Tag Archives: old-hat

I went old hat again.

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Yup, I love knowing all the old DOS/Win3.1/Win9x tricks. Another one of my technicians, D, was having issues with a Majhongg program. Whenever you tried to run the program, it complained of not having a “suitable device”, and to check DirectX and the display driver.

D is a very good thorough technician. He checked just about everything. D checked both DirectX and the video driver, and both were okay. He checked the program itself by removal/reinstall. That didn’t work. He tried the application on another computer to rule out the program just being crappy. The program worked on another computer.

To rule out basic “Windows-is-messed-up-broken” issues, he disconnected the customer’s drive, attached a new one, installed Windows and drivers fresh, then installed the program. Now, the program works. D was thinking “Format/Reinstall”. He had to leave for an appointment and was going to try the format/install when he returned. I had another idea however. I was thinking “program settings”.

My thought was that perhaps the customer put the game into some sort of resolution mode that the video card/driver just couldn’t handle, and because the game is crappy and cheap, it had no routine to catch this, so it just broke.

To test this, I put the machine in the “working install” mode and looked at the video card settings. My intuition voice called out to me “try that one”, a weird setting with options of HAL and REF. I switched it from HAL to REF. The once working program now crashed with the same error message the “broken install” crashed with. AH HA! But now a problem: How to change the setting back, so I can fix the “broken install”. Any normal technician knows settings are saved in the Registry, so in I go.

I mucked around in the registry looking for settings for the game, but I simply couldn’t find anything other than user registration info. Then, my old hat voice spoke up and said “ini file”. AH HA again! Ini files, the way Win3.1 programs saved their settings. I mucked around the game’s program folder, and found an ini file loaded with settings. My intuition voice spoke up again and said “try that one”. I changed the setting called VideoMode from =1 to =0. Game works again.

At this point, I had to leave, so I told T how to fix it without giving him the details of how I came about it, so he could tell D when D got back. I returned to the shop after D had returned and left for the day, and T told me:

“I gave your message to D. He said ‘how in heck did -inanis- figure that out?!?”

Ah yes, old hat strikes again. You can’t get this at Geek Squad.

Old hat is so cool…

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ATTENTION: Boring story follows, but it’s tech related and makes me feel smart, so, whatever.

So, today is Wednesday, and one of my technicians (T) is out of the office, because he minds the store on Saturday, so, you know, I can totally not have to work on the weekend. He had a few high priority projects on his workbench today, and I decided to go old hat and do some real tech work, instead of super-nifty, totally boring marketing and sales fliers.

One particular computer I worked on was being persnickity. T was having massive issues figuring it out so I cranked on that one first. Basically, during the Windows XP boot process, right when the system would normally initialize all the drivers and bring up the video, the machine would hang. Safe mode, normal mode, VGA mode, no difference. At first, I thought it was a bogus CD-ROM filter driver or something Windows related. On a whim, I tried booting to a WinPE CD, to rule out the customer’s Windows installation. The WinPE CD would not finish booting either.

HARDWARE!!

I started pulling cards, disconnecting cables and all to no avail. I thought to myself, “WTF, is the motherboard bad?” Then, I had an old hat moment. Back in the DOS days, if you had hardware issues, you dorked around in the BIOS setup, for compatibility or port addresses or whatever. I figured “what the heck”, dropped into the BIOS and shut EVERYTHING off. Lo and behold, the machine boots to desktop.

About 10 minutes later, had it pegged down to the USB 2.0 controller.

I had the machine up and running in about an hour. Poor T took almost a whole day with the result of “It doesn’t boot.” Don’t get me wrong, T is a great technician, but he just doesn’t know the old tricks.

Makes me feel smart…