Microsoft Windows Officially Broken

Windows was broken and Microsoft has admitted it. In an unprecedented attempt to explain its Longhorn problems and how it abandoned its traditional way of working, the normally secretive software giant has given unparalleled access to The Wall Street Journal, even revealing how Vice President Jim Allchin, personally broke the bad news to Bill Gates.

Spent the last two mornings working on co-workers computers. We have a particularly nasty problem this week with Windows XP computers not wanting to boot past the splash screen.

I've heard people comment that Windows is more user friendly than Linux.

That may be true, but only for the first ten minutes.

In contrast, my Mepis box ran for 56 days without restarting, connected to the Net all the while.

how would you know?

You've already admitted on this thread that you don't even have the authorization to make the necessary changes to correctly administer your network. Hence, you're not an administrator. You're more like a trained monkey.

I would bet that this would fix your problem...

Download Knoppix, burn the .iso to cd and see if it boots into X. If you get to the KDE desktop, do this...

Open Filemanager in Super User mode. Navigate to /etc/X11

Mount your hard drive by right clicking the desktop icon and choosing "Mount"

Open another file manager, also in Super User mode. Navigate to /mnt/hda1/etc/X11

Copy the XF86Config-4 file from /etc/X11 to /mnt/hda1/etc/X11. If it asks you to overwrite, choose Yes.

What this does is overwrite your old XFree86 config file with one that you know will work.

I did this on two machines running Debian when XFree86 couldn't automatically get the configuration right. Worked like a charm.

BTW...I've always had better luck with Debian and Debian based distros than anything RedHat, but that's just me.

Also BTW, if Knoppix is too big to boot on your system, you could choose any small distro that uses XFree86. One light distro that uses XFree86 is Featherweight Linux (not Feather Linux).

PS...I believe in Knoppix you may have to also change the read/write permissions on your HD before you can write to it. This is to keep newbies from deleting things off their hard drives. Right click on the hda1 icon. When you get the menu, click on Change Read/Write mode, and it will ask you to confirm that you want to make your hard drive writable.

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