More tales of Woe Administrative2/20/2001; 9:34:48 AM Update: I think I've got it going. It's stable and working. RU was a bit tipsy but I still need to upgrade to the latest version.I did have everything working again recently, but events conspired against me and I'm now below fully functional. It'll be a little bit again (though I hope to be back up today).The long version is this: LinkBack has been running on a Windows 95 machine. Every hour on the 25, when it begins processing, the computer coughs, chokes, and becomes sluggish for a few minutes while the program runs, because Windows 95 has no ability to regulate how much of the processor a program consumes. This has been annoying my wife, justifiably so, and I like my wife unannoyed whenever possible. Call me "Whipped and Proud Of It". So I recently came across a copy of Windows NT, and I sez to myself, "Hey, self, if I install Windows NT, I can kick the priority of Radio Userland into the background, where it will happily do everything it wants to do, and we'll never even notice the computer is running it! Wouldn't that be great!" So I start installing Windows NT. And everything goes great until I get to the graphics card. *FREEZE* Well, damn! Just once, I'd like to install an operating system without having to beat it into submission."The beatings will continue until morale improves!" is no joke when you're trying to make an operating system and a motley collection of hardware play nice.I've seen conflicts between two pieces of hardware before. I've seen graphics cards that hate my COM port (back in the early days of consumer hardware acceleration), I've seen sound cards and network cards that will not stop until one has killed the other, but for the first time, I'm seeing a genuine bona fide three way incompatibility! From the update page for my motherboard:'VIA VxD v. 2.6 and newer, in combination with latest BIOS, makes i740-related problems on MVP3-based FIC motherboards such as VA-503+, PA-2013, running Windows95, appear less often. Currently there is no solution to i740 problems under WindowsNT. 'Care to guess what kind of graphics card I'm using? "Currently there is no solution" is just the sort of thing you need to see at 1 am in the morning, having spent 6-8 hours working on fixing the damn problem.So, anyhow, I'm going to see about picking up the cheapest damn non-S3 card I can find on the open market and sticking it into the system, after which I hope to get that thing up and running, after which not only should everything go back to normal, but reliability should improve as well (though I've been pleased with it overall lately). Also (hint hint) I'm working on another significant improvement, one that will hopefully encourage a lot more weblogs to join... more later, when I have time to work on it and make sure it works, but stay tuned! LinkBack is not done yet. Beta is still the truth, and I'm still learning as I go along.