xmf

Looking for an all-around machine - nothing too specialized (such as for gaming or photo editing). Appealing so far has been the 2nd gen intel core processors, a good graphics card, and lots of ram. I'm also intrigued by (excuse my naivety) the dual hard-drive setups that apparently increase speed greatly. Any input/suggestions relevant to my search are greatly appreciated Thanks

I appreciate the reply. The registry entry I have is different than the one shown in the linked tutorial (screenshot on left is mine). Perhaps this could be the source of the problem?

I believe this happened around the same time that I was tweaking startup programs and services. After re-enabling all the startup programs the system tray is still not displaying anything other than the clock (if that counts). Definitely not on auto-hide inactive icons TIA

Using XP Home. From the Start Menu a right-click on My Documents gives the message: "The properties of this item are not available" Any ideas? TIA

Well, I have one click selection enabled, I don't know if that would affect anything. This is beyond me - I have tooltips and selected items selected as being non-blue colors. When I select an item it is bluish gray, when I then scroll through items with the arrow keys (icons in a folder for example) the icon text is pure gray only.

Hovering over icons, the text is highlighted blue. How can this be disabled without using TweakUI (which only yields half results - blue tinge remains)? Thank you

Thank you both very much.

When I press F3 to do a search, the default folder is "Desktop" but I would prefer if it were C:;D: How can this be changed?

please delete, not nlite related

please delete, not nlite related

please delete, not nlite related

please delete, not nlite related

I created a USB Linux flash drive so I could test CD capabilities and I encountered playback issues in Linux also. It would play fine for maybe 10-20sec. and then stop completely for a few seconds, the disc would spin up, and playing would then resume. It must be the drive. I will try a cd-cleaner from the store next, I suppose (although I already tried water and microfiber on the lens). I don't know what else to do at this point. The drive was replaced earlier this year by Dell and the machine is no longer under warranty.

Why was the drive replaced at first ? (similar problem ?) Sorry for suggesting a cable problem, I hadn't paid attention to the fact it's a laptop. I honestly can't remember what was happening with the drive when it was replaced (I know, that's pretty bad) but I will try to find out.

Puppy Live seemed to work fine, however, I couldn't try to play a CD in Linux as the tray was occupied by the Live CD. Back in XP I tried another CD and it was clipping like before but the drive wasn't spinning up or showing other signs of distress. This leads me to believe that the Linux test could still be inconclusive as to whether the drive is bad (or if it's XP).

I checked a (pretty much new) CD with CDCheck and I got a 969 kB/s read rate (6x). I noticed much of the time during the check the disc was continually "spinning up" and stopping every few seconds. For the remaining few minutes of the check it was silent. During the spinning up the mouse cursor would jitter or stutter across the screen as I moved it, then return to normal when the spinning up abated. The drive in question is rated to a 24x (CD) read speed. One error was reported under "other", but I didn't see how to uncover more info about it. I'm not sure how to interpret these results. I've worked very hard to keep this machine bloat and malware free. I have over 3gb's of RAM intstalled and a 1.66g dual core processor. I never experienced such problems before now. The only other app I had open during the test was Firefox (with nothing intensive like video, etc).

CDs & DVDs Won't Play Properly I've been playing DVDs on this laptop for years, it's an Inspiron 6400 w/ an nLited install of XP Pro. Out of the blue none of my discs will play properly and some of them are just about brand new. The disc drive itself was replaced by Dell earlier this year and has been working fine up until this point. I tried uninstalling/re-installing VLC but it made no difference. I also tried cleaning the lens with a damp microfiber cloth and blowing into the drive. Best way I can describe the playback is the sound is clipping and video is stuttered. Thank you

Yes, the machine picks up many other networks. As I mentioned, my other computer (a netbook) can sign in to my wifi network no problem.

Anyone? Thanks

Wireless Zero Config is set to Auto. My wifi adapter is definitely on (wouldn't see a list of networks otherwise). Only thing I can think of is that I've done extensive tweaking of windows services and maybe something got turned off.

Always good replies. Thanks again. I found the following system from Lenovo for ~$800 (my price range). Non-pretenscious hard-drive, pretty good processor, and the design features I wanted. The memory is a little low, but in 1 dimm so can be easily upgraded later. Looks like a winner. ThinkPad L512 i5-540M Processor 2.53GHz XP Professional downgrade 15.6" HD AntiGlare Mobile Intel HM55 Express Chipset with integrated Intel HD Graphics 2 GB PC3-10600 DDR3 SDRAM 1333MHz SODIMM Memory (1 DIMM) 160 GB Hard Disk Drive 5400rpm DVD Recordable 8x Max Dual Layer 6 cell 2.6Ah Li-Ion

14-15 in. screen matte display totally awesome processor xp pro cheapie hard drive (to be replaced by my own) no silver anti-microbial finish (I hate that) It seems like most companies are using my money to pay for expensive os's like win7 pro and big hard drives that I don't need. Tons of glossies. I'd rather have a few discerning specs and a *ichin' processor to boot (no pun intended).

Using XP Pro. I get a good network signal, but this error message when I try clicking to connect: "Windows is unable to connect to the selected network. The network may no longer be in range. Please refresh the list of available networks and try to connect again." My netbook gets online no problem. The network is WPA2 protected and my non-working system doesn't ever prompt me for a password. It is configured to detect IP (and gateway I believe) automatically. I've never had a problem with it's wifi antenna in the past. Thank you

So two Intel Atom chip users are using the dual core boot option with apparent success. My question now is, can I possibly damage/mess up anything by simply trying this?

So the man claiming performance gains by altering the core# in startup options was clearly mistaken then? Anyone? Chief?