Slightly OT: Netstumbler, high channel numbers, other weirdness

Joerg wrote

Yes of course.

Jeff Liebermann wrote

Thinkpad X60S.

But I have 2 of them, nearly identical models, and the 2nd one is fine.

As stated, it is no doubt a corruption issue somewhere, but M$ had so many (many thousands) they set up a special free hotline for it.

snipped-for-privacy@coop.radagast.org (David Platt) wrote

I did that today - deleted it from the list of previously used networks.

It may have done the trick.

Thanks. I thought you said it was a machine specific problem: "(can't put SP3 on that laptop because it trashes its HD; it's one of the thousands of machines which SP3 totally trashed when it came out years ago)." which suggests that there is something inherently unique to the model that trashes the data on the HD when SP3 is installed. However, since you own a 2nd machine that doesn't have this problem, I would guess(tm) that it's the Windoze installation that is corrupted, probably by malware.

You might try Microsoft Fixit: which does a good job of cleaning up some problems. Otherwise, if you want a quick fix, I suggest you backup just your user data, clone the hard disk from the working machine to the non-working machine, restore the data files, and it should work (if the machines are identical).

The only free support lines are for either products that have the cost of support built into the purchase price, or for products that don't need much support.

Jeff Liebermann wrote

I am sure that's right.

I very much doubt it is malware, since the laptop gets used in a very narrow range of apps (GA flight planning, and accessing specific websites). Also I don't use any M$ apps for www or email which alone removes some 99% of the malware risk. Also I have done regular scans with the M$ scanner which boots from a boot CD. All desktop machines have Kaspersky AV. I never found any malware on any PC of mine, or any at work.

Don't take this personally but whenever one does a google on some IT issue, one finds 1000000 hits of which 99.99% are one-liners posted by self proclaimed IT experts (geeks who have nothing to do except post one-liners all over the internet) telling people to do a malware scan, usually with Malwarebytes or some such.

In reality I have never found any substance for that, on any machine I operated. Not once, ever.

Malware does exist in the "IT idiot" community, where people use IE and Outlook (two great attack vectors, especially the latter one) and crazily click on every link that pops up. Kids are the worst. I once found 13 trojans on a laptop owned by my son, who refused to let me fix it (lives with ex wife so I could not lay down the law on it) so I set up a special wifi AP for him which has all but 80 and 443 (plus DNS?) blocked and cannot access our internal subnet.

Well, yes, I am sure that if I wiped the HD, reinstalled XP, reinstalled all of the many apps, it would be just fine :) :)

I will try your link. I sometimes find that curious problems get fixed by doing the M$ security update, which replaces a large number of files. But very few updates now come up for a machine with XP SP2. One needs SP3 to get most of them.

Sure.

M$ now charge several hundred GBP per phone call (actually per issue) for windoze or app support. But the people they have on that line don't know more than you or I or any other keen tech person who has built and supported many PCs over some years.

I've been supporting my decadent and lavish lifestyle since about 1982 doing either part time or full time computah support. When I read something that doesn't fit my past experience, such as the XP SP3 trashes the hard disk, I want to know more. Sometimes, I offer suggestions. In this case, when a machine is infected by some form of malware, one of the first things the malware does is prevent installation or operation of anti-malware programs and fixes, which includes system updates. In most cases, it blocks installations and updates of any type. Since you are operating a pre-SP3 operating system, which is about 5 years out of date, I can assume that it is full of known vulnerabilities and subject to many exploits. Therefore, given the limited information on the circumstances, malware is a fair guess.

You lead a charmed life. An experiment I did many years ago was to load a new machine with XP SP1 and no updates. I then put it directly on the internet (not through a router) with the XP software firewall enabled. It took about 30 minutes for a bot to attack and take over the machine. After a weekend of this, I was a member of at least 3 botnets and spewing spam all over the internet. My ISP informed me that my system was compromised and blocked access until I fixed it. It was an interesting experiment that others have repeated with similar results.

That's number 3 in my war chest. #1 is Microsoft Security Essentials which seems to be the least obnoxious of the popular anti-virus programs. #2 is Malwarebytes (free version): which seems the best at cleaning up the mess. Best instructions are under:

You might find it useful to re-read what I wrote. I'm not suggesting that you reinstall anything. I'm suggesting that you transplant your working machine disk image to the non-working machine. Once that is functional, put your user created files back onto the previously non-working machine. It's a huge time saver. For cloning, I use: ($50) or

It's like that everywhere. Online support is free, while phone support costs money. Mostly, the phone support is for people that are not familiar with using the collective wisdom of the internet to solve their problem.

I have a slightly different view of phone support. I spent a few days doing phone support for a local company. I wanted to get the experience and see for myself. After just listening in on other phone support conversations, I was seriously wondering if it was a good idea. There were plenty of issues, such as people not being able to follow instructions, or simply lacked the computer specific vocabulary. An amazing number simply couldn't type, even one letter at a time. However, the greatest number of callers were simply overwhelmed and didn't know what to try next. The huge difference in competence levels between support and the caller created numerous problems. The big one is that the caller would feel intimidated by an overly competent support person and simply become unable to do anything. Management was not very helpful as they were worried that an unfavorable support call might result in an unfavorable impression of the product and kill any future sales. At the same time, support was expected to sell updates and support contracts. The best they could suggest is to act dumb. Eventually, they made that easy by hiring dumb. What you see today is the result of all that, where you can get better answers from the users (via forums and Usenet) than from the company.

Jeff Liebermann wrote

That I completely believe.

I will try those - thank you.

Unfortunately the "working" one is not the same as the "non working" one, which has many more apps on it.

I use Trueimage too. It is very good but one has to get the latest version to get support for SATA controllers, otherwise one ends up in a situation where all your old image backups cannot be restored... easily done with things like RAID controllers which TI never supported.

There is a load of stuff on the TI forum about how to build custom TI versions with custom hard drive controller support - too much hassle for me.

Run Belarc Advisor (free): There's a section that displays all the serial numbers and activation junk it can find in the registry. Very handy for reinstalls. You should be able reinstall all your apps with numbers. If you can't find the original CD's or need an older version, these can be downloaded from various sources on the internet. Yes, it's quite a bit of work, but you'll have a better and more secure machine when you're done.

I've been using TrueImage since about 2007. It was unreliable junk back then. I believe that I had RAID controller support in 2010, but I'm not sure. TrueImage adds (Linux) driver support for new controllers as they appear. If you're using late model hardware, you need the latest version with the latest drivers.

You should try it for practice. I've had to make custom CD's with additional drivers for odd hardware. Most commonly, for strange video cards and RAID controllers. What I need to do is create a custom CD that has all the prompts and check boxes pre-loaded for a specific machine, so that users don't have to play question and answer in order to do a simple image backup. (Yet another project).

Update:

This time I did a load of googling on that old problem.

I went to the Lenovo driver site and installed a load of updates. It's interesting that they continue to publish updates through 2013 for this old laptop. Most are for win7/8 but quite a few were for winXP. There was a BIOS update too.

I installed only fairly recent ones - 2011 and later.

That took a few hours.

Then I did something which I found recommended in some obscure forum: installed SP3 with the computer in Safe Mode.

It worked!

Peter

Jeff Liebermann wrote