A thread for boring computer questions.

sorry I didn't respond sooner, but he connection was really weak from my neighbours so I couldn't get on long enough to post and I jsut got tired of trying.

You can have DSL without a landline in Canada, too, apparently... because I did for about 9 months, until the other day when my Internet broke :(

The way the VoIP works on my end is that it's a box that connects to the all-in-one modem/router, so if the problem was only with the voip box, it wouldn't affect the overall workings of the DSL line. It goes wall -> modem/router -> then to the voip or to the xbox or to the computer.

I haven't yet been able to find an outdoor phone jack, although I did find what appeared to be some sort of cut line, although I think it may have just been a cable line? It's definitely strange, though, and I have no idea why it's cut... does anyone know what an outdoor phone wire would look like? Or the cross-section of one, for that matter?

Agreed that bell.ca's support site is garbage. In between having to steal a connection last night and that site being mostly useless anyway, I got nowhere with it. I did try the no-equipment-near-it thing and the powercycling too, but no dice. I will see if I can get a live chat with one of them, but so far they've been useless on all fronts. I got finished with their level 1 tech last night, and their level 2 tech was supposed to call 30m later, and never did.

I'm in need of help:

Vista won't let be uninstall some programs. Certain programs have to be installed by right-clicking the installation program, and selecting "install as an administrator", or words to that effect. If I want to uninstall one of these programs by using the add/remove programs in the Control Panel, it won't let me because I'm not an administrator.

For those who love closure, I *might* have solved my problem, after another long, drawn out conversation with bell's support team. Apparently, my account is not a "naked" or "dryloop" account, so this is why it's not working. I'm not sure how that makes a lot of sense, because I (thought I) didn't have a dial tone for the past 11 months and it's worked fine. So I need to call their accounts group or whatever, and turn ym regular DSL account into a dryloop DSL account. Which costs nothing. Except a shitload of my time, apparently. And then, if that doesn't work, I have to start over.

nate,

please contact your administrator.

will m. - for future ref - an outdoor copper phone line (in the US and probably also in Canada) is a 4-wire (green & red, black & yellow) unshielded but typically with a drain (uncoated silver wire) in a gray poly oversheath. If you're on a fiber optic run, it's hard to say what the wire will look like, generally they're coated with orange kevlar-type stuff.

Ok so I've had this problem for over a year now, and it's finally starting to driving me crazy. I got a Titanium Powerbook 17" about 4 years ago way before the switch to Intel processors. A couple of years later, I upgraded it's original 512 Mhz to 1 G. I'm not sure exactly when, but it was around the time that I upgraded to 10.3 and 10.4 that my fans would go on after about 5 minutes of working on the machine, and would never go off unless I shut it down or put it to sleep. When I set my processor speed to Reduced in System Preferences however, my computer becomes extremely slow, even opening ILX takes about 3 seconds on a stable cable connection. I've used about 4 different programs to verify my disc and fix permissions, which doesn't seem to do jack shit. Since I cannot afford another machine right now, what should I do, should I downgrade? Thanks.

starting to drive ... obv

You upgraded the CPU in a powerbook? Bad, bad mojo. Put the original CPU back in if you still have it.

Heat variance tolerance is very slender in all lappies; it's even tighter in Powerbooks. Installing a CPU a PB wasn't designed to take will probably shorten the life of everything else in the PB, not just give you noisy fan issues.

Were there ever 512MHz processors? I think maybe Jena means 512MB RAM.

Yeah, maybe not. The PB can not only deal with 1G of RAM fine, it will probably run cooler with it (less disk paging).

I think maybe Jena means 512MB RAM.

that's what i meant, sorry

No point slowing processor down. Have you looked in Activity Monitor to see what % of the CPU is actually being used when the fan's going crazy? If it's *not* high, then it suggests that it's a fan control issue, rather than your Mac actually getting overloaded with work. If the load *is* high even when you're doing nothing, then look at what processes in the list are using all the CPU's resources.

If you are comfy taking the PB apart, then you might try that and see if you have some kind of obstruction blocking the airflow. You might have a dustball or something. I've taken apart a couple of PBs, and it's definitely harder than taking apart a PC, so you might want to have a geeky pal along for the ride.

when i buy a new harddrive, no external. can i write the stuff thats on my old one to the new one?

do i have to make copies on cd's first and then write them to the new one? i found this rather cheap samsung HD with 400 GB, and ive decided i need it to fulfill my digital collector needs

Every OS in the universe should allow you to copy stuff directly from one hard drive to another, even vista.

I once solved a fan problem by taking my pc apart and hoovering its insides. There was hell of dust.

Yeah I don't feel comfortable opening my computer up like that, but my situation is pretty desperate. Even when I only open Firefox, it'll bounce in the dock about 8 times, then the fans come on and keep going.

Anyone know how I uninstall an Ubuntu guest that I'm running through VMWare?

isn't the whole guest just a directory that you can nuke? or a disk image that you can similarly delete?

http://communities.vmware.com/thread/105077

Just delete the virtual hardisk and start again.

NAS and HD media streaming

it's not really there yet, is it?

basically what i want is:

* a huge hard drive which mounts wirelessly via 802.11n, is attached via HDMI to my TV, and has a nice interface for playback.

Have you heard the one about the Western Digital media storage drive designed for sharing, that doesn't let you share your media?
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/12/07/western_digital_drm_crippled_harddrive/

yes, and also about the Seagate FreeAgent drives that don't wake up in linux (the buggers! i bought one a month ago)

Question:

Sometimes when i get given MS Word Document forms to fill in there are premade Blanks to click on and type to fill in (they look like black rectangles).

How do i make those?

Thanks in advance, Nerds!

I still can't find the right button. I'm sorry if i upset any nerds, please do help!

OK, here's an odd problem: My Mac Mini is acting very odd. First, the iTunes database keeps getting corrupted for no clear reason. Then, it wouldn't update to 10.4.11 -- it would download, and then say the file didn't match up, checksum-wise. Even when manually downloaded.

I reinstalled 10.4(.8) and it still did it. I attached it to my MacBook like a harddrive and was able to get it up to .11, but it STILL is screwing up with iTunes and it STILL is failing to mount dmgs. The dmgs work fine on the MacBook, though, so something is very wrong.

(Also, it's out of warranty.)

Any idears?

Slumpman, read the Help for "Create forms that users complete in Word". There are templates and fields involved. You can get a similar effect by using Tables, but making a form keeps the user from changing fields you don't want them to change.

bge: [ID 801725 kern.warning] WARNING: bge0: ddi_regs_map_setup() failed

So I have no network:/

Where are network settings actually stored? I was trying to set up my new mobile to act as a bluetooth modem (in 10.5.1), and was messing around with the port settings, and the whole system hung. When I restarted, finder had tanked. Luckily, I was able to restore the entire system from Tiome Machine (yay for TM) but I can't get my old mobile to work.

I thought if I could find out where the old settings for the bluetooth phone and modem and network settings were stored, I could just restore the fiels from a time when the old phone worked and hey presto. But I dinnae know where exactly they're kept...

Casuistry: try reinstalling 10.4.0 (or whatever is on your DVDs) then running the Combo updates to 10.4.6 (http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=303410) and then from 10.4.6 to 10.4.11 (http://www.apple.com/support/downloads/macosx10411comboupdateintel.html) before restoring any backup.

Also, are you sure your hard drive has space? What you're seeing sounds like the kind of weirdness a full drive might give.

I have done that, and it has massive amounts of space.

And I haven't even "restored any backup" -- I've just tried to get iTunes to parse the music folder into a database.

I am having nic problems with both ethernet and wireless, with both Solaris and Red Hat..

1. The bge0 interface was initially recognised by Solaris but vanished on reboot (appeared to be a driver issue) The iwi0 interface was succesful first time. Had to do a sys-unconfig and both disappeared altogether

2. a scanpci now no longer returns EITHER card

3. same thing in red hat, neither nic appears when i run lspci

although /usr/sbin/lspci now seems to have...vanished?

Oops. Ignore last post. But still...nics not being detected by either scanpci or lspci (even though the wireless was working under Solaris for 3 days until sys-unconfig)

yes, and also about the Seagate FreeAgent drives that don't wake up in linux (the buggers! i bought one a month ago)
-- koogs, Monday, 10 December 2007 13:25 (1 week ago)

Also, how is it apart from that? Are you happy with your purchase otherwise?

was reported here and confirmed something i'd experienced the day before
http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/12/09/0651200

some fixes on that thread too (http://hardware.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=383981&cid=21630177), mostly done using a cron job resetting a flag on the drive (via /proc file system) every 5 minutes or so (other people mention a better fix being udev based but no link was forthcoming). (oh, new answers, http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=494673)

it's certainly faster than my other one (fast enough that i can use it as workspace and not just backup) but i don't like the way it looks - is asymmetrical and looks unstable. (my other one looks like a toaster). don't like the lack of an off switch. is cheap enough and has plenty of space on it (for now). it also came ntfs formatted but i had no trouble resizing it with the gparted that came with Edgy. 5 year warranty too, always good.

From our support guys:

I understand one or more of the shops in town is selling 4GByte flash
USB drives at suspiciously low prices. There's a reason for that:

* There's a password-protection mechanism built in. This is believed
to work with MS-Windows XP, but to fail with MS-Windows Vista; hence
the sell-off.

* They can't reliably be mounted under Linux. The logical device, on
the one in front of me right now, doesn't exist.

* After attempting to mount them under Linux, disconnecting them
causes the kernel to panic, freezing the system. Your only recourse
is then to call on us.

Stigmata: Black body with retractable USB connector and white writing,
marked "SanDisk", "U3 smart" (sic), "cruzer", and "micro 4.0GB". If
you've already got one, *don't* use it with our GNU/Linux clients.
I've had to deal with at least two systems in the past few weeks
because of these little offenders.

I suspect (without evidence) that attempts to get a refund will yield
only laughter and/or comments of the form "it was cheap". Basically,
if it sounds too good to be true, more than likely that's because it
*is*.

Caveat emptor.

http://www.pendrivelinux.com/2006/06/25/u3-uninstaller-for-usb-flash-drive/

uninstaller is windows only. lol.

AiD: Get a well-supported/not broken NIC. They're cheap.

I don't understand why Solaris picked up the wireless nic and was actually working fine for 3 straight days till I sys-unconfiged

Also, both the wired and the wireless? I think it was

Broadcom 5705M (570something anyway)
and
Intel 2200 of some kind for the wireless

Thanks koogs. But I'm getting it for backup so try not to tempt me into using it as another current drive and having even more stuff not backed up anywhere :)

Oh, my boss has one of those U3 flash usb sticks. He'll be glad of the uninstall software, and our IT techs might just be glad of someone steering him away from using it on a Linux machine.

I have a cheap not-Sandisk 4gb stick which I picked up partly because the packaging actually bothered to mention Linux on the supported OSes list. Will be interested to see if it has anything like that.

Outlook has ruined my life twice this week. What a fucking load of shit.

They've had how many years to get this arsewank "product" working?? Useless knobs.

Help pls. I'm using a laptop with Vista and need to know how to switch the source for recording audio from the external microphone to the internal mixer, so that it can record directly from the computer.

It used to be very easy with XP but Vista, as with so many things, seems to be determined to make my life unnecessarily difficult.

gracias.

ok so my cd drive recognizes regular recorded-on cds, regular recorded-on cd-rs, regular dvds and blank dvds - but not blank cd-rs. i've tried cheap and expensive ones, and a cd cleaner thing with the little brushes, and it's still not having it.

is there anything particular about how cd-rs scan that might be the issue?