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