpha testing for me.
It took a new BIOS and a new video driver, I solved the recent problem.
Posted by: dan at October 10, 2002 06:17 PM