Posts by Reverend Jim

Do a google search for "gparted live cd". The first one that came up on my PC was

http://gparted.sourceforge.net/livecd.php

It states, "GParted Live is a small bootable GNU/Linux distribution for x86 based computers. It enables you to use all the features of the latest versions of the GParted application."

There are instructions for creating a bootable CD or bootable USB stick. You can use the partition editor to shrink the OS down to the size you want. After that you can either create a new partition from the unused space with gparted or you can boot into Windows and do it from there. Probably best to do it through Windows. Grab a book. It may take a while.

PS: Virtual PC is available from

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/virtual-pc/

If XP mode doesn't work you might try the full product, Virtual PC, from Microsoft. I haven't used it personally (I prefer VMWare). I believe it differs from XP mode in that XP mode lets you run the app from the Windows 7 desktop (hides the XP innards) whereas with Virtual PC you actually build a separate virtual computer and you must launch the virtual environment and run the app from inside that environment.

I appreciate the feedback and suggestions. I had not even thought of trying the Costco web site. I'll have a look. Thanks.

There is an excellent series of pages on hard disk troubleshooting at

http://www.pcguide.com/ts/x/comp/hdd/errors.htm

I hope this doesn't come off as argumentative because I appreciate the suggestions but I have to say a few things.

I bought the Windows 7 software at Costco and I really doubt that they can help me with a technical question. I will, however, check with Dell. That was a good suggestion. There was a comment that "Next, even though it's really simple to choose that menu item, it's not really what it was designed for." I cannot imagine that a menu item from the desktop labeled "Next desktop background" could possibly have any other purpose other than the obvious especially since it only appears when the desktop slideshow is enabled.

The same poster also said "but I thought this was an "IT Discussion Community". To me, personally, the term IT means information technology as plied by engineers or at least technicians." I am sorry if I posted this question in error but the forum title is "Windows Vista and Windows 7". Thar certainly sounds like an appropriate place to post this question. I am willing to be convinced otherwise. If Microsoft had an obvious place to post possible bugs I would certainly use it.

I'm right clicking on the desktop in order to cycle to the next image. I have a bunch of Irish Setter pictures in a folder and my wife wanted to see the next one. And then the next one, etc. The desktop context menu comes up but is missing the appropriate item.

"Desktop background" returns 132000 results. My screen is set to 1440x900 32 bit (true colour) and I don't have a screen saver enabled.

I have never had much luck searching the M$ support site. If I do a search on "next desktop background" I get 17000 results which are way too many to search through. If I try "missing next desktop background" I get 342 results and most of them are in no way related to the search terms. Even the ones that are sort of close don't refer to my specific problem.

For more technical information and warnings, etc go to

http://www.pcguide.com/ref/hdd/geom/formatLow-c.html

Sorry. I exceeded my length limit. Here is the rest...

As long as nobody parks "over top" of an existing vehicle, that vehicle can be recovered. Likewise with a quick format. Your files are still physically on the drive and, with special tools, can be recovered.

If the attendant is feeling especially malicious he may decide to not only clear the board but also physically have all of the vehicles towed and shredded for scrap. Naturally this takes longer than just clearing the board. You will notice the same if, when you format your drive you do not check the quick-format option. Instead of just rewriting the file allocation table, the format process must rewrite each sector on the drive.

Now we get to the biggie. Suppose the owner of the parking lot has decided that the lot has just too many cracks and potholes. At that point he decides to close the lot for an extended period and send in the construction crew to rip up the lot, repave it and repaint all of the lines. This is a low-level format. Low-level formatting recreates the positions of the tracks and sectors on the drive and rewrites the control structures defining where the tracks and sectors are. Repaving the lot takes special tools. Likewise for doing a low-level format of your hard drive.

Forgive me if some of this is too basic. I just copied it from an explanation I gave to a neighbour/friend who was unclear on the concepts as explained in highly technical (and highly inappropriate for the audience) terms to the computers for noobs evening education class.

Imagine an empty, paved parking lot with the lines painted on. There is a gate at the entrance and the parking lot attendant has a board where he keeps track of what spots are filled. At the moment the board is empty. This is equivalent to a freshly formatted hard drive. As you save stuff to disk (park cars), the attendant keeps track of which parking spots are taken. The board is equivalent to the file allocation table.

At the start, the attendant assigns parking spots in sequence so all of the cars occupy one area of the lot but as people come and go blank spots appear in the lot (your hard drive becomes fragmented). If a large semi-trailer or Winnebago shows up early enough it may be assigned several adjacent parking spots, however, if it shows up late enough in the day there may not be enough adjacent spots to be able to park. The attendant has two choices. He can refuse to park the vehicle or he can reshuffle all of the existing cars so that they occupy the lower numbered spots. This is a time-consuming operation, especially if he waits until the lot is badly fragmented. Doing …

I'm running Windows 7 Pro on a Dell Inspiron 1720. I have desktop slideshow enabled and pointed to a folder of my favourite pictures. Occasionally I will force a switch to the next picture from the desktop context menu item "Next desktop background" which appears between the "NVIDIA control panel" and "New" menu items. However, every now and then this menu item disappears and the only way to get it back is to go into the desktop settings (Personalize) and reselect "Desktop Background" and reselect the picture folder. This is very annoying. Does anyone know why this would happen (three times in the last hour)?

I really have to start proof-reading my postings.

Please not that on the site I referred you to they state that a low level format is the last step to try so I suppose I should have recommended

1) try non-quick format
2) try low-level format

in order to make the preferred choices more clear. Good luck.

How about copying all of the files from the suspect disk to some other storage media then doing a low level format of the suspect disk. Normally the low level format is only done once at the factory but you may be able to get a utility for this from the manufacturer. You can start by looking here:

http://www.ariolic.com/activesmart/low-level-format.html

If you aren't ready to try that just yet then do a regular (ie non-quick) format via Windows, then do a chkdsk to see if it reports any errors.

My mistake. The package you want to install is "wicd" and is described in Synaptic Package Manager as:

Wicd is a general-purpose network configuration server which aims
to provide a simple but flexible interface for connecting to networks.
Its features include:
wide variety of settings.
* ability to connect to (and maintain profiles for) both wired and
wireless networks;
* support for many encryption schemes, including WEP, WPA, WPA2 and
custom schemes;
* wireless-tools compatibility;
* tray icon showing network activity and signal strength;
* lack of GNOME dependencies (although it does require GTK+), making it
easy to use in Xfce, Fluxbox, Openbox, Enlightenment, etc.

This is a metapackage, it allows installation of all the components of
Wicd, including one of the clients, which must be manually chosen.

Hitachi has a free drive fitness test that you can burn to a CD and boot from. It is non-destructive so you can run it against your hard drive and not worry about overwriting your files. Download and docs are at

http://www.hitachigst.com/support/downloads/#DFT

Have you tried sfc /scannow

When you check your services (run by services.msc) what is the status of the "Plug and Play" service?

I had the same problem with Ubuntu Studio. I don't have the installation handy so I will be guessing at the name here but I think you have to cable up then install a package called (I think) widi. My problem was that every time I tried to enable the wireless connection by setting the authentication type and access key, the setting were discarded. After I installed widi I was able to set and save. My Ubuntu is on an external drive (I boot to USB when required) and I do not have the drive here right now. If I am incorrect about the package name I will correct it shortly.

By the way, this fix was difficult to identify and in my opinion, should have been included with the default install. But then again, I am a Linux noob so the fault may be entirely mine.

I had the same problem with my Dell. There was a (default) hotkey combo set when I installed Windows 7. I disabled it by going to

Control Panel -> Region and Language -> Keyboards and Languages

click on Change Keyboards...

select the Advanced Key Settings tab

You can set or disable the hotkeys here.

What happens when you go into the device manager (you can run it directly by entering devmgmt.msc in the run menu). Do you have any items with yellow flags? Does anything change when you do "Action -> Scan for Hardware Changes"? Are any of the new devices listed under any of the device categories?

All things considered, I agree. Computer in a public area is best.

I set up a test system. My laptop is a Dell Inspiron 1720 running Windows 7 Pro (192.168.1.99). I already had a vmWare virtual Windows XP Pro environment (192.169.1.102). I installed the RealVNC server on the vmWare machine and added 192.168.1.99 as a client. I installed the vVNC viewer on the Dell. I was able to connect (invisibly) to the XP machine in viewer only mode. The connection was fast and seamless. I don't see how you can call the free version useless.

Or you can download gimp which IS free.

If you want to block specific sites you can edit the file

c:\windows\system32\drivers\etc\hosts

for each site that you want to block, add a line like the following

127.0.0.1 site-address

for example, if you wanted to block access to the site www.wired.com you would add

127.0.0.1 www.wired.com

Normally, if you entered http://www.wired.com into your browser address bar, a DNS (domain name server) would convert that address to an IP address (in this case, 216.246.75.107). What the new entry in HOSTS does is force the location to the address you specified (127.0.0.1) which, instead of being the actual site is now your localhost adapter.

Note - you will have to run your editor as Administrator. Also, once you are done, you can check the results by opening a command window and typing (substitute your blocked website address)

ping www.wired.com

you should see

Pinging www.wired.com [127.0.0.1] with 32 bytes of data:
Reply from 127.0.0.1: bytes=32 time<1ms TTL=128
Reply from 127.0.0.1: bytes=32 time<1ms TTL=128
Reply from 127.0.0.1: bytes=32 time<1ms TTL=128
Reply from 127.0.0.1: bytes=32 time=1ms TTL=128

Sorry. That should have said P2P instead of P@P

You might try OneSwarm from the University of Washington. See the wiki article at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OneSwarm which, as I understand it, is a a bittorrent P@P system but which allows you to specify who may participate in the share. From what I have read you should be able to set up a share between two remote computers and have the file(s) transferred like and other bittorrent transfer.

Another possibility might be DropBox from http://www.dropbox.com/
The free version allows files up to 2 gig. This would likely be easier to set up than OneSwarm.

When you are asked a technical question and you don't know the answer it is always acceptable to say "I don't know". Making shit up is not just bad; it's plain malicious. It can cause the person who asked the question to either stop looking for the answer or waste a lot of time trying to fix the problem based on your incorrect answer. In any case, once the person discovers that you had no idea what you were talking about, he/she will likely start telling people that you are unreliable. Is that the reputation you want to cultivate?

As to your question - I don't know.

I use robocopy.exe (command line tool free from Microsoft). I do a weekly backup from my D drive to a folder on an external T drive. The command I use is

robocopy d:\ t:\ddrive /e /r:0 /purge

the first two parameters are the source and destination folders.

/e copies all sub-folders
/r:0 do not retry on error
/purge delete any files in the destination folder that are not in the source folder

You will get an error if you try to copy certain system files/folders like system volume information (which you don't need to back up). The /purge ensures that if you have deleted a file from the source drive then it will also be deleted on the destination drive. There are a ton of other options as well. This particular form of the command will not copy unchanged files so the more often you run it the faster it will run.

Do you have any programming experience?

The way I would do it is to create a vbscript file that creates a Microsoft Word object and uses that in a loop to open each file in the folder and check the text. If you are not familiar with scripting or creating scripted controls then it becomes very difficult. I had to create many such scripts to tie processes together before I retired.

When I use the word "permission" I am speaking strictly in the computer/user sense of the word. I mean he can set it up so that he can connect without her authorization. I don't make any judgment on the morality of snooping. If I had a 12 year old daughter who started acting strange after she got her own PC in a private room with no supervision I would be very concerned. I would want to monitor to see if she is being manipulated by a stranger in a chat room or sending/receiving/viewing inappropriate material. That's not snooping; that's good parenting. This parent has observed a personality change and is not just writing it off as a phase.

I'll just ask two questions then. How much is your data worth? How much is your time worth?

You don't need her permission to connect with team viewer. When you install it on her computer, set up a free account on the Team Viewer site and set TV to autoload into Windows. Install on your computer and use the same registration information. This will allow you to connect on demand. However, she will get an indication on her monitor that you are connected so if she is doing something she shouldn't otta then she will just stop doing it. You might try RealVNC. There is a free version available at

http://www.realvnc.com/products/free/4.1/index.html

It's been a few years since I used it but I think it will be more like what you are looking for.

Before installing, check to see if both computers are on the same workgroup.

Just as a note (now that all the real work is done), I always enable /sos in the boot.ini. This causes Windows to display drivers as they are loaded (like you see in safe mode). I always prefer to see this instead of the no info "idiot lights". If it hangs anywhere while loading drivers you will see where the problem lies.

You can set this on one of the tabs under msconfig.exe or you can edit boot.ini directly. On my old XP system this changed

multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(2)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Professional" /noexecute=optin /fastdetect

to

multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(2)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Professional" /noexecute=optin /fastdetect /sos

Do you know anybody who has a copy of ERD Commander? This has an option to reset the Admin password.

What is the parent folder of what? First of all the actual fully qualified path is not

C:Report\Level 1

it is

C:\Report\Level 1

So "C:\Report" is the parent folder of "C:\Report\Level 1" and "C:\" is the parent of "C:\Report"

The first backslash is important. Let's take an example. Let's say I enter the following commands:

C:
cd \Windows\System32
D:

I am now on the D drive. If I now type the following command

dir C:Reports

Windows will try to list the files in C:\Windows\System32\Reports. When you leave out the first backslash Windows fills in the last current folder on that drive.

A remote possibility, I admit, but it may be possible your master boot record has been corrupted. It is easily fixed as long as the drive itself is not faulty. Download and create a dos boot disk from http://www.bootdisk.com/bootdisk.htm then boot into that disk and run the command

fdisk /mbr

on your system drive. More info at http://support.microsoft.com/kb/69013

Check out SpinRite at http://www.grc.com/spinrite.htm

They have an excellent video on what the software can do.

Pick up a copy of SpinRite (I keep recommending this software but I do not get anything for my recommendation) and create bootable media (usb stick or CD) then boot off this media. Run diagnostics on the hard drive and see what it reports. hard drive controllers have error correction built in. All hard drives get errors but almost all can be corrected. That is what the controller does. SpinRite disables (temporarily) this correction so you can see exactly how your drive is performing. I always recommend running it on a new drive to get a baseline to compare to later performance. In some cases SpinRite can map out bad sectors and even recover data from those bad sectors.

My son's Dell was getting BSOD with increasing frequency. I eventually tracked it down to his hard drive which was failing. We didn't suspect this at first because the drive was only a few months old but when we ran SpinRite it identified problem areas. When we replaced the drive his problems stopped.

Is it possible the files could just be hidden? I have noticed that on occasion when I run the command

robocopy d:\ t:\d-drive /e /r:0 /purge

(which is how I back up my internal d drive to my external t drive) that the d-drive folder on the external disappears until I do

attrib t:\d-drive -s -h

so perhaps the files are there but are flagged as hidden. Possibly not but it's better to check before you go into recovery mode.

Copy the following code and save into the file "copy10.vbs".

'fso = for file i/o operations
'arg = for getting at command line arguments

set fso = CreateObject("Scripting.FileSystemObject")
set arg = Wscript.Arguments

'make sure we have two arguments

if arg.count <> 2 then
	wscript.echo 
	wscript.echo "copy10 fromfile tofile"
	wscript.echo ""
	wscript.echo "  copy up to 10 lines from <fromfile>"
	wscript.echo "  and write them to the start of <tofile>"
	wscript.quit
end if

'get the source and destination file names from the command line

srcefile = arg(0)
destfile = arg(1)

'check to see if the source file exists

if not fso.FileExists(srcefile) then
	wscript.echo "source file not found:",srcefile
	wscript.quit
end if

'if the destination file does not exist then create it

if not fso.FileExists(destfile) then
	fso.CreateTextFile(destfile)
end if

'read the source file and split into separate lines

srce = fso.OpenTextFile(srcefile).ReadAll()
srce = Replace(srce,vbCr,"")
srce = Split(srce,vbLf)

'copy up to the first 10 lines

newlines = ""

for i = 0 to 9
	if i > ubound(srce) then exit for
	newlines = newlines & srce(i) & vbCrLf
next

'read the entire destination file so we can add to the start

if fso.GetFile(destfile).Size = 0 then
	dest = ""
else
	dest = fso.OpenTextFile(destfile).ReadAll()
end if

'write out the new lines followed by the existing lines

fso.OpenTextFile(destfile,2).Write newlines & dest

Do you get the same problem when running in safe mode? I believe this error can be caused by a video (graphics hardware/driver) problem. Check to see if you have the latest version of your video driver. Even if you do, I suggest you uninstall the current driver and re-install it.

I wanted to be able to boot into linux as well as Windows 7 but I didn't want to go the dual-boot route so I installed linux and grub on an external (USB) drive. When I want to run linux I just F12 at boot time and boot off the USB drive.

If you really want to see the health of your hard drive I highly recommend SpinRite. My son (who now understands the importance of regular backups) almost lost a couple of years of PhD research due to a drive problem. SpinRite was able to recover the data from bad sectors. His laptop was experiencing BSOD with increasing frequency and we were able to identify his hard drive as the problem. SpinRite's diagnostic mode can help you to detect when a drive is nearing the end of its life.

If you do not want to physically remove your hard drive then you might want to consider downloading a linux livecd and booting into that. If you can plug an external drive into a USB port then you may be able to copy your files without having to open your PC case and getting your hands dirty. If you are unfamiliar with linux then I suggest Bart's PE which is a bootable (from CD) Windows disk that will allow you read/write access. You can download it from

http://download.cnet.com/BartPE-Bootable-Live-Windows-CD-DVD/3000-2094_4-10611131.html

I agree with a previous poster who said it may be a battery problem. I used to maintain a few dozen Toshibas running Windows XP and often a problem with the battery resulted in a dead machine. You'd think it should still work with a bad battery if the AC was connected but this was often not the case. On my Dell laptop battery there is a button which shows the battery health via LEDs when pressed. Does your Toshiba battery have something similar?