bonestonne

i think the closest you could get to having something similar to Flashblock would be getting firefox and using it. honestly. i know that you can disable a lot of the popups caused by websites by disabling the Messenger Service in windows. however, IE itself has no plugins that i'm aware of or could see in a google search. maybe someone knows of one thats more under the carpet, but i doubt it, as IE isn't the most secure or stable of browsers.

the first time i cracked open my computer was when i found out my front USB ports didn't work on my old HP 7915. turns out the cable for that USB port wasn't even seated properly on the motherboard, instead of being in contact with all pins, one pin was holding up the bunch...therefore no data could transfer whatsoever. you may want to look into that because when a computer is made, its sometimes done sloppily and as fast as possible, which is why so many parts have such a short lifespan. this computer i'm using now isn't even 4 years old, the hard drive crapped out [100GB WD] and now the RAM and original Mobo are gone...for several reasons, poor living quarters, lack of user service, and design...if a company had the same desires that many DIY'ers have, computers would be much more quality oriented...its all about cheap quick and useable... moral of the rant, check your inards before anything else.

if you have other RAM to check, that would be something to work on very fast. if not the RAM then you should check the PSU by shorting out the green wire with any ground wire, and that will tell you if the PSU is working. i think it might be the RAM.

i think i've only seen one laptop without s-video...but it was fugly and old.

excuse my oldschoolness, but i have no computers that use DDR, thus my lack of it has caused the inability to test it. soon i may have a stick to use to test it, but no promises. my newest computer is an Athlon 2200 system that uses SD-RAM...if i had DDR ram i would have at least a 2ghz CPU... don't blame me, blame my parents for having the philosophy of "what you have is good enough, you don't need another computer"

Ok, heres how my friend caused the trajic death of his computer. http://i55.photobucket.com/albums/g142/bon...er/IMG_0898.jpg my friend was troubleshooting his computer i suppose. See anything wrong yet? most people who've built there own computer should. if you haven't, this picture may mean nothing to you. What does happen when you insert RAM backwards in the slot? is a question some n00bs may ask. the answer: you fry your ram and your motherboard. http://i55.photobucket.com/albums/g142/bon...er/IMG_0899.jpg blurry, but gets the point across. you see the notch on the RAM, you don't see it in the same spot on the board do you? heres all i have to say: in doing this, you lose all chance at getting your board to work again. the other slot may work, however i have no way to test it, as his only stick of DDR ram is now fried. never push the power button unless your RAM is securely seated properly and both clips are holding it in place. the only parts easily taken from the system that are still good are his optical drives [CD-RW, DVD] his hard drive, his Visiontek Radeon 9200, his SB Live, processor, heatsink/fan, and PSU. the case is marginal for being useful. can i rebuild the system? well, maybe. the closest i can come is a system with SD RAM, no firewire, no USB 2.0, and no DVD drive, and a PSU that puts out 100W less than what he had. at this point, the question is whats cheaper, a new system, or a rebuilt system. and when you work it out, for the problems source, neither. comments are welcome, my friend will get the news tonight after i help another friend build their C2D rig, 2.4ghz C2D, 2gb DDR, 300GB SATA-I, X-Fi, DVD+/-RW. if i do end up rebuilding his system, it wont be as good, and it'll cost him for this job, the last time i fixed the computer i did it free.

look around for S-Video to RCA cables, those are most common, and your laptop should have an S-Video out. if not, there may be a VGA to RCA cable, although no bets, i've never seen one.

my server has hardly any room, the hard drives that would help me with it for its job are beyond out of my price range. 320GB ultra2 SCSI 15kRPM drives...last time i looked, between 400 and 600...more than what i could shell out. for now its got a single 40, it may get another, but my external is my main source of storage. 733mhz with 128mb of ram will run decently, as long as its PC100 or PC133 ram. the NAS you have with the 1ghz CPUs, the only thing that kept me away from them was the lack of L2 cache, which is what my computers always need. i use my computers to help me DJ, whichever one is best for the situation, one looks good, one is very powerful, and the other is an AMD, small and fast, but hot. so whichever suites the event goes. if theres a problem with storage size, you could always get a PCI IDE adapter, those normally have a higher limit than onboard, sometimes even faster. i use Windows 2k every now and then, its a very nice OS...i think that as long as you don't have any excessively large partitions, it should work fine. i used 2k on a 40GB drive, it would most likely work all the way to 80GB i think, my pentium 4 had ME on a 60 gig drive when it was made, so 2k should be able to handle about that much. i'd say that if anything, maybe have another 128mb of ram if possible, because if multiple people access it at once, you don't want it to get swamped.

as for it being hard drive, two of my computers hang right after post before actually getting to the windows boot screen...its most likely the bootsector of the hard drive, the cable, or the hard drive on its way out. the computer may not be reading the boot sector far enough to make it all the way, have you tried replacing the ribbon cable on the PATA drive? that would be what i see as causing the problem, also, don't leave external drives plugged in and switched off [if they have a switch] as that can cause a problem with a long boot time.

its more than just the music, its the profit margin...i don't want to be out of the water, with one buyer who then makes copies for everyone else.

Ok, so yesterday evening i recorded my schools rock show. It was 5 bands, and when i finished editing the 3 hours of audio, splitting it into tracks, and remastering them as best i could, i've come down to one last question. How can i protect the CDs when they're sold? my sister told me i can copy protect CDs with Nero, which i suppose is good enough, but i'd like to make sure that it can't be broken, easily at least. it'll will likely be 3 CDs of music burned, i have 53 tracks between songs and segways. my first protection from copying files will be pre-orders. i'm not handing out a CD if someone hands my $15, as thats my current price for it, i still need to consult the bands about better prices for the CDs, as its their work, however, as i edited the whole thing myself, i think i deserve my own say, and i'm also collecting a small commision of the profit from the money, as i'll be burning it, and i'm the only person who has a copy of it at the moment. i need software thats hopefully free or easy to find in a store, as i don't want to fuddle around with online orders of software. suggestions are much appreciated, as it is mainly to keep myself in check, and keep the music in legal flow. being part of the music industry, i'm against pirating, and the effect of pirating one of these CDs could be destroying windows for all i care, if it hits limewire, i'm the one in trouble, i recorded it, i'll be distributing it. i'm well aware of how easily some encryptions are broken, and i only hope that i get a good one. thanks in advanced, from me and the bands involved, as keeping it legal is the most important thing.

there could be an issue where you can only partition a set size of the drive...however i think thats a rare thing, shouldn't happen. I have a Pentium II server/workstation that i revamped to have Pentium IIIs...runs a 40GB drive, and it had used an 80GB drive once or twice. the board is about 9 years old, so i'm not sure if 80gigs in a single partition was even possible back then, but it worked...i'm sure that as long as it runs windows 2k or XP you'll be fine...if its got slower processors, like 450 or lower, you may want to slipstream XP with nLite, it helped my rig [stats in the sig]. you can also find tools around here to give you 32bit icons and such... i see nothing against it, if theres a 750GB drive, i could only assume that theres a place for it anywhere. if all else fails, you could use an idea i had a while ago that i haven't had the money to carry out. have a smaller drive boot, and have the rest go USB with IDE>USB cables, they'll be seen as external drives, so you could just have them internally with the cables going into USB ports that could be internally mounted. unless i'm mistake, external drives can have infinite size, the only restriction would be if you're using a 32bit OS vs a 64bit OS. not only would the USB help you, it would work faster than most onboard IDE of older computers. my S2DGU has 33mb/s transer rate on the IDE channels, USB 2.0 is faster than that. i'm sure it could be argued, but i don't see how it wouldn't work. i've gotta hit the hay, if i run into something about it tomorrow i'll post it...normally the board just restricts PnP sizes, however the OS can override that, like you said. in theory it could work...i can borrow my dads 160GB drive and put it in my server to test the theory tomorrow night.

i haven't touched Deamon Tools since the beta Vista 5536...only used Deamon because it wouldn't burn for balls... atapi only stood out because if you look at an optical drive, or even in BIOS, it refers to all optical drives as Atapi CDROM glad it helped you, my dad would think knowledge like that is useless.

memory dump or not atapi.sys has something to do with an optical drive...could be on the fritz with a bad cable, maybe even driver issues.

remove the battery for at least an hour i think you're confusing something else with BIOS, you don't need to have a hard drive to get into BIOS..all you need is power, video and a keyboard. the board might be dead, or its just having an issue without the soundcard. is there a place to connect the monitor on the motherboard itself, or do you need to use a graphics card?

i cant say much other than that recently happened to me, there was a contact missing from a DIMM slot. thats the end of that. along with the vendor of choice, what would be more important from this system, energy efficiency or performance. not only that, but what will it be used mainly for, and what would it do once in a while?

if you have another computer, you could try extracting the files from the CD and creating a new copy of it. yes, technically it is illegal to make a copy, however, CD-RW's make it possible to 'destroy' the evidence when done. i'm not endorsing the making of copies, but my windows Server 2k3 CD had to be backed up somehow..that was the only way. now its just an ISO on the external drive. my cd was slid along my desk across a nail point that pokes up, giving a deep scratch on the data side of the CD, not the plastic bottom.

i've run into this problem before, and its not usually the OS, try going into BIOS and going through the menus and looking for Plug N Play Aware OS, sometimes its called USB Enable....something like that may be disabled, you can try that, thats the only reason i can think of that that computer wouldn't be recognizing the printer. have you tried other USB devices, or is the printer the only one?

but XP is so much nicer than vista, whats the point of vista anyway? blowing 450 to get nice graphics? blow 3 hours and install linux, beryl, 3d desktop, and a few others [i can't remember everything offhand] and you'll be able to do stuff windows can only dream of, such as the 3d cube, 4 seperate desktops... vista isn't good enough to be a useful OS yet. at least in my opinion.

hm, you know, i've had that problem too. if the CD isn't bootable, in some cases, it doesn't work at all. i have a Darwin CD from a while ago, Darwin is a version of Mac that was recoded to work on anything, although the program was shut down because they didn't reach their goals in 6 months... basically, if theres no boot sector for the CD, it may not boot for anything. try maybe removing the HDD from the boot device list if possible, i have an Amibios, and it allows me to do that, so that would force the computer to boot like that, although i'm not sure how well it would work, i've never do it. that should be bootable, as a lot of linux kernals are used to fix computers...do you have an IDE drive you can use? SCSI isn't the best mix for some things..i had a lot of trouble getting SCSI to work with this computer, i ended up giving up the battle, but i recently found the drivers, so i may try again.

my problem is finding the room for the PSU. i love it, but its so big. not to mention its quiet honestly as wide as my current case. also, both of the 300w packs are on all the time, but technically i can remove one if needed. if someone could found like a really budget case that could fit it, i may go and use it, but its really heavy too. the system is basically my portable one as i don't have a media center [i've built a few at my school, its a DVD player, VCR, tape deck, CD player, EQ, and in one case, a computer thats all in a rack mount, put on wheels, and used whenever needed]. its also my most versatile system [kinda sad] it has the most RAM, in fact, if you took all the RAM in all the other computers in my house that are used daily, its got 128mb less RAM in it. 5 systems, each with 256MB of RAM, or my dual system with 1152MB. new CPUs on the way, maybe more ram soon too. its just the size and weight. i'll be recording the rock concert, however, with something thats come up recently that may be hard to do. i have seen cases that fit the PSU, but they're massive and the cases just empty are heavy. i'm not about to get rid of the PSU though, once i get my AMD system up, that will be what i cart around, and i'll have less of a hard time giving the Xeons a permanent place. not to mention cost...buying the new CPUs for my system has brought me down to nothing until allowance time...being in highschool makes this kinda hard, as i have little time for myself, much less a job, between having a radio show, being on tech and having homework. i would love to use the xeons and have them in a similar setup as they were put in back when they were made, but right now its too hard.

i do similar things with my computer having multiple bootable drives. glad to have helped.

if you aren't booting off one, typically that would NOT be the drive labeled C: you could go into my computer, right click on the other drive, and click on format, however its better to use a partitioning tool, as there will be a much better job, and you'd be able to utilize maximum possible space.

ok...i guess i spoke too soon on what happened last night. the PSU is now faithfully chugging away upstairs without a hiccup. before i get too into it, yes, i'll still be looking for a new PSU if the 700mhz CPUs run unstably with only 300W. as for the problem, i found a short in all the wiring. i have pretty bad pics, but i'm glad i found it. http://i55.photobucket.com/albums/g142/bon...er/IMG_0881.jpg the first picture is of "The Troubleshooter" which is my 600W hot swappable dual power supply. this was what was given to me to run the system however, at 600W, not to mention its size, it will take a good amount of power...also being a dual pack, it takes twice the power the run. it was at this point in time where i realized, if that thing wont start with just the fans plugged in, theres a problem. "The Troubleshooter" as i call it is a very nice PSU for what it does, however, its massive size, and its weight at 12 pounds makes it somewhat difficult to use. When it doesn't start, theres a problem. So I continued on unplugging things. Well, I go and I unplug a 60mm fan that i have on the lower CPU's heatsink to cool it as possible, as its not in direct airflow. Well, thats where i found the problem. When I unplugged it, i noticed that one of the ground leads was seated kind of low. Well, not kind of, it was really low. It turns out that the barbs that keep it from sliding around were bent. How this happened, I can't give any explanation, i don't mess with the fans unless i have to. http://i55.photobucket.com/albums/g142/bon...er/IMG_0882.jpg Theres where you see theres obviously a problem...the ground wire had the freedom to come all the way out of the plug without any force. No, this didn't make me happy, the fan thats on that wire is very important. and very hard to replace. Its a Cooler Master Rifle, from maybe 2002. You can find fans almost exactly like it on some new AMD coolers. http://i55.photobucket.com/albums/g142/bon...er/IMG_0883.jpg This is where you see that I'm sitting on the floor, with a few connectors out of the picture, and a small jeweler's flathead screwdriver. I had successfully and safely removed the other pins from both connectors, thus leaving me with 4 wires with 2 wires that the fan was connected to. Well, I'd spent the next hour blasting heavy metal to drown out the swearing of me poking myself with that screwdriver [it really did hurt, the thing is sharp] and creating a way to power the fan. http://i55.photobucket.com/albums/g142/bon...er/IMG_0884.jpg Thats basically where i finished. Well, halfway. Turns out the first time I went to test this i forgot to plug in the PSU, so there was a little more swearing to accompany the ever louder heavy metal. Well, after 2 hours, the system is back up and running. and its actually much cooler. i need to find a way to cool CPU #2, but CPU #1 is much cooler than it had been with just the thermal pad on it. CPU #1 is now running with an internal temp of 49C and a Heatsink temp of 26C, CPU #2 isn't so lucky, running with an internal temp of 61, and a Heatsink temp of 28C. After plenty of swearing after finding out the problem was with possibly the most important fan in the system, i'd managed to get everything working again. Luckily I don't have to buy a new PSU just yet, and I'll be able to record my radio show on Wednesday. Sadly i wont get my new processors until Thursday. As long as the system works. Thanks to Zxian for the help..next time I aim to start a PSU with a paperclip, everythings getting unplugged.

i understand what you're aiming for, but i've only helped my sister replace existing speakers...not add any... if you were to add more without loosing anything, try wiring in series rather than in parallel. or a concept like that, you may find it much easier.