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I'm in the middle of cleaning an infected PC (my youngest daughter's) :boom: With a suitable tool (Security Task Manager is still my firstline choice over HijackThis etc for reasons of clarity), I can see the hidden instances of the Internet Exploder engine - killed two, but then another popped...

This may be a singularly unsuccessful topic, but what the hell ... France rebuilds relations with Anglo cousin ... For the first time in 12 years (remarkable considering the countries are only 20 miles apart at their closest points), a French president is visiting the UK. Further, he's making...

Britain makes camera that "sees" under clothes I thought this was a few years away - I'm impressed. Once again, science fiction becomes everyday fact. This further blurs the already frayed line between fantasy and reality in our brave new world.

By the time you read this, the first big stockmarket crash of the 21st century should be underway. This one's different; it's predicated by a loss of confidence in the future of the United States. There will be subsequent gains and losses - indeed, this may not be the biggest fall - but I...

I figure this isn't exactly a Tech Support question. I can't seem to find any kind of utility to sync contacts from Thunderbird to Blackberry. What little information I could find on RIM's pathetic site was from 2002 (and didn't mention Thunderbird - or for that matter any email client except...

I'm probably going to be showing my age here, but who has - or is intending to - put up Xmas lights? The rot set in when we moved into the current house. All six immediate neighbours had made at least some effort. The killer was the guy more or less opposite; he had probably 40+ light sets...

Today, someone asked me to check an old computer before they pass it on to a friend ("They just want to surf the Internet"). When I picked up the keyboard, I noticed the 5-pin DIN plug ... The back of the box reveals a single 5-pin socket - not a PS2 in sight, and sure enough, there's a serial...

I want to try recovering data from a failed Seagate 80GB SATA drive. Therefore, I'm looking for the same model: ST380817AS (7200.7?) Has anyone got one? Failing that, is anyone interested in sourcing one for me? It would involve DHL or FedEx to Australia. TIA.

Anyone used these? They claim to survive a 2m drop. I'm looking for backup media, and given my well-justified fear and loathing of tape solutions, this seems to be the best alternative. There's also Lacie, but reviews seemed a little more mixed. Flash capacity increases seem to be having a...

Despite that CFLs are promoted in order to save energy, some of you guys (and you're not alone) are just making your homes brighter! A funny thought struck me: are proposals to counter global warming even a talking point in the US? We know that the US and Australia are pretty much the only two...

The Age newspaper reporting on Netspace, an Australian ISP

Buck hasn't posted for at least three months, and he last checked in 6 weeks ago. Cougtek cut off all contact after the Dubai headhunter incident nearly 7 weeks ago. Gary and his many brethren are up to 7 weeks, but that's not extraordinary for him. Sechs left 7.5 weeks ago but last posted 3...

So, I see that major laptop manufacturers (it's really farcical when they insist on referring to them as "notebooks") provide Vista, Vista or Vista as OS options. This sounds only bad to me. Does anyone have a survival guide to Vista on laptops - apart from, "Don't do it!"? Can it be as bad as...

I get this error on TinyXP while trying to install an app with a 1999 version of Installshield. Not sure if the problem only affects Tiny, but I have noticed that there is no 'compatibility' option in the properties - it's ages since I'v e used that, should it be there? Unfortunately, searching...

Despite FDB, the handful of Samsung drives I have bought have usually exhibited excessive vibration. When mounted with grommets, they can really become annoying; the last PC I built actually vibrates tonally from time to time.:evil: I'm also less than convinced about their reliability, having...

I think it will be hard to top this. The BBC's take http://www.creationmuseum.org/ Walkthrough

The Sydney Morning Herald I think it's worth looking past the sensationalism to contemplate the content. An article worth reading.

I get the feeling I'm missing something obvious here. Customer has a Netgear wireless router with three computers: Desktop 1 - wired, Win2k Pro Desktop 2 - wireless, Win2k Pro Laptop 1 - wireless, WinXP Pro They're all part of the same Windows workgroup, with DHCP from the router. There's an...

I was lucky enough to get a copy of this from a notable member of this forum some time back. ;) It's version 4 and completely amazing, but I notice that the site hosting the associated forums couldn't afford the consequent traffic. Has anyone fortunate enough to try this gem found anything that...

So this morning, I was awoken by a call from a different timezone, telling me a file server had died. After a few hours of trying to find someone who could speak English (this is in a nominally English-speaking country: New Zealand), I got someone on site who confirmed that the motherboard had...

To my surprise, it looks like we haven't raised this topic for a few months, and the last thread is looking out of date. The ATI X1950 Pro appears to have been the benchmark for moderately priced gaming cards, but I see that locally, it still costs nearly US$200! Below $US100, I found the...

I notice that Gigabyte is flogging "solid capacitor" i945/i965 boards, but no AMD equivalents. Anyone know what this is all about, and more importantly, if the products are any good?

I'm out of touch with this sort of thing: which AM2 motherboard do you guys recommend? Fan-cooled chipsets are out of the question; more than one PCI slot would be nice; I'd like the Gbe interface to be half decent if possible. Oh yeah, reliability is more important than anything else ...

You'll need sound for this, and don't worry, it's perfectly work-safe. http://asia.aopen.com.tw/products_detail.aspx?Auno=2362&mdstl=236

Here in Oz, we can buy a CF bulb from GE called "Tiny Spiral". AFAIK, it's the smallest Compact Fluorescent on the market, designed to be a same-size replacement for 'fancy round' style incandescent bulbs. They're nominally available in three color temperatures, but the ones I've bought have...

I have a requirement for monitor arms to support 3 LCD monitors. There will likely be one 21" monitor and two 19" monitors. They need to be dynamically adjustable for reach, at least. Here is the best multi-monitor mount I've found so far, but it only handles two 6kg units: It's the Visidec...

We have Ulead DVD MovieFactory Suite 3.5 (a lite version of 3.0?) and Cyberlink's PowerProducer Gold 2.0. Ulead's product seems infested with bugs, while Cyberlink's is just plain stupid. I've downloaded a couple of patches for MovieFactory, which didn't bring it any closer to looking like its...

I'm looking at laptops with usable gaming graphics. The choices are nVidia 7300 or ATI X1700, in Acer, Asus and Lenovo models. I think they're all 128MB VRAM, although the specs for the X1700 state 512MB. On a 1280x800 screen, what's the difference likely to be? There's also the Core 2 Duo vs...

WTF is the point of the "image verification" when you try to search for posts? Apart from pissing people off, that is.

Stung through the heart by a stingray barb. Really shocking - he seemed indestructible. Some of the news services are a little overloaded; he was incredibly well-known around the world. His wife is yet be informed, she was trekking in the wilderness. :( ABC News Corp Sydney Morning Herald...

http://www.todayonline.com/articles/131016.asp

After I emphasized the importance of the Winblows XP product key sticker (as opposed to the booklet and CD), a customer managed to lose it. I came across the rather wonderful Magical Jelly Bean Keyfinder that reveals the product key for Windows and Office. Unfortunately, this installation is...

I'm attempting to salvage a Samsung 200GB SATA drive with head crash symptoms, specifically, two bad areas. What's frustrating me is that the first area at least is right in the middle of the directory/FAT data (it's a 10GB FAT32 partition), and most of the files and directories are consequently...

I remember when my computers never ever got infected. Ah, that was before I had kids ... As near as I can tell, the victim received an MSN message that encouraged her to download some software; I'm told it appeared to come from one of her friends. :-? After opening it, the antivirus software...

Here's the scenario: LAN with a 10/100 switch. There's a separate DSL router. Three workstations have fixed IP addresses; the rest are dynamic, served up by the router, but all specify the router as gateway. Printing is direct to fixed address print servers (no file server queues). After a...

After David's and Coug's experiences, I'm increasingly nervous about this Samsung SP2504C I have here. Does anyone know how to interpret the SMART attributes? I'm worried that the Raw Read Error Rate seems kinda high - currently 0x984 (2436), as well as the Hardware ECC Recovered - 0x22F063E2...

I am not making this up: http://blogs.smh.com.au/mashup/archives//004567.html

Although I've been aware of this program for quite a while, I've started relying on it to show HDD SMART info, as well as temperatures and fan speeds. It has the added advantage of partly running as a service to get around permissions issues when accessing the hardware sensors, i.e. it works for...

After recently wrestling with cooling an Athlon XP, I came across this. I've slowly realised that power saving (on idle) may be broken in many Athlon systems. In particular, I suspect it may be completely broken on certain VIA chipsets. The one in question reported the idle temperature of an...

I'm guessing many people here already know this, but Cool'n'Quiet is disabled on Palermo Semprons below 1.8GHz, ie. 2800+ and 2600+. I found this out by accident when the supplier ran out of 3100+. :( There's no warning on AMD's website, leading to general confusion. Here's confirmation on the...

Cool, I see I can now get a Gigabyte Socket 939 board with integrated DVI video. Has anyone tried one? Does it detect as nForce4? Is the heatsink woefully inadequate?

A practical application of 'electronic paper'.

I have a situation where a workstation needs to be logged in automatically during working hours and logged out otherwise (for security reasons). The workstation uses a barcode scanner for input. The complication is that this is connected via a keyboard wedge, so keyboard operation must be...

This is by no means the first time I have had to work with Dell PCs, but I've really had about as much as I can take. Dell Optiplex GX280 SFF. These 3GHz space heaters are the slowest thing I've seen for years. Maybe the Symantec crapola suite is contributing, but 5 to 7.5 minutes (repeatedly)...

The Spybot authors have their knickers in a knot over Invision Powerboard. You may recognize that forum software from a site well-known to most here ...

Others may care to add other examples to this thread. I installed Suse 9.3 on an nForce4 (Athlon 64) PC with virgin drives. Everything was fine. I experimented with software RAID, including breaking it, and somewhere along the line, Linux started having a 'kernel panic' while booting. I didn't...

We've been struggling with ATI Hydravision (latest version) on a Sapphire X300SE (i.e. dual monitors). Tried the 'Full Edition' first. Hydravision Properties didn't work, neither did 'Move to 1/2' to position a window. In fact, the only thing that did work was dragging a window across the...

I have a Via KM400A motherboard (Asus, curse their black heart). It temporarily replaced an nForce 2 board and all was fine (actually, it was a huge PITA, but I won't go into that). I removed it and used it to replace an nForce 1 board. Everything works except the Via Rhine network chip, which...

Customer runs Windows 2000 Pro. He's vague, but a few months ago it started hanging with a blank screen when he tries to do a restart. It gets through the 'saving your settings' part, then blackness (and sometimes a cursor), but only the big switch (or reset) gets it any further. And now for...

I've just had to replace a couple of socket A boards due to capacitor failures, and boy, there sure isn't much choice left (the originals were Epox, but I insist on replacing with other brands). The local Gigabyte supplier only had two models, one of which was superseded some time ago (eg...