Posts by chrisbliss18

Please explain what you mean by "direct x packs a fit".

Do you get an error message?
Does the rendering in your game mess up? If so, how?
Does the game suddenly shut down?

What exactly is the problem? The more specific you are, the better answers we can provide.

Who told you that it was a timing problem? Tech support? If so, I wouldn't trust them anymore than I would a bum on the street.

Test your memory, this will tell you if everything is fine with your system. Burn a copy of Memtest86 (it's free) and test your memory with it. I would start by testing the BIOS default of 8-3-3 and then testing the RAM at 3-3-3. If your system passes the memory test, it is highly unlikely that your memory is to blame.

Are all of your games crashing or just certain ones?

Have you tried upgrading your video drivers?
Do you have the latest verison of DirectX?
Do you have all the current drivers for your motherboard installed?
Are you pushing your system too hard?
Have you overclocked your system?

Why would you be concerned that it wouldn't work? Is there anything you know about the power supply that might indicate that it wouldn't?

What is the brand and model number of the power supply?

Sounds like overheating to me. My laptop did this to me, but a good cleaning addressed the problem quite nicely. Take a can of air and thoroughly blow out all the intake and exhaust ports.

Your system has a custom MSI motherboard, the MS-6577 (codename: Gamila). You can find the full specs here.

As you can see from the specs, the motherboard can handle memory up to DDR333 (PC2700). It does indicate that it messages PC2700 as PC2100, but I don't know if that means that it runs it at the speed of a PC2100 module or just displays messages that it is PC2100 rather than PC2100.

All of AMD's fastest chips are 64-bit. They aren't necessarily faster because they are 64-bit; rather, all their latest chip lines are 64-bit capable.

64-bit Windows still has many problems, so you shouldn't use it unless you have to. If you don't know whether or not you need to use 64-bit Windows, then you don't need to use 64-bit Windows.

There really isn't any performance loss by running a 32-bit version of Windows on a 64-bit-capable processor. The performance gains that come by being able to use a 64-bit chip won't be fully realized for many years to come. Many years will pass before software vendors move from 32-bit applications to 64-bit ones, and you only fully use a 64-bit processor when you have a 64-bit OS and 64-bit applications.

In short, you aren't losing out on anything by using a 64-bit chip with a 32-bit OS, but you will be settling for a slower chip if you buy an older, 32-bit AMD chip rather than one of their newer 64-bit ones.

Your diagnosis steps are flawed.

A system will not fail to POST (Power On Self-Test) because of a bad IDE connection. In fact, a system can successfully POST without any IDE, floppy, SATA, or SCSI devices connected to it.

Just because a motherboard is supplying power to the fan headers does not mean that the motherboard isn't damaged. It does mean that motherboard is able to recognize when it should be on and is supplying power to the fan headers.

It's hard to say that it is improbable that you have a bad CPU. People receive dead CPUs quite frequently (that isn't to say that one out of ten will get a bad CPU, but it does mean that it isn't rare for people to receive them).

Considering that you aren't even able to hear a system beep, I would think that your motherboard and/or your CPU are damaged.

If you have been connecting and disconnecting cables from any component while the system was on, there is a very good chance that you did permanent damage to your motherboard and possibly to the component that you were connecting/disconnecting.

Since the system is new, are you sure that you connected everything correctly?
Have you followed all of the instructions to the letter?
Do you have any previous experience setting up new machines?

Your power supply is small, but should be sufficient to boot up a system with nothing but the motherboard, CPU, …

What brand and model number is your motherboard?
If you don't know that, what model number is your HP?

Do you need help with the HTML form or the Perl code that parses the information sent from the form?

Reply #2: I don't really want ZoneAlarm, and i don't think i have it, if i do is it bad? Also, I have not re-installed the router/adapter but do i really need to uninstall it if i am directly connected to it? it works fine on safe mode. Also, i am very bad at setting up networks and i don't have alot of time. I would prefer that we find the problem and IF IT IS the router, then i will re-install it

I was just curious if you had ZoneAlarm. Since you don't, don't worry about it.

The driver I am talking about is your wireless card driver for your system, not a driver for the router (you don't load drivers on your machine for your router). Notice that your error says "Program: ...ram files\Linksys\Wireless-G Notebook Adapter\OdHost.exe". The error is indicating that something is wrong with your wireless card files. Did this card come preinstalled with your system or did you install it yourself?

You mention that you cannot get to the internet at all in "normal mode", is this only in Internet Explorer? If so, have you tried another browser to see if it works? If you haven't, load up Safe Mode, download Firefox, restart your system without Safe Mode, install Firefox, and try to browse the net. If you are able to, the problem is most likely IE and not your connection while outside of Safe Mode.

Just to make sure you aren't doing this, do not plug in or unplug the IDE cable when the drive is powered. Futhermore, do not plug the power cable or unplug the power cable when the system is on. In short, only plug or unplug cables when the system is off. You can damage your drives if you do otherwise.

Since you aren't able to get your system running, it sounds like you have a dead machine. Read My PC won't start - Read this first! to help you find your actual problem.

It is very likely that the drive isn't spinning at startup because your system has a different issue that is not related to the harddrive. Go through the guide and see if you can get your system to boot.

It works just fine for me. You can see a test here.

Have you tried turning down the burning speed and seeing if that improves anything?

What did the error message say?

It sounds like you are sold on SATA. I'm not trying to tell you not to get SATA; however, I am saying that SATA isn't going to give you huge benefits.

Here is a nice bulleted list for you:

• If you time your data access times, I'm sure that you will notice a marked improvement, but, without actually timing data response times, I doubt you will ever notice improvements that are directly tied to using SATA rather than IDE.
• SATA will most likely give you headaches when you try to install Windows to it.
• IDE will not be going away for a while yet (read: will be here for years to come).

That being said, the choice is your's. I just want you to be informed and to not fall for the overhype that people are spewing all over the place. Also, I don't think you should have to buy a new motherboard for no real reason.

The commonly used 4:3 resolutions are 640x480, 800x600, 1024x768, 1280x960, and 1600x1200.

I don't think your power supply is the issue. If it was, you would get periodic system shutdowns not screen flicker.

Test with a different monitor, that will show whether we need to focus on the monitor or the system.

A SATA drive is no different from an IDE drive except for the interface. So, if you are thinking that a SATA drive will avoid problems like your current IDE drive has, you are mistaken.

Personally, I don't like Maxtor (or Western Digital for that matter). I like Seagate drives. They are quieter, have been reliable for me, and have great warrenty (five year replacement warrenty) and RMA support in case any problems do happen.

If your drive has problems, get a new one. It doesn't have to be a SATA, an IDE will work just fine for you and prevent you from having as many installation problems.

Ohh... I forgot to mention something about how people see "huge performance gains" from running a SATA drive. Each time I reinstall my Windows, I see a huge performance gain because I got rid of all the crap on my system. Most likely, the people that claim huge performance gains are actually noticing how much better their system runs after a reinstall, not the actual speed increase from IDE to SATA.

What do you mean by hardware independant? Are you wanting to be able to store an image and replace that image on any machine (essentially allowing you to load up the same settings on different machines you build)?

Click "Start", click "Run...", type "sndvol32.exe", and press "OK". This will load up the volume control program. Click "Options", click "Properties", select "Recording" from the "Adjust volume for" options, make sure that "Microphone" has a check mark next to it under "Show the following volume controls", and press "OK". Click the checkbox beneath the "Microphone" heading and raise the volume slider about midway. If there is a button labeled "Advanced" underneath the "Microphone" heading, click it, put a check next to "Mic Boost" (if present), and press "Close".

Try the mic out. See if you are able to get any sounds through it. If you aren't able to, adjust the volume slider up until you get sounds out of it. A good way to test if you get any sounds through the mic is to load up Sound Recorder (sndrec32.exe), press the record button, speed directly into the microphone, press stop, and press play.

Click "Start", click "Run...", type "regedit", and click "OK".

Hold down the 'Ctrl' key and press the 'F' key. Type "CTHelper.exe" in the search box and click "Find Next". You will have found the right entry when you notice that you are in what looks like a subfolder called "Run". Right-click the "CTHelper.exe" entry and click "Delete".

This will prevent the application from loading at startup.

Another potential solution is to uninstall and reinstall all your Creative software.

A router is a switch with routing functions that are necessary to connect to your broadband connection and can also include other devices, such as a hardware firewall and DHCP server, so a regular switch is unable to replace your router. My recommendation is to buy whatever switch fits your price range (I have an 8-port Linksys switch that works great), connect a cable from one of the LAN ports on your router to the uplink port on your switch, and connect the additional PCs to the switch.

Most switches do not have any configuration to set, you just plug devices in and connect the switch to its powersupply. You also shouldn't have to change any settings on your router. If you have your router's DHCP server turned on, all the machines will be added to the network automatically.

Are you running ZoneAlarm? If you are, reinstall it using these instructions.

Have you tried uninstalling your Linksys software, uninstalling the driver, and reinstalling everything for the adapter?

The speed differences between SATA and IDE, in my opinion, are negligible. While many people say that SATA gave them huge performance leaps, I just don't see how that is possible. The likelihood that you will see any major performance gains from a 12% increase in potential speed is next to none.

SATA still has some issues that IDE doesn't, and, until those problems are corrected, I will not be making the switch to SATA. The main issue that I have with SATA is that Windows still doesn't have built-in driver support for the different SATA buses. This means that you usually have to supply driver disks in order to install Windows to a SATA drive. I find it ironic that a person must use what is commonly thought of as a retired technology (floppy drives) in order to use the latest and greatest in drive technology. I don't have floppy drives on any of my systems, so I don't want to go through the hassle of installing one each time I want to install Windows to my system that has a SATA drive as its main drive.

It's true that SATA will most likely replace the IDE drives one day, but that day is very far off. If you check any online computer parts retailer, such as Newegg, you will see that most of the optical drives and harddrives are still running off of IDE channels. You will be very hard pressed to find any …

The PCI bus has a maximum data speed of 133MBps, which, on paper, is slightly slower than the max data speed of the IDE bus.

The SATA PCI expansion card probably specifies 150MBps since it is able to fully interface with 150MBps-capable drives and can handle data at that speed. It's possible that data transferred from one drive on the SATA card to another drive on the same card would transfer at 150MBps. Data that has to go through the PCI bus will be limited to capabilities of that bus.

Keep in mind that data transferred on the PCI bus will have to compete with other data on that bus. So, if you have a PCI sound card, PCI USB expansion card, and other PCI devices, your drives will have to compete for access to the bus with those other devices.

Another problem with running drives through a PCI

60hz is fairly low. I never run my monitors under 70hz since I notice flicker under that refresh rate. Are you sure that setting your refresh rate higher than 60hz doesn't address the issue?

Does this flicker only happen at certain times, such as when you are watching a video or have a certain program loaded or does it happen periodically no matter what the system is doing?

Are you able to connect a different monitor to the system in order to confirm that a different monitor reproduces the flicker?

BTW... Your resolution choice is odd. A resolution of 1280x800 has an aspect ratio of 8:5 while your monitor has an aspect ratio of 4:3. You might try changing your resolution to one that matches your aspect ratio, such as 1280x960.

Did you try what I recommended?

If you let the machine run, do you hear the harddrive being accessed? Do you hear the Windows startup sound if you give it enough time and the speakers are on?

If you leave the machine powered off for an hour or so and then try to power the machine on, does it get farther along in the startup process than it does when you immediately try to start it up after a shut down?

This has all the signs of overheating. You may want to make sure that the fan problems that you had a few months back aren't happening again. Open up your system case and watch the fan on the CPU as the system starts up. Notice if the fan spins or not (it should spin very fast).

A good test to do to diagnose a heat problem is to open up the case (take off both side panels if possible) and point a very powerful fan directly into the case (make sure that you are blowing the fan towards the side that has the CPU on it). If doing this allows your computer to run properly (or allows the computer to run longer than usual), then you definately have a heat dissipation issue.

It's possible that it just needs to be fully reset. Take the battery out and unplug the power adapter. Let the laptop sit like this for a few minutes. Connect just the power adapter and try to run the computer. If that doesn't work, disconnect the power adapter, insert the battery, and try to start it up again. If that doesn't work either, we'll have to look at other possibilities.

That's interesting. For some reason, your system can't access your web server's HTTP port.

If you are running any types of firewalls on your machine (including Windows' firewall) or any type of server software (like a mail server, Apache, etc), turn all that off before trying the next step. Make sure that you have updated your system with the latest hotfixes and that you have installed SP2.

Repeat the previous steps again, but replace "telnet www.evilmanta.com 80" with "telnet 64.246.57.158 80".

You can find almost any program (old or not) available on the net. These sources are usually less than legal however. Vendors don't like selling old software since they don't want to offer any support for it. This is why you don't see old software available legitamately years after its end of life.

Live and learn Veritas. It's exactly because of situations like your's that causes me to build each machine I use.

I doubt that you only have one IDE channel though, most boards have two IDE channels minimum. What is the model of your system? You can also use Everest to find out what model motherboard you have. Let me know the model number of your system and the motherboard if possible.

If you end up not having any additional IDE channels and are set on using an IDE drive, I'd recommend getting a PCI IDE controller board, moving one of your optical drives to it, and adding your IDE harddrive to built-in IDE channel.

Firewire was designed to transfer large quantities of data at a sustained high speed, so it is possible that you will see a performance gain by using it. Unless you really need to save some minutes; however, I don't see it giving you sizable performance gains.

If you want to try it out, go to any store that has computer equipment and pick up a cheap PCI Firewire or Firewire/USB2.0 combo card. They run anywhere from $10-30, so it shouldn't be too expensive. Even if you end up sticking with the USB2.0 connection, you will still have extra ports to use.

It's very possible that the material/construction of the floor that separates the two floors is blocking/absorbing/reflecting the signal and would hinder any type of connection. I have a DI-624 in my room upstairs that is able to be connected to by two downstairs computers and one upstairs computer. All the connected machines read 90% signal or better, so your wireless devices should not be having a distance issue (unless you have lowered the strength of the antenna signal in any of the configurations). Sometimes the materials used in construction make using wireless devices very difficult if not impossible.

It looks like your browser is being pointed to the correct server. Let's see what response you get from it.

Run "cmd" again. Type in "telnet www.evilmanta.com 80" and press enter. You will not be able to see what you type, so you will want to be very careful that you type the following exactly as I have (this is case sensitive, so be mindful of the case of the letters).

GET / HTTP/1.1 host:www.evilmanta.com

Press enter twice after you have typed this.

Copy and paste the reponse inside of CODE tags in your reply.

I think he misunderstood your questions Speshul_K.

Try running "sfc /scannow" and see if that fixes the problem. If it doesn't, try one of these two guides to reinstall IE: How to reinstall or repair Internet Explorer and Outlook Express in Windows XP or Repair Internet Explorer 6.

Did he attach an audio cable from the CD drive to the audio card? See this guide for detailed pictures.

Maybe your system isn't able to give your media player enough resources when the other program loads.

Does it only happen when certain programs load or when any program loads?

Something you can try is pressing "Ctrl+Alt+Del", selecting the "Processes" tab, right-clicking the process that is playing the music (wmplayer.exe for Windows Media Player), select "Set Priority", and changing the priority to "Above Normal" or "High". This will tell the system to give preferential treatment to the program playing your music so that it will have a better chance to get access to the resources it needs. This can sometimes cause the problem to lock up or make the program "freak out", but it will be a good way to try to see if it addresses your problem.

It may be that you have too much junkware/malware on your system that is eating up too many resources. My system only lags with video playback while doing processor or memory intensive tasks, never audio. It's also possible that you are just trying to run too much. A system is only capable of giving a certain level of performance.

HELP!!!! At the IE Outlook Express email screen, I clicked on MESSAGE, then I clicked on the CREATE RULE, and created a few rules to a few emails. In one case, I entered a wrong email address by mistake. How can I go back and edit it (correct it)?
Many thanks

Start your own thread.

My comment may come off as rude, but it was a legitimate question. When you say what you need to program to do but you don't specify what questions you have, we have to assume that you want us to give you the code. In short, the fastest way to get the help you need is to ask the questions that you have, so we don't have to pry them out of you.

Not a problem.

Using a Live CD OS is a good way to make use of an older system. You can find a nice list of Live CDs here. My personal favorites are SLAX (the Kill Bill Edition is great), Damn Small Linux, Ubuntu, and ELE (this Live CD encrypts all your communications).

Once you've loaded your new Live CD OS, you can format your harddrive however you please. You should be able to find information about this process on the site for the distro you've selected. If you need any help, let me know which distro you are using, and I can help you from there.

Probably because they already had it, and they don't have enough in the budget to buy new software. The students get the shaft once again...

So I guess you want to get it so that you can work on your projects outside of the lab. I couldn't find anywhere that sells the program, so your best bet would be to ask your instructors if they knew how to get ahold of the program (maybe they have additional copies they could loan you). Also, they may have information about how you can use more up-to-date versions and save in a backwards compatible format.

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If you aren't going to be reinstalling Windows 98 on the machine, you don't need to follow a Windows 98 guide. Just install the distro of Linux you want while following the instructions that it provides. It will walk you through the formatting process.

I have some questions for you.

Can you access www.evilmanta.com?

Click Start, click "Run...", type "cmd", click OK, type "nslookup www.evilmanta.com", and copy and paste the response you get in your reply. You should get a portion of the response that says:

Name:    evilmanta.com
Address:  64.246.57.158
Aliases:  www.evilmanta.com

Does this only happen in one browser (such as only in IE or only in Firefox) or does it happen in all your browsers? If you only have/use one browser, install and use a different one to see if it makes any difference.

I'm assuming that this is on the same machine. If it is not, please let us know.

Just as a test, try installing Firefox and see if you can get to those sites through it.

Go to Tools -- Internet Options -- Security -- Click Custom level in internet --
Scroll down to "Downloads" - "File Downloads"
Check the "Disable" circle
All done!

Interesting. I never knew that IE had such an option.

At what time does it start working again though? Does it just start working after a certain number of hours of retrying, or do you have to leave the machine off for a certain amount of time before it will run again?

If you are asking about how to make a machine vision program, this is a very hard task. Without someone just giving you the code -- I'm not sure anyone here actually works with machine vision -- we would have a very hard time telling you everything you need to do to get the program to work. My suggestion is to find a site that has articles on machine vision. A site I like that has very good articles on this topic is generation5. You can find machine vision articles here.

Beyond the knowledge of machine vision, you will also need a very strong foundation in the Java language itself and a good understanding of how to read and interpret image data.

From what you've posted, it would seem that you don't know much about Java or machine vision. If this is true, how in the world did you end up needing to do such a project? I'd say that it seems like you are needing this for a class. If this is so and you don't have the backing necessary for it, you are taking a class that is far too advanced for you. You will just have more problems as the coursework gets harder.

hatch, the reason people are responding to you like that is that you don't seem to want to work with us. You have given very little of what the responders have asked for. You gave what little bit of code you had, which is good, but you have not explained what your specific problem is. If you come into a site, put down a project description, say that you want help without explaining what exactly it is that you are having a problem with, and sit back and wait, we will assume that you are sitting back and waiting for someone to give you all the code.

This may not make sense to you, but you need to look at it from our perspective. If you don't supply us with specific questions to answer, then you must be expecting us to just start throwing code at you. Since that is the case, it would seem that you want us to do the project for you. You say that is not what you want, so prove us wrong by asking questions: "I thought this was programming not Biology. How many rabbits are required for mating?", "Can I implement this entire program with just one class and one class instance or do I need to create a Population class to fill with all the created Rabbit instances?", "I've slept through most of my classes, so I understand the basics, but this program is way too much for me to handle all …

Your tables are designed very poorly. I'm not even able to follow which table relates to which other table.

An easy to follow table design has an ID field that has values that are unique, non-repeating, and refer to the records in that table and the table itself has a meaniningful name. When you make fields that will hold ID values that relate to other tables, name them as such (parentID, childID, etc). For example, remake your tables as such:

Parent (ID, group, toChild (this field confuses me; it doesn't seem to have a purpose))
Child (ID, parentID)
Message (ID, childID)

If your tables were designed like that, it would be very easy to understand what you are trying to do, but as they are, I cannot follow what you are wanting.