Grafitti

They're selling Blu-ray drives for around $200, i think. But then the Blu ray dvds cost like $40 each.... so they're heavily slashing the burner costs, but they make it up with the burning media costs. I would love to be given one of those, but I'm not going to go out and buy it. I still prefer the 4.7 GB dvds. Both because of cost, and also because they only can hold that much, so if it goes bad all you've lost is that. What if you damaged your Bluray disc? Alot more's at stake. I'm also soured on the whole external HD backup idea... I got a Western Digital 500GB external, and backed up everything onto it. After 3 months the drive failed, and though WD gave me a new one in exchange, if I had been keeping that as my only backup source, I would have lost irreplaceable data.

A good TV series to watch is "The Real Hustle". It's easy to see how this scam is simply a variant of others.

My ISP is quite special. I have a cable 512k connection from them, but it's shared between 10 users and in addition they won't troubleshoot it for me if i have more than one computer connected. No wonder the IT infrastructure is 4th rate here. Anyways, my problem is that I can't open any web page whatsoever. It just returns a page not found. But if i type in the IP address, the page loads fine. This is something I don't understand much about, and I'm not getting any help from my service provider for the above mentioned reasons. Is this a software problem on my end, or something out of my control, and if so, what would be the way to fix it? Basically I have to call them up and tell them how to fix it, so any help would be appreciated.When I run the modem through my USRobotics router, it frequently tells me there's a DHCP problem with the internet. I know that's not good, but I have no idea how to go about fixing it.

To change the color of Office 2007, open any of the Office Applications (let's say Word), then click on the thingy in the top left corner for the menu, at the bottom you'll see a button called "word options". Click that, then click the "popular" tab if it hasn't already gone to that page, then under "top options for working with word" there's one that says "Color scheme". rather self explanatory. And the 3 colors to choose between are blue, silver, and black. I'm a big fan of the 2007 release. It was a worthwhile upgrade. Takes a little bit to get used to the new layout, but then it's faster. It's been designed with an emphasis on speed, and being able to find what you want with a click rather than having to hunt through the menus. Though if you don't like the new interface, there's the classic menu program which changes the tabs and menus to the look of Office 2003. But I'd suggest trying out the new one first and I'm sure you'll like it. Issues with Office 07 so far only are with powerpoint and outlook. Outlook is infernally slow compared to the 2003 version. Powerpoint is awesome, but you've got to use your presentations on computers that run Office 07. You can save it as a 2003 version, but it becomes bigger to the tune of hundreds of MB, and runs slowly as well. Keep it in 07, and you've got a wealth of new features at your fingertips.

That's true... plus isn't Toshiba notorious for being finnicky with their hardware? I remember an older toshiba model which only worked with a certain hard disk, and took several tries to find a brand of ram that worked.

I have a healthy dose of skepticism for any of these health studies. Every few years the findings change, and all of a sudden it doesn't really matter what you're eating, some study has shown it can kill you. Then things like caffeine studies. one finds it prevents this certain type of cancer, and another study finds it causes something else. I think my favorite quote for these things is that one that says "It is now clinically proven that laboratory testing causes cancer in rats". That's about the only one I'd accept right now. Sadly ironic.

Also CPU-Z (freeware) has a very detailed breakdown of your computer parts. It'll tell you what socket you're using, and more information than you can use about the rest of your computer. get it here: http://http://www.cpuid.com/softwares/cpu-z.html

Thanks. will post back after trying it out.Edit: took it down to the shop... Tried out several stabilizers, but they all fluctuate. the power grid is just too obsolete. But I was able to download the proper software from the UPS manufacturer's website, and have set the computer to stand by when the battery power dips too close to zero. Not the best solution, but it does work. thanks, faulty, for your help and advice.

Yes, me too... I thought this was a joke at first.

I've now run into a new problem: The UPS has a voltage window of 10% up or down. Beyond that, and it switches to battery. But much of the time the power is around 15% or 20% lower, and so the ups runs off the battery... if it goes on long enough it dies. If I unplug the computer from the ups and just plug it straight into the wall, the low voltage doesn't have any effect on the running of the computer, but then it defeats the purpose of having a ups. -- if a power cut comes then of course the computer goes off too. But I run so much off the battery with this low voltage. How can I avoid this? would putting a stabilizer before the ups offer any help? I would have thought so, but since this ups is supposed to contain its own stabilizer I'm not sure what it would do.

Yeah ... poorly written childish humor, and it goes on way too long.

Especially when even a huge bank or corporation can't manage to keep your credit card details safe nowadays, why would you enter that info on one of those ad-riddled sites? You're bound to end up paying for that xbox or whatever in some way.

I got an article this morning about it from Siliconvalley.. I think it's interesting, and actually quite a breakthrough.

An added benefit of Gmail now is the free IMAP access they're implementing. It'll make things much simpler for those of us who want to sync mail between PDAs and desktops.

My old Compaq laptop used to do the same things, right before the motherboard finally gave out. I had been using it heavily for a couple years, and i guess under heavy use, it doesn't last much longer than that. I would definitely have it checked by a tech, to see if there's some way to repair it. Especially if it has a heating problem. Some laptops are always hot, but if there's a noticeable increase in the average temperature, something's usually wrong, and waiting only makes things worse, as heat destroys critical components.

Sounds interesting, yordan.. I'll have to try that sometime. Thanks for the tip.

Yeah, I just don't see the Zune as any sort of a threat to Apple. Even if they were to double anything Apple had, still they would be a distant second, if that. People just don't see Microsoft as a MP3 player contender. Like I was reading once about how cars like Honda and Toyota are perfectly good and acceptable cars in the west, even looked at as "oh look, an import!", but in Japan they don't sell as well and are looked at as second-rate cars, because over there they're primarily known for their motorbikes, and so no one wants to drive a car made by a bike company. I suppose it would be the same if Harley made cars. I for one wouldn't want to drive around in one. The first assumption people would make is "A car? Harley makes bikes!" and it's the same with the Zune. It's just not going to sell well, being branded a Microsoft product. I don't like iPods either. Overpriced and more of a fashion statement than a music player. -- not that they're bad, they're good quality mp3 players, just too hyped up. But they have dominance, precisely because of that. And they won't lose that market anytime soon. The die-hards will always buy iPods, ignorant people and first-time buyers will also buy iPods, because of the fantastic job Apple has done with brand awareness.

Especially with flash disks, the autorun feature is where all the viruses and worms load themselves. Currently I'm fighting an infestation of Ravmon.E worms. They hop around on flash disks, and for some reason neither NOD32 nor AVG is detecting it. It's a pretty harmless virus, doesn't destroy anything, just runs and makes a nuisance of itself. It's easy to kill, and looking at a flash disk with total commander shows the virus, and from there's it's just a click to delete. the problem is users. who don't know what they're doing and think they know better, and refuse to stop the autorun feature. That, and they won't open their pgp disks (which ravmon infects as well), so they come crying for a cleanup, and the next day they're back again.

It depends on what you count as wasted space. Generally in cloning to a larger hard disk size, you have two options. Either keep the partitions the same size, or resize them proportionately. Say you have a 40GB disk and you're upgrading to a 200GB. If your 40GB disk had a C: partition of 10GB and D: of 30GB, then your ratio is 1:4If you choose to clone the partitions exactly then you'll have 160GB free space to create more partitions. If you do proportional resizing, you'll end up with C: being 50GB and D: will be 150GB. If you're into keeping your C partition as small as possible, then yes, it's a waste of space. Otherwise not. There are several freeware programs that can do this... of course the paid ones are more powerful and with less limitations. But in the UltimateBootCD, found here it has quite a few freeware cloning tools. For paidware, I've always used Paragon Drive Copy -- price around $25. check it out here: http://http://www.vista-files.org/

See my reply to your other thread here: http://forums.xisto.com/topic/94273-topic/?findpost=

I think what he's asking is how to add an image signature to his posts... Just a hunch, but I know the same thing threw me when I was first starting out. If that's what you're looking for, then go to My Controls > Edit Signature > and paste the link to your graphic, enclosing it in IMG tags. Example: [img]http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/;'>http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/; If, on the other hand, you're wanting to know how to create a signature, just google it. Or look at these example tutorials. They generally use Photoshop, but if you don't have that you can use pretty much any good image editing software. It comes down to a combination of skill and creativity. Example tutorial: http://forums.xisto.com/topic/32200-topic/Lots of tutorials: http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/Signature tutorial for GIMP: http://http://www.gimptalk.com/index.php?showtopic=5773

Although, if you're set on keeping your existing windows exactly as it was when you first installed it (provided you have the same install cd and haven't done major system file changes to your system), what you can do is mirror or clone the hard drive over to the new one. Simply cloning a single partition hasn't always worked in my experience. But using proper drive cloning software, you get the new hard disk exactly the same as the old one, and then pop it in the new computer. If it all boots up, then you're fine. But if not, boot off of your install cd and perform a repair. This reinstalls the hardware-specific drivers without changing any settings, login info, or software installations. Be aware though that if you've patched the uxtheme.dll or similar stuff for customizing purposes, the reinstall will overwrite these patched system files with original windows ones. But it hasn't failed me yet. --it's worth a try.

I have both, and I never use Corel. I don't think it can compare in any way to photoshop. Fundamentally though, IMO photoshop is the best raster image editing software you can buy, but Corel's strengths are in the vector field. Photoshop has made some progress in that, and with the new Illustrator we're getting there, but for vector image manipulation, I still think Corel is at the top. Since I work in raster most of the time, I never use Corel. People who compare those products side by side for photo editing don't know the power of photoshop, and would probably be just as well off using MS Paint. Really I don't think you can compare them in any way, they're both different products with different targets.

As long as I can get to the generator and turn it on within 10 minutes, I shouldn't have to worry about hibernation. The UPS has intelligent software stuff bundled, but can't use it currently because it communicates through a serial port and my motherboard (946) doesn't have one. I might look into software overclocking, because I do need the power. I've placed the UPS on a separate circuit now, and it seems to hold up a bit better. Wiring in the house is bad quality, in addition to low quality power coming into the house. So spreading out the load over a couple breakers is having a positive effect.

I figured it doesn't matter about the file corruption. Once more wouldn't hurt, it already goes off several times a day. On good power, it powers both computer and monitor for around 20 minutes. But I've ended up unplugging the monitor from the UPS, because the power is so dirty with extended brownouts, that there's constant strain on the UPS. It has a 10% buck/boost ratio. Only once has it stepped down the power for a few seconds, but more than half the time the boost is active. And like yesterday the power kept dipping below the 10% threshold, and constantly switched back and forth between line power and battery. Then when the power finally cut out completely, the UPS only lasted a minute. And after the power was back, it didn't have enough charge to start up just the computer--- had to leave it to charge for a couple minutes before the batteries had that initial power back. Kind of disappointing, but hopefully it will work with just the computer.