Posts by goldeagle2005

What's the email message format? Rich Text? HTML? Try sending a plain text email and see if the issue persists.

Looking at the partitions on the 2nd screen cap, I seriously doubt that this was a DVD/DVD drive issue. This looks more like something to do with the partitions going awry. The "System Reserved" and "Boot" paritions are created by the OS when installed and are usually hidden and should not be visible. I would instead try to clean the entire hard drive using the diskpart command. Heaven knows I've resolved a number of such issues using diskpart. If anyone wants to know the exact commands, let me know and I'd be happy to elaborate :)

While changing the graphics chip on a laptop is more toward chip level, you can confirm your diagnosis by running your hardware verndor provided diagnostic program. That should run a stress test on your video card and if it fails, will report the problem.

You're saying you're trying to activate Office Home and Business. However, the screen shot you've posted shows Office Professional Plus installed. Remove Professional Plus and install Home and Business. The program should activate then.

If you can post the exact error message, we'd be able to assist better.

Try disabling "Tap to click" in the touchpad settings

Any chance these chips were nvidia? They had these issues on a few models

Cornflakes!

Is this post for real?

Water... frozen to a slush like form

Fig rolls here...

Salami

An apple and coke!

French Toast with coffee

Butter chicken

Tea.

Butter chicken!

Cranberry juice

Well said, Bob! Reputation up...

Some systems have a wireless switch to enable/disable the wireless card. Check and see if you have any such switch and that it is in the "enabled" position

plese i want you to give me free
vista that i can use till i purchase one

How about you go out and purchase a copy if you want Vista.

Have you tried Safe Mode?

PCs built by HP, Dell, Acer etc have built in diagnostics for the hardware. Try running those and see if they give you a clue as to what the issue may be

Why not just right click on the drive and choose "Change drive letter and Path" and then click "Add" to associate a drive letter to it?

Speaking of which... wonder where the OP disappeared...

.... to someone (or something) who logs in.

Let's take an example of IIS running on a Win 2003 machine. Once you've configured the IIS settings, specified your root directory and placed your web content there, it would continue serving web pages to anyone who connects to it, even if there's no local user logged in.

I guess what I should've added to my last post was

and configured all required settings, you could log off the local account

Could you post the ipconfig /all results on your friend's system?

Have you tried enabling file and printer sharing? Start > Control Panel > Network Connections. Right click Local Area Connection > Properties. Make sure File and Printer Sharing is checked. If the entry does not exist, add it by clicking Install below.

That's true, but once you've configured the server and configured all required settings, you could log off the account, leave the server at the login screen and it will continue 'serving'

Good for you lad. However, people have data on their systems and don't want to lose it. NOt everyone takes backups or has multiple partitions to store data. Besides, a reformat is always the last option when troubleshooting computers. Let's not give any advice here which can cause distress to people.

@torbonator : Have you tried any of the steps mentioned above?

Removing it won't hurt your system at all. A web server is an app used to either host webpages, forward emails etc. If you're not running any such tasks on your system, your system will actually perform better due to freeing up of system resources.

You know, as time consuming as it is, I honestly prefer a Windows DVD based install to the image restore option provided simply because that way, I don't get all the trial software OEMs install. Infact, I recently did a clean install of the OS, drivers, apps and all updates and then used the "Create a System Image" option in Windows (Vista and 7 only) to create a backup image. In order to restore, you just have to boot from the OS DVD and from Windows Recovery Environment, choose "System Image Recovery" and it's done. As fast as Dell's Image Restore and I have all of my apps and 3rd party hardware drivers in place. You could look at this option too. Only drawback is that this image restore option can, depending on how you've configured the system, take ~25GB of disc space. But if you can save the backup image on an external hard drive, you should be good. Hope that helps.

First thing springs to mind is that your system became un-validated (ie, MS servers thinking was a pirated copy = no updates allowed). Since you've restored to factory settings, is a little impossible to diagnose if this was in fact the case.

I beg to differ. If indeed his system had become unvalidated, it would initially provide a prompt during login that the OS needs to be re-activated, followed by disabling of the desktop wallpaper and a message on the wallpaper saying "THis copy of Windows is not genuine; you may be a victim of software counterfeiting". . If this activation os not done, it would log him off ltogether.

Also, MS recently changed their pirated=no updates allowed policy. Now, it's more like pirated copy=only critical software and security updates allowed

BSODs on NTFS.SYS can point to a corruption of system files as kanineplus said. However, I've seen a few systems throw up NTFS.SYS related BSODs and the problem turned out to be faulty hard drives. Apart from the steps mentioned above, I'd also recommend tunning any vendor specific diagnostics on the hard drive.

If you could provide us with the model number of your system (or maybe the brand of the motherboard and hard drive) we could suggest a few other steps.

It is indeed a web server. However, it's not part of the default Vista install. Did you try uninstalling it from Control Panel > Programs and Features ?

Hey, don't complain too much... just think of the variety that would provide :D

Gotta love that kind of variety on a dull work day :P

Yeah... that would happen if the MBR is overwritten by a standard MBR - which would probably happen if you use partition management software/

The option is present on a factory install of Vista - my friend's Studio XPS 16 has that option, as does my Dell Inspiron :)

You can invoke Factory Recovery options on Dell system by tapping F8 onthe initial Dell sign on screen. From the Advanced Boot Options list, choose "Repair your compyter" and follow steps onscreen.

Detailed steps present here

Hi there,

Try to download the the driver from the OEM site.

This might work. If it does not try to reformat the NB to clear waya all software issues. If its still the same it is now time to consider this as HW.

You always seem to suggest a reformat as the only resort if the first step fails. As a tech, you would know that there are other things that can be tried rather than telling the OP to wipe out his data. Or do you?

How about checking the Winows Audio service?
How about making sure that the sound card is set as the default audio device?
How about trying to see if generic audio drivers work?
How about trying the steps here

I second what Suspishio says. Rather than disabling all startup items, it's a better idea to just go to Safe Mode and try copying your files. Once done, edit your startup by disabling non system critical apps - Instant Messengers, Quick Time, Adobe etc and see if that works. If the system crashes in Safe Mode, I'd duggest RAM and hard drive diags to start with.

I went through the entire Vista training module here at Dell too, and i must say I did not find Vista worth all the hype and delays. Sure, the Aero interface looks cool; sure, the animations are cool, but the price for all these is way too high in terms of system requirements, especially when you can use WindowBlinds to get most of these effects in XP. Vista RC1 brought my machine (Athlon64 2800+, 1 Gig, GeForce FX 5200 w/128 Meg to a crawl, even with Aero switched off. I also don't care for the new folder view. I kinda preferred XP's task oriented Task Panes. I also don't like Vista' Start Menu, and there seems to be no way to revert to the XP style menu. I think Vista'll have a steep learning curve, even for IT experts.

On the positive side, I do appreciate the security features, especially UAC, which though a tad annoying does work to keep youinformed about what's happening. I also think the protected mode in IE7 will help to keep viruses/trojans at bay.

Let's see what the final release will be like, but if it's anything like RC1, I'm gonna stick with Xp/Server 2003

That thing puts ALL the computers to shame. Sorry AlienWare, but I think I'll pick this thing up.

Well, to a certain extent. Windows Defender is part of Vista, but having that is just part of the solution because

a. Defender will not detect viruses
b. Having just an antispyware app is not enough

For daily computing, connected to the web 24/7, you need beefier security. Windows Defender with, say Windows OneCare or another antivirus suite is a step in the right direction. I don't think there's any OS out there which does not have viruses. An antivirus software is a necessity.

Sure the AMD systems will be pricey, but I'm guessing they won't be as pricey as the Intel ones as AMD always has lower prices compared to Intel. And if it were up to me, I'd buy one of those systems as soon as it was out. However, I'm saving up for a DX10 based graphics card when it comes out.:)

You do have some valid points there. I just wish there was a better way to implement them without confiscations of expenisive machines. I'm not disapproving of this step completely; I do believe it will be helpful, but I think that in the long run, the sheer number of false positives will be greater than the actual positives., not to mention inconveniencing the travellers.

I have to agree with 'Stein here. Random confiscations of laptops is not going to help much. What is needed is some sort of procedure to identify and target the REAL terrorists. Granted people have to cooperate with authorities with security procedures, but random confiscations is taking it too far. Random searches are bordering on unreasonable.

Are you really surprised? It was just a matter of time before someone thwarted the scheme. As they say, no man can create something another cannot. this promises to be a long waged battle between the music companies who want to "protect" digital content and the people who believe in openness...

Agreed. No matter how big competitors you are, blaming the other company on a lapse on your part is not called for. What Apple has done is nothing short of hitting below the belt. Instead of owning up to its mistakes and combatting, Apple has taken the weasel way out, one which will not go down with the millions of Apple and Windows fans alike worldwide.

Kinda reminds me of the story, 'The boy who cried wolf'. I honestly think that making such incredulous claims just for humor's sake and without actually doing research amounts to nothing but sheer callousness. As you rightly pointed out, the Mozilla developers worked the weekend trying to fix a flaw that did not exist! Who's going to make up for the loss the company suffered. More important than financial loss, what about the loss of face? Personally, these two programmers should be made to pay for the losses incurred.

So does this mean that HD DVD will become the de-facto standard for DVDs? What about Blu-Ray?