My computer has Gremlins!

Last week, my friend Warren mentioned that he had a video recording that was very special to him and his wife. He had made enquiries about transferring it to DVD, but had discovered that the shops would charge a small fortune to do this, and also would refuse to touch any copyright material. I told Warren that I had a video capture card on my computer at home, and would be happy to transfer his video for him.

That's when the Gremlins came visiting!

Everything started off fine. I installed the software for the card, and connected the video. Picture and sound were showing on the computer, so I started the recording process.

After about 40 minutes, the computer froze. The keyboard and mouse would not respond. So I hit the soft reset button and restarted the computer. Once the computer was up and running again, I discovered that the video capture software had sound but no video!

I then spent hours un installing and re-installing the software numerous times. Eventually, the computer gave a message that essential drivers were corrupted or missing and that I would need to repair Windows!

I dug out my Windows XP disk and started the repair installation. The only problem was that all data would be wiped if I tried to repair Windows! The repair is no different from formatting the drive and starting again! Before I could repair the drive, I had to save all the essential data first.

I have 3 hard drives in my computer. What I did was to replace one hard drive with an old smaller one I had removed a couple of years ago. Install Windows on this temporary drive and then commence transferring data from the original C: drive onto one of the other hard drives. Once this was done, I formated the corrupt drive.

The next day, I started the slow process of re-installing all the software, and transferring the data stored on the other hard drive. I initially had a problem getting the internet to work, until I found I needed to load in some drivers for the motherboard.

This project had taken nearly 6 days to get to this stage (admittedly only 3 or 4 hours each day), but every time I sorted one problem, another took its place. Things were heading in the right direction until yesterday morning.

I had just loaded Microsoft Office onto the computer, and I decided to put the video capture card back into the computer. When I restarted the computer, I was asked to install the drivers. I put the CD into the computer and waited for the drivers to be loaded... And waited... And waited. Then I noticed that the computer had stopped recognising the CD and DVD drives!!!

When I resumed my battle this morning, I eventually found a website that explained what to do. I had to go into the Disk Management section and search for "UpperFilters" and "LowerFilters" and delete them. When I did this I got my CD and DVD drives back... Only to find all my PCI card slots had stopped working!

Next I tried to update the BIOS on the motherboard, only to find the computer crashed halfway through the process. Now I had to reset the BIOS by removing the graphics card to get to the on-board battery, remove the battery and temporarily set a "Jumper" to reset the motherboard. When I put it all back together again I found the video capture card worked... But the sound card didn't!

I tried to reset the BIOS again, only this time the computer refuses to start at all!!!

So its back to the drawing board again.
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