Technical troubles

I’m remembering why I deeply loathe having Windows boxen in the house.

OK, question for those of you familiar with this sort of thing: I’ve got a box that was, until recently, in use as a DVD player, media station, etc. Apparently in the very recent past, nVidia, as a result of pressure from Macrovision, pushed a new version of the video driver which completely breaks DVD output, causing any attempt to play a DVD to fail with a copy-protection error. Searching a bit on the net found this out – they didn’t bother to call anyone’s attention to the fact, and they just pushed the drivers as part of their automatic updates. It simply requires that one roll back to the 40.72 version.

Unfortunately, doing this seems to have failed utterly; despite the installer claiming to have succeeded, Windows does not believe that there is any driver at all, and the DVD problem is persisting.

Does anyone know a solution to this short of nuke & pave? Or alternately, would anyone like to buy a nice little Shuttle box with a 2GHz Athlon and a gig of RAM, so I can replace it with a Mac mini?

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Published in: on April 3, 2005 at 21:58  Comments (14)  
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14 Comments

  1. On April 4, 2005 at 05:18 artistic_chaos said:

    If you end up selling it, I’m interested. What do you want for it?

  2. On April 4, 2005 at 05:18 artistic_chaos said:

    If you end up selling it, I’m interested. What do you want for it?

  3. On April 4, 2005 at 05:23 aaangyl said:

    Damn, beat me.

  4. On April 4, 2005 at 05:23 aaangyl said:

    Damn, beat me.

  5. On April 4, 2005 at 17:23 zunger said:

    Hmm… I was thinking around 600. Here are the specs:
    – The box is a Shuttle SN41G2, so it has an on-board nVidia GeForce 4 with niceties like TV output.
    – The CPU is an Athlon XP 2800+, 2.08GHz clock, 333MHz FSB
    – 1gig of RAM
    – 200G hard disk, Western Digital IIRC
    – 12x DVD drive
    – Windows XP Pro SP2 (That’s an actual legit copy, with all the license docs and so on)
    The machine is headless – no mouse, keyboard or monitor. (I was borrowing those parts from another machine which really needs them back) Basically I’m selling it for a little under cost of parts; the cost of getting a Mini instead. (I don’t need this much horsepower for this machine, I just need something that will work reliably)
    Deals involving a combination of art and money are also possible. 🙂
    (Damn, I always wanted to say that – it makes me sound like an international something-or-other trafficker.)

  6. On April 4, 2005 at 17:23 zunger said:

    Hmm… I was thinking around 600. Here are the specs:
    – The box is a Shuttle SN41G2, so it has an on-board nVidia GeForce 4 with niceties like TV output.
    – The CPU is an Athlon XP 2800+, 2.08GHz clock, 333MHz FSB
    – 1gig of RAM
    – 200G hard disk, Western Digital IIRC
    – 12x DVD drive
    – Windows XP Pro SP2 (That’s an actual legit copy, with all the license docs and so on)
    The machine is headless – no mouse, keyboard or monitor. (I was borrowing those parts from another machine which really needs them back) Basically I’m selling it for a little under cost of parts; the cost of getting a Mini instead. (I don’t need this much horsepower for this machine, I just need something that will work reliably)
    Deals involving a combination of art and money are also possible. 🙂
    (Damn, I always wanted to say that – it makes me sound like an international something-or-other trafficker.)

  7. On April 4, 2005 at 17:28 artistic_chaos said:

    Heh, I was thinkng the art/money thing too, so it’s all good. Let me research the machine a bit and get back to you. If nothing else, it might get me off my ass and working on the painting you asked for, what, 2 years ago? 😛

  8. On April 4, 2005 at 17:28 artistic_chaos said:

    Heh, I was thinkng the art/money thing too, so it’s all good. Let me research the machine a bit and get back to you. If nothing else, it might get me off my ass and working on the painting you asked for, what, 2 years ago? 😛

  9. On April 4, 2005 at 17:44 zunger said:

    *grin* Let me know, then.

  10. On April 4, 2005 at 17:44 zunger said:

    *grin* Let me know, then.

  11. On April 5, 2005 at 10:14 zorbathut said:

    http://www.drivercleaner.net/
    If that doesn’t work, well . . . nuke and pave. 😛

  12. On April 5, 2005 at 10:14 zorbathut said:

    http://www.drivercleaner.net/
    If that doesn’t work, well . . . nuke and pave. 😛

  13. On April 7, 2005 at 00:29 zunger said:

    Gah! I’m definitely selling it. I have no idea what ever posessed me to have a Windows box in the house. Heather, if you’re interested, let me know…

  14. On April 7, 2005 at 00:29 zunger said:

    Gah! I’m definitely selling it. I have no idea what ever posessed me to have a Windows box in the house. Heather, if you’re interested, let me know…


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