JorgeA

Just spent the last 2 hours scouring the Web for this device. The bottom line is that I don't know what to look for (item name? brand?? model number?). Looked in all manner of known and unknown vendors' sites, and found several bracket devices that resolve four ports into two connectors, but none that had four connectors for four ports. Without more specific info, it's like looking for a needle in a haystack. Can you provide some more information so that I can look for this more efficiently? --JorgeA Edit: I think I may have hit pay dirt with these two: http://us.startech.com/product/USBPLATELP-2-Port-USB-A-Female-Low-Profile-Slot-Plate-Adapter http://us.startech.com/product/USBPLATEB-2-Outlet-USB-Plate-in-Blister-Pack ...although I'm not sure what makes the first one a "low profile" adapter and the second one not; they look the same to me. Two ports instead of two, but is this the right sort of thing I'm looking for?

Thanks, dencorso. Obviously this is a new concept for me. Would any of the products that jaclaz linked to, do the trick? (With my limited knowledge, I would guess not.) --JorgeA

Hey puntoMX, Here's my mobo information. If the link doesn't work for any reason, it's an IPIBL-LB (Benicia). The specs state that this mobo has three USB 2.0 headers, but when I opened it there were definitely other USB thingies that were unused (not connected to anything) running along what is the bottom right edge of the picture that you see on that page. If it turns out that they don't work, why would they even bother putting them in there? --JorgeA

Thanks, jaclaz, for the info and for the links. You are a fount of useful information! I'll follow up on them, and no doubt will have follow-up questions. But before that -- how can I determine whether I have the first (easier to deal with) kind of USB header, or the second (more difficult) one? From the pictures on the linked pages, it looks like they would fit into what I have on the motherboard, but of course I could well be wrong. Do the two types look physically different? --JorgeA

Hello, A few months ago, in another thread, the topic of unused USB headers came up. These headers in my PC are inside the case, not connected to anything. In that thread, dencorso (thank you) suggested that in order to use them, "The new USB ports would be attached either to one (or two) rear bay-bracket(s) or to a front-panel blind drive-placeholder, if there is one such placeholder still free." Can anyone point me to instructions for doing one or both of these operations, and what are all the new parts/kits I would need to accomplish them? I'm not ready to actually perform either one, but I'd like to get a feel for the operation in case I decide to go ahead (and that info might also assist in the decision). Thanks! --JorgeA

Thanks dencorso, I too trust MDGx's judgment on these issues. Re: merging this thread with the previous one that was renamed -- that's OK with me. Thank you for asking! --JorgeA

dencorso, Thank you, I did come across that. But I'm wondering whether one can install WildBill's version by itself, or if some kind of prior groundwork is needed (like installing other updates first, or performing OS tweaks/patches). --JorgeA

Thank you problemchyld. Looks like an even newer update, judging from the KB number. Can we trust that it will work on Win98? --JorgeA

Hello, My PC just received a Cumulative Security Update for Internet Explorer 6 (KB2360131). (Just received it, though the publicaiton date is October 12.) This was on an XP machine. The Microsoft page for the update states that this is for Windows XP systems, and the Windows Update page for Windows 98 doesn't list this update. However, as we know, many things that officially work only on a more recent OS, also work unofficially on older OS's. Has anybody tried to install and run this update to IE6 on a Windows 98 (FE) PC? Let's just say, I'd rather not be the first to try this and discover that it screws up the system royally or something... A forum search revealed this unofficial update by WildBill. Would I simply download and install it, or is there some preliminary updating or prep work that needs to be done? Happy New Year to all. --JorgeA

Hey dencorso, Great that you got the chance to pop in! BlouBul's advice is sensible. Getting a faster CPU would speed things up, but it wouldn't cut the loading time by nearly as much as a version of Word that's not so loaded down with background processing. It's odd that nobody seems to have complained about this, and (especially) that so few tests appear to have been run to compare the performance of Word 2007 with earlier versions. In my Web research, most of the complaints about slow loading in Word seemed to have to do with particular program settings or corruption in the individual document, with (as far as I could tell) little focus on this issue that seems to be "built into" Word 2007. Now that we have a hypothesis, when I get the chance to I'll do research based on that, and see if anybody other than that Open Office guy ever reported the same problem. --JorgeA

Hi BlouBul, I'll see if it's possible to install the 2010 trial download on that XP machine, so we can compare. Thanks for the link. I'll let you know what happens. Welcome back! I can relate to what you say about Christmas family gatherings... Well, it looks like we've come up with a solid diagnosis and prescription for this problem. Thank you very much for sticking with me all this time -- there's no way I could have done it without your help. Gratefully, --JorgeA

Hi BlouBul, Finally back in the action here! I had to work through midnight on Sunday, but I got the project done and now I can have some fun. In our case, "fun" means that I got the chance, at long last, to uninstall Word 2007 from the Windows XP computer, and put Word 2000 on it in order to compare the file loading times. I ran a 5-test series with the same offending file, and here are the results, in seconds: 17 ! 14 !! 18 17 14 Can you believe it?! It looks like this really clinches it: whatever the holdup is, it has to do with Word/Office 2007, as last week's benchmark webpage said. So as I see it, there are two choices for speeding up the file loading process: Use Word 2000 instead of 2007; or Upgrade the hardware. I suspect that it's mainly CPU processing involved (right?), so that would mean getting a faster CPU, of the kind that CoffeeFiend recommended way back when at the start of this thread. What do you think? And of course, we always have Choice (3) not to do anything... I hope you & family are having a good time on a warm beach! --JorgeA

BlouBul, Agreed! For example, I do like the feature where you can select a chunk of text, and see on the full screen what it would look like if you changed the font or the type size. I'd still like to know (if possible) what accounts for the difference. For document loading, the writer says that, "Word 2007 introduced the compressed .docx format which was smaller on the disk (so less disk I/O), but uncompressing and parsing XML requires much more CPU time." I wonder if some sort of behind-the-scenes XML processing might be the source of all our troubles, since AFAIK it wasn't a part of Office 2000. FWIW, I should note that the original 7MB document is in .DOC format, but that saving it as a .DOCX file, despite decreasing the size to 6MB, didn't seem to have a dramatic effect on the loading time. --JorgeA

Hi BlouBul, Still in the crunch, but it's been stressful enough that I woke up early and couldn't get back to sleep. So I spent a little bit of the "additional" time searching the Web for this issue. Most of the diagnoses and solutions are either stuff that we've already tried, or which don't apply in our case. But here's the most interesting link I found, comparing the performance of the various editions of MS Word. I suspect that the answer to our mystery is to be found somewhere on those charts. --JorgeA

Hi BlouBul, Today turned out to be a hectic workday, and the next couple of days are shaping up as busy ones, too. So we will probably have to wait till Friday before we can start relaxing! --JorgeA

Hi BlouBul, OK, I will try that. There's (literally) nothing to lose!! The HDD on that machine is all of 40GB. I can relate to that! Thank you for hanging in there with me. --JorgeA

Hi BlouBul, Great to hear from you again! We still have the two radical options (uninstalling and reinstalling Word on the HDD, or installing a new HDD to put Word on it fresh). But over the weekend a new idea occurred to me. Back in August I bought a 2.0GHz Pentium 4 refurbished computer running Windows XP for use in a distributed computing project. It's a "lean and mean" machine that doesn't have a lot of stuff crammed into it. No Office, no Norton, no Spybot -- hardly anything except for the OS and the DC software. (It does have Avast 5 and SuperAntiSpyware installed.) I installed XP Professional on it myself with the accompanying CD. It hit me that putting Word 2007 on this computer might be worth a try, so I took that trial version of Office, installed it, and then copied the original offending file for a test. I'd actually thought of it before, but I wasn't sure that the system would be comparable enough for our series of tests. But now that we're considering more radical measures, it occurred to me that this might be a good time to try it. Three loadings took 3:52, 3:43, and 3:43. This was a fresh Word installation on a clean machine. So it looks pretty clear that -- unless Windows XP on a Pentium 4 is not a suitable comparator, or unless Avast + SAS are as much of a system burden as Norton -- then whatever our problem is, it has to do with Word 2007 itself, and not with corruption of Word or with the presence of other software. Just as a sanity check, I re-ran the same .DOC file on my Vista laptop's Microsoft Works. The loading times were 1:15, 1:12, and 1:10. Even as a .DOC file, which isn't Works's favorite format, it loads faster than Word 2007 on any system I've tried. Enjoy your holiday, BlouBul, we can pick this back up when you come back! Those of us who live halfway to the Pole on the other hemisphere tend to forget that there are warm and sunny spots on the globe this time of the year. --JorgeA

All normal what you saw there; as I remember you can manually select the partition to shrink IF there is enough space, so, in this case the program did it for you and decided that D was too full so it was better to move D and shrink C, or you picked C to use its space to make that recovery partition, one of both. puntoMX, Hmm, let me see if I can remember what I did... I told BlackArmor to use the C: partition as the source for the new hidden partition. That was 465GB before the operation was performed, and with the 50GB Secure Zone hidden partition it went down to 415GB. The used space was still 137GB or so. Then afterward, I used the BlackArmor process to remove the hidden 50GB partition, and then the C: drive went back up to 465GB. Thinking about what you wrote, I remember that in the interim I did uninstall a 30-day trial version of Adobe Acrobat (nice program, but way too expensive for what I need it to do). No doubt that removing it accounts for some of the difference. Acrobat, though, doesn't take up 60GB, even after the installation file is decompressed... or does it? Anyway, I'd say that the bottom line is that nothing has (apparently) been lost, yet somehow I reclaimed a ton of real estate on the HDD. Maybe I should install and uninstall that Secure Zone on a regular basis as part of HDD maintenance! --JorgeA P.S. I also noticed that the 11GB D: recovery partition, which Explorer had regularly reported as having ~1.04GB free, now has 1.42GB free. How about that.

Thanks, Andre! --JorgeA

BlouBul, Well, today I used that "Try&Decide" feature from Seagate. Interesting, but it has its limitations. With the associated "Secure Zone" feature, it takes an amount of disk space from a drive that you specify, and uses it to create a kind of partition. (I say a "kind of" partition because you can't see it via normal means, although your regular disk does appear smaller in Windows Explorer.) Then, anything that you do while Try&Decide is working, happens in that secure zone without (they say) affecting anything on your actual PC. When you turn Try&Decide off, you get the choice to accept whatever changes took place while you were in it, or to discard everything and revert to the PC's previous state. (Except that you still have to tell it separately to delete the hidden partition.) Creating the hidden partition was a bit frightening, since as it updated you on progress it reported that the D: (recovery) partition was being "moved." (Why would it have to move that partition? Couldn't it just work around it -- there was plenty of space on the physical disk.) But anyway, the process concluded and I installed a downloaded trial version of MS Office 2007, then watched it install. That part of the experiment went well (apparently). What didn't go so well was the test-opening of the original big file. The BlackArmor manual does warn you that the system will work more slowly while Try&Decide is active -- and they weren't kidding. The test load took 5:43 to finish. Far off enough into the woods (and time-consuming enough) that I decided that a second test was not necessary. So I stopped Try&Decide and then removed the Secure Zone hidden partition the recommended way. Everything appears to have gone back to the way it was before. The HDD has regained its full size. The only difference is that the apparent space used on my C: drive has gone down from ~137GB to about 77GB -- yet, nothing seems to be missing, either data or applications! What might account for that? So we're down to the option of uninstalling and reinstalling Word. As I wrote this, though, it occurred to me that another alternative that would not disrupt the existing installation would be to get an identical (if possible) second HDD, remove the existing HDD, put the new one in, and do fresh (trial/experimental) installs of both Vista and Office on it. I might have to deal with some BIOS issues, but somehow this process seems less risky and disruptive to the system than uninstalling one of my most important and often-used applications. What do you think? --JorgeA

Andre, Thanks for the link. However, the instructions there say to install IE9 Beta. Trouble is, as I understand it, IE9 Beta gets installed over IE8, no? That's what I'm trying to avoid, so that I can still decide which IE version to use on a case-by-case basis. --JorgeA

Hello, I'm curious to try the Internet Explorer 9 beta, but the Microsoft page says that it installs over the existing (IE8) installation. I'd rather not do that, not only because I'm loath to mess with a program that's working, but more importantly because I want to be able to open one of each IE version and go to the same (any) website to see how the two compare on my screen. Does anybody know of any hack or trick or workaround to install IE9 separately from IE8, such that IE8 won't be affected? Thanks! --JorgeA

Joe, You're right, the swap file on the W98 gets huge when Spybot is running a scan. The last time I monitored it, I think it approached 1GB in size. Although, I should say that Spybot runs fine on the Vista PC when it's scanning the Vista PC itself -- the scan finishes in about 20 minutes. The problems come when Spybot is scanning the W98 PC, either from the W98 machine itself (program crash) or from the Vista through the network (crawling scan). --JorgeA

conway, Well, that information was certainly worth waiting for! Thank you very much. I'll explore this and see if I can figure out how to do the procedure you outline. --JorgeA

BlouBul, AFAIK, WET is designed for moving settings from an old PC to a new PC. That's not what I wish to do. In any case, even if it works, as a writer said in one of the pages I saw when looking into this, he couldn't believe that MS would recommend using such a "clumsy tool" for this purpose. And, it's uncertain what the process might do to my existing PC. This page seems to say that the data is not erased from the source, but that you would need to reinstall the programs -- which is precisely what I'm trying to avoid. And restoring a HDD image (as suggested in one reply) is serious overkill for the sake of saving a couple of minutes on loading a document. Plus, the WET process appears to be difficult and error-prone. I am definitely skipping that one. Saving it for emergencies and new PCs only! --JorgeA