How can you trust computer to a company that makes a heat sink and fan that is as awful as the stock fan included with retail boxed Intel socket 775 processors?
One flex of the motherboard (like when inserting a video card) or a jar of the computer and the heat sink comes loose. Awful.
We found a site that infects visitors computers with the nasty Antivirus 2009 fake antivirus virus. We checked it against the Mcafee Site Advisor. Despite 4 user posts warning about this site, the “Advisor” had still not gotten around to checking it.
Google has not flagged it either.
System: HP M7480n.
Symptom: User can power on for a few seconds and the computer shuts itself off.
Problem: diagnosed and replaced power supply.
Visual inspection showed defective capacitor on AT X1600 video card. Replaced with ASUS 3450 ATI PCIe.
Catalyst Control Center software bundled with the new card requires .NET 2.0
All attempts to install .NET 2.0 failed, both in Windows Update and the using MSI redistributable.
I tried to research the problem in general by Google searchin .NET 2.0 install problems.
Aaron Stebner’s Web Log appears to be a good source for technical information about .NET.
I ran Aaron’s .Net Setup Verifier and it looked like .NET 1.1 was ok but 2.0 had partially installed.
The MSI redistributable produces better error messages so I looked at the System Event log and found a 25015 error which I cut and pasted into Google.
This lead me to the dotnetfx_cleanup_tool.exe which appeared to hang itself prior to completion.
I looked at the Task Manager and it saw SPYSWEEPER was causing the system to hang even though SpySweeper had been disabled through the UI.
I waiteded it out and eventually the cleanup tool finished successfully and cleaned out all the .NET installs.
Upon reboot I was able to install .NET.
There is a strong case to be made for uninstalling all the SpySweepers, Spyware Doctors, Zone Alarms and Internet Security Suites and even antivirus software when chasing down software problems. Even though the UI for these products says they are disabled….they arent. They impede the software troubleshooting process. One could even make the case that these security softwares cause as many problems as they prevent.