OK My old Windows XP computer finally died. Well, almost anyway. It's currently on life support, but the plug is due to be pulled any time now. It's about 7 years old with only a 40 MB hard disk, a boot-up procedure that fails more often than it succeeds and a nasty habit of crashing at ever more frequent and unpredictable intervals.
A new PC was obviously the way to go. No place for sentimentality here! The new one that I decided on came with Windows 7, which was a bit of a worry given the newness of that operating system. Now, one of these days I'm going to buy a new computer and it's going to work first time right out of the box. This wasn't that time.... The first problem was that the OS booted up and set my 19 in wide screen monitor at 1280 x 800 resolution. "No problem", I thought. "Go to Display Properties and nudge it up to the native 1440 x 900". Bad idea. The screen went black and stayed like that. Hmmmm. Reboot - no display, so I couldn't even reset it back to the lower res. Swapped the widescreen for my wife's 19 in standard screen. Well, at least that worked. Reconnect the widescreen and the black screen returned. Packed up the computer plus the wide screen monitor and headed off to the computer shop. Collective scratching of heads until a light bulb went off over Dave's (Dave being the computer shop manager). "Let's try a DVI cable", he said. It worked. High five's all 'round. Back home, booted up with fingers crossed and (whew) up came the screen at 1440 x 900..... Next. Pluged in one of my two external hard drives. "USB Device not recognised" came the unwelcome message from the operating system. More hmmms... Tried plugging it into each and every one of the other 5 USB ports on the new system. No joy. Connected the second external drive. Same result. Now this was potentially serious because those two drives are where all my photo backups are. Both drives are Western Digital but they are different models. Off to the Western Digital site. "No special drivers are needed for Windows 7" was the extremely unhelpful message. Panic stations! Remembering that 'Google is my Friend", headed back into cyberspace in search of wisdom online. 3 hours of fruitless searching later, came to the realisation that this isn't an isolated problem with Windows 7 and it's not limited to Western Digital drives. However, no definitive solution was forthcoming - a few suggestions, some of which worked for others but none of which worked for me (by this stage I had a few choice suggestions of my own concerning the new computer....). Finally, in desperation, pluged one of the drives into a 4-port USB hub and.... suddenly Windows 7 could see it. Same with the other drive. Pluged it back into one of the other 5 USB ports and the dreaded "Device not Recognised" message appeared again. A bit more investigation revealed that not only would the two Western Digital drives not work when plugged directly ito the USB ports on the system board, the same applied for any mass storage device. So I was unable to read any of my thumb drives unless I plugged them into the 4-port hub. However, the system USB ports work fine for my mouse and printer. Well, at least I now have a working system but there is another visit to the computer shop in my future to try to sort out the USB issue. I can only think that this problem is power related in some way and the built in USB ports deliver too much current. Does this sound feasible? Cheers (sort of....) Brian ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Brian Walters Western Sydney Australia http://members.westnet.com.au/brianwal/SL/ -- -- http://www.fastmail.fm - The way an email service should be -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List PDML@pdml.net http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.