On Wed, 25 Mar 2020 12:43:28 -0400, Paul wrote:

Well, I hope it turns out it was just a RAM issue of some sort.

Hi Paul,

Thanks for all your kind, patient, and purposefully helpful advice.
People like you are what make Usenet valuable to all us old men.

At the moment, shockingly, the machine has stayed alive nearly 20 hours,
which is longer than it has done since this started happening.

At the moment, what's removed is:
a. Two memory cards (4GB each for a loss of 8GB)
b. Two terabyte hard disk drives
c. One built-in DVD/CD optical drive
d. One Nvidia graphics card (the motherboard has graphics)

For screen real estate, I hooked up the second monitor, so the motherboard
is running both monitors just fine now (white, DVI, and blue VGA outputs).

What I'll do is let it run for a while (all power management has been
turned off) where, if/when it BSODs, I'll swap the other two cards in.

I don't know if I can do one 4GB card at a time, so I'll try that, but I
suspect it has to be in pairs, where I put them in adjacent slots.
https://i.postimg.cc/J0G9Qp8t/bsod28.jpg

Meanwhile, there are literally a couple hundred tweaks I need to make, one
by one, where, for an example, here are some of the registry treaks to set
up a basic Windows system to work properly for me.

*Copy 15-year old WinXP menu from WinXP to Win10, where it still works!*
C:\data\menu\{archiver,browser,cleaner,database,ed itor,finance,game,hardware,etc.}

*Disable keyboard capslock key*
1. Start the registry editor & navigate to "Keyboard Layout"
HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Keyboard Layout
2. Create a new "binary value" named (sans quotes) "Scancode Map"
3. To disable the capslock key, set the "Scancode Map" value to:
00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,02,00,00,00,00,00,3a,00,00 ,00,00,00
To enable the capslock key, delete the "Scancode Map" altogether.
4. Reboot (you must reboot for it to take effect).

Here's what it should look like in the registry editor when done:
Value data:
00000000 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 ........
00000008 02 00 00 00 00 00 3A 00 ......:.
00000010 00 00 00 00 ....

*Remove " - Shortcut" when creating shortcuts*
Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00
[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\Curre ntVersion\Explorer]
"link"=hex:00,00,00,00

*Open extensionless files in gVim*
Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00
[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\.]
[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\.\shell]
[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\.\shell\open]
[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\.\shell\open\command]
@="\"C:\\app\\editor\\txt\\vim\\vim81\\gvim.exe\ " \"%1\""

*Add a 32-bit DWORD to open more than 15 files at a time*
HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Exp lorer
Name : MultipleInvokePromptMinimum
Type : DWORD
Default : 15 (decimal)
Change to: 100 (decimal)

*Turn off the Windows UAC queries when running VPN config files*
C:\Windows\System32\UserAccountControlSettings.exe
(I need a more graceful way to turn off _just_ VPN config files!)

*Clean up the quicklaunch right-click explorer menu*
{app,data,software,tmp}

*Add mvp hosts file*
http://winhelp2002.mvps.org/hosts.txt

*Add context menu entry for Open Admin Command Windows Here*
Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00
[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Directory\shell\cmd2]
,-8506"
"Extended"=-
"Icon"="imageres.dll,-5323"
"NoWorkingDirectory"=""
[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Directory\shell\cmd2\command]
@="cmd.exe /s /k pushd \"%V\""
[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Directory\Background\shell\cmd2]
,-8506"
"Extended"=-
"Icon"="imageres.dll,-5323"
"NoWorkingDirectory"=""
[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Directory\Background\shell\cmd2\ command]
@="cmd.exe /s /k pushd \"%V\""
[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Drive\shell\cmd2]
,-8506"
"Extended"=-
"Icon"="imageres.dll,-5323"
"NoWorkingDirectory"=""
[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Drive\shell\cmd2\command]
@="cmd.exe /s /k pushd \"%V\""
[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\LibraryFolder\Background\shell\c md2]
,-8506"
"Extended"=-
"Icon"="imageres.dll,-5323"
"NoWorkingDirectory"=""
[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\LibraryFolder\Background\shell\c md2\command]
@="cmd.exe /s /k pushd \"%V\""

*and a few hundred other mandatory Windows 10 tweaks as needed*
(including the Marek Novotny VPN scripts to run thousands of IP addresses)
--
Usenet is a public place for purposefully helpful adults to share ideas.