Ghost Hardware??? and other problems

[moxy]

After my CD-ROM drive died, my system on booting has been saying I have new hardware. I have taken the drive out with the same problem.

Another thing that happened at the same time was with my inability to sync my PDA. It's on COM1. Along the same lines, I can't see the other system on the network but they can access my system without a problem.

The other weirdness of all this is, before the CD ROM drive totally failed, it would come back once in a while and during those times, everything worked right. Go figure. :confused:

[kaz101]

Hi Moxy :)

My experience with networking is minimum so I was sorta hoping someone else would jump on board ;)

re your CD can you give a little more info. So it died and you uninstalled it? or did you just manually remove the hardware? or did you do both? 'died' being how/what? Have you had a look at device manager to see if/what dregs are still hanging around?

did you get ME on new PC or upgrade? what's your PC specs? did the problems with your PDA come about after the CD died or during the "I'm dying" stage?

[moxy]

Well, I didn't do anything... Windows stopped seeing it and it didn't appear in system properties under CD Rom Drives nor in My Computer. I just replaced it and that is hunky dorrie. BTW I put it in another system and it didn't appear either so the drive was faulty.

As for the false hardware, if I switch to view by connection, the Unknown Device appears attached to my video card (ATI-All in Wonder 128). This is the only problem that appears in my system Properties.

Fixed the network problem by uninstalling/reinstalling my NIC but my PDA still will not connect via MS Activesync. This problem started right after the CD conked out. I'm thinking it might be due to musical IRQs because I think the system is giving the free IRQ to something which is messing the whole thing up (new CD drive is different make/model so system treats it as new hardware).

ME was a clean install on my system. It's a 500 Celeron w/128meg RAM, 16 GB HD. My fingers are crossed that I don't have to do, yet another, clean install.

Thx

[Steven.Bentley]

Well my $0.02 as a perdominently Mac user ;)

Unknown device attached to the video card... have you checked that the drivers are ME compatible?