wildyams

Let me just say I fucking hate my PC. All I wanted to do was hook up a second monitor to it, so I got an extra video card, got a set of BNC cables so I could share one of my monitors, and set off. I installed the second video card (a Voodoo 5 to go with my Radeon 7000), and it loads up, the second monitor tells me:

"If you can read this message, Windows has successfully initialized this display adapter. To use this adapter as part of your Windows dektop, open the Display option in the Control Panel and adjust the settings on the Settings tab."

This is the standard message you get just before setting up a second monitor on Windows. However, when I go to Settings under Display in the Control Panels, it doesn't even acknowledge that there is a second monitor there. So essentially it gives me no way to activate the second monitor.

So I checked my Device Manager (or hardware profiles or whatever the fuck it is on 98se), and there's a little yellow exclamation point on my Radeon 7000 card, which means its got a message to tell me. The message says to turn off EMM or any memory checking devices in Config.sys because the memory allocated for my Radeon is being used by another device (my Voodoo 5). So I went to msconfig and clicked on "EMM Exclude A000-FFFF" then restarted my computer.

This solved the problem and I finally had my two monitors working (something I've been waiting for for months now, if not years). So this was great I thought, till I opened AIM to talk to Koga and it told me "this program has performed an illegal operation, blah blah blah" and closed. So I restarted my computer, and tried opening it again. Same result. So I went to AOL.com and re-installed AIM and tried it again. Same result. So I opened AOL and tried to check my mail. AOL froze and I had to restart my computer. After restarting it, I suddenly noticed that my whole OS had become unstable, so I tried to uncheck "EMM Exclude A000-FFFF" and restart. That just made it so I could only use one monitor again, but my system was still totally unstable (no programs worked for more than a few seconds).

So I figured fuck this, and tried to re-install Windows, but that crashed in the middle. So I tried it again and it crashed even earlier. I have now tried shutting it down and restarting it a couple times, and am attempting to reinstall Windows 98se for the third time (its gotten much farther along this time, but I'm sure its only a matter of time before it hangs and crashes on me). This is my last shot tonight though. Either it will reinstall Windows or it will crash. Either way, I'm going to bed after this.

If it crashes and I can't fix this, I'm going to run F Disk and wipe my fucking hard drive, then try to get XP installed on it. However, since I have a hardware conflict in my system, I can not install XP on my hard drive with my current motherboard (believe me, I tried). So I'll take my hard drive out and try to get it cleanly installed somewhere else, then put it back in my system here and hope for the best.

But basically Microsoft can kiss my fucking ass.

If I can't get XP on my current setup, I'm almost surely not going to get another PC, and will instead use my money to just get a faster Mac. They're clearly better anyway.