A friend complained her XP machine was 'acting up' and brave old me said 'no sweat...I'm a consumate genius and modestly can fix it in a jiffy'. She brung it over me joint and I rolled up the proverbials and got stuck into it. Bit of a mess was putting it mildly....it hadn't a firewall or AV running for 'some time'. I found a dozen or two 'issues' with it ...before pulling out the drive and chucking it in a caddy to load into my own machine...to do a thorough clean.... Norton got abo...

Today IE6 decided to shutdown ZA's TrueVector service.Pretty neat, really....get on the net and your firewall karks it.SDC is fine [IRC] ....Firefox is fine....Outlook is fine.....supposedly it was an issue with the MS Antispyware proggy....but shutting that down didn't help....IE6 was the culprit....

'Twas Wednesday [yesterday] about midday.....there was a flicker onscreen... 'Damn', I thought....'not more animated Gifs'...... The flicker was the screen image edges...far left and right.....the extremes of the horizontal scan.  In other words the image was narrowing 4 or 5 pixels each side...and recovering. Just now and then. My next thought was.....'probably time for a new monitor' It was a CRT... Hyundai, aka DiamondView ....19" true flat screen.....ran like a dream at m...

All the best people are 52.... Have a good one....

Things Are Going to Get a Lot Worse Before Things Get Worse "I liken starting one's computing career with Unix, say as an undergraduate, to being born in East Africa. It is intolerably hot, your body is covered with lice and flies, you are malnourished and you suffer from numerous curable diseases. But, as far as young East Africans can tell, this is simply the natural condition and they live within it. By the time they find out differently, it is too late. They already think that the writin...

Lately, when dl clicking on a file...eg a jpg .... Paintshop Pro loads...but this error pops up.  Then I dl click on the file again and it'll load. This is using Explorer Plus....but Windows Explorer is the same. I'm assuming I have a service stopped that cause the error....yet dl clicking on a doc file loads word just fine. Any ideas? Google didn't help as any refs to the error appear to be different issues or system-wide...

Seems all new uploads there are being 'gift wrapped' with a proprietary installer...complete with toolbars etc that one 'must' opt out of if all you want is the proggy you were hoping to get. Time perhaps to find a new source of your proggy downloads.... I'd checked out that flash cookie proggy and it had been wrapped....pain and a half. More on the 'scam' here... http://www.extremetech.com/computing/93504-download-com-wraps-downloads-in-bloatware-lies-ab...

My DVD burner died in my current/new machine. I know they're built to a price, not a quality...but I figure I've used it no more than a few dozen times in its life....but it studiously waited 'long enough' to be out of warranty. They shouldn't kark it that easily. Maybe it was getting all moralistic on me...as I was attempting to 'rip' my Nephew's music to MP3 [and I'd omitted to let the drive know I even had permission to do it]. I reverted to the second one....that still works [fo...

I have the computer [i7-920 12gig and XFX 1g GTX285] ....I have the racing sims [GTR, GTR2, GTL, GT Evo, NetKar, GP4, rFactor, NFSU, TestDrive Unlimited] and....I already have the wheel/pedals [G25].... Logical progression [and an Office/Computer desk rebuild imminent] and it's only fitting I drive in 'style'... 'Should' turn up here in a day or two...[for some reason it's coming from Perth, WA]....

Since first using Litestep I have ALWAYS used an alternative to Explorer for file management. Directory Opus works perfectly in Win 7....and has a ver specific for 64bit [all the better].... ...so it's the one I use now. 24 hour link to the discount....time is ticking.... hours http://www.bitsdujour.com/software/directory-opus-9/  

Skinners like to mess with defaults....we screw up our systems quite well doing it, too. This one had me stumped.  I just could not get 'control' of the included folders in windows/web/wallpaper/  no matter what I poked and prodded. The solution is a reg 'hack' to merge...and you can regain ownership of what are otherwise locked folders/images/etc. http://www.herbystweaks.net/files/TakeOwn.zip   The only warning is that you are merging and thus altering registry ent...

The old box served well for over half a decade ..... but eventually life was passing me by.... particularly during the FULL boot time being around 10 minutes.... It was [in its day] a fairly decent machine...P4/3.0 in an ASUS P4P800e Deluxe mobo with 2 gig [4x500] ram and eventually about the 'fastest' AGP card still around....a HD3850 with 512 GDDR3...all in an old Lian Li P60, powered by a TruePower 550 Watt PSU. Then I got hacked....ending up as a mule server for email spam [I think] .....

For me it all started before Windows....in Dos ....and a proggy called Xtree , XTPro and finally XTGold . Great stuff...but as computers got bigger it hit the 640k limit and went belly-up in 32 bit Win Vers. Then there was ZTreeWin ....a one-man development that had 'no limits'...still a 'text' file manager...but if you were used to Xtree ....you were at home with this one. Alternate shell users [particularly Litestep ] never wanted to inadvertently invoke the dreaded Exploder s...

My old scanner died...so I got myself a new one....CanoScan LiDE 600F Fun thing is the CD doesn't autorun to show the setup/install menus.... Not on this box...or on my Lappy....but it does on my wife's machine. There's no autorun.inf ....and the files there are all appear to be for a Mac.....and not apparently executable. I dl'd the driver and toolbox...but I still need the OCR and editing stuff ...but can't get the disc to 'do anything'....short of throwing it frisby-style.... ...

I have 4 computers running Windows 10. On all 4 I've either avoided by deferring and/or simply not been in the rollout of the Anniversary Update yet. So I decided to treat [?] Terry to the new and 'improved' Win 10 and loaded it on hers via me 'forcing' the update. And all worked fine....even improved some graphics glitches [as in eliminated them, not made them bigger]. So... Armed with an exuberance of confidence [you know....confidence - that feeling you have...