Posts by TallCool1

Ok, heres my story, my current 420watt powersupply is shot, it powers my pc, but sometimes it starts making static sounds and my pc restarts, so I was wondering

I found a ultra 400-watt power supply

3 questions

1) is Ultra a good brand for power supplies
2) is 400 watts enough to run a 64 3400+ cpu, with a mobo, and 9600XT
3) Are staticy sounds coming from your PS normal?

I have a bit of a background in this; I used to repair switching power supplies when it was economical to do so, going back 30 years .

1) The Ultra brand is unknown to me, but it looks OK from the picture and other info I've seen. If I had one in hand, I could trace it to the OEM (original equipment manufacturer) from the UL recogition code (the backwards UR followed by the letter E and a series of numbers). You can usually Google that code and find out more.
2) 400 watts is a bit low these days. The minimal incremental extra cost of a 500-watt supply is a good investment.
3) No :-)

I'm having a similar problem as well with our monitor
we have windows 2000 and recently a horizontal line
which keeps changing colour (usually it's red/pink/blue/yellow)
started to appear on the right side of the screen
it sometimes disappears but it always comes up again. Could this possibly be a trouble with the RAM as you've mentioned?

I assume you are talking about an LC display. If so, the problem is never RAM. Instead, it is usually a bad contact between the driver circuitry and the display panel itself. This happens because the contacts are secured by pressure, not gripping or soldering as is true with most other electronics; this is a major failure point for LCDs--and one of my biggest gripes about them.

Here's what I have suggested in the past, and it reportedly has helped in more than one case: monitor repairman that I am (or once was), it sounds like bad contacts between the driver electronics and the display itself. One relatively easy test for this problem is as follows:

With the unit on, gently grasp the left and right edges of the display. Gently twist the display (no more than a few ounces of pressure) as though you are wringing out a towel. See if the display flashes, changes, etc. This may even fix the problem by "wiping" the contacts of dirt or oxidation.

When I log off, my screename for widows xp, i get 3 annoying boxes that pop up, -one of them saying, (RunDLL.exe......End Now) i forget what the other two are. Is there any way i can stop this. its very annoying. thank you

Does it say RunDLL.exe or RunDLL32.exe? The difference is important; it may be an indicator of a possible hijacking. RunDLL32 is supposed to launch-and-release under XP. If it fails to release (keeps running), it usually indicates poorly written malware. See my article Dealing with Malware (in my signature, below) on downloading and using HijackThis. Post the log here, but don't fix anything until instructed on what to remove.

ok im not really following, so if I have 256 256 128 128 then i would not be getting as good performance as if I did just 256 256?

No, that two pairs (128/128, 256/256) beats one-pair-plus-one (128/128, 256/0)--depending on the hardware. This also assumes that you have Windows 2000 or XP, since Windows 98 will choke on more than 512 MB.

I have a little problem, I can't choose which OS I'll be using for my pc. Do you have any good experiences with any OS for personal use?

128 MB Ram
2 GB Root drive
20 GB logical drive

You need more RAM, at least 256 MB, better still 512 MB. You also need a bigger hard drive. 2 GB is too small for any modern OS. This is true no matter which OS you get.

i've already got adaware and spy-bot but it's failed to get rid of it. Also my norton anti-virus doesn't always get rid of all the adware threats.

Is the hijacker easy to use?

Actually, it's an anti-hijacker. The page that Caperjack refers to is both a download link and a quick-start for beginners on HijackThis. I'm also writing a beginner oriented article on this subject, as well.

You do realize that you have to attempt to update the data files for both Spybot - S & D and Ad-aware before each run? If not, you may still be vunerable.

I am a complete noobie. I don't know anything about Linux. Can someone please give me some tutorials?

There are several ways to go about this.

I can't rcommend Red Hat (now Fedora, for all practical end-user purposes) or Mandrake for beginners, though Mandrake has a live-CD version. A newbie should not be forced to install Linux just to try it out. The best way to start is with a CD-bootable Linux, if you have enough memory (128 MB or more. "More" is better :)). That way, you can experiment in a "sandbox" until you feel comfortable enough to install Linux as a dual-boot (or triple-boot) system.

The best known Live Linux-on-CD distributions are Knoppix and an up-and comer, Mepis. These run entirely from CD but can also be used as Linux install discs. They are both based on Debian, one of the leading free distros and KDE, the K Desktop Environment. Lindows and Xandros are both also based on Debian and KDE.

The leading alternate GUI (graphical user interface) under Linux is GNOME, the GNU Object Modeling Environment, which has its own live CD, Gnoppix.

There are a number of Linux portals available for beginners to get information. These include YoLinux, Linux.org, and Linux.com. Once you feel more comfortable with Linux and want to dig deeper, check out the Linux Documentation …

I'm having the same problem with IE its saying the page cannot be displayed.

The follwing are hijackers and troublemakers: New.net, jbeakuoo.exe, searchxl.com, and mysearchnow.com
You need to use Hijack This to remove those. Go to their forum and post this list for further help.

Have Win XP pro, when I go to the run menu and type in a letter it brings up a url. I have deleted my cookies, history and files for IE and Netscape. Does anyone know how to get rid of it?

That information is stored in the Registry, but there is a tool for it, TweakUI. I have not used it under XP, but if it's like all earlier versions of the utility, there's a tab labeled Paranoia which allows you to clear things like the Document History and the Run string-box. It's one of the Windows PowerToys and can be downloaded individually.

I have a HUGE upgrade that I'm working on (50,000 PC's) and it would be really nice for some of the batch files to reboot the PC's automatically after they are done installing the components.

EDIT: Shutdown.exe is part of an upgrade pack for 2000 (not included), but included in XP and Server 2003.

Here are three setups I'm looking at. Which do you think would be better suited to run this site alone, which mainly interacts with MySQL and php.

Pentium 4 1.8 ghz with 512 mb of SDRAM
Celeron 1.8 ghz with 1024 mb of SDRAM
Celeron 2.0 ghz with 256 mb DDR RAM

Of these three, which would be the best solution (in your opinion) for a database driven site?

The P4 has more cache RAM. I think that counts, due to the threading nature of what you are running (slight pun intended). The more it can hit local memory, the quicker it can talk to the world. All three are pretty close, though, and would work OK.

Running XP Pro - think I've sussed it - went to Symnatec(?) and got rid of the worm - I think. Is there any programme or web based thing that anyone knows about so I can test my system to make sure it's running at it's optimum???

I know that I'm coming a little late to this party, but some important new information has come to light. It turns out that even with the MS patches applied, there are still DCOM/RPC vunerabilities. Go to Gibson Research Corp at http://www.GRC.com and download DCOMbobulator and ShootTheMessenger. The first shuts down DCOM, and the second shuts down the Windows Messenger Service, useful only as a source of spam pop-ups, most selling "services" to stop spam pop-ups...

It's also good to use Gibson's UPnP utility to shut off Universal Plug and Play, another useless feature. All of these utilities are reversible, as well.

I have a Toshiba Satelite laptop and a few days ago a single grey line appeared across the lower portion of my screen. Yesterday, another grey line appeared across the upper portion of my screen. Does anyone know what this is?

It is probably a bad display. The LCD is addressed by rows and columns and it sounds like the drive contacts to the display itself have become dirty, or the display-drive electronics are going out. Is the display active or passive? The answer will provide more clues. You can probably find out on Google if you don't already know from the product literature.

My question is: Can a bootable Win98 CD be made?

I went to Google with the search string convert bootable floppy to bootable cd (no quotes) and got back a bunch of hits -- my thought is that you can take the Win 98 emergency boot disk, turn it into a bootable CD, and copy the Windows 98 CAB files to it. You would then be able to boot into a DOS environment and run setup from there.

which partition program do you recommend and where could i get it, preferably free.

The Knoppix CD has QTParted to manipulate partitions and Partition Image and Mondo to back it up. I have used them to great effect -- QTParted seems to work as well as anything commercial. Knoppix is a free CD-bootable Linux distro that doesn't mess with your HD unless you tell it to. It's also a quick way to check compatibility without the hassle of a full Linux install. Oh, did I mention it's free?

Of course, this assumes that your Windows partition isn't full. How many partitions are on your drive now? What capacity is it?

...the screen is now a greenish color. Is there any way to fix it, maybe demagnetize the screen?

I'm a monitor technician (among other things). Is green the only color you see, or does it just predominate? Is the green tint uniform, or splotchy? What happens when you rap or slap the side of the case? How about a brand / model ID? How old is it?