Yep, unfortunately last night, I thought my server had died on me. Abyss kept on crashing, I couldn’t even open Task Manager because it kept displaying the “Out of Memory” error message. Today, I forced a hard reboot, and finally; yes! My server now lives, and is serving a little slower that usual, but I need a hell of a RAM upgrade, if you didn’t know, my server currently has only 64MB, according to server expert, Andrew Whyman, this is no way near enough. He runs a server powering I think 4 of his own sites, using the same program as me, Abyss Web Server, but his server has a) a faster processor than mine and b) lots more RAM than mine, plus mine is a laptop, optimized for mobile use, obviously resulting in less power, so less speed, and so on. He very kindly offered to put me up on his server, but I declined, because I wanted to see if my server could survive on its own, obviously it has because otherwise you wouldn’t be seeing this.

I think that a good beginning to this post would have been ‘Okay’ but I’ve used that too much to begin previous posts, so it all starts like this…

One day I was browsing the internet and came across this www.orangeproblems.co.uk website, because Orange are my ISP. I thought it was quite odd that they were voted worst ISP of 2007, they’re not that bad from my experience. Anyway I found this article of how to set up your printer with a Inventel Livebox (the routers that Orange you get ‘free’ with their wireless and talk packages but as soon as you cancel you’ve got to send them back to Orange – I would have prefered to have used my old NETGEAR router but the Livebox seems to be faster plus it has a phone plug for Orange’s talk service), so I followed this guide and got to the point where it came to select the drivers, and I thought i’m not digging out the printer disk, it’ll take ages and under my computer desk is a right mess; pieces of paper, lots of blank disks that have data on them but not labelled, random disk cases without the disks in them, etc. So I decided to use the nearest driver on the list, since the actual driver I want wasn’t on the list. I wanted a HP PSC 1510 driver but the closes to that was a HP PSC 950 so I just chose that and completed the guide. Then I set up the other machine (the one running Vista) exactly the same and printed a test page. When it started printing, first of all it took about three sheets of paper with it and began. It was about a third through the first page when it stopped and the light kept on flashing, and continued not to do much. Maybe it will continue, but no it didn’t so I checked the “See what’s printing?” screen and nothing was there. I thought a good old unplug would do the job. It did sort of but I’ve still got the problem of it locking up and not doing much.

When I get the time to dig out the printer disk then I’ll hit the “Have disk…” when resetting everything up. So the moral of this story is never choose the closest driver to the one you need if its not there because if you do then something really bad could happen like in my case where I nearly broken my printer and also using ‘Okay’ to begin a post too many times isn’t good so you should start off with something like “I think that a good beginning to this post would have been ‘Okay’ but I’ve used that too much to begin previous posts” when blogging.

Okay, so this post is titled a little oddily, let me explain; after forgetting the site that I previously went to, I googled it (what did I google? I googled on how to get the eyetoy on a PC, or laptop in my case) and it returned a lot of results to either forums or blog posts telling you to download some D-Link drivers and then edit them in notepad so they would work…

But I found a much better and simpler solution, just download a program called EOCP (or if you’ve already installed it, its got some long S.E.U.D.C.a.S folder name in Start Menu’s programs folder), this program is free and avalible from eocp.sourceforge.net and its open source too!

As the title of this post describes; it wasn’t my shiny new nice shiny (its not a mistake I’ve put it twice, it really is shiny!) Ubuntu disk that was causing the problem, because I downloaded my copy of Freespire. It was 686MB, and it only took about half an hour (fast DSL plus GetRight, which I told to do the 4 part thingy). I booted it up, selected the ‘FreespireLive’ option, waited about 5 minutes for it to load and guess what… as soon as it had finished loading, my damn screen turned off! WHY IS IT DOING THIS TO ME! It never did it before, that was before I deleted all of my hard disk partitions, and then started again with the ‘XP Recovery Disk’…

You may have read in some previous post, that I had the same problem with my Ubuntu 7.04 disk. Both of them, since I ordered 3 just to be safe (2x Intel x86-based systems compatible disks and 1 AMD64 or EM64T-based systems compatible disk). Its now really beginning to bug me, since ALL of my Linux disks work on that other laptop (argh! Its running Windows Vista aswell)…

I even Google’d for updates to my GPU (graphics processing unit, for those of you who didn’t know ) and graphics card (c’mon, you gotta know what one of those is, no? Well thats what Google is for…) but have found nothing. One thing I did find was that by pressing my ‘FN+F11′, FN is short for function (only for laptops) and F11 is the function key next to F12 at the top of your keyboard – anyway, pressing those combinations turns my screen on and off. So I pressed it (obviously) and the screen turned on (this was after it turned on after Freespire had loaded), but no luck… no it didn’t turn off again but it came up light grey with vertical black lines. Why? I don’t know… So I just hit the power button for 5 seconds, and left it to boot as usual.

I’ll post any updates Don’t forget to post your comments if you’ve experienced the same or similar issues. (But please remember, that I’m only 13 years old)…

I’m sorry for any current downtime you may have occured. I have now identified and fixed the problem. It goes as follows: my ISP switched me to their Mansfield / Nottingham data centre, instead of their one in Stevenage which I think has now been shut down, because my DNS address used to end in pol.co.uk, which Cable and Wireless now own and now it ends in orangehomedsl.co.uk, odd. Since then, there dynamic IPs have been incredibly dynamic, so dynamic, my IP is now chaning every day (or their DHCP server has malfunctioned). This means that if I decide to do an A record to it, I’ll have to update every single day (and 1&1 take over 2 hours for data to be live on their system, damn them!), so I CNAMEd to it instead, with my NO-IP subdomain thats automatically updated by my router, so if you experience any more downtime, its either my lines have gone down (unlikely), my ISP has gone down (less likely), my server has gone down (very likely), thus resulting in no more DNS updates that I have to do manually! Before then the only time I’d have to do a DNS update is if my router needed an update, my power went down or some other problem like the phone line came loose from the wall socket.

Argh! So after reinstalling Windows (I won’t go into those details, I already posted about them), I remember that I need to install some printer drivers. I have the HP Installation Disk, somewhere, but its bundled with a load of rubbish (sorry HP, but its true), this ‘rubbish’ includes the somewhat useless “HP Digital Imaging Monitor” to make the ‘Start Scan’ button on the printer WORK! Its just easier to just go to the ‘My Computer’ screen and double click the scanner and choose the ‘Microsoft Scanner and Camera Wizard’ option to do a fast, reliable scan. Also it includes some “HP Service Support” (or something like that), to basically ‘assist’ you if you are in any sort of difficulties. What a load of bob that was! If I need to be assisted with any sort of difficulties, I’ll go and Google it, not launch some 30-minute load time, screwed up application. So I just downloaded the drivers WITHOUT the rubbish software as described above.

But my problem obviously wasn’t to do with the printer. Oh no, it wasn’t, you know. It was Windows File and Folder sharing. For some odd reason, I can access shared files and stuff on my server (thats not the ‘odd reason’, please read on), but I either can’t host any shared files, folders or printers with Windows XP or Windows Vista cannot connect to them :S. Mind you, what do you expect with Windows Vista:

Unless of course it was the problem with Windows XP, but highly unlikly in my opinion, since I can access shared folders, files and printers, from my server hosted on my machine, and as I already described, I can access my servers’ shared folders, files and printers (if I needed to). Now, even more obviously, its all Vista’s fault, since it can’t connect to shared folders, files and printers on my server or my machine (as I already described).

Off topic to the printer problem, if you use Windows Vista or are thinking of upgrading to it, I highly recommend that you visit the BadVista website. After that, you may wish to destroy your copy of it, or demand your money back (just don’t point your computers’ manufacturer to this blog post if you are thick enough to destroy a perfectly working machine), since after all, when you buy Windows Vista, you don’t own it. Microsoft lease you a copy of their sofware, emphasis on ‘their’. Thats the same with all Microsoft products (so I am aware of), thats also why they don’t release there source code.

“If only Microsofts philosophy was the same as Linux’s”

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