Hi Harry,
Thought I should follow up on this, even as unfinished business. It turns out that this user is in the midst of a major project, and has forbade me from doing **anything** to or with that machine until the project is completed. I'm thinking this could be rather optimistic, because it assumes that old desktop rig will continue functioning acceptably (basically, minimally) until then. In the meantime, she is getting by with the only means of getting stuff On or Off being via burning to or reading from optical discs. Nevertheless, I thank you for adding that Windows technique to my repertoire -- such as it is.
While waiting for the opportunity with the aforementioned system, I thought I would try it out on one problematic system I had at home, which is running W7U x64. That one has a recurrent boot failure loop, most particularly after almost any MS update has been applied, but sometimes even after the system has just been sitting unused for a couple weeks. There was some technical gobbledygook I jotted down, which included some general codes and the word "fallover." Not very revealing so far, and the better known Windows repair procedures have not been helpful either. When I tried that sfc /scannow here, it took about 10 minutes to run, and returned: ""Windows Resource Protection did not find any integrity violations." So, in this case the mystery remains, and it is annoying. The only good part is that I've always been able to get it back to booting up with "Use Last Known Good Profile," though one has to time that just right. Still, I look forward to seeing what sfc /scannow makes of the ports corruption issue on the old XP rig.
Jordan
From: Harry Binswanger
To: xywrite@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Sent: Monday, November 20, 2017 5:47 PM
Subject: Re: OT: some questions for our Apple + Parallels Users
Jordan,
Sorry to be so long in replying. It's entirely self-contained. Takes 1 to
2 min to run. Probably won't fix things, but nothing to lose. the
/scannow switch tells it to replace any corrupted files (I think from its
.cab files, or whatever way it now stores system file originals).
You just go to the Run command (Winkey-R) type in sfc /scannow and hit
enter. No biggie.
Regards,
Harry
Harry,
Regarding that scan you suggested: is it entirely self-contained, or do
you need to be connected to the internet for it to function ? Does
it take a fairly long time to run ? (Say, on a middling Core-2 Duo,
1 GB. hard drive, 4 megs of RAM -- of which XP will only see 3.2)
I would be trying that on my next visit . . . presuming that it
would not tie up the machine for hours. If that was the case, this
may have to wait for some more opportune timing.
Jordan
From: Harry Binswanger
To: xywrite@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Sent: Thursday, November 16, 2017 6:54 AM
Subject: Re: OT: some questions for our Apple + Parallels
Users
Certainly OS X vs. Win is endlessly debatable. I agree with Carl that,
unless she's already acclimated to the Apple environment, there's less of
a
learning curve in going from XP to Win 7 (probably even to Win 10) than
in
going to OS X.
But here's a new thought: why not fix her XP software? If all the ports
have failed (yet work as hardware, proven by your test) there must be
some
one point of failure. Some Googling would probably turn up the
problem.
In fact, have you tried running:
sfc /scannow
-- that alone could completely solve the port problem (ever the optimist,
I
am).
Regards,
Harry
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