DonDamm

Sorry, but it sounds like you've picked up a trojan or virus which wants to use your account to send spam or report back home with information it's found. You'll need to do a full scan with something like Spyware Doctor or Spy Sweeper. You can get a free version of Spyware Doctor from Google Pack. Just uncheck eveything but Spyware Doctor and you've got it. Also, temporarily disconnect your internet connection, open Outlook and look in the Outbox and see what's there, if anything. If it were me, I'd just do a reinstall so I'd be sure nothing was lurking like a rootkit. Then I'd make a complete image of the system which can be restored in ten miniutes - much less time than any scan and more secure.

AbiWord comes to mind. http://www.abiword.com/ It's free and small, and does most all of what you'd want it to do. It's also easy to make portable.

Yes, Click the "Switch User" button, but DON'T actually switch to another user. Log Off instead. You want to arrive at either the Welcome screen or the classic logon screen as mentioned. If Administrator isn't on the normal Welcome screen, you have to hit Ctrl+Alt+Del TWO times for the classic screen to show.

If you follow the above advice of brucevangeorge and DigeratiPrime, you won't be sorry. First, do as suggested and make a 1:1 copy to another disk. then work on that disk. You probably corrupted the MFT or maybe even the partition table. That can be fixed and your data accessed. I fixed one of mine once using Acronis Disk Editor, but that can be very tricky and the language they use is occasionally misleading - probably lost in the translation. It is a really excellent program and they've made many improvements over the intervening years. They now have Disk Director Suite. You will have to experiment a bit with which program works best for you in the situation. I've found some work better than others and then later the reverse, so don't lose hope if one of the programs seems to fail for you. I had very good success with this program after failure with many others and even known good commercial ones like Get Data Back and Easy Recovery Pro... http://www.softperfect.com/products/filerecovery/ The program is free, too! Good luck. Let us know how it all turns out, okay?

Nicely done. I was going to suggest that you have the script calculate remaining space and then subtract the 6GB from it and use the result as the second or D parameter. You beat me to it! :^) Note that the formatting is the Quick mode and good for most situations. If you want to do a full format for some reason, you'd need to change the script.

I've used the catalog site before and find it cumbersome, to say the least. When you finally get the download, all the files are in separate folders and sometimes subfolders. This means a whole lot of extra work which wouldn't be necessary if they were all in one folder. I like WUD, have used the c't utility, but Autopatcher was pretty sleek. I imagine when Antonis gets all the kinks worked out, the new version will be splendid and not offensive to MS (may the lord forbid!). I would welcome an updated WUD, jcarle. Salud! :^)

Cable connection problem?

No worries! Sometimes it's thing really small things that can stump us!! :^) Fortunatley, this one was a dead easy "fix". Have fun with it!

Well, my first thought would be to say stay with Vista for now and just clean up and tweak the current install. the reason has more to do with the drivers. Do some research and see if you can locate all the necessary drivers for your particular model of laptop for XP. this is important because I know of some folks who tried to do the same thing with a Sony and ended up failing to find appropriate drivers for the hardware!!! Once you locate any necessary drivers, then you could switch to XP if you wanted to or feel you need to. In the meantime, you have enough RAM to run Vista quite well. Go through all the running services and shutdown those which are irrelevant to you. I'll bet you mostly are near a power source when running the laptop anyway, so the battery power time won't be a big issue. Just remember that in Vista it doesn't show a progress bar when it goes to Hibernate (apparently a feature - not a bug - haha). You'll probably find that it is easier having the same OS on both machines. One thing you can do is to buy yourself one of the new bigger laptop harddisks that run at 7,200rpm (most notebook disks run at 5400 or less), - Hitachi, Samsung, and Seagate have them - and clone the installation to it. Now, that will speed up your laptop and make it behave more like a destop, but it will have an effect on your battery life. I've found I prefer the faster disk in mine so I do that, but your mileage may differ... :^)

What ripken204 says. If your driver has the 1680 resolution and the nVidia control shows it, then your in like flint! My radeon card doesnt' natively support that resolution, so if I want it Ill have to insert it. the card is capable of it because it can handle a 1920 resolution without a hitch. PowerStrip is just a handy utility for those times when you have a monitor that doesn't match your video card. Case in point: I built a machine for a friend the summer before last and used a Gigabyte fanless 1650 series video card (ATI based). Later he bought a 1440 res monitor and then decided he wanted a 22" one with 1680. Neither of those resolutions were available on the card, so I inserted them with PowerStrip. It worked a charm. The only drawback is that if he needs to reinstall, he'll have to do it over again and I don't think he'll be able to manage by himself. I imaged the setup for him, though, so he should be okay.

@brucevangeorge sorry for the long delay in getting back to you. I'm not sure what question you are asking concerning dual inputs. Many many cards have dual outputs these days, but afaik that is just a software function relative to the card. The resolution is a function of the available memory (256MB, 512, etc) and the driver. That's why Power Strip is so brilliant. It allows you to do in Windows with graphic cards what you can do a bit more easily in linux - that is adjust the resolution. My trusty 19" Samsung 192T has two inputs and my Radeon 9600 has two outputs. The ATI driver doesn't include a 1680x1050 resolution, but the card is capable of it because it can handle a 1920x1200 one. By inserting the resolution into the driver with PS I can run a 22" monitor at native resolution which I have done for testing a friend's monitor. As noted it is important to run LCD monitors at their native resolution to get the best look. Otherwise all kinds of fuzzy things creep in!

That's great news! I like the idea of not duping files, but being able to keep more than one image in a single file. What I have investigated about ImageX I like. I am encouraged. Thanks. As with all things, I would urge Lonesome21 to try out making and image and then testing it out on a separate hard disk to make sure it works and that he feels comfortable with the process. If you go to the trouble of making a recovery solution, you reallly need to know that it will work when/if the time comes!! :^)

The answer to yoour question is yes. And it has been answered!! Ghost is one of the recommendations. ImageX is for Vista as far as I know and I don't know if it works well for XP. It might. Another program that works very well and I think is a bit easier to use than Ghost in some ways is True Image by Acronis. It has certain advantages, but does basically the same thing as Ghost and Drive Image. Personally, I use a tiny program called BootIt NG by TerabyteUnlimited.com. XYou don't need to buy it to try it out and you don't need to install it to use it. It is pretty "geeky" so I don't recommend it to most, but it is by far the fastest and most reliable one I've ever come across. It does it's magic usually in under 10 minutes!!! Even with 6+GB. In fact, making regular images of your system keeping a basic, and two known good working ones is great peace of mind. If anything goes wrong, you can just slap the last good working image on in ten minutes and you're back up and running. It beats re-installing by a mile!! Do a little research and try a couple of them and see how you like them. There#s no harm in trying more than one.

The issue seems to be the lack information. His machine seemed to be taking a long time and wasn't sure if things were working as they should. I agree. It was silly of them to remove the progress bar. I'm speculating a bit here, but I believe the issue of taking a long time has a lot to do with the amount of RAM. Under XP most folks did fine with 256-512 of RAM. Hibernate proceeded rapidly under these conditions. Now in Vista it is quite common for folks to have 2GB. Vista will run in 1GB, but my experience is that it really likes 2GB. Now, given the fact that almost all laptops have hard disks running at the slower 5400rpm (some even at 4200rpm), when you start to hibernate, you are dumping all 2GB of RAM into a file on the hard disk. Even my desktop server running Server 2003 with 2.5GB takes way way much longer than my HP laptop with 1GB. It doesn't seem to be linear either. Anyway, the combination of the two things amy make it seem like it is taking longer than it should. I've pestered MS about that screen among many other things, but they don't pay any attention to me. Afterall, I' just an EU...... lol

If you use Outlook, then Word is loaded when you open it and runs in the background. Check Task Manager and see if Word is running. If it is, then it will load very quickly. Ubuntu is a great OS and the team they have working on it is incredible. They are responsnive to problems and have done an amazing job over the last 18+ months. As a minority OS there will always be some driver issues with some hardware. One of the several machines I have has been running Ubuntu flawlessly for amny months now. I use it for downloading and other things. I like µtorrent which is only written for Windows32 so.... I use it under Wine! If Verizon requires you ro run some software only for windows, you could run it under Wine. Already mentioned is running a VM with XP installed in it, but that requires a bit more memory set aside and takes longer to setup. Side note: a VM running Windows under linux takes way fewwer system resources than running native! This is particularly true for Vista which will use all the memory you have and then some... :^)

It sounds like something went awry with your install. do you have the version which checks if you've a legitimate copy of Windows, or the newer released version which doesn't check? I'd consider removing the installation through the Add and Remove Programs applet in Control Panel and then reinstalling with the latest version. While you can choose a bit how you want the tabs to behave, by default they appear, so you should be seeing them. When you do get it sorted, rememgber to make an image of your complete installation. That way if anzthing comes up in the future, it will be easy to return to a known good point.

Hmmm. Let's see. Yes, It's possible. First realize that there are usually two instances of notepad.exe in Windows. Don't ask me why, but there are. The first is under C:\Windows\ (usually capitalized for some reason) and the second under C:\Windows\System32\ getting rid of one of them won't get rid of it and as noted it isn't a good idea anyway. To make Notepad++ or Notepad2 the default, just right click on any text file and choose Open With... , and then at he bottom click on Choose Program... . In the next dialog box highlight the one you want as default and then make sure the box that says Always use this program to open this file type is checked (I'm paraphrasing here as I'm working on a German machine!). This will set your chosen program to the default. By the way, I use Notepad++ regularly and it really is a super program and free!! It color codes html and deals with a wide range of formats. It has tabs and can hold many pages open simultaneously and even will remember what you had open last and open with it if you want. Good program. Small, fast, and well thought out. Recommended. Notepad2 is good, too.

Cold is generally good. If you value your data, then always make a back up before it crashes. The quickest way to do this for future reference is to make an image of the entire disk and save that somewhere else. Then you can always retrieve data if you really need it. A power outage can indeed play havoc with the disk corruption and even the electrical control board on the drive itself. That may not be the case here, but you can't be sure without testing, so save your data first, then repair. Spin Rite is excellent for for a disk in your situation and wilol identify any bad sectors. It is like Scan Disk on steriods. It is slow, though, so set it to go overnight. If you can read data, then your partition table is probably okay. What happens to older disks is that the magnetic domains in some areas become a bit weaker and when the signals are right near the borderline, it becomes difficult for the drive to distinguish between a 1 or a 0. Those signals generate scan errors and the bad sectors are usually marked and avoided. As a disk ages, more and more of those can show up. ScanDisk and other utilities will mark these and then activate replacement sectors from an unused part of the disk. Most of this is transparent to the user until the errors become too numerous and the "spare" sectors too few. Also, if the FAT is corrupted just a little, some of the file bits may have become lost or crosslinked. ScanDisk will find these and collect them into one file. Usually it is useless. If it's a five year-old disk I'm guessing it is no more than maybe 40GB. A brand spanking new 500GB Samsung will cost you no more than about US$80-90. I'd spring for a new disk and relegate this one to temp duty and not for important data. Good luck with it!

Just a note to say thank you again! The different languages have really come in handy and I really appreciate your efforts. Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to you :^)

If the newest driver for your card doesn't have the resolution you want (or need), you can add it yourself with a brilliant application called Power Strip (http://www.entechtaiwan.com/util/ps.shtm). Remember though that while it may work, you may also find that it stresses your card to the max. Since 256MB and even 512MB cards are available for around $80 that are fanless, you might consider the wisdom of fiddling with it. If you are going to spepnd the money on a decent display (and you should as you only have one pair of eyes and it is your primary interface), I'd get a decent card to match it. If you ever want to run aero in Vista either native or in VM, or run several windows at the same time and do stuff in the background (torrents, etc), you'll want the power of the newer cards available. I still use an old trusty 32MB Matrox in a test machine and a 128MB ATI in my curent workstation and both are adequate to the tasks I ask, but the moment I stress either of them it becomes obvious, Neither of them have the wide screen resolutions either. Check out Power Strip for now if the newest driver doesn't offer the resolution, but think about shopping for a new card! :^)

The sidebar is ..... annoying. I find I just turn it off - permanently. They didn't configure it for the taskbar on top and that's where I like it, too. I find the sidebar just gets in the way. Best advice? Turn it off.

You didn't mention the video card, but remember that 160w is reserved for the CPU. That's why in a dual processor system you'll see the specs top out at 80w per processor! Subtract that from the rating of the psu you're considering and what's left is what you have for the video card(s) and the drives. If you are a big gamer and have 2 of those 8800GTS cards, expect about 200+w for them. Low level cards draw about 40w and the rest in between. Your drives draw a big chunk (50+w) each on startup and this is what often stresses a psu over time. Drive startups can now be staggered with some drives to help with this, but don't count on it. If you're not running dual vid cards, then jcarle's recommendation is a good one. Look at SeaSonic, too. You'll also find names like Enermax will deliver very good performance, but always check where it's made. Antec used to have really good ones and then they farmed out the manufacturer and the quality went down.

I think you're right. Conner came out with a 2GB model in the summer of 1995. Most machines were delivered then with 4MB of RAM and somewhere between 200 and 500MB. Remember that many bioses then couldn't handle more than 512MB. I bought a Micron P133 with 32MB RAM and a 2GB platter in August 1995. I'm pretty sure 5GB wasn't available until at least a year or two later. No mattter. The comparison is still valid. I was just looking at a Toshiba laptop the other day with 64GB and no hard disk! Way too much money for the thing (~3000), but then I heard I could order one of those "laptops for the world" for 290 which would include........64GB of flash memory!!! It seems that that project is showing how little the technology really costs. Think of it. A laptop which really only does weigh in at a pound or two! What a thought!!! lol

By all means, get rid of the Trial version asap. Use the Programs and Features in Control Panel to see what's installed and to remove things. first take out the trial software and then see if that helps. If not, then remove it entirely and reinstall. You should have no trouble with activation, and if you do, call MS and just explain what you did and they'll get you activated again.

If this is the only hard drive you have and the only computer you have, then you will not be able to do what you want on that machine without a complete reformat and install. This is because Windows will prevent you from deleting the system partition which you state is about 180GB. If you are not afraid of doiing a new install, then you can certainly use the built in utility in Windows to make the partitions you want. Using the install disk you would choose to do a new install of Windows and then when it asks you where you want to install it you would delete the current 180GB partition and then create a new one, but this time set the size at 60GB. Then create two more of the approximate 70GB and 50GB that you also want, and then choose the 60GB partition as the place to install Windows. Then say yes to formatting NTFS (a quick format is all that's necessary and it will go very much faster). Once all is done you can access the Disk Manager by right clicking MyComputer and choosing Manage | Disk Management. It will show you the three partitions and you can then format the two newer ones there. As for changing the size later, you can only extend an existinig partition with the Windows utility and only if you have unallocated space. Mostly I don't recommend this (also it is only with the newer version of diskpart.exe which didn't come with the original XP, but was in Server 2003). If you want to later change the size of any partition, I'd recommend a third party utility like those mentioned, Acronis, GPartEd (free), Partition Commander, or the old standby Partition Magic.