A client was getting blue screen errors with STOP 0x0000007E. This indicates drivers or hardware, and given that the machines were fine until upgrading to WinXP SP2 I decided it must be a driver.

Through trial and error I found that Logitech Mouseware 9.76 was installed on the PCs and was causing sporadic blue screens when a USB mouse was connected. Just uninstall Mouseware, let Windows XP install the native driver and all is well.

UPDATE: It has come to my attention that this problem may be related to DeviceLock USB security program installed on my client's computers. It's possible that Mouseware and SP2 alone won't cause the blue screen crashes but that Mouseware and DeviceLock are conflicting.

Obviously I haven't done much with this site. I want to start blogging about my desktop admin experiences, but I decided to do it on Blogger to hopefully catch more readers sooner than I would here.

I'm going to hang on to the domain name for now unless somebody decides to offer me a silly sum of money for it. Send any silly sum offers to webmaster at this domain. The dynamic DNS idea is still kicking around the back of my head, but I'm not planning to implement that soon. I'm not sure what else I can reasonably do with this for now, but I like the name and already paid for it, so here it will stay.

A somewhat unrelated note on floppies and flash drives. I say this due to recent and ongoing flabbergasting experiences at work.

If you have important documents, you should have them backed up somewhere. This does *not* mean keep your only copy on a floppy, CD-RW or flash drive. If you need a working copy on portable media, fine, but *frequently* copy it to a backup location. If your office, say, has a server that the local admin backs up daily to tape, freakin use it! If you have a USB hard drive for backup, that would be a good place.

Floppies: I can't believe people still use these for important documents, but I swear somebody asked me for help with a floppy drive last week. And in the past 5 years I've had 4 instances of people coming to me in a panic that their only copy of a critical document is on this floppy and quit working. (They had been updating the file on the floppy for years.) Floppies *will* physically wear out, especially if you're updating an Excel or Word file and re-saving it frequently.

I'm not sure yet what this site is going to be. One idea is for it to be documentation on my Windows and Netware experiences and tips. Another idea is to make it into a DynDNS-type site where users can get 3rd-level domains. (I am not affiliated with DynDNS.) Either way, the primary goal is to demonstrate and/or document my abilities and boost the ol' resume.