Andromeda43

When is a dead video card really NOT dead? The Living Dead? The answer to that question may just be: "When it's just dirty". Today, my own video card just totally wigged out on me while I was working a forum on the internet. My mouse started bleeding all over the screen. Everyplace I moved it, there were little red dots. It was horrible. I though my resident poltergeist was playing a little Halloween prank on me. When I tried to reboot the system to clear up the problem, my PC just beeped one long beep and refused to boot. NO joy in mudville! I removed the old video card and installed a new one I had sitting on the shelf. The system booted up without a hitch. My next step would raise the hair on most readers. That's OK since this is, after all, Halloween. I took the failed Video Card to the kitchen sink and scrubbed it thoroughly with hot water and Dawn dishwashing detergent. I really concentrated on the ram chips. (there was no cooling fan on this particular card) I did remove the ROM chip which was socketed. After scrubbing and rinsing the card very well with warm water, I rinsed it again very thoroughly with denatured alcohol and then set it out in the afternoon sun to dry. About three hours later, with the card now nice and dry, I reinstalled it in my PC. With one hand on the main Power Switch, I booted the system. The familiar little single Beep was a very welcome and Happy sound. Seeing video coming up on my monitor was equally nice. That was several hours ago and my computer is still running great. No more video problems. My mouse pointer isn't bleeding all over the screen any more! I've used that cleaning technique many times to reclaim an ailing ram stick, but this is the first time I've used it on a video card. (I'll never write off a ram stick without washing it first.) Just a little dirt between the contacts of those memory chips can cause memory errors. I hope this can help someone,,,,,somewhere,,,,,Someday. Happy Halloween everyone, Andromeda43

In a word: "NO"! When they say Windows 98/SE, that's exactly what they mean. SE is as much a totally different os from old 98 as XP is. Flash drives that plug into USB ports just require much more support than is built into old 98. Get yourself an SE upgrade disk and bring your system up to 98/SE. You'll be very glad you did. I do this all the time. Still you may need drivers from the flash drive manufacturer. This is what happened to me with my SanDisk Micro. Once I had the drivers downloaded from SanDisk, I installed them on the old PC and rebooted, then my Flash Drive worked without a hitch. Good Luck, Andromeda43

Scandisk and Defrag are Two programs that want full access to the hard drive with NO other program trying to access it. ALWAYS, shut down all running programs before running those two programs. And DO a defrag at least once a week to keep your hard drive running smoothly. If you want a nice, simple little program to help you keep your hard drive clean of junk, download Hoover.bat Here. Save it to your desktop and run it once a week before you do your Defrag. Your computer will love you for it. Andromeda43

I'm not saying that anyone in his/her right mind should upgrade from 98 or 98/SE to XP, but if for some weird reason he/she has to.....for God's sake, leave the HD in FAT-32 mode. Just use an XP Upgrade CD and keep your old FAT-32 hard drive.....so if you need to get into your files, you can do it with a simple Windows 98 boot floppy....Great for removing viurses, spyware or just doing drive maintenance. Unknown to most of the world, XP will run just fine on the FAT-32 file structure. Some even say it runs faster. I won't go there..... I have six PC's that will run and they all have Windows 98/SE on them,,,,except this one. That's because I had to learn XP for my computer business. I'm able to tweak out 98/SE so it runs quite well, thank you. I'm in full support of anyone who wants to keep their ol' 98, 98/SE. Cheers, Andromeda43

Update servers having technical difficulties... Posted by: rdsok - Moderator (IP Logged) Date: October 21, 2005 01:27AM Currently the AVG 7 Free update servers are having technical problems and will be resolved as soon as possible. Your AVG will still provide you the protection you need, they just won't be able to update normally and the icon in the system tray will likely turn from the normal colors to the black and white indicating a problem. If needed, you may update manually even though this isn't recommended. Note.. the servers that supply the manual updates have been getting overloaded since the automatic servers are having problems... be patient and you will eventually get in. We will remove this notice as soon as we see the updates working again. We (the Moderator's) will likely not respond to questions concerning this since there is nothing else that they can do about this until the situation is resolved. Feel free to discuss this as you wish.

--- AVG Anti-Virus Update --- (10/20/2005) ******************************** ** AVG Anti-Virus 7.0 ** ******************************** --- information about Update --- Update Summary: Grisoft announces the release of AVG Anti-Virus 7.1, the latest version of its award-winning AVG Anti-Virus software. All current AVG customers will able to download the upgrade to the new 7.1 version through the standard update process. To ensure that all customers are able to take advantage of the full functionality offered by AVG 7.1 as soon as possible, the upgrade will be available as two updates: a "Recommended Update" available today, which will include program components, and a second update available on Monday, October 24, which will include additional components. Among the most important new features you will find * Detection of potentially unwanted applications. * Support for Windows XP 64-bit Edition * Additional configuration options for the AVG Resident Shield * Improved support for screen reader programs * Further reduction of update package size * Improved automatic configuration wizard for the AVG Firewall * And more - extended email scanning options, additional event history logging, extended system area test options AVG Anti-Virus currently protects over 25 million computers worldwide. Update your AVG Anti-Virus 7.0 using one of the following methods: - Use the Update feature in AVG Anti-Virus 7.0 to perform your update - select "Internet", and AVG will prompt you with the update files appropriate for your installation. - Use the appropriate link from below to download the Update file to your hard drive. Then access the Update feature in AVG Anti-Virus 7.0 - select "Folder" and indicate the location of the Update file which you have downloaded. Update file for all Program versions (size 2262218 bytes): http://www.grisoft.cz/softw/70/update/u7fwf360w1.bin Update file for all Program versions (size 6742409 bytes): http://www.grisoft.cz/softw/70/update/u7f360w0.bin Update file for all Program versions (size 2607067 bytes): http://www.grisoft.cz/softw/70/update/u7lngextf359w1.bin Update file for all Program versions (size 1334408 bytes): http://www.grisoft.cz/softw/70/update/u7hlpf359w1.bin All available Update files, including previous versions, may be found at the following link: http://www.grisoft.com/update/index.php?lng=com -- GRISOFT

Try System Restore and go back a day. Next time, shut down ALL running software before installing anything new. Cheers,

Sometimes an "Upgrade" will de-install itself. If that's not possible, then a cold install of the previous OS would be in order. You might not have to reformat the drive, but at least delete the windows folder. Good Luck, Andromeda

Big bananas? You mean the two biggest P.O.C.'s on the planet? All they do, and they do it very well, is load down your system with superfluous BS. This thread is devoted to those who want to 'clean up' their PC's....and getting rid of BS like the two above mentioned programs is the best place to start. Sorry, if I come off here a bit on the hard side....but I fight this battle every day in my own Computer business. Every day I take Norton or McAfee off of a customer's PC, with their blessings, and replace them with FREE software that actually does a much better job. y'all have a great day now, y'hear? Andromeda

Sometimes it's called a "Y" connector. I have one here.....got it at 'Radio Shack'. Some speaker systems have a headphone jack right on the master speaker. Plugging in a headphone shuts off the speakers. You may just want to get a better speaker system that has that feature. Good Luck, Andromeda

Sounds like a very simple fix to me. 1. Stop using Spyware Dr. 2. Stop using screen savers. At best, they are INVASIVE. 3. Get some more ram. Double what you've got is just about enough for your CPU to run XP without choking.

Hardware Guy,,,,, What is the diff. between SATA and SATA2?

Bragging rights! They don't get paid for doing it, but it gives them bragging rights with their peers. There is now a virus war going on between authors. One guy will write a virus to kill another guy's virus and replace it with his own. The guy who can write the most impervious virus, is for a time the Alpha Male. It's just a big game to those guys and they don't give a hoot, how many people they hurt in the process. The "Game" is everything.

I've lived it! I sure don't need to read about it! But thanks for the links, for those who havn't been where I've been. Blessings, Andromeda43

Why are we belaboring trying to install an out of date OS on brand new hardware? It's just going to be one driver hassle over something else. Why not just install Windows XP and be done with it? Just curious, that's all. Andromeda43

Ha Ha Ha! Bit by the ol' Norton bug, eh? I see this all the time. It doesn't make a lot of difference whether you properly uninstall Norton or not. It still leaves c.r.a.p. like that behind. At that error message just press any key and the program will continue. Write down the file names if it give you more than one error. Then after windows has booted up, go into 'Regedit' and do a search for the offending file name...SYMEVNT.386 is a real common one. Anyway, find the file and delete the key that it's in. Press F3 to continue the search to the end of the registry. When Search tells you it's done, exit Regedit and reboot your PC . The problem should be gone. Make sure that in MSCONFIG all the Symantec programs are DE-Selected. That sould do it, Andromeda43

Every first year computer student knows about the ol' Windows "Memory Leak". When you close any program in 98 (for instance) all the ram that the program was using NEVER goes back into the available ram list. As time goes by and you open and close programs, the available memory will eventually go down to zero. Don't believe me? Then run a memory manager like "MemTurbo" or "WinSystem" and you'll see exactly what I'm talking about. WinSystem, will give you a little real time monitor to show you exactly how much ram you have available at any moment....kind of like a memory thermometer. It can be quite an eye opener. I use it often to show a customer just how little ram they actually have after the OS and all their TSR's finish loading. You can easily download "WinSystem" from the internet. It's freeware. [some virus also took on the same name, so if you Google for it, you'll get page after page of virus info. Sorry bout dat!] I can email it to anyone needing it....just PM me. The only way to run a computer non-stop with 98, 98SE or ME, is to run a memory optimizer that frees up unused memory every so often, like MemTurbo. Just shutting down the PC when not using it is probably the best way. Cheers, Andromeda43

You need a disk copy program like Norton's Ghost, or "Disk Copy", Acronis, etc. They all copy everything down to the last bit of info on the old HD including the boot sector. Which program to use, depends on whether you're using FAT-32 or NTFS for your hard drive structure. With a FAT-32 drive, its so simple using Ghost on a boot floppy. Cheers,

When ever possible, burn ALL data to a CD or DVD and give the disk to the customer. Don't try to select just this data or that data,,,get it ALL. Then the customer has a permanent record, so that if their NEW DELL shoots craps, they still have a copy of their valuable data files. I'm preparing to do this soon for one of my own customers. I've had enough experience with Dell's to know that the data from her old PC, which she's going to give away to a Katrina survivor, needs to be safely on a CD before we try to copy it to her new Dell. Dell's far eastern computer support has one basic solution for all problems......RE-Format and install the Restore CD. Boy, does that ever do a number on data files! Good Luck, Andromeda43

There are two words that do NOT work well together. That would be "Computer" and "Lazy". If you're going to work on your own computer, then you can't be lazy. There are just too many things that have to be done by the numbers or you're going to be in deep sh**! A truly lazy person will want to do it right and the most efficient way the first time so they don't have to go back and do it again. Maybe you've not learned this yet. I learned it over 25 years ago. Doing things by the numbers is much more critical now with Win XP than it was then with DOS. Make just one mistake with XP and it will ruin your day! Good Luck, Andromeda43

I tried MS Paint many years ago. It was lame and looked and acted like a kid's toy. I haven't tried it since. Did they improve it maybe?

even in not so gut englich, that would indicate to me that you ran ONLY ONE anti-spyware program. (?) BIG MISTAKE! NO One anti-spyware program will find and remove all the spyware on your PC. You need at least three to be comparatively (mostly) safe. My personal choice is: AdAware SE/Personal Spybot Search & Destroy Spyware Blaster You can add Microsoft's Anti-Spy for an additional layer of protection. It can also run a very good active scanner, to prevent spyware from ever getting on your PC. All the above programs are 100% FREE, so there is NO reason NOT to use them. As with all security programs.....they are totally worthless if not properly set up and kept updated on a regular (daily?) basis. Good Luck, Andromeda43

Gee, I wish I knew what you're talking about! What's "thin" (something I've not been in over twenty some odd years) What's "embedded" (sounds like something I did one nite in Paris) What's CE? (that's really got me stumped)

And just what crazy visual error would that be? Spybot creates NO errors of any kind on MY computer,,,,visual or otherwise. Rjz, I see you're from Leesburg. Very beautiful country. I attended the Xerox world training center there in the late 70's. Cheers, Andromeda43

I find it so laughable that this thread's Question and poll is about a Spyware Blocker. If I remember correctly, MS Anti-Spy is high on the list, and they aren't even a blocker. they do however run an active scanner, if you select to let it run as a TSR. AdAware is a great find'em and kill'em program but only runs when YOU run it and it does NO blocking at all. Spyware Blaster is the number one blocker,,,,,Spybot's Immunization is a blocker. All of the above are pretty worthless though, if you don't keep them up to date. A "Hosts" file is a blocker, but how many users even know about or use a custom Hosts file? Again, it's pretty worthless if not kept up to date. jus some thoughts and ramblings.