Medical study weekend thoughts
Jun. 6th, 2007 09:07 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
robotech_masterI'm sure people are wondering what happened after I made my frustrated voice post Friday night about my difficulties getting my computer set up at the study. Happily, the problems ended up resolving themselves—after considerably more problems were caused. Here's the story.
So, when I originally reinstalled Windows, I forgot to reinstall the drivers for my wireless card, which meant I couldn't log in from the medical study. Fortunately, someone else brought his computer, and was actually able to get a wireless connection. So he downloaded the drivers for me; this much you know.
What happened was that this fellow, who looks and acts like the poster child for Asperger's (Note: I will admit that I have at least a touch of Asperger's myself, but this fellow made me feel completely normal, right down to wearing big plastic-framed geeky glasses with a crack in one lens) agreed to download the drivers for me, but he got fed up with me looking over his shoulder and pointing where to click so I gave him some space. This turned out to be a mistake, because there was a page on the manufacturer's site where you have to click on one of four pictures of a wireless card; you have to select the one that looks like your card. And as it turns out, he selected the wrong one, but I didn't find this out until much later. He put it on my iPod for me, and I went to load the drivers.
And, naturally, they wouldn't load. Figuring maybe there was a hardware fault, I went ahead and pulled the card, put it in another PCI slot, and rebooted—and something happened to my Windows driver directory. When I tried to reboot, I got an error that made my blood run cold: system32/drivers/pci.sys was missing, and I should use my original Windows XP disc to repair it.
That was fine, I had two different Windows XP ISOs on my 300 gig USB hard drive; it only took connecting it up to another student's laptop and burning CDRoms of them. But the thing was, neither of them gave the option to "repair." They just started installing another Windows installation alongside the one I already had. I booted into one of those, tried copying the system32/drivers subdirectory over the directory on my original Windows installation, but it didn't like that.
At about this time, one of the friends of the Asperger's poster child was at the computer, and someone else suggested downloading the wireless drivers again. I didn't think it would do any good, but there wasn't anything else worth trying at the moment. So when this person went into the site, and we navigated through the pick-a-card screen, I suddenly noticed that the filename for the drivers was different than the one I had. Lo and behold, I suddenly realized he had downloaded the wrong drivers!
That fixed my drivers problem, but I still needed to get my original Windows installation working. I spent an hour or two futzing around with windows repair disk creators, none of which did anything useful, and finally hit upon the idea of running Windows Update on one of the new Windows installations to bring it up to spec, installing my video and sound card drivers, and then copying the drivers directory over to my original Windows directory.
And lo and behold, it worked. I was able to play City of Heroes again!
With my computer working again, I had a happier Saturday afternoon.
Sunday morning, I burned off the DVDs of Heroes I had downloaded from the Internet (just to tide me over until the official DVDs come out in August), and put one of them in the DVD player attached to the bigscreen high-def TV. I figured what the heck, I'd watch a couple episodes until someone else came out and wanted to put in something else.
Only…no one did. People watched Heroes all through the entire day, and even convinced the clinic staff to let them stay up an hour late past lights out so they could finish the last episode. (I had gone to bed by then.) All in all, those were the most successful DVDs I ever brought to the study. Heh.
And that's how the first weekend of the study (not counting the prior week where I stayed overnight as an alternate) went. Next weekend I just stay overnight Sunday again, then I have to be back at the study from 6:30 to 7:30 every morning for the following week. Then it's another full weekend stay, and a week after that I get my money!
So, when I originally reinstalled Windows, I forgot to reinstall the drivers for my wireless card, which meant I couldn't log in from the medical study. Fortunately, someone else brought his computer, and was actually able to get a wireless connection. So he downloaded the drivers for me; this much you know.
What happened was that this fellow, who looks and acts like the poster child for Asperger's (Note: I will admit that I have at least a touch of Asperger's myself, but this fellow made me feel completely normal, right down to wearing big plastic-framed geeky glasses with a crack in one lens) agreed to download the drivers for me, but he got fed up with me looking over his shoulder and pointing where to click so I gave him some space. This turned out to be a mistake, because there was a page on the manufacturer's site where you have to click on one of four pictures of a wireless card; you have to select the one that looks like your card. And as it turns out, he selected the wrong one, but I didn't find this out until much later. He put it on my iPod for me, and I went to load the drivers.
And, naturally, they wouldn't load. Figuring maybe there was a hardware fault, I went ahead and pulled the card, put it in another PCI slot, and rebooted—and something happened to my Windows driver directory. When I tried to reboot, I got an error that made my blood run cold: system32/drivers/pci.sys was missing, and I should use my original Windows XP disc to repair it.
That was fine, I had two different Windows XP ISOs on my 300 gig USB hard drive; it only took connecting it up to another student's laptop and burning CDRoms of them. But the thing was, neither of them gave the option to "repair." They just started installing another Windows installation alongside the one I already had. I booted into one of those, tried copying the system32/drivers subdirectory over the directory on my original Windows installation, but it didn't like that.
At about this time, one of the friends of the Asperger's poster child was at the computer, and someone else suggested downloading the wireless drivers again. I didn't think it would do any good, but there wasn't anything else worth trying at the moment. So when this person went into the site, and we navigated through the pick-a-card screen, I suddenly noticed that the filename for the drivers was different than the one I had. Lo and behold, I suddenly realized he had downloaded the wrong drivers!
That fixed my drivers problem, but I still needed to get my original Windows installation working. I spent an hour or two futzing around with windows repair disk creators, none of which did anything useful, and finally hit upon the idea of running Windows Update on one of the new Windows installations to bring it up to spec, installing my video and sound card drivers, and then copying the drivers directory over to my original Windows directory.
And lo and behold, it worked. I was able to play City of Heroes again!
With my computer working again, I had a happier Saturday afternoon.
Sunday morning, I burned off the DVDs of Heroes I had downloaded from the Internet (just to tide me over until the official DVDs come out in August), and put one of them in the DVD player attached to the bigscreen high-def TV. I figured what the heck, I'd watch a couple episodes until someone else came out and wanted to put in something else.
Only…no one did. People watched Heroes all through the entire day, and even convinced the clinic staff to let them stay up an hour late past lights out so they could finish the last episode. (I had gone to bed by then.) All in all, those were the most successful DVDs I ever brought to the study. Heh.
And that's how the first weekend of the study (not counting the prior week where I stayed overnight as an alternate) went. Next weekend I just stay overnight Sunday again, then I have to be back at the study from 6:30 to 7:30 every morning for the following week. Then it's another full weekend stay, and a week after that I get my money!
