The Misadventures of Dan
Peer into the mind of Dan as he tries to build an MP3 Player for his PDA and searches for the next thing in his life be it an electrical engineering job or graduate school.
Sunday, February 01, 2004
.:1:30:57 AM:.
msconfig and other things...
They say that instant messaging brings about a whole new way of social interaction and decorum. There are people who only log on during times when they work, there are those who log on late at night to talk with their friends overseas. Others have the whole 'I'm-away-but-here-if-I-want-to-talk-to-you', there's the whole 'lingo' -> lol, haha, amazing how :P can be different from Xp. You get used to some things... like when certain groups of friends are online. Such was the case with my friend who suddenly came online earlier tonight. I say suddenly because he's never on at night because of how difficult it was for him to get access to the internet during that time.
Hi Dan! he says,
Hey, what are you doing online so late?
I need your help.
ahh cut straight to the chase. Forget the small talk. Who needs that?
I need to find a driver for a CDRW GCE 8400b (I'm surprised I could type all that by memory)
Ok... have you tried looking at google?
Help me please, my download is too slow! Avoiding the question... hmm could that mean that it was 'no'?
Granted not everyone knows what's missing but sometimes you have to wonder. Googling revealed that a GCE 8400b is made by LG Electronics but their service/support webpage does not contain all their drivers. Despite whether or not the company's support is good or bad you should _always_ start at the company's site. This may sound trivial but really... people skip the company and go straight to other people's webpage which isn't good. Next, in this impromptu 'how to find a device driver' you want to check out the results of your webpage. See if there's a pattern. Often times if the device is bad you'll see a lot of quotes from discussion groups telling how bad it is... if it's good you'll see product reviews. No matter what, this gives you a feel for how rare this driver may be. Next, I check Driver Guide-although yes you do need to register to be able to download-it's not that bad. I haven't gotten any spam from them or anything like that. Luckily Driver Guide seemed to have the driver files so it's all good. The next alternative is to try and use Windows Plug and Play detection-you never know it might actually be on there!
I noticed that some people were trying to find out what to do if they can't run MS Config or ms config is missing. MS Config is sort of a small program to help you figure out what's being loaded at start up and stuff. I've found that msconfig only works in the Windows 9X (Win 95, Win 98) and Windows XP versions. If you have Windows 2000 (win2k) you won't be able to run msconfig. Instead you'll need some alternative like Mike Lin's CPL Startup.
