Thursday, January 1, 2004
More computer troubleshooting. I got Win 2000 installed yesterday after wiping the Win XP installation away. Today, I installed drivers for my network card, which Win XP autodetected properly but Win 2000 did not. When installing SP4, I got this error: "an error in updating your system has occurred." I clicked OK and the install continued. Several hours later it was still installing updates. I aborted the process, restarted, then tried again with the same result—extremely slow behavior. Gave up trying to install SP4 then installed ZoneAlarm and figured out what was going wrong. Immediately upon starting ZoneAlarm for the first time, it warned me that msblast.exe was trying to access the network. I immediately restarted, unplugged the ethernet cable, and reinstalled win 2000, wiping the previous installation in the process. Had an early version of win 2000 so my usb key wasn't autodetected, so I had to use a file splitter on zonealarm on another computer to bring it over across 4 floppy disks. Once ZoneAlarm was installed and configured, I was able to connect it to the network and the Internet, download and install SP4 and other updates, then test security using GRC. Finally things seem to be stable! Lunch and dinner at home with Patrick: leftovers. Picked up Sam from the airport who had spent the past week visiting his mom in New Orleans. He brought us back a bag of PJ's Sumatra Mandheling coffee beans, Biermann marzipan, and Koppers Mardi Gras espresso beans.