Posts by chrisbliss18

Since you have a Dell, it may not be the best thing to set a BIOS password. If you ever lose that password, you have to have either replace the chip that handles passwords or have it professionally repaired. In other words, I suggest that you just put a password on all the user accounts on your system and force a log in each time Windows is started or comes out of a standby state.

In order to set a user password, click Start, select Control Panel, and select User Accounts. From there you can select a current account and change the password. If your system automatically logs you in each time the computer starts, simply click Start, select Log Off, and click Log Off from the pop-up. From that point forward, you will need to use your password to access the system.

The Windows password will completely prevent someone from gaining access into your system but will deter people who do not want to use special tools and some time to gain that access. It will also give you the ability to reinstall Windows or use special tools to reset your password if you ever have problems accessing Windows.

If you simply must set a BIOS password, know that if you lose it, you lose access to your machine until you drop $50-$200 to fix it. In order to set a BIOS password, you must first load your BIOS configuration. You load the configuration by pressing …

There are Linux antivirus products. There are just far fewer Linux antivirus programs when compared with antivirus programs for Windows. There are a few reasons for this:

• Virus writers want attention. Since most people that interact directly with the OS interact with Windows, why not make a virus to infect Windows since you will annoy the most people?
• Stereotypically, a larger proportion of Windows users are vulnerable to making mistakes that allow viruses to infect their system when compared to Linux users.
• Windows is more vulnerable to attack. This is a very debatable topic, but it is widely believed that there are more exploitable holes in Windows than there are for viruses.
• It is also argued that potential holes are found and patched in Linux versions faster than in Windows versions because of the fact that more people look at, analyze, and test the actual code that builds Linux distros and much of the software that runs on them. This is due the the fact that most of Linux software is open and able to be viewed by anyone.

It should be noted that while Linux doesn't suffer from most of the software considered to be viruses, there are still large batches of software that "infect" Linux machines. The worst kind of software to get on a Linux machine is a rootkit. Rootkits allow someone to gain top-level system access and control while not alerting the actual users of the system that anything has changed. These rootkits …

There are a number of different solutions for your problem.

The easiest solution is to replace the RT31P2 with a switch and connect the cable modem to the WRT54G. This would create one LAN rather than the two LANs that you currently have. This isn't a very good solution though since you would have to replace a component.

Your computers may be able to share files across the different LANs currently, but they just don't see eachother in Network Neighborhood. To test this, use one of the computers to try to access the shares on a computer that is connected to the other router. Rather than going through Network Neighborhood, type in the location of the other computer in the form of "\\ipAddress" such as "\\192.168.1.101". See if you can see across to the other router's systems this way. If this set up works for you, you could actually make links on each machine to point to the systems on the other router. It's not the most elegant solution, but I have seen it work.

Now for a solution that is both elegant and inexpensive (free) but is also more technically involved. This is the best solution I can come up with in your situation. Basically, we will turn your wireless router into nothing more than a switch with a wireless access point. In effect, this will bypass all the router functions -- NAT, firewall, DHCP server, etc -- on the wireless router. …

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 …

There's an easy way to find out. Compile the program with none of the imports and take note of the size (get the exact size, such as 3221 bytes rather than 3.2 kilobytes). Compile the program with many imports and take note of the size. Then compare the two sizes and see if there is any difference.

In my experience, declaring imports does nothing more than tell the compiler where search for class files that haven't been referred to by their full name. I can't say that this won't have any affect on the size of the byte file however, so I recommend that you check it out for yourself.

Download the attachment that I have below, unzip it into a folder somewhere, and double-click it. A pop-up window will ask you if you are sure that you want to add the information to your Registry, click "Yes". This will ensure that the WSH is not turned off in your Registry. After applying the fix, reboot your machine and try again. Let us know if the fix worked or not.

Even if you could turn off the firewall (you can't), ports can't be forwarded to more than machine. In all my research, I did not find any means that allows for MSN port assignments to be modified. It is for this reason that I have decided that the MSN Messenger was very poorly designed or designed to be fully functional for only a small subset of users.

As for your router's firewall not being very important, that's not true at all. The router's firewall protects your machines from attacks all day long. If you turn on full logging on your router, you will no doubt see all the deflected port sniffs, buffer overflow attempts, excessive ping requests, and other potentially harmful requests that your router's firewall absorbs so that your machines don't have to. Furthermore, the NAT feature on the router means that your machines are never directly exposed and that a whole network of computers appears as just one.

Browser: Firefox and Flock
Email: Thunderbird
Media: Windows Media Player 9 and VLC
Messenger: Trillian
SSH: PuTTY
Desktop Enhancements: Hotkeycontrol and Google Desktop
Spyware: Microsoft AntiSpyware, Ad-Aware SE Personal, Spybot-S&D
FTP: SmartFTP
Misc: Who Lock Me?
Network Bandwidth Monitor: NetStat Live
IRC: mIRC
BitTorrent: Azureus (I might switch to µTorrent 1.2)
Text Editor (for programming): Crimson Editor

Here are a couple possible solutions.

Click "Start", click "Run...", type "msconfig", and click "OK". Click the "Services" tab, find "Windows Audio" in the list, put a checkmark next to "Windows Audio", click "Apply", click "OK", and restart your system.

If that doesn't work, try the following.

- Click "Start"
- Select "Control Panel"
- Select "Add Hardware"
- Click "Next"
- Select "Yes, I have already connected the hardware" and click "Next"
- Scroll all the way to the bottom of the list, select "Add a new hardware device", and click "Next"
- Select "Install the hardware that I manually select from a list (Advanced)" and click "Next"
- Select "Sound, video and game controllers" and click "Next"
- Select "(Standard system devices)" under "Manufacturer", select "Media Control Devices" under "Model", and click "Next"
- Follow the remaining prompts

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.

No. Your understanding of how drives store data is horribly flawed. The notion that you could just upgrade the firmware and suddenly the internals understand how to fit more data is rediculous.

Not every drive has multiple platters. Most laptop drives have just one. Most desktop drives have one, two, or three platters. Understand that on most drives, both sides of the platter are used.

You keep focusing on the idea of clusters and such, but in order to fully understand why there are space limitations, we must inspect how an individual bit gets stored. While computers are digital machines (data is represented as ones and zeros), there isn't any real way to represent a true zero or one in most mediums. This results in defining a certain range of values to represent zero and another range to represent one. When the harddrive writes a zero to a specific position, the write head applies a negative charge (think of it as a -1 charge). When the harddrive writes a one to a specific position, the write head applies a positive charge (this of this as a +1 charge). This method of storing zeros and ones on the harddrive platter is where the space limitations come in. When this charge is applied, it doesn't get applied to an infinately small point of singularity; rather, it has a radiating effect, so the write head modifies a certain radius of the area that it is writing to (Think about dropping a …

It is normal to see those lines scrolling across. What happens when you see those lines scrolling by? Do you reboot the system or do you let it finish?

If you let it sit there, does it hang for a few minutes after a certain point? If so, there may be a file problem somewhere. If the system freezes at a certain point, what is the last line of text that you see?