Asp

I've been upgrading my PC, replacing hard disks. All was going well till I replaced an IDE cable. (Yes, IDE, it's several years old.) Then when turning it on, no video, no beeps. Fans are on, disks are spinning up. I think that I didn't turn off the external main power the last time I plugged the IDE cable in to the mobo. The PC's front panel switch was turned off, but I the mobo was probably still live. I've turned it off and on a dozen times, to no avail. So: is it a write off? Any other tests or advice? (Other than: replace the mobo, which is what I am hoping not to have to do.) ================================= PS: one hour later; powered on with no expection of change, and I had video! (POST from BIOS). I had unplugged all the drives, so couldn't do anything. I'll plug and pray tomorrow (late night now.) Is there some fuse/capacitor that has reset? Any light anyone can throw on this, please advise. I'd like to know WTF is going on. I need this to be stable, I use it for my home office.

Thanks. I gave up on trying to hijack the Windows install and installed Ubuntu, wiping the disk. I might add a dual boot to XP later.

I've just been given an ex-corporate Dell laptop running Vista. It has one user account that I have the password for, but not the admin password. Which of course is rather limiting. I rebooted and tried to go to safe mode to create an admin account, but then I was greeted by a "Bitlocker" screen that again asked me for a password. I'm not familiar with Bitlocker, but a few minutes with Google tells me that it's full disc encryption and not crackable short of hacking the hardware. So I definitely want to get rid of that, I care more about losing access to my files than securing them from the KGB. So, is there an alternative to nuke and reformat and install the OS from scratch? And are there any issues with doing this with Bitlocker -- I don't want to brick it. I'd like to keep the installed drivers and apps, but if not, c'est la vie.

Office; that was the cause and where the solution was. (That wasn't clear to me at the beginning, but it is now.)

There is no "regedit32" on my PC. So I thought you were just confused with a later version. But I looked again and found that there is "regedt32" (So you were just confused by Microsoft's spelling.) Looks interesting. Had it on my PC almost 10 years without noticing. But with GrofLuigi's hint seeming to work it may not be necessary for this issue. Thanks! That SEEMS to have worked. I remain cautious as it has reverted every other time I thought I'd fixed it, but after opening and closing Excel and Word a few times, it seems stable.

That says to lock the Registry branch; I can't do that (in Win2k). WHY not? I can't see the option anywhere. I saw an "NT" forum and "XP", so chose the latter, of course now I see 2k is also in the NT group. And as you know, XP and 2k are very similar in most respects, I run lots of "XP" software, I haven't needed to upgrade. But really, I think this is not so OS specific. Googling found various people complaining about this problem many versions, including Win7. If nothing turns up here I'll repost in the MS Office forum, that being the guilty party.

Office 2000, but my daughter installed a later version as a "trial" which I had to get rid of (no need for the **** thing) and it may have left remnants). That's the same file associations dialog you get via Explorer. I already did that, as I said, it gets reverted after a short time. I found that earlier, couldn't see anything there helpful. The last post: [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\11.0\Common\Internet] "DoNotCheckIfOfficeIsHTMLEditor"=dword:00000001 I already have at "1" = do not check ( I presume that's what it should be). That says to lock the Registry branch; I can't do that (in Win2k). I expected that since it's MS Office that is stubbornly doing this there would be an option in MS Office to stop it. But Microsoft being the control freak that it is, that was misguided I guess.

For years I had used either Opera or Firefox as my default browser. So if I clicked on an HTML file (e.g., a program help file) that browser would open. Recently though the browser window opens, but no file. If I use "file/open" in the browser and navigate to the folder and select the file, it opens. Which is an enormous pain. If in Explorer I click on a HTML file, same thing, browser opens, but not the file. If I look at the file associations, I see the default action is: "open" with "P:\Opera\Opera.exe" "%1" which is correct. but I also see for "edit" : "P:\MSOffice\Office\msohtmed.exe" %1 and "print": ""P:\MSOffice\Office\msohtmed.exe" /p %1" And I have no idea how those got there. If I change or just delete the "edit" and "print" association, Opera will open the file normally. But a short time later, it reverts. I assume that if I open MS Word or Excel that somehow it thinks it has a licence to screw up my file associations. recently I updated MS Office, though I certainly DID NOT agree to it doing anything about HTML files. How can I fix this permanently?

I've got a laptop and a wifi PC card -- D-Link DWL-G630. (Both quite old.) I'm having some problems connecting to a new wifi router. I have found advice that using a driver from ASUS gives better results, the ASUS device has the same chipset. (This post -- from 2004, so I don't think profitable to resurrect that thread.) This says : But when I try this and point to the folder with the inf and sys files, Windows just says "no suitable drivers found" and reverts to the D-Link software. Is there a way to override this? .

Thanks. I installed the HP version of the driver, which was slightly newer than the built in one with Windows. I'm not sure if it was there before, but under "properties" there is "Printing preferences/Finishing" where I can set "pages per sheet". And this is persistent. So finally I can just select the "2-up" printer when I want to do that instead of having to reconfigure each time. I think the n-up settings were under "Layout/advanced" before. But as I said, they did not stick. One difference: Previously each original page had an outline around it when I did them 2-up. the "Finishing" version does not. Not a problem though.

I often print documents using "2 pages per sheet" in "Printing Preferences". But I have to reset this preference every time -- even if I click "apply" after setting this, the next time I open that printer it's reverted to "1 page per sheet". Same if I go through Settings/Printers an select the printer icon, change its preferences; it has reverted next time I open it. Can this be made to stick? This is for a HP Laserjet 5MP PS, using Win2k, if it makes a difference.

Thanks; "Produkey" did the job.

I've been given a laptop that had some bad RAM. I replaced the RAM but it appears that Windows borked itself when the RAM was failing and is unbootable. So I'm going to reinstall XP, but I would like to recover the XP serial number if possible first. I booted it from a Vista boot disk and ran "Keyfinder". Which gave me info about the Vista boot, so that was useless. Is there a utility, boot disk, or any way to extract the serial from an inactive Windows installation? It's possible of course that that was corrupted too, but I can see what looks like a normal collection of files on the hard disk, so it's worth a try.

I've got an Inspiron 5000, I thought that was old. It also is on 256 MB RAM, and runs XP. Haven't used it for a few months now... Anyway, I gotta say: RAM. It makes all the difference. I upgraded a Thinkpad from 128 MB to 640 MB and it was a huge improvement. I got bitten by some fake RAM in an auction, but it's worth shaking the dice if there aren't any local dealers. Or a local PC/laptop repair shop that you can visit and ingratiate yourself, and get a deal on some RAM they pull from a dead laptop. That's where I get my "old" RAM now, they guarantee it's legit and working for at least a month; which is enough to test it out.

My wife's office PC (XP SP3) used to present the number of new mail messages under the user name on the login screen. A few days it got infected with a virus, I managed to clean it off, and thought it was repaired. All seemed well for a day, but this morning after booting and selecting the user, it displays the desktop background, but no icons or taskbar, and a single box saying something about "Microsoft Outlook Express 6" and the mouse cursor is an hourglass. Waiting literally hours nothing has advanced. I can't be more specific about the message, since it's in Chinese, which my wife speaks, but can't understand the technical terms well enough to translate. However, I CAN boot into safe mode with networking, and in that can use Outlook Express to read and send mail, apparently normally. The problem seems to be whatever Outlook is doing on login. How is Outlook hooked in to the login, and how can I unhook it?

My wife's office PC (XP SP3) got infected with a virus, I managed to clean it off, and thought it was repaired. All seemed well for a day, but this morning after booting and selecting the user, it displays the desktop background, but no icons or taskbar, and a single box saying something about "Microsoft Outlook Express 6" and the mouse cursor is an hourglass. Waiting literally hours nothing has advanced. I can't be more specific about the message, since it's in Chinese, which my wife speaks, but can't understand the technical terms well enough to translate. However, I CAN boot into safe mode with networking, and in that can use Outlook Express, apparently normally. It's probably relevant that on the user selection screen under the user name it normally lists the number of new messages in the mailbox. How is that done, and how can it be deactivated so whatever is wrong with Outlook doesn't cripple the computer?

I've got an XP PC infected with some virus. I managed to get rid of it, but it left the system unable to boot. I've found too late that I should have made some changes to the registry before rebooting... So can I use a bootable XP install CDR to run regedit on an existing install? Exactly how do I access that? Or is there another downloadable ISO with tools that I can use to do this?

I'm setting up a PC for a family member. After spendng some time tweaking the setup, I want to create some other users. But if I do so, they all start with the inane MS defaults. Is there a way to clone an account, with all its settings, only the name different?

I've just found that Firefox 3 now stores its bookmarks in a file "places.sqlite" instead of the html file it used to use. Is there a way to import bookmarks from these files into Firefox? It can "restore" from such a file, but that loses any existing bookmarks and replaces them with the new ones. I've looked through Firefox extensions and didn't see one that did this. The only way I can think of is to export existing bookmarks as HTML, restore the new one, import the old ones (you can import HTML). Haven't tried this yet though. Seems a backward step to make the file format less malleable. Used to be able to just open the bookmark.html file in any browser. I don't care if it's "more efficient" if I can't easily use the **** thing.

Yes it does, which was why I was surprised at the apparent driver problem -- most of the suggestions on that front seem to relate more to Win98 issues than Win2k. But as I said, it was actually a voltage issue.

I feel a bit stupid -- it was a hardware problem. Checking out the error message I got when messing around in Device Manager: "A function driver was not specified for this device instance." I found some links saying that this could be due to insufficient USB power. And so I plugged the cable directly in the back USB socket, instead of via the extender, and it came up as a hard disk. Why the hell isn't there an "insufficient power" error in USB? There was a connection all right, the light on the cable was flashing, just I suppose not enough power to spin the disk up. Thanks to all, hope this thread helps someone in the future.

What about your DevicePath? Does 2000 machine use default still: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/314479/ HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\DevicePath: REG_EXPAND_SZ:%SystemRoot%\Inf Try navigate to %SystemRoot%\Inf manually. That's already %SystemRoot%\Inf I don't let Windows go online by itself to find drivers, it never finds anything anyway. Will try to run the apps mentioned by jaclaz when I get back on the XP machine.

I have a simple cable with a header that fits on an IDE hard disk to USB. When I plug this into an XP computer, it sees the hard disk. My Win2000 PC however asks for a driver. There wasn't any with the cable, any idea what would work? Googling for generic things like "USB, hard disk, driver, Win2000" gives 5 million hits, so I'm hoping human intelligence is more targetted.

I'm pretty sure this is coming from Windows, I think related to autorun (though I have deactivated that). Anyway, I'll see if any other opinions surface. The problem is due to my not following the spec, by putting the drive vertical instead of horizontal. If I turn the PC 90 degrees, the disk ejects easily enough. But it won't fit into my desk like that. It worked fine for a few months until it started to stick on eject. Once the disk is in it plays or burns fine. Maybe I'll try to lube it though: Where exactly?

I have mechanical problems with my DVD drive, it often takes many "ejects" before the tray actually comes out. So I have a script that runs a soft eject 100 times when I need to change disks. However, this is slowed down as after a failed eject, Windows (Win2k) thinks there is a new disk inserted, and spins it up to read it for several seconds, before stopping and allowing the next eject attempt. Is there a way I can disable this? Preferably reversible, but I could live with it being off permanently.