These problems did not occur on my Packard Bell, but on other computers that I broke. Have fun reading.

ToggleMouse

Found the pointless but nifty program ToggleMouse that among other things kept track of how far your mouse cursor had moved on the screen. But, there was a minor bug in that code. Also, it sometimes popped up the message box when I was not even touching the mouse.

Modem

I'm not entirely sure that I'm right on this one because of bits and bytes, but anyway, my 56K modem was connected at 28.8 (I know great modem and phone lines) and I used system monitor to see how fast my total transfers were, and it was almost 4K/s. [pic] Computers are so nice.

Stupid IRC Servers

I did a /whois on myself on IRC just for the hell of it, and when the results came back, they said that I had been idling on their server longer than I had been connected to the internet, go figure. [pic]

Who Knows

Word

Microsoft Word decided to start putting the tool tips in the taskbar too. [pic] Odd.

Hotmail

I had a Hotmail account for random usage. While logging in, Hotmail has occasionally given me some strange errors. In all honesty though, these errors usually occur only once.

Bye-bye Printer

My printer sometimes decided not to print right, but I was really surprised when this came up. I thought windows was 32-bit.

Partition extreme

Well, this wasn't really a problem, just something I did when I had too much free time and my my new 17 gig HD. After 26 partitions, you start to receive errors on start up...just in case you wanted to know.

File Systems

For long file names, windows adds a ~ plus the number of files in that directory that start with the same first 6 letters. So I though, "Hey what happens when they run out of numbers to use." It should take about a million files to run out of numbers (8 characters, minus 1 for the ~, minus 1 for a letter). I made a little program to create the files and waited to see what happened. It turns out that the FAT and FAT32 file system only allow about 22,000 files in one directory before it stated giving errors. Need to try it on NTFS sometime.

Crappy Mouse

You think Packard Bell could make better mice. I mean, you get a couple of bored guys, lighter fluid, and some matches, and poof, the mouse doesn't work anymore. Wonder if they will replace it under warranty?

I Love Terabytes

I downloaded a trail version of Virtual Net Drive. The program worked fine and everything, but I decided to look at the properties for the drive, and I got a little surprise. [pic] (I am surprised windows even has support for displaying terabytes)

Get Wrong

I used Getright's segmented file downloading, and it made my transfers go real fast, especially over a modem.

Napster

Napster decided to give me some really fast transfer rates. If only I could get these all the time.

BlackICE

I used a copy of BlackICE (a personal firewall) and let it detect attacks against my system. I got about 2 or 3 a day, which seemed high, especially over a modem. Anyway, I visited Altavista and a couple seconds later it popped up an intrusion. OH NO!, it looks like Altavista is trying to hack into my computer.

AC No See

Well, it was the best image viewer (or try Irfan View for a free one), but it game me an interesting error message when I tried printing something.

Windows Update

I was updating IE to get new cool features, when Microsoft told me that IE wasn't a Microsoft approved program...interesting.

I have also received other security errors while trying to use windows update.

Copying

This bug has been in windows for as long as I can remember. I don't know if it has been fixed it in XP yet. If you try to copy/move a couple of gigs of data, Windows will count normally for a little while, but then the status bar will become 100% complete, and it displays a really long estimate on time remaining (almost 2 years?) I guess it overflows whatever variables they use.

Other People

The rest of the stuff on this page has happened to other people/machines and not mine, but they were still amusing.

Conflicts?

This happened to a friend of mine when he was installing 98 on a machine at work. Windows just assigned all of IRQs so well.

Lost Space

My friend was copying files when windows said you have no space left. But of course, she did have free space on the drive.

Zip Disks

Here was a really messed up Zip Disk that was trying to be read in Windows. I want to have this kind of space on a removable disk.