Computer Hassles

Here you can see what a mains glitch may look like — very different to the waveform glitches caused by internal computer or software faults.

Martin Walker has had more than his fair share of computer hassles recently, including exploding monitors, audio glitches, and the mysterious death of Word...

This past month has been the month from hell for me, with one computer setback after another causing totally unexpected problems and delays. Although some of these problems still remain unresolved, the approach I took to solving them may help others presented with similar situations — so here's what happened.

Vision Off

Ahead Software's Nero 5.5 now includes a full‑featured audio editor that should prove invaluable to musicians wanting to burn audio CDs.

Sod's Law dictates that as soon as you buy a new piece of gear (in my case, it was the excellent Echo Mia soundcard), something else will break down to dampen your enthusiasm. Hearing what I initially thought were the sounds of my young dog chewing a Biro in the studio, I raced in to discover my four‑year‑old Iiyama 17‑inch monitor emitting alarming cracks and sparks. Unlike most other PC equipment, there are no replaceable parts in the average monitor, so it was off to the web to research a suitable replacement.

Now, this would be easy for all those of you who have several PCs available — you'd simply plug in another monitor instead of the failed one, and then log onto the Internet. Unfortunately, the only other monitor I had available was a 10‑year‑old, 14‑inch, pre–plug–and–play model, and plugging this into my PC resulted in the expected picture roll, as it attempted to produce the 1024x768‑pixel resolution and high refresh rate of its predecessor. I had to make it work, so I set about figuring out what to do. If you should ever find yourself in a similar position, needing to connect an old monitor in place of a modern one, you may find it useful to know the steps I took.

Booting into Safe Mode provided a nice stable image (admittedly at 640 x 480 resolution), but no opportunity to change video settings. The answer was to enter the Monitor properties page inside System, and then click on 'Update Driver'. Then, using the Update Device Driver Wizard, I chose 'Display a list of all the drivers in a specific location', and then 'Show all hardware'. After choosing the topmost ('Standard monitor types') entry, I selected the 'Standard VGA 640x480 @ 75Hz' option (closest to that of Safe Mode), rebooted, and was then able to limp online to order a new monitor. I chose an NEC MultiSyncFE700+ that was recently praised for its price‑to‑quality ratio in a PC Pro roundup. I'm very pleased with its performance, particularly at the bargain price of just £169.99 plus VAT, since the picture is significantly sharper and flatter than its predecessor.

Glitch Central

My next problem concerned audio — a new batch of audio clicks. Unlike my previous waveform glitch problems, which were caused by conflicts between Cubase and GigaStudio (discussed in PC Notes March 2001), this time the glitches were definitely arriving via the mains supply. When a couple of nasty ones occurred during a recording, I had the evidence in a WAV file, and by using the Wavelab glitches function I could home in on them quite quickly for closer study.

Waveform glitches caused by computer software or hardware normally exhibit a missing or repeated section of waveform, with a vertical join like a seismic fault line. As you can see from the screenshot, a mains glitch tends to look very different — mine showed a rapid (but not instantaneous) rise time, but with the characteristic multiple 'bounce' often associated with switch–contact problems. Switch contacts don't open and close cleanly, but bounce several times as they change state, and this bounce will steadily get worse and worse as the contacts start to wear. Then, as the circuit is made or broken, the resulting tiny sparks (arcing) not only put a click onto the mains but also generate RF that can be picked up by other audio and mains leads in the vicinity acting as aerials. (By the way, the arcing mentioned above is why you should never operate a light switch if you suspect a gas leak.)

The most common culprit for contact clicks is apparently the central‑heating thermostat, but fridges, freezers, lights — in fact, any switch — can start to cause the problem. It's difficult to completely remove them, except at source, and the cure is to fit a switch‑contact suppressor directly across the offending switch contacts. This is a capacitor/resistor network that is specifically designed to be used at mains voltages. You can buy them from many suppliers. For instance, in the UK, Russ Andrews Accessories (telephone 0800 373467) have them in their catalogue at £3.95 each.

Unfortunately I haven't tracked down my culprit — it wasn't the central‑heating thermostat causing the clicks (they still happened with the heating completely turned off), and they didn't seem to be caused by the fridge or freezer either. In fact, I'm still flummoxed, since sometimes the clicks disappear for days, while during one particular mastering session they happened so regularly, every 100 seconds or so, that I could predict exactly when the next one would get recorded. If this scenario sounds familiar to you, do let me know!

Lost For Word

The next calamity occurred out of the blue when Microsoft Word refused to boot up, for the first time since I installed it nearly three years ago, reporting an 'Invalid Page Fault' in the module MS097.DLL. There were a few 'issues' related to this module in the fault‑finding section of Microsoft's web site, but none that matched my problem. So the first thing I did was to run the Repair option in Word's Setup.exe file, which re‑installs the original files over the top of those on your hard drive, to repair corrupted ones, but it didn't cure my problem.

So I spent the next couple of hours making sure I had backups of everything important on my hard drive, and then used Cleansweep to reverse the install process and remove every change made by Word on my PC. Fortunately, my data is stored on a separate hard drive, but I still backed this up too, for safety's sake. Once I had Word eradicated from my PC, I re‑booted and installed it from scratch. If you find yourself in a similar situation, this is often the only course of action, and should solve the majority of problems, but in my case it made no difference — the new installation gave exactly the same error. Apparently, this can sometimes be caused by an associated INI file, or even a rogue printer driver.

As a reviewer, I need a word processor running on the same PC as my audio software. But perhaps you'll realise why this isn't generally recommended for musicians when I say that with the minimal choices in my Microsoft Word installation the program only occupied about 30Mb of hard disk space, but the Cleansweep log indicated that 2458 items had been installed, the majority being Registry entries. Frightening!

The next step for most people would be either to restore the entire hard drive contents from their newest image file, if you're using a utility like Norton's Ghost or PowerQuest's Drive Image, or, if not, to reformat the hard drive and install everything from scratch. Sadly, since my software changes on an almost daily basis, I don't use such a utility (although I suspect I may in future!). Also, I have absolutely loads of software installed on my PC, for comparative review purposes, that was all still running perfectly well, and had already lost so much time that I needed a fast alternative. So, on the recommendation of a friend, I installed Corel's Word Perfect. I found this product aptly named — for me it was the perfect solution, especially as the installation seemed extremely well behaved, placing few files outside its own folder, and comparatively little in the Registry.

Long Term

As soon as I can, I intend to re–format my boot drive and start afresh. Some musicians do this quite regularly, but it shouldn't be necessary in most cases; despite the heavy throughput of review software and hardware on my PC, this will be the first time I've had to re–format since I bought it in August 1998.

I could install removable drive bays, as described in last month's PC Musician feature — one for my music and the other for general use — but since I spend so much time writing about the software I'm running, I personally need everything on one partition. Also, both my current drives are now in SilentDrive sleeves, so I'd lose the low‑noise advantage if I moved to bays. However, I might take advantage of the opportunity to invest in a new larger boot drive, and even install Windows ME. One thing's for certain, though — I won't be reinstalling Word!