Posts by TallCool1

I need to know where I can get a auto-feeding CD-rom. I dislike the ones with these trays even tho I know if my cd got stuck in there it would be a pain to get out. I still like autofeeding ones better and have seen them before but I cant find them or on google search. Anyone know?

Try this search, for starters.

I just bought a new Samsung flat screen monitor, SyncMaster 955df, and it gets fuzzy near the border, especialy the text in my web address bar. I have tried everything to get it to focus.

It's the monitor. Edge-focus is notoriously tricky on flat-screen picture tubes. I have not found anything on adjusting the focus for this model. A quick check on the web indicates that you are not alone, though it seems to be more of a sample-defect problem rather than a poor design; a replacement should be OK. As a former monitor repairman, I have no problem recommending Samsung as a brand, in general.

I did find a different USB to 25-pin (female) parallel cable at coolgear.
http://www.coolgear.com/productdetails1.cfm?sku=USBG-LPT25&cats=596
DO you think this will work?

This is a common item. It allows a parallel-port printer to be hooked to a PC's USB port, very useful for Win2k and XP since there are no hardware interrupts for the parallel port on those OSes. Other parallel-port devices such as scanners and Zip drives are not likely to work due to driver issues.

Also, this does not, unfortunately, work the other way around; a USB peripheral can't be hooked to a parallel port. Sorry.

hey guys how do i enable fast writes?

It depends on the video card, the BIOS, and the video card driver. There are tweakers for both nVidia and ATI that will do this if it's supported. Guru3D is a good source for these.

I know this is a stupid ?, but please give me the run down on the different types of burners and how they work. Exe.
If you get a dvd burner, do you have to have a seperate dvd drive. One to read while the other burns? Same ? for the cdrw. Please help.By the way my whole goal is to be able to burn cd's,dvds,play cds and dvds. What combo am I looking for?

A DVD-burner is backwards-compatible with the earlier formats, but watch out as there is more than one DVD-writable standard. What you want is a drive that is both DVD+R/RW and DVD-R/RW compatible -- the price differential is minimal, and the flexibility is a good thing.

The brand I recommend most is Lite-On, as it has the best price-performance ratio out there. Clearly, Sony agrees -- their next-generation DVD-burning drives will be sourced by Lite-On.

I fully agree with Sardukar on the utility of a 2-drive setup, both for reduction-of-wear and overall flexibility. Again, the extra incremental cost is minimal for the benefit received.

Thanks I think I found just the thing.
http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=2788373864&category=3761

Yes, something like that would work well, since it uses a standard-and-well-supported video chip.

My friend has a camcorder with rca output jacks including s-video, I was wondering if there is some software that allows you to plug the camera into the computer and record on the computer what comes out of the camera.

There are a variety of hardware/software combos that will do this, ranging from the barely-adequate to the ridiculously over-engineered. Some of your decision as to which road to take will be based on the computer hardware and software involved. If it's a newer computer with Windows XP and USB 2.0, a USB solution is suitable. If it's older, or running Windows 98, your options are more limited. USB 1.1 works, but quality and flexibility suffer.

As Roberdin pointed out, most TV-tuner cards (and some mid-line and high-end graphics cards, as well) have video-capture capabilities. Some even have separated video (a/k/a S-Video) inputs -- and come with video capture software. Win XP comes with a simple video editor, and you can also check out the video section on SourceForge for free software that might be useful to you.

I find my GeForce2 32 MB PCI graphics card doesn't run my new game, The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King the way I want. So, I'm thinking about getting a new card.

Does anyone have any advice on what to look for when shopping for a new one? There are so many choices!

I have an AGP 4x slot right now, but I am planning on getting a new MOBO and processor sometime in the next couple of months, it will have AGP 8x.

I'm thinking approx 100 dollars for the card, does that sound fair to get a good one that I can rely on to run games well for at least a year to come?

Bump that up to about $150 and you will future-proof your video for quite a bit longer. Think about it; an additional ~$50 investment will roughly double your overall video performance. There are several nVidia and ATI cards in that range that are a vast increment above the sub-$100 cards. The ATI 9200 series and nVidia FX5200 series just don't have the oomph for high-demand gaming. I have a slight preference for nVidia due to better Linux support and a more-robust driver model. Boards in the $150 price range include those based on the nVidia FX5600 and (newer) FX5700 series and the ATI 9600 series. 256 MB RAM is a good idea.

Most new cards are 4x/8x AGP compatible, but it doesn't hurt to check.

In your new …

I am running WIN98 SE and IE 6.0.2800. I can't get Flash to install.

What are your security settings? I believe Macromedia uses ActiveX to install the Flash player, and settings can interfere with it.

Here's something else that might help: Macromedia Online Forums.

Cable wise connection it is potentially possible. I have tried to connect my external SmartDisk hard drive (USB) to a serial port:

SmartDisk -> USB male -> mouse adaptor [USB female -> PS/2 male] -> serial adaptor [PS/2 female -> Serial female] -> male Serial in the computer.

Connections are not signals. Hardware is not drivers. The setup you describe will not work. For one thing a USB-to-PS/2 mouse adapter only works because a USB mouse emulates a PS/2 mouse in software, making an adapter very simple, only a small subset of the full specification. Also, a mouse or joystick uses slow USB, not even the full USB 1.1 bandwidth. Last but not least, an RS-232 serial port cannot emulate a USB port in software.

Some young and semingly computer savvy kids at two department stores, while I was looking for a boombox for work that would play my burned cd's, told me they write the mp3's to data files and are able to fit many more songs on a cd-r and play them on simple players just for cd's and cd-r's, not mp3 compatible players. Anybody know how to do this? Can it be done with iTunes?

The short answer: no, it can't be done that way. Audio CD standards are such that a standard audio CD player can only play uncompressed audio files. MP3, OGG, AAC, and FLAC files can be written as data to a CD-R (and play back on a computer or compatible player), but a CD-audio-only player won't even see them, let alone play them. A music CD and a data CD have entirely different disc layouts; that's one of the reasons why there are special "music" CD-R discs for the dual-deck CD player/burners.

Hi,
I think I got u question. I have same needs. I have a old laptop(contua aero 4/33). I want a parallel -> USB adapter which the parallel side can connect to my laptop and USB(female) can connect to my extenal CD-ROM (has USB male connector).

It doesn't exist. It can't. You can find adapters that will adapt a USB port to serial or parallel easily enough, but the signal output from a parallel port (and the software that drives it) is not set up to handle the demands of USB signal management. What you can do is get a PCMCIA USB card and do it that way.

I've got svchost taking 100% CPU (it's the RPC service) on my Windows XP Pro. I don't have any virus (did a full scan using F-Secure Anti Virus 2004) and it didn't find any virus.

You also might want to go to http://www.GRC.com and run Shoot the Messenger to explicitly turn off RPC. The MS patches don't really turn it off; the Blaster worm and Messenger spam are blocked, but other processes can still access RPC.

Hello, I have a major problem with my Win Xp Professional.
Every time I enter the Internet, windows shuts my computer automatically within a minute. The message presented is as the following:

"This system is shutting down. Please save all work in progress and log off. Any ansaved changes will be lost. This shutdown was initiated by NT Authority/System.
Windows must now restart because the Remote Procedure Call (RPC) service terminated unexpectedly.

That's the MS Blaster worm in action. It used the useless open service RPC on XP to install itself and do its dirty deeds. You will have to take several steps to fix it.

1. Go to Symantec and download-and-run the latest version of FixBlast, a free stand-alone tool to remove this worm.

2. Go to the Gibson Research website. Download-and-run the program Shoot the Messenger. There are other tools there, also.

Note: both these tools will fit on one floppy, so you can download them at a friend's house or computer store.

3. Make sure that all your XP patches are up-to-date.

4. Come back here and do a search on "Blaster" for more details.

5. You will likely also have to delete your System Restore files, as those have probably also been infected.

Because it's there. Why would Joe Home User want to download a new browser, especially if he's unfamiliar with the new Dell he just received at his doorstop?

Could it be because "doorstop" is the right term to use in this context? What better time to take greater control of your system? (Well, after you download all the patches needed by your "fully installed" Windows XP.) We are suggesting Mozilla so strongly because Internet Explorer (IE) is so fundamentally broken as to be rather dangerous in many ways. Let's look at the facts:

* Microsoft has admitted, in print, that IE has serious problems--but that they will not be fixed until the next version of Windows. Paraphrase: "There will be no new stand-alone versions of IE." That new version of Windows, currently codenamed Longhorn, is not slated for release until 2006 at the earliest.

* There are dozens of critical vunerabilities in IE, many unpatched for years. In fact, many of these flaws cannot be fixed. Because it is "integrated" with Windows, the whole system is made massively vunerable.

* ActiveX controls are high on this list, and so closely related to the DCOM/RPC vunerabilities exploited by the Blaster worm and its variants as to represent a gaping hole in any security wall a user tries to erect, including hardware firewalls. When a website uses ActiveX controls exclusively, it is exposing its users to unintended consequences through potential malicious exploits. This also excludes …

I downloaded and used "Starter" and it tells me I've got the following running:

Microsoft Office.lnk-C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office\OSA9.exe

QuickTime Task-C:\WINNT\System32\qtask.exe -atboottime

These two can be safely killed. They are both useless wastes of resources. A good tool to do this with is xteq x-setup http://www.xteq.com/products/xset

If you run Windows, you absolutely must run an anti-virus program! Avoid Norton and McAfee--the first is a resource hog and the second has too much baggage. My absolute favorite is Grisoft AVG http://www.Grisoft.com, but there are other good ones, including Panda, AVAST, and FreeAV.

One caution: some of the above programs are specified as free for personal use. Since you would be using them in a commercial environment, any use of the free versions would be for evaluation purposes only, but you should be able to check them out, at least. IANAL...

In general, the best list of startup programs is at http://www.pacs-portal.co.uk/startup_pages/startup_full.htm
and the best list of malware and hijackers I have found is at http://www.mvps.org/inetexplorer/Darnit.htm

It still runs slow and I don't know what the problem is!

Download and extract the free utility PrcView from http://www.teamcti.com/pview/prcview.htm

This utility is excellent for looking at what processes are running on your system. It will show you not only processes but threads that the Task Manager often hides from you, including spyware. It also can give you details on each task and kill them, if you so wish.

Installation doesn't modify the Windows Registry, so you simply extract it to wherever you want. I find it so useful that I put a shortcut to it in my Startup folder; I run it with Windows.

Try running it and let us know what's running.

...some program will run for just a few seconds.and this fwvjqcmdte.exe keeps apearing in msconfig / and run in the registry,(in the registry it says config.sys -----fwvjqcmdte.exe)after i remove it and reboot .any ideas ,nothing in a google search .
It also won't let me install nortons anti virus ,install but will not auto protect .!!???????

You have a "smart" virus that blocks the Norton install. Try another virus checker, instead: Grisoft AVG--it's free.

Norton is effective, but it is the worst resource hog out there. Also, the virus may not "know" to block AVG.

Before you install the virus checker, go to the Task Manager, kill the offending process, clear out the Temporary Internet Files folder, and delete the Windows\Temp directory (or at least as many files as possible). These two sets of directories are where these virus executables tend to hide. Once these steps have been done, install the virus checker.

I have the same problem. I'll try that... the thing is, won't it still not save my settings for the increased text zoom?

The new fonts, as far as my experience goes, are "zoomed" by nature -- the too-small size was caused by a bug in the old fonts themselves -- of course, this can be tweaked somewhat by editing the preferences.

I'm running Mozilla 1.3 on Mandrake 9.1, and I have a very hard time reading the text on web pages... Am I doing something wrong?

Nope. This is a known problem. This was fixed in Knoppix by moving to Vera Bitstream fonts -- just do a Google search on bitstream fonts linux to find 'em. They look soooo much better than the old ones... and they're FREE.

"Time flies like an arrow, fruit flies like a banana."

This has been used to test natural-language parsing programs.

...is there a way to shut down specific processes which are summed up in svchost.exe?

As I have stated before, svchost.exe is a launcher -- you will often have multiple instances running, with no way of knowing which is which.

Of course, since this reply was originally written we now have HijackThis and CodeStuff Starter, as well as other tools, to manipulate the startups in the registry and elsewhere. See my signature for links and articles.

Another utility I find useful is PrcView.

My Computer is rather stable, but when I go away and the computer is idle it freezes after about 20 or 30 minutes. I've disabled the screensaver, and watched the task manager until the computer freezes. I saw that a svchost.exe process suddenly takes more and more cpu power and then I can't even move the mouse, I have to shut it down. I don't know what to do anymore.

It's difficult to answer this question directly. svchost.exe is the NT equivalent of the Win9x RunDLL32.exe in that it's used to launch other things, most of them hidden "behind" the launcher -- a major pain in cases like this. I would disable as much stuff as possible in your startup, then fold them back in one-by-one to see which one is clobbering cycles.

I only checked the system with norton antivirus pro 2003 with the newest virus definitions. So which virus prog would you recommend ?

Symantec software, in general, is among the worst resource hogs out there. It could even be part of your problem. I use Grisoft AVG in my Windows environment; it's free for personal use, better for resources than Norton or McAfee, and just as well-supported and effective.

You might also try a spyware-stomper like Spybot-Search & Destroy or Ad-Aware (I much prefer Spybot-S&D over Ad-Aware, but I always mention both - S-S&D is free but "donation suggested", AAw is available in free and paid versions. Both can be downloaded from http://www.Download.com.

Grisoft AVG site: http://free.Grisoft.com

S-S&D support (including forums): http://Security.Kolla.de

Ad-Aware's site: http://www.LavaSoft.nu