Posts by DMR

You probably wouldn't have seen much (if anything) directly relating to the mouse or keyboard in the registry entries- what Puckdropper was alluding to is that there might be some other program/process automatically starting when Windows starts which is contributing to or causing the problems. The "Run" entries in the registry are what control the auto-loading of such programs.

"i've also gone into safe mode and there doesn't seem to be any hardware conflicts..."

Meaning that there are no yellow "exclamation point" symbols or red "X"s next to any of the devices, yes? If the mouse and keyboard work in safe mode and Device Manager indicates no hardware problems, you almost certainly have a software conflict.

"To solve this problem I uninstalled Windows XP and because the previous version (Windows 98) was there I was able to use the computer as usual as it was back to its previous state."

The upgrade/downgrade process might not have gone as flawlessly as it might have appeared. I hate to suggest this, but do you have the option of backing up your data and reinstaling Win 98 from scratch? Considering that none of us can sit down in front of your computer and get a first-hand look at what's going on, that might be the less time-consuming way to go.

I'll have to try running it in safe mode and see if that makes any difference too. :)

Yes- definitely give that a try.

...(It was a 486 running Freesco. www.freesco.org)

Sounds like you're talking about about a dedicated computer acting as the router, yes? That might a bit of overkill or a bit too complicated for the average user to set up, but dedicated dial-up router devices are available.

Like Cable/DSL routers, dial-up routers have built-in Ethernet ports where you plug in all of your computers, and a modem port which you connect to your modem. There are some considerations to keep in mind though:

- The setup needs an external modem.
- Each of the computers that you want to connect to the router will need it's own Ethernet network card.
- Dial-up connections are quite slow compared to broadband, even with only one computer involved; simultaneously sharing a dial-up connection with multiple computers will not be much fun performance-wise.

It's possible that a virus or "malware" program has broken your connectivity- some of those nasties can do that. Have you scanned your system for viruses and other malicious programs with the latest versions of detection and removal tools? You can find out much more about the problems caused by malicious programs and how to remove them by reading many of the threads in our Security forum.

When you say that you can get an Internet connection, could we verify that by doing the following?:

Click the the "Run..." option under your Start menu and type "cmd" (omit the quotes) in the dialog box; this will open a DOS window. At the command prompt in the window, try the following commands and let us know what the results are:

ping 127.0.0.1
ping localhost
ping www.google.com
ping 64.233.167.99

It sounds like you're taling about "wake on modem"-type functionality. Check out some of these links and see if they give you the info you need:

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&q=%22wake+on+modem%22+&btnG=Search

When you say "no detection", what exactly do you mean? If the drive hasn't been formatted yet, you won't be able to "see" it in My Computer or Explorer.

I'm not familiar with that particular Netgear model, but it sounds like an issue with "secure" pages/sites. Check the router's settings and your system's settings to make sure you're not blocking secure/SSL connections.

Also make sure to create a user account for each of you on both computers. For each account, the username and password should be identical on both machines. In a workgroup/peer-to-peer environment each user has to have a valid account on the machine they are trying to access (or know the username/password of an account on the machine).

If it's only one address, it could also be a problem with the site/server.

Open a DOS box and try the following commands:

ping URL of site
ping IP address of site
nslookup URL of site
nslookup IP address of site

Depending on the make/model of the straight 56k modem, it may or may not support the v90 enhancements. However, since the condition of the physical phone wiring in your area is going to be the biggest determining factor in terms of performance, you might not see any measurable difference between the two devices.

Did the program seem to start running correctly and then get "reset" at some point; starting from the beginning again, or did it just never appear to even start scanning?

Have a Windows 98 SE. Lost IE a few months ago (not sure why - fires up but no connection to the server) but Opera, OE, MIRC worked. Upgraded to ME and lost the connection to everything. Any ideas why?

That's a pretty broad description of the problem, could you be more specific?

What type of Internet connection do you have?
What devices are involved in your setup?
When you say "lost everything", what exactly do you mean?
What exact errors (if any) do you get when you try to connect?

Giving us as much information as possible will help us help you get things going the most quickly.

Foster,

As you requested, I've moved your latest post here (with the HJT log) into a new thread of the same name in the Security forum.

linuxiso.org has been around for a long time. I'm glad you found it useful; it really is a "Linux supermarket", isn't it?

In terms of which distro- that's always a personal preference. Also, because the distros are always maturing and improving, what was the "best" distro last year may not be today. I prefer the Sys V-based distros (RH, SuSE, Mandrake, etc.) as opposed to the BSD-ish ones such as Slackware, but that's just me.

2 NICs sharing the same IRQ could be problematic. Try moving one of the NICs to another PCI slot; that might force a reallocation of IRQs on the PCI bus.

The brand isn't the important bit really- what we would need to know in order to help you get the drivers is the make and model of motherboard and/or specific information about the hardware devices (sound and video chipsets, for example) you're having trouble with.

First of all- don't do anything further with the drive until you get the right utility! There's a good chance that at least some of your data can be salvaged, but if you run any program which might attempt to write to the drive, the data will be overwritten.

Most of the available recovery utilities cost $$, but some offer a trial version which is fully functional. Information about recovering data, and links to a few utilities, can be found here:
http://www.pcmech.com/show/harddrive/664/1

I'm sure a Google search for keywords like "hard drive", "format", "data", and "recover" will give you more options.

Great, glad we could help :)

DMR,
I am at my aunt's house right now. I will have to see if it works at my house. If it does, I thank you in advance.

If not, I will be posting in a few days.

OK- we'll be here then if you need us...

OK- we'll be here... :)

I was clear on your setup, but did you try what I suggested in terms of refreshing your IP config info once you hooked the machine back up to your home network?

After doing what I suggested, open a DOS box, try pinging the IP of your router, and tell us exactly what happens. Might not hurt to post the output of "ifconfig /all" as well as the IP addy (LAN-side) of the router on your home network.

Aladdin has a full version that's called "Stuffit." What you probably have is "Stuffit Expander." Unfortunately, it's a commercial product and you have to pay for it.

Yup.

Can you get Adobe Acrobat reader for the Mac?

That would be the thing to do.

In terms of your other problems- what version of Mac OS are you running, and what model of Mac is it?

Cool- after you do the Ad Aware and SpyBot runs, make sure to run HijackThis and pull a copy of the log so that you can post it here. We'll look over the log and see if there are still traces of any Gremlins.

When you say DOS, do you mean that you have a dual-boot XP/DOS setup or are you talking about something running in "DOS" mode from within XP?

Either way, since DOS doesn't natively support USB, you'll have to jump through some hoops to make it happen (if it can happen at all). Check some of the links in this Google search for suggestions:

http://www.columbia.edu/~em36/wpdos/winprint.html

"MSCOMLTL.OCX' or one of its dependencies not correctly registered:a file is missing or invalid"

Don't understand this?????

It happens sometimes- the file either gets deleted or corrupted during software adds/removes. You'll find fixes here:

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&q=MSCOMCTL.OCX+dependencies+registered&btnG=Search

It depends on the make of BIOS you have, but basically you have to hit a certain key just as the computer is booting up (before Windows starts) to enter the BIOS setup. Some common BIOS access keys are F1, F2, and Del.

Once in the BIOS you have to locate the section which has the settings for your IDE channels and devices. Make sure both channels are recognized and enabled. Also make sure your IDE devices are being recognized correctly.

Hi,

This isn't the right forum for your question, so if you could please tell us which version of Windows of you're using I'll move this question to the appropriate place.

Thanks :)

It looks to be two huge long slots, and the other one is not is empty.. Maybe, the other ram was with the old CD,-cd writer box.

Is it possible that the second stick of RAM, although seemingly physically compatible with the new comuter, is not electrically compatible? That is- is the second stick of RAM the same type as the first?

...I wanted to hook to computers so we can both get online..someone said a router, I do not have any idea.

If you have a cable or DSL Internet connection, a broadband gateway router is the specific beast you're looking for. They come in a wide variety of flavors, but basically they all have one connection that goes to your modem, and a number of other connectors into which you plug your computers. The router acts as a "traffic cop" by correctly routing the streams of information between each of the computers and the Internet.

You can get wired (Ethernet)-only routers, wireless routers, or routers which have a combination of both connection types. Linksys and Netgear are two popular manufacturers, some specific model #s are:

Linksys- BEFSR41, BEFW11S4, WRT54G
Netgear- RT614, CG814M, WGR614

my guess bluedos82 picked up an IP address while there and now it's not compatible at home. Will time out eventually or can he can flush it.

Assuming the computer is usning DHCP, that's quite possible. Release and renew the DHCP lease when connecting the computer to a different network:

Open a DOS box and issue the following command:

ipconfig /renew

Then do:

ipconfig /all

to see if you've obtained the proper IP/DNS/Gateway addresses.

You can fit those 4 operating systems in 40G, but things will probably get a little tight if you plan on installing tons of apps or storing a lot of data.

There are a lot of suggestions for multi-booting combinations of the operating systems you want to install in this Google search:
http://www.google.com/linux?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&q=freebsd+linux+windows+boot&btnG=Google+Search

As Christian mentioned, if you want to share files between the different environments, it would be a good idea to set aside a small slice of the drive for a FAT32 shared data storage partition; Linux isn't fully interoperable with NTFS filesystems.

You will also want to set aside 256-512M of the disk for a swap (virtual memory) partition. A single swap partition can be used by both of your Linux installations and FreeBSD, although there are some issues with sharing swap between Linux and BSD. More on that here:
http://www.google.com/linux?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&q=freebsd+swap+linux&btnG=Google+Search

The "180" file is a piece of the 180 Search Assistant malware. You didn't remove all of it, so now it's "kindly" asking to be reinstalled.

SpyBot alone will not be able to fix everything. You should, at the least, also get Ad Aware. Run Ad Aware and Spybot consecutively, rebooting after each program is run. Also- Ad Aware gets updated quite frequently; make sure you have the latest reference file before actually running the program.

In terms of the Internet connection- many spyware programs can "break" your TCP/IP software, or alter your system in other ways which make browsing impossible. We need a better idea of exactly what got altered, so...

I'm moving this thread to our Security forum. In many of the other threads there you'll find instructions for downloading and running a program called HijackThis (a link to HJT is in my sig below), which can generate a log file which will contain useful info about the malware on your system. After running Ad Aware and SpyBot (have them fix everything they find), run HJT according to the instructions found in the other threads, have it scan (do not have it fix anything yet!), save the log file it generates, open the log file in Notepad, and cut-n-paste the contents of the file here.

Thanks, that was an excellant web adress for the different linux to download. I am going to research on a few and download one. This site should be visited by anyone interested in downloading a version of linux. Thanks again!!

Your're welcome; glad we could help.

In terms of K_T's suggestion of verifying the MD5sums- that's a very good idea, regardless of which version of Linux you download (or which site you download it from). The MD5sums program will verify that your iso images didn't get corrupted during the download. The linuxiso.org site I linked to has more info on the MD5sums program and its usage.

You're welcome. :)

Good luck luck; let us know whether that was the problem or not

Try SpywareBlaster in conjunction with SpywareGuard- the two together make a good "preventative" pair.

The weird homepage URLs do indicate a virus and/or spyware infection.

1. Have a look through the posts in our Security forum for info on how to download and use Ad Aware, SpyBot, and other recommended "spyware" removal utilities.

2. Download the latest updates for your anti-virus software and run a full system scan.

3. If you do find virus/spyware problems, start a thread in the Security forum and tell us exactly what you've found. Include as much spaecific informatio as possible.

what was the problem?

Yes- if you could post that it info here it could help others in the future.

Glad to be of help. :)

Hopefullly that got it, but let us know if it didn't...

I have also thought of a reason why I would want to change a MAC address... so that I could have a wireless device filter for that MAC address.

Yes. As wireless becomes more ubiquitous, that reason is becoming more common.

Hi,

Wouldn't the MAC address on the Cable Modem / DSL device be the one tracked by the ISP? I know that on my systems here, there are various hops to get to the network. The ISP wouldn't care what NIC is in my Redhat box... they see the MAC on the cablemodem device.

Depending on your particular setup (and your ISP), the cable modem will acquire the MAC addy of the attached device and pass that on to the ISP. That's the reason many broadband gateway routers have a "spoof this computer's MAC address" (or similar) option.

Thanks for that info Alex- glad we've got a certified Dell lunatic on board... :mrgreen:

Judging from your HJT log, your %systemroot% folder is C:\Windows. If you want to be absolutely sure:

1. Click on the "Run..." option under your start menu.
2. In the resulting dialog box, type "cmd" (omit the quotes) and hit enter.
3. At the resulting DOS prompt, type the following and hit enter:

echo %systemroot%

When you reformatted, did you immediately use Windows Update to check for and download all of the lastest critical fixes. Remember that you will have lost those when you reinstalled your original version of Windows.

Also, are you sure that isn't something like a DNS issue on your ISP's end of things?

Hi folks,

For those of you new to this forum:

We ask that members not tag their questions on to a thread previously started by another member (regardless of how similar you problem might seem). Not only does it divert the focus of the thread away from the original poster's problem, but it also makes it less likely that you yourself will get the individual attention that you need.

Please start your own thread and post your question there. When you do, please try to give us as much specific info as possible regarding the problem (exact error messages, system specs, etc.).

Thanks.

Unfortunately not... :(

Ok, first- download and run CWShredder (from the author of HJT).

Then run HJT again and have it fix the following:

R1 - HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Main,Search Bar = file://C:\WINDOWS\System32\SearchBar.htm
R0 - HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Main,Start Page = http://www.weather.com/weather/loca...LocalUndeclared
O2 - BHO: (no name) - SOFTWARE - (no file)
O2 - BHO: (no name) - {00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000221} - C:\Program Files\ClearSearch\CSIE.DLL
O3 - Toolbar: (no name) - - (no file)
O4 - HKLM\..\Run: [0fp.exe] C:\documents and settings\owner\local settings\temp\0fp.exe
O4 - HKLM\..\Run: [2P6WFAX43ZHE7C] C:\WINDOWS\System32\Clk7ubTz.exe
O4 - HKLM\..\Run: [Bakra] C:\WINDOWS\System32\IEHost.exe
O4 - HKLM\..\Run: [RunWindowsUpdate] C:\WINDOWS\uptodate.exe
O4 - HKLM\..\Run: [Dsi] C:\WINDOWS\System32\dp-him.exe
O4 - HKLM\..\Run: [ss7S3sg] msuacct.exe
O4 - HKLM\..\Run: [AutoUpdater] "C:\Program Files\AutoUpdate\AutoUpdate.exe"
O8 - Extra context menu item: Web Rebates - file://C:\Program Files\Web_Rebates\Sy1150\Tp1150\scri1150a.htm
O10 - Broken Internet access because of LSP provider 'spsublsp.dll' missing

- Reboot into safe mode (hit the F8 key just as Windows first starts).

- Open Windows Explorer. In the Tools->Folder Options->View tab, select "show hidden files and folders". Deselect the "hide protected operating system files" option.

- Find and delete the following files/folders:
C:\WINDOWS\System32\IEHost.exe
C:\Program Files\ClearSearch
C:\WINDOWS\System32\Clk7ubTz.exe
C:\WINDOWS\uptodate.exe
msuacct.exe
C:\WINDOWS\System32\dp-him.exe
C:\Program Files\AutoUpdate
C:\Program Files\Web_Rebates

- Go to your C:\documents and settings\owner\local settings\temp folder and delete all of the contents of that folder (but not the folder itself)

- In your Internet Options control panel:
delete all cookies
…

Also, your method of obtaining your IP address and DNS info could play a part. Are you setting your IP information manually, or is the router acting as a DHCP server (automatically providing your IP info for you)?

Hey, why am I the only one who answered who isn't a supermod :)

Only because you posted before I did... :mrgreen:

"ifconfig eth0 hw ether AA:FF:EE:00:00:00"

Yes, that might very well work. The interface will probably have to be taken offline in order for that to work though, so before you try the above command, do the following:

ifdown eth0

Remember that the example "eth0" refers to your first or only Ethernet NIC; if you have 2 NICs and it's the address of the second that you want to change, it would be eth1 instead of eth0.

Also, a change implemented by the above command may not persist through a reboot; you have to take extra steps to make the new MAC "permanent". See the following for a bit more info:
http://whoozoo.co.uk/mac-spoof-linux.htm

There are also utilities specific to the individual chipset used on a given NIC which can change the MAC as well. Regardless of how you try to make the change, the chipset and driver must support this ability,

*Note that ISPs often use your MAC address as part of the information which authenticates you as a valid customer. Depending on your network/Internet configuration, changing your MAC addy might break your connection to your ISP.

Due to patent/license issues, RH does not include mp3 support for its shipped version of xmms. You can add mp3 support by finding and downloading the xmms-mp3 plugin package appropriate for your version of RH. I don't have a link to the package right now, but you should be able to find it with a Google search.

In terms of this:

"It prompted errors of licenses conflict!!"

What were the exact errors?

-----------------------

Hi rafe,

As indicated by the announcement at the top of the Internet Explorer forum, all HijackThis-related posts belong in our Security forum. I'm moving this thread there now...

noah,

I've deleted your previous post to keep things focussed in this new thread.

:)