The Steel Guitar Forum

Thanks, Jack.

I don't care about gaming at all, on this or any other PC. This box came from my kid's high school CAD lab - they were going to pitch it, and they let him take it home instead. It has AutoCAD on it, which is why I'd like to keep it going.

Thanks again.

Question for the Dell wizards: I have fallen heir to an old Dell Precision Workstation 420 MT (800 MHz PIII, Win 2000, 256 Mb rambus memory, SCSI hard drive) that works dandy, but I can't find drivers for the motherboard chipset on the Dell website. I entered the service tag number, and found and do...

Where do the "Recovered Items" folders in the Storage Folders section come from? There is usually nothing in them; if there is, it's a subfolder named "Outbox", containing an outgoing message that was successfully sent. Anybody know what's up? Thanks

Lou

I gave up on a Logitech wireless mouse because it ate batteries like popcorn, causing the pointer to freeze. It also didn't play well with my KVM switch..

Thank you, Wiz. I won't be using this box for any serious browsing - in fact, I'm not sure what I'll do with it just now. The PC is a mini-desktop freebie that my son's school was going to pitch - said it didn't work. No name on it, but the mobo is an Asus CUSI-FX. I put 2000 Pro on it because a) th...

Rats! That's what I thought. Thanks John

Will IE 7 work with Win 2000 Pro?

Thanks.

Lou

Wiz, I understand that it needs to lock the drive. The thing is, I have hard drives that chkdsk can lock without having to reboot. Where is the logfile in that case (if there is one)? That's my problem.

Thanks,

Lou

Thanks Wiz. I did some searching before I posted here and that's basically what I found. It seems absurd for Microsoft to assume that checkdisk will only be run at boot time.

If running checkdisk requires that you restart your system, you can see the results in the Event Viewer.

But where is the checkdisk log file if you DON'T have to restart your system to run checkdisk? In this situation there is nothing in the Event Viewer.

OS is XP Pro.

Thanks,

Lou

i have a complete copy of my OS already stored on my new Dell. Cass, I'm not a Dell guy, but I'm guessing that you're referring to the restore partition on your hard drive. Look in 'My Computer" and see if there isn't a hard drive named "Dell" or "recovery" or some such. It...

To expand on the bootable cd thing... 2: The ROM loads and executes the boot sector You tell your computer, by way of BIOS settings, which devices to examine for a boot sector, and in what order they should be examined. On my PC the order is 1) CD-ROM, 2) floppy drive, and 3) hard drive C. If the BI...

What you need, Chip, is a bootable CD that loads Acronis. When your hard drive fails you boot to this CD and then restore the hard drive from your backup. Open Acronis and look under the tools menu for "Create bootable rescue media" and make yourself one.

Acronis has saved my bacon on several occasions when a hard drive crashed. I'm just scared to rely on a backup image that won't validate. Wiz I'll probably take your advice and put an extra hard drive in each box for backup purposes. Chip, if you're getting a successful validation of your backup ima...

That's what I was doing in the first place. I had a dedicated PC with two large capacity hard drives that I used for backups via the LAN. This PC died (motherboard, I think - won't even try to POST), which is why I started fooling with external hard drives. The hard drives in the external enclosures...

I don't use the scheduler. I do everything manually, and here are my results - I uninstalled/reinstalled TI 11 Build 8101. I ran checkdisk and defrag on both internal source and external destination drives. Did a backup to external hard drive. File failed validation. Copied this backup file from ext...

Acronis True Image 11 does not seem to be able to validate a backup image done on a USB external hard drive. I've tried using 2 different external drives on 4 different computers - 3 towers running XP Pro and a laptop running Vista Home Premium. All come up with the same validation error codes - &qu...

Thanks for your input. Larry, problem is these are IDE drives I'm trying to use. I'm looking at the Thermaltake A2395 which supports both IDE and SATA - $38 at cyberguys.com, but maybe I can find a better price elsewhere. There is also an IDE-only enclosure at cyberguys for $18.

Thanks again.

Lou

Has anyone had any experiences with external hard drive enclosures as backup devices? The old PC that acted as my backup server died. The box won't even do POST, let alone boot, but I think the hard drives are OK. I'm considering buying a couple inexpensive external hard drive enclosures to house th...

One person uninstalled/re-installed AVG and that solved it for that user. This worked for me as well (so far - I just did it a short time ago). Manual updates didn't help. I did download the most recent version available. I have 5 PCs on a home network running AVG Free and only one had the problem,...

I don't remember what the difference is, but I think you pay extra for it and it doesn't make any difference. I've always used plain ol' data CDs for music and they work just fine.

I don't want to renew the Mac. vs. PC war - we all have good reasons for our preferences. But I did find this article in PC Magazine an interesting read.

My wife's computer is giving warnings about "Unknown publisher - no valid digital signature - are you sure you want to run this software" when she opens a particular game (Gold Mahjongg) and also Mailwasher Pro. Didn't use to - now it does. Any suggestions on how to stop this? System is Wi...

I've been using TotalRecorder for years - it's an excellent program. Not free, but not expensive either. The Standard Edition is $17.95 and will record anything you can put through your sound card. Find it at http://www.highcriteria.com/

Chip - Re. Torx fasteners. I think I saw them first on automobiles, and I agree with you in principle about them wanting to sell more tools, etc. But as an ex-HP assembly tech I can tell you that Torx fasteners are quicker and easier to deal with in an assembly-line environment than Phillips screws....