Wrestling with this %$#!*ing laptop again.
It’s still winning.
This is getting really old. (The extended frigging hassle - not the computer, which is less than a year old and shouldn’t be causing me this much grief)
rubberchickens
Brilliance by accident, mediocrity with effort
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June 23, 2007 at 2:48 pm
tru
I hear ya… stupid laptops. At least the dog whizzing on mine was a reason (of sorts) for mine to begin (and continue) having issues.
It sure doesn’t help when my IT guy buddy sums up his *help* with “GET A MAC” are there three more annoying words in the English language that can be strung together with that whole snobbery tone and fingerpointing at one of the funniest series of commercials to come along in a long time?
I think not.
But before you eschew the solution, maybe read this?
http://moxie.nu/moveabletype/archives/003699.php
June 23, 2007 at 7:03 pm
Heather
YOU have a Mac guy buddy, too?!? Wow, parallel lives.
)
Aren’t they… um… entertaining people to have around at times like this? Yes. Yes, let’s go with “entertaining”, shall we? (since mine reads here
June 24, 2007 at 1:11 pm
Light & Dark
Is it hardware or software problems, H?
June 24, 2007 at 5:40 pm
Heather
Near as we can figure, it’s software, Paul. Which makes it all the more annoying. Now, keep in mind that I don’t speak tech-speak, so this could be wrong – it’s just what I’ve gleaned from listening to my husband think out loud when I whine to him about this blasted beast. But it appears to be a display driver issue — annoyingly the *SAME* issue we had earlier this year that required taking it in for service. I may be telling you WAY more than you wanted to know, and if so… just ignore the rest of this….
I have a Toshiba Satellite P100, PSPA6C-SD802E, and an NVIDIA GeForce Go 7900GS video card. When it fires up, I get a dos window that opens and says:
“C:\WINDOWS\system32\spoolsrv.exe
Program too big to fit in memory.”
then it closes. It will function properly for a random number of minutes or hours (albeit WAY slower than it should be) then it will just suddenly lock up with the display going all lines and pixels and crappy, OR flashing total black screen and locking up, OR going to blue screen of death… any of which require a complete power-off and restart (which of course takes forever with these beasts, especially if it happened to be in Outlook when it conked out and Outlook wants to “check the email file” before re-launching. Grr.)
The worst part is I can’t even do a complete re-install from the OS/recovery DVD that came with the machine, because for some reason it just loops through the first part of the re-install and doesn’t ever get to a screen where I can do anything. I sat on the phone with Tech support through all this before, and they told me to take it to service. Weeks later I got it back – service had to recreate a partition (or something?) to be able to reinstall, then they wrote some kind of custom-display-driver fix-it file, and it worked fine after that for several months. But it seems like maybe a Windows update or something mucked with the driver file again just enough to cause the problem to return.
Doc is a very savvy computer guy, but even HE’S ready to frisbee this thing.
(Betcha you’re sorry you asked, huh?
)
February 1, 2008 at 7:22 pm
Chris
I don’t know if anybody’s still following this, but Heather, your spoolsrv.exe program is a trojan virus. I think your system is infected with something. spoolsrv allows someone access to your machine, your files, tec from over the Internet. If you need a hand getting rid of it, drop me an email to cbiltcliffe@cbserviceslondon.com. I can help you out with that.
Chris
CB Services
http://www.cbserviceslondon.com
February 2, 2008 at 12:09 am
Heather
Thanks, Chris, but I managed to completely reformat the laptop and (knock on wood) it’s been working fine since.
I don’t know why a search on that problem at the time didn’t tell me it was a Trojan… either I typed something horribly wrong and/or was blind when I was researching, or… it was a fairly new Trojan at the time I had the problem? Don’t know. Either way, thanks for the info.