neosapience

Well, if you're sure nothing cumbersome is loading and that you're virus/spyware free, I'd suspect your computer. Over the course of 6 years a LOT can happen to your system. Fixes/upgrades/dust/powersurges/etc... can all take their toll. Have you checked under the hood lately?

NM, the above post has the answer.

This sounds like a virus to me. Be sure your anti-virus program is up to date. If you can't update it, try going here - http://housecall.trendmicro.com/housecall/start_corp.asp I also recommend using Spybot to remove spyware - http://www.safer-networking.org/index.php?page=mirrors

If I turn on all my inputs and crank my speakers up, I can hear the local radio station. You probably just heard a someone messing with their HAM radio.

I'm assuming that all your systems are running XP. If so, this should do it for ya. You may have to reboot the computer tho. nomsn.cmd

Hmm, only advice I can offer is to check for newer highpoint drivers. Could be a bug.

Hmm, the only thing I can think of, is that your HTML pages have somehow become read-only. Check the HTML file properties and see if the read-only attribute is checked.

If your computer is as old as Windows98, it's NOT going to play Thief 3 anyway.

AutoPatcher is awesome. It's a program put together by the guys at Neo Win. It contains every patch released by MS since SP1, along with a ton of other important stuff, like DX9, .Net framework, etc... It even comes with a bunch of system tweaks. It's a pretty big download and the links are a tad flaky, but it's surely worth having until SP2 is official.

I'd suggest getting an actual RAID card and setting up a RAID1 array. It's fairly cheap and not too hard to do.

Well, if worse comes to worse, you can try a Repair install of Windows. Just pop in your windows cd, reboot, boot from the CD-ROM and wait for the install prompt. Use the Repair option and hope that fixes things. With the repair option, you'll keep all your programs/settings/etc... Then I'd re-install SP1. After that, use AutoPatcher to get your system up to date. It's a lot of work, but it will surely fix any windows problems you may have. Unless you have a virus. Anywho, I hope you can get the problem fixed without too much trouble.

It sounds to me like you're motherboard is having ACPI trouble. If you can't seem to fix it with MCTs advice, try heading to your BIOS. There may be some erroneous power management settings there. Cross your fingers and hope your mobo isn't going out on you.

Happy to have helped!

There's a bug that can cause explorer to not read AVI files correctly. It basically makes explorer.exe go nuts. Open regedit and head to - HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\SystemFileAssociations\.avi\shellex\PropertyHandler Delete the "Default" value which should be {87D62D94-71B3-4b9a-9489-5FE6850DC73E} Hopefully that'll do it.

Looks like explorer is crashing on you, then restarting. This could be caused by any number of problems. Make sure you don't have a virus or any spyware on your system. You could try this little registry hack, it will force exploder and the taskbar to run in a separate processes and may keep them from crashing. No guarantees tho - Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00 [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Advanced] "SeparateProcess"=dword:00000001 [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer] "DesktopProcess"=dword:00000001

Um, my anti-virus program says that Windows is a virus, how do I remove it? old joke, old joke

Here's an article I wrote a while ago - _______________________________________ Warez for everyone! The warez scene is a booming industry. Despite all the crackdowns, people continue to share illegal copies of their favorite software. The software giants have been screaming 'Pirate!' so loud and for so long, my ears hurt. So why all the fuss? According to the media, the software industry loses Billions of dollars every year to pirates. There are litterally factories where pirated copies of various software are manufactured, and thousands of web sites that distribute them. How can the software industry not be losing money? Well, it's not as simple as you might think. First off, there's more than one type of pirate. There's the pirate that cracks the software and then there's the pirate that downloads it. But exactly which one is causing the industry to lose so much money? The answer isn't so simple. For example - Someone makes a copy of Adobe's Photoshop and puts it on a public web site along with a serial number. Adobe doesn't lose any money if nobody downloads it, right? Let's say 100,000 people download it. Photoshop costs about $600 a pop, so that's about 60 MILLION dollars that Adobe lost to this one pirate, right? Wrong. Of all the people that download pirated software, how many of them actually use it? There's no way to be sure. Some people are just curious about the program or maybe they're just using it to learn the software. More to the point, how many of these people would have actually payed for the software if they had not been able to download it for free? A likely answer is - almost none of them. Just where does a software company get it's projected sales numbers? How can a company know how much money it's losing to pirates if their product has always been pirated? How can you even guess at such a number? There's no way for them to know just how many people would have bought their product, it's just not possible. The fact of the matter is, the software industry is driven by the honest people that actually buy the software. Those people would most likely continue to purchase their software, even if they were offered a 'dishonest' alternative. Don't get me wrong, I don't advocate pirating in any way. But the software industry probably wastes more money on their anti-pirate campaigns than they actaully lose to the pirates themselves. The best way to prevent pirating is to make your programs mores secure. By adding better software encryption and forcing users to register, software companies could significantly decrease the pirating of their products. But what do I know, I've never even written a real program before.

Yes, holding CTRL while refreshing the page will force IE to ignore any cached files and re-download the page. I use it every once in a while, like if I'm fiddling with my proxy or something.

There's something similar for the 'Add/Remove Windows Components' list. It's not a registry setting, it's in an INF file. Look for this - \windows\inf\sysoc.inf Open it in notepad, then look under the [Components] section. All of those are installed windows components. Now, look for the word HIDE in the list, like this one for windows messenger - msmsgs=msgrocm.dll,OcEntry,msmsgs.inf,hide,7 Just remove the 'hide' then save the file. You'll now have the option of uninstalling windows messenger from the 'Add/Remove Windows Components' list.

RSS is a way for websites to syndicate their news. You use programs like DesktopSidebar (http://www.desktopsidebar.com) to read RSS feeds. If you put another websites RSS feed directly on YOUR website, that would be called stealing. If I misinterpreted what you're talking about, and you're trying to make an RSS feed FOR your website, go here - http://searchenginewatch.com/sereport/article.php/2175271

Man, I hope you didn't follow Bashrats advice... All you have to do is hit Ctrl+Alt+Del twice at the logon screen. You'll get the old style Win2k logon and can log in as administrator.

Debunking a few things here - Your hard drive will NOT effect your framerate. If you experience periodic 'stuttering', that may be your drive, as it's trying to load new content. But your average FPS will not be affected by your drive. 512MB of RAM is plenty for just about any FPS at the moment. If you ARE running out of RAM, it's because you have too much crap running in the background. Without getting into detailed system settings, the most obvious problem is your graphics card. Get a new one.

Please remember that this would only apply if the processor were the only remaining bottleneck on your computer. A system with a crappy video card wont play ANYTHING well, regardless of the CPU.

The only thing I can think of is that some setting (like IoPageLockLimit) may be out of whack for your system. I've seen it happen before, where certain motherboards just do NOT like the settings that XP uses. Disabling explorer/cmd may be forcing the system to use 'default' settings and thereby temporarily rectifying the problem. Look around the net for some info on these reg settings - IoPageLockLimit Win32PrioritySeparation LargeSystemCache SystemPages You also may want to make sure your BIOS settings are set properly and that your Windows DMA transfer mode settings are set to 'DMA if available' (using the device manager). Best O' luck to ya. NS

The "ConservativeSwapfileUsage=1" tweak isn't wrong, it simply does not apply to Windows XP/2000. BTW, the link to the tweak guide doesn't seem to be working as of 6/02, 11pm PST.