I jumped on the downloads (Installer DVDs of 32bit and 64bit) as soon as I could, burnt the 64bit DVD, and rebooted, hoping to have it installed within half an hour.

I already had 10GB of empty space at the start of one of my 750GB drives in preparation – all I had to do was tell the BIOS to boot the DVD and install it!

Well, that was the idea… If only it was that easy… Linux is never (at least in my experience) that obedient

I got into the second step of the installer (the first is chosing the language), where it asks you to chose your keyboard layout/language. I picked “United Kingdom”, and clicked “Next”… and the whole installer (minus the mouse cursor) froze. I assumed it was processing something, and waited a couple minutes… no change. CTRL+ALT+F1-8 did nothing (normally they’d switch to other terminals/logs). CTRL+ALT+Backspace did nothing. CTRL+ALT+Del did nothing! I lost my patience at that point and pressed the reset button…

I rebooted and tried again: same error. I rebooted and tried the default “US – English” layout: again, same error. I rebooted yet again, and tried the text-only installer… I’m sure you can guess what happened when it asked me my keyboard layout… Yup, it did it again.

I have now given up with trying to install it, at least for – I might try it again in VMware, or burn the 32bit DVD (or perhaps a 64bit LiveDVD, if there is one) and try that instead, once I can find a bit of spare time.

However a friend of mine let me borrow his Experts-Exchange account in our Design Workshop lecture today at Uni to search their database, and I found someone with the same problem as I had:

The solution is to copy the C:\Windows\inf folder from another fully working Vista installation over the top of the original*.

I’ve tried two other USB flash drives, and both worked within seconds of me plugging them in.

Yet another Microsoft product declared “finished” before it’s ready… Anyone else have/had this problem?

- Fr3d

* I actually renamed the original, and then copied the other computer’s inf folder, as Vista wouldn’t let me overwrite the folder

And that was a fresh start of iTunes, after it refused to play anything… Everything would work, it would even tell me it was playing… but no sound came out, and it didn’t move the progress bar.

It works well *most* of the time, but it crashes a lot more than it used to do when I had XP

I refuse to use anything else though; I’ll just wait until a patch is released

Edit: Seems to be working fine now – I think it was partially caused by a dodgy plugin.

WTF does a noob need with a clone scanner?! Noob’s aren’t opers, so they can’t do anything about clones. And a sensible oper uses a plain(-er) mIRC, Xchat, or another client.

Also, do noobs need an annoying away system which spams every single channel their in with an action (using “/me”) when they go /away, come back, or are highlighted? I don’t think so… That’s what /whois is for!!

Another annoying habit is for noobs to load a system stats script (or a lame script to bundle one inside), and then not change any of the settings, so if you send a VERSION request to that user, you’ll end up with between two and four replies! One from mIRC, one from any lame scripts their running, and one from the System Stats thing, with all their OS/CPU/RAM/HDD info in.

There will come a point where I start banning every user of these damn scripts from any channel where I have +o or higher… and it’s coming quickly.

To start off… “NoNameScript” is aimed at the more experienced IRC user — according to their website – what a joke. It inserts it’s name and URL in your version reply, quit message, and several other places. However, less people use it now, as some of the other scripts below are (unfortunately) becoming more popular.

(10:00:00) * Quits: User (name@random.isp.com) (Quit: ( www.nnscript.de :: NoNameScript 4.02 :: www.XLhost.de ))

“-I-n-v-i-s-i-o-n-” is the ultimate n00b client. It inserts it’s name and URL wherever it can, and then it does it again in some extra places. In kick messages, quit messages, the “Now playing” announcer and the version reply. And it’s not subtle!

(12:00:00) [User VERSION reply]: ”–I-n-v-i-s-i-o-n–” 2.0 Build 3515 by cRYOa with Advanced File Serving features on WinXP obtained from http://www.i-n-v-i-s-i-o-n.com

You think that’s bad? You should see it colored! And because “cRYOa” defaults the background color to black (or some other dark depressing color), and optimizes the colors to show up on black, they look even worse than they would normally if you use a white background (which is mIRC’s default).

“mIRC Power Pack 8.00″ is up next. Bright, annoying colors, more crappy scripts are the main features (or so I’ve seen so far). It’s less popular than the above two, but still manages to insert it’s name and URL everywhere.

(10:00:00) * Quits: User2 (name@another.isp.net) (Quit: mIRC Power Pack 8.00 (www.mIRCPowerPack.com) by sod/sgt-d (sgt-d@sodpit.com))

Now for the ultimate l33t script, with L33TSpeak everywhere. Plenty of self-advertising in this one as usual.

(14:00:00) [User2 VERSION Reply]: « Ë×Çü®§îöñ » Info~[v9.5 for mIRC v6.12 32bit on Win2K]~ Released~[October 27, 2003]~ Channel~[#Excursion on efnet.net]~ Webpage~[http://excursion.humr.org]~ « Ë×Çü®§îöñ »

—

From what I’ve seen, each one of these scripts have increasingly annoying abilities… There are simple ones, which can take stuff the user types, such as “brb” or “lol”, and turns it into something like “Be Right Back” (and so on). And of course, there are more annoying ones yet: from being able to “mass highlight” every user in a channel, to creating stupidly long, pointless phrases/sentences or actions (using the “/me” command) which have more color codes in than actual words. And of course, there are the ones which use between 5 and 15 lines creating something that looks like a button.

Here are some great examples, all taken without about 30 mins of each other, and all one one channel.

The button thing:

Another button..:

Converting acronyms:

Yes there are more, I probably missed loads… but it’s not worth finding them. I’m highlighting the ones I see every hour or so connecting/quitting/chatting on my network.

If you’re a newb/noob and are thinking about running one of the scripts I mentioned above, please don’t… you’ll only get laughed at, kicked/banned from most channels/networks, or just ignored

</rant> :P

I’m posting this because the internal security team at BT, who control the blocking of “bad” websites on their corporate networks have apparently found a message board here… So they blocked my entire domain!

I’ll see if I can get a screenshot of the funky error message – you have to see it to beleive it… dark blue background, big bold yellow text everywhere. And then they stick BT logos all over it too

This post marks the opening of a new category, designed specifically for posts like this

Edit: I’ve updated the post with a screenshot of the message :P

Oh and I’m now waiting for Royal Mail to give me my insurance money for my graphics card; I sent the form today so in a day or two I hope to have a cheque or something…
Edit: I’m still waiting…

- Fr3d

I have emailed Royal Mail and Overclockers several times over the last couple of weeks, and I hope things are getting better. I got a claim form to send off (which I will send tommorow) to claim for my graphics card, which is good news at last.

Apart from that, I don’t have much else to write about… Well I started back at college a few days ago, but that’s hardly what I would call interesting…

I’ll try to think up some better stuff soon! :P

- Fr3d

First my motherboard broke (see here and here for more info), and now my graphics card is broken! It was a (pretty much) brand new card, I’d only been using it for about 3 or 4 days after I got it before the motherboard packed in.

And now, to top it all off, Royal Mail and/or Overclockers UK have managed to misplace my almost-brand-new, £200 graphics card! :|
(Also, as I was on holiday it’s been lost now for over two weeks so what hope have I/they of finding it now?!)

I am in contact with OcUK and will be in contact with R.M. too if this isn’t sorted out very quickly… Back to gaming at 800×600 with no AntiAliasing or AnisotropicFiltering for now I guess…

*Sigh*… Why they couldn’t look at it when they had the board last time I don’t know, but I’m not sending it off untill my graphics card works again.

So I’m back on my GeForce 4 Ti 4200 for now, although I fixed my RAM issue! The board limits the speed, unless it’s manually set, when you have more than one slot occupied! Stupid, but at least its easily avoidable…
Perhaps a case of RTFM!! :P

This is all very well and good, except that the repair guys seem to have broken more than they fixed

For a start, I can no longer reboot my PC! I have to fully shutdown the computer, wait a few seconds and then boot it up again, or windows does not recognise my Graphics Card properly and I get “glitches” all over the screen. Also, my hardware accelerated sound no longer works. I can’t play any games whether or not Windows has detected my card, as it crashes the PC.

Also, the board often refuses to detect either my shiny new 160GB Maxtor harddisk, or my slightly older 80GB one, also a Maxtor. Both are SerialATA and also in good condition.

Oh yes, last but not least, my memory! It runs at 333MHz when I have my 512MB and 1024MB sticks in… But at 400MHz (which is the normal speed for it) when I only have the 1024MB stick in… So it seems to me that yet another thing is broken! It’s funny though, as I’ve just been using that same stick in my server and it was working fine there…

Anyway, I’m waiting now for a reply to my two thousand character technical support email… Zzz…

Oh yes another thing..: I was forced to reinstall Windows again yesterday… So you’ll have to excuse me from being a little lazy to post on here as I’m still getting the system the way I like it…