Wayne Stallwood wrote:
>
> On Tuesday 04 November 2003 09:53, Jenny Hopkins wrote:
>
> > Coo. That sounds exactly like the problems I've been
> having. Do you
> > have to be moderately good at hardware to check for this?
> >
> > Thanks,
> > Jenny
> > /me prepares to whisk new hard drive out of wrapper....
>
> It may be Power Supply, to be honest unless you have a
> reasonably accurate
> Multimeter laying around, Substitution will probably be
> cheaper than getting
> the equipment to test such things.
>
> Worse than that it could be ripple or power on spikes on one
> of the lines, in
> which case you are going to need even more expensive
> equipment to check it.
>
> Just a thought though, Did you plug that Serial modem into
> either/both of
> these machines (remember the time you mistakenly plugged the
> serial port of
> your modem into your laptop's parallel port) did you try it
> on these machines
> as well. If so have you had the parallel ports working since then ?
>
> Regards
>
> Wayne
>
> PS, You should try and convince work to pay for VMware, why
> ruin the uptime of
> a perfectly good Linux system by starting windows :o)
>
I'll try replacing the power supply then.
Re. serial modem - no, that was a moment of laptop idiocy that fortunately seemed to leave no damage done (good memory you have!). This is my main desktop pc. I did have the printer printing over the parallel port from both OS until recently, as I did the sound. I'm racking my brains to think of any hardware changes I suddenly made (plugging in zip drives instead of printers to parallel ports etc) but can't think of any.
I might bring the box along to Syleham meeting and invite speculation, if the psu change doesn't work.
VMware - what an excellent idea. I was thinking of looking into WINE, but it didn't sound as though it would be over-reliable for msaccess, and I have to maintain a db for work in this (although I've just ported the back end over to postgresql on the linux server :-)). I'll go off and look at costs and spec.
Thanks, Jenny