Posts by chrisbliss18

Sounds like your router is the issue. Constant self-rebooting is a typical problem for routers these days for some reason. When the router reboots, it will disconnect both your machines until it fully boots up. It typically takes anywhere from 5-30 seconds to regain a connection. Does this sound like what you are experiencing?

Since you have Windows, give Speedfan a try. It's a great piece of software and should be able to do what you are wanting without too much hassle.

Another step you will need to do since this is a server is make a service that will start this program on boot. You can find out how to turn Speedfan into a service here.

If you have any more questions, just let me know.

There are very few power supplies that allow their fan speed to be controlled by the motherboard, and even fewer that allow software to modify their speed. Even if your power supply is one of these rare beasts, you would not be able to shut off the fan using either of these methods. Even if you were able to shut it off using one of these methods, the fan would still spin up when first started since the system wouldn't have been able to give it the instruction to stop the fan yet. Given this information, I have no doubt that the failure of the power supply fan has everything to do with you plugging a device into it while running and has nothing to do with your tinkering around with the settings for your video card.

The biggest piece of conclussive evidence is the fact that the fan that was connected to the power supply also stopped working. This fan didn't stop working because the fan was fried (since it worked when you plugged it into a different plug); rather, it wasn't working because that power supply connection wasn't receiving a current anymore. The only reasons a power supply connection would totally cease supplying a current is that one or more of the wires became damaged (which doesn't seem to be the case here), the power supply is off (not the case), or the current-supplying circuitry became damaged (which can happen when you connect/disconnect devices while the power …

If you really feel adventurous (and have a death wish ;)), you could destroy one of the working cables to wire directly to the power supply fan. It would possibly damage your PSU further if not done properly, but it would work.

Wierd. I never heard of such a thing. Good find.

I just wanted to make sure.

You should never plug or unplug anything from a power supply while the system is in operation. I'm not sure exactly how your power supply is set up, but since it has a molex labeled for fan use, I would suppose that power cable shares the same circuitry as the power supply fan. It's very possible that when you plugged the fan in, you blew that circuit. You will probably have to get a new power supply. You might be lucky and find a fuse in there that can be replaced, but do not open up that power supply before you ask us for advice since doing so is very dangerous.

I don't think your RAM is the issue, but I could very well be wrong.

Can you give us any specifics that the blue screen errors provide? It could give us some ideas about what is actually happening.

Is this is a Windows or Linux server?

If it is Windows, you can use Speedfan to create an event that will execute a program with specified parameters. You could use this to execute a script that would send an email message.

It it is a Linux system, I would have to look around.

Does this system have an overheating issue? If you know it gets too hot, it would be better to just properly thermally cool it.

Quick question. Did you plug the fan into that cable while the system was running?

Let's clarify some things.

When you say that the power supply and case fans aren't running, are you talking about the power supply fan isn't running or the power supply itself isn't running?

Is the system running normally but without the fans turning on like they should?

Do the fans turn on when the system boots but idle down or stop later on?

Have you done anything else other than just mess around with nTune? Things that I am looking for are: making any hardware changes/adjustments (basically touching anything inside your case) or changing BIOS settings.

What are the manufacturers and model numbers of your motherboard and RAM?

What problems are you experiencing while installing XP?

Just pop the disk in your drive, reboot your system, and the install program will automatically run. Is there a reason why you are trying to install through DOS?

Is your girlfriend unable to get broadband? There are many places that you can get DSL for as cheap as $14/month. This would give her a better connection, not tie up the phone line, and allow her to use a wireless router for her connection.

If you become a sponsor, you can customize your title.

With the way that you are using it there, there isn't any way it would work properly. My only guess is that all the previous times you have used the variable that way, you were only retrieving one record.

Think about it in simple terms, you are essentially saying this:

$variable = 3;

while($variable == 3)
{
	$variable = 5;
}

There is no way for that loop to loop more than once, no matter how you look at it.

If you have a system built in the 1980s that has a 600MHz chip, you have a very rare item that you can get a lot of money for ;).

Download and run Everest. It should be able to identify most of your components, including your motherboard. Give it a try and let us know if it helps you.

What version of Windows are you installing?

Is the version you are trying to install an upgrade or is it a full version?

The recovery disk is a boot disk. You put it in the drive (usually the first one), reboot your computer, and the recovery disk will load and reinstall everything on your system.

Recovery disks are used to set all your software back to the state it was in when it was originally configured in the factory. None of your files will be saved.

If you wish to back up your files, there are many ways to do this. If you have a CD or DVD burner, burn your files off onto disks. You could put all your files onto flash drives or an external/secondary harddrive. If the files that you wish to save aren't too large, you can email them to yourself, run the system recovery, and download them from your email.

I'm very curious though. What problem are you having with your system that causes HP to tell you to reinstall everything? There are many times when tech support will tell you this simply because they do not have an answer for you or it would take too much time to explain how to fix the problem.

Look at what you are doing in the following line:

while ( $result = mysql_fetch_assoc($result) )

You are using the $result variable for two different purposes, first it holds the query, then the results of the query. After the first loop iteration, you are passing the returned values back into the fetch function rather than passing in the query reference.

That's sweet. If I had a bit of money, I would love to invest in Mindstorms and play a bit, but alas, I'm poor :(.

I just stumbled upon this thread and wanted to mention something in case someone else is dealing with this issue.

Most likely, the reason the video stopped working isn't because the video was being played on a TV-out connection; rather, because the card can only full-screen display overlays on one connection at a time. If the video player had its overlay settings turned off, I'm sure that the video would still run while in game. To turn off the overlay settings for Windows Media Player, click Tools, click Options, select the Performance tab, click Advanced, clear the checkbox for "Use overlays", select OK, select Apply, and select OK. After doing this, the video will most likely have to be stopped and started again in order for the change to go into effect.

I hope this helps some of you that are dealing with similar issues.

Can you give us the specifics of the error messages that you receive when your games crash?

Furthermore, what do you mean when you say, "unable to play for awhile again"? Do you mean that when you try to launch the game again, you get an error? If so, what is the specific error message that you get?

Hey Dani. Sorry to bump an old thread, but I don't visit this section very often.

First off, I have to commend you on the concept and design of this site. The web has over a thousand forums for every topic, but most of them are overly-specialized. While it is important to have very tightly focused forums in order to deeply explore certain topics, there are very few forums out there that have a broad enough focus to help people out when they don't know just which focus pertains to their questions, wants, or needs.

Most programming sites focus on just one language. You have managed to create a strong community that is willing to talk about and assist eachother with any programming, scripting, databasing, or application language. You have also managed to attract some very impressive members that have are very talented with these different languages.

Most computer help sites focus on just one operating system, application, class of applications, hardware aspect, or hardware component. You have managed to create a site that covers all things related to computers. Quite an amazing feat. Even though many of the people that are assisted in Tech Talk forums are one-post or one-thread wonders, the fact that these people are getting help that would have cost them a lot of time and money without the assistance of this site's community is very commendable.

Even though I am not a frequent visitor of the Site Management forums, I have …

Did everything work properly at one point? If so, what did you change on your machine just before this problem started happening?

Have you scanned for viruses and spyware? If not, you can follow this guide to clean viruses and spyware off of your machine while making tweaks to your system in order to speed it up.

Are you multitasking while you try to load the video? Close all programs (including all the system tray programs) and try running the video again. Does it make any difference?

Hold down the Ctrl, Alt, and Del buttons. After the Task Manager loads, select the Processes tab. Look at the CPU column and see if there are any processes that are taking a lot of CPU time (more than 10%). While keeping the Task Manager open, try to run one of your videos while making sure that you can still see the Task Manager. When your system slows down, see what is taking up all the CPU resources. Let us know what program is doing this.

Please answer as many of my questions as possible. The more questions that you answer, the faster we can help you.

It sounds like you aren't sure what made the sound. It's very hard to say if there is a problem or not if it could have been one thing or another. I have never heard a harddrive make a sound like you described, but that doesn't mean that it can't happen. I have heard optical drives and fans make sounds like that though.

If one of your fans has a variable speed determined by the temperature surrounding the fan (some fans do), then it is possible that the fan just kicked up its speed as needed when the temperature around it increased.

When you look at the properties of the drive, what does it say the total capacity is? If it says the total capacity is approximately 40gigs, it's most likely that your partition is only 40gigs in size and that the rest of the drive is unpartitioned.

You can check this by right-clicking My Computer, selecting Manage, selecting Disk Management, and looking in the lower-right pane. Look to see if your disk is listed with two different partitions, with one saying 40 GB NTFS and the other one saying Unpartitioned Space.

If this is the case, you can create a new partition out of the unpartitioned space by right-clicking the unpartitioned space and selecting Format. This will create what appears to be a new drive on your system. You may wish to have all the space in one large partition, but you cannot do that without either purchasing partitioning software or using freeware software that is should only be used by advanced computer users.

In my opinion, it is better to have a secondary partition. Save all your must keep files in the second partition. This way you can format the partition that Windows is on and reinstall the operating system if needed, and you will still keep all your needed files.

Let us know if this addresses your issue.

This is a point that you get to where there are one of three possible problems: the power switch is defective, the power switch wasn't hooked up properly, or something completely different. The quick way to decide whether there is a problem with your power switch or if it is something else that is causing the problem is to disconnect all the cables from those pins and carefully short out the two power supply pins with a thin-blade flathead screwdriver. What you do is place the blade on the two pins so that the blade of the screwdriver actually makes the connection. Be very careful that you only touch the screwdriver to those two pins and to nothing else. If you connect the pins and the system starts up, the problem is related to how you connected the switch or the switch is defective. If the system does not power up when you do this, you have a problem somewhere else.

Try doing this and let us know what happens.

Heh... You found the easy way. Another way to do it is to hook it up to a Linux machine or to boot your system up using a Live CD bootable distro of Linux. I love how the super-secure Windows file system only "secures" your files if you are trying to read the file system on a Windows machine. Even then, you can break the security in minutes if you know what you are doing.

I'm glad you got it sorted.

Do you have a gateway that you are going to use to make payments?

The reason I ask is because I don't know of any way to make payments using an HSBC account. I don't even think that you can use Best Buy credit cards (which are actually HSBC credit accounts) outside of a Best Buy store.

If you just want to do online payment processing, I recommend using ECHO. They have the ability to accept credit card payments using Visa, MasterCard, American Express, Discover, Diners Club, Carte Blanch, and JCB. Their payment gateway also accepts online check payments.

I have used ECHO on a number of sites and haven't had any complaints. The best thing about their software and service is that their payment gateway is completely free to use. Another excellent feature of the service is that you don't pay any monthly fees if you didn't take any transactions that month.

Is this what you are looking for? If not, you really need to be more specific.

Payment integration with what? Are you wanting to automatically submit payments to them or are you trying to set up a payment system?

Server 2003 is meant to be just that... a server. If you want a pretty OS, use a workstation operating system such as XP.

Until you find a working solution, you might try an Internet Explorer-based browser such as Avant, Maxthon, FlashPeak, NetCaptor, or iRider. You can also try the Netscape Browser 8.0 which has both the Gecko (Firefox) and Trident (Internet Explorer) rendering engines to allow for maximum site compatibility. Opera is also a very popular browser.

Follow Coconut Monkey's instructions. You have to disable Simple File Sharing first.

I'd leave it how it was. If you set it to max, you could see noticable slowdowns in your graphically-intensive games.

Is 3mbps your downspeed? If so, what is your upspeed?

Furthermore, are you sure that your connection speed is the limiting factor? What about the people that are viewing your cam? What are their connection speeds?

Are you multicasting or do you have to run a connection for each viewer?

The performance difference between the two chips averages about 2-3%. If that performance gain is worth the extra $100 to you, then get the 4400+.

Load the command prompt by running "cmd" from the run dialog. Once you are at the command prompt, run "nslookup domainName" (replace domainName with a domain that you haven't visited for a while). See how long it takes for you to get a response. Run this test a number of times with different domain names. If you get quick responses, the problem is most likely related to your Internet Explorer. If you don't get quick responses, the problem is related to the name servers that you are using. Let us know the results of your tests.

Are you currently needing to do something using Partition Magic? If not, don't worry about it.

A custom hosts file will not protect you from such things. Creating a custom hosts file can only guard against known threats, something that your antivirus software should already be doing. Since attacks can come from anywhere now, a custom hosts file will do nothing to guard your machine against the most danagerous malware out there. The only fullproof way to prevent yourself from coming into contact with malicious code is to disconnect the machine.

That being said, there are a number of things you can do to prevent almost any infection from hitting your machine. Notice that I said "things you can do" and not "programs you can install". The number one reason why most computer users get virus infections and spyware nightmares isn't because they aren't running enough protection software; rather, it is because they do one or more of the following on almost a daily basis.

• Run programs of questionable origin. All those fun little games, freeware apps, and other web "trinkets" that people love installing on their machines are usually free because they install junk that you don't want when the program is installing itself.
• See popups that say, "Your system is infected! Click here to remove the virus" and follow the instructions on the popup without even questioning the popup's origin.
• Open up email attachments without even noticing who the email is from or what the attachment is called
• Run peer-to-peer programs like Kazaa, K-Lite, Bearshare, etc. There are viruses out there that …

The standard location for autochk.exe is "C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM32\autochk.exe". Try giving it that location and see if it works.

The 100% legal method that Microsoft would want you to use is to use your system recovery disk that came with your computer or get recovery or install disks from the manufacturer of your system. Since you did not buy that copy of Windows directly from Microsoft, they won't even sell you a replacement disk.

I tried finding out the legality of what I am about to say, but this wasn't as easy as I thought it would be. Anyways... here we go. Borrow a Windows XP Home Edition disk from a friend or have them burn a copy for you. From everything I've read on the Microsoft site, the legality concerning installing a system from duplicates was related to the legitimacy of the individual key and not the disk itself. Their site gave detailed instructions in numerous instances where a copied setup disk could be used on multiple systems. Since you have a legitimate unique key that you can show as purchased and owned by you, there shouldn't be any reasonable argument against you using or acquiring a disk to enable you to utilize that key. This is a really murky area however, so make of it what you will.

Simply delete the unwanted Windows folder, irregardless of whether it is on the same partition as your wanted copy or a different partition. After you have done that, run msconfig, select the BOOT.INI tab, and click "Check All Boot Paths". After the check is done, click Apply, click OK or Close (sometimes it renames the OK button to Close), and reboot your system.

If your unwanted copy of Windows is on a separate partition, you may want to move all your wanted files off of that partition and format it so that all the Windows files are removed.

Repartitioning a drive deletes everything on it.

That isn't true. Most partitioning software can resize existing partitions without damaging existing data.

Did you try what I originally suggested? Did it have any effect?

The power connector is typically located on the motherboard PCB. Do you think that the plug is the problem and not some other hardware failure?

Go into the Recovery Console again and run the following commands:

chkdsk /r

sfc /scannow

These commands will first scan your harddrive for errors and attempt to fix them followed by replacing incorrect protected system files with the proper ones. Hopefully this will fix your problem, but more than likely, you will have to reinstall Windows. Let us know the results of running these commands.

Sparking is bad. Sparking means that the component is malfunctioning. What sparked? Whatever it is, stop using it and get it replaced immediately or you may damage other components.

This subject has come up before. You can see that thread here.

Catweazle suggested resetting the CMOS as a possible solution. Since the thread starter never replied, I don't know if it worked for him. Give it a try and let us know how it went.

Take out the battery and disconnect the power supply. Let the laptop sit for a couple of minutes. Attach just the power supply and try to start the system. If this doesn't work, disconnect the power supply, let the system sit for a couple more minutes, insert the battery, and try again. If neither of these steps work, look for a reset switch somewhere on the machine. They usually are little pinholes on the bottom of the machine. If you find one, depress it for about ten seconds and try the above steps again.

If this doesn't work, you may have gotten a bad laptop. Did the person who gave it to you indicate that it worked or not?

Your system has a Phoenix BIOS which has very complex beep codes. They either have a series of three or four beep codes. For example, a beep code combination of 1-3-4 (one beep, pause, three beeps, pause, four beeps) means that the motherboard is bad. You can see a full listing of the beep codes for Phoenix BIOS here. You say that it's one long continuous beep, but this doesn't make sense for your system. See if you can discern a pattern of beeps.

My guess is that your problem is either with your video card, RAM, motherboard, or power supply. How's that for a vague answer? If possible, see if you can get your hands on a friend's AGP video card and power supply to try in your system. This way, you can at least rule out those components.

With a price cap of $300, the ASUS Radeon Extreme AX850 XT is your best buy. It connects through a PCI-Ex16 connection, has 256MB of GDDR3 VRAM on a 256-bit interface, has 16 pixel pipelines, has dual DVI outputs, supports VIVO for video input and output (for your video editing), comes with an impressive bundle of software and cables, is very highly rated (not just on Newegg but also on many benchmarking and gaming sites), and has very good thermal properties. This is a two-slot card, meaning that it will occupy the slot that it resides in and will cover over the slot below it because of the design of the cooler. The cooler is very large and is very loud at system startup, but after post, the cooler is actually very quite.

If you want any other suggestions, just ask.

If I were you, I would backup all needed/wanted files from the system and go to a clean install of the operating system either by using the Windows XP disks or your system's restore disks. When an install of Windows gets botched, the best solution is usually to just get a clean slate.