A thread for boring computer questions.

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?

If it's not a CD writer drive, it won't recognise it.

oh yeah course, wouldnt be asking if it wasnt

- Operating system?
- PC make/model? (and drive make/model if possible)?
- Driver for DVD-ROM drive?

Without any of this we are stabbing in the dark, k thx.

Revive...my flash player seems to be completely screwed. I have to reinstall it over and over, then it's fine for a while, then next time I try to watch a video or stream audio I get no sound. Audio streams just buffer without ever playing and video streams show pictures but no sound.

When I load the install.exe file again it works, but I don't know if this is actually "reinstalling" it or not. Is there something else I should try?

Have no idea why it happens or what has caused it.

Which browser?

Also which OS?

Firefox and Windows XP.

It works fine in Internet Explorer for some reason.

Oh. Yeah, I think the Flash plugin is different in Firefox.

I'll have a look for some stuff later (I'm in my underpants).

I got a "notice" from Vista this morning about a "problem" with Flash, and that Adobe had a solution... but I don't have details because Vista automagically "fixed" it. Probably just a coincidence and of no help.

Have you tried uninstalling it completely, and then reinstalling the latest version?

You could be all hacky-cracky and remove all the adobe/flash dirs in your mozilla profile. Firefox seems to be amenable to that kind of behaviour.

I want to run an unsecured wireless network. I'm not really worried about hackers sitting outside my flat, using my connection for nefarious purposes. I am however worried about people abusing the connection and hogging bandwidth. Are there any programs which I can use to track the traffic on my network, and to show in easily an easy understandable way (pretty colours, graphs etc) what traffic is flowing on the network and who is connected?

Are you worried about nefarious hackers doing something nefarious and you getting blamed for it because it's yr IP? Are you worried about nefarious hackers haxx0ring yr own computer?

If not, then it all depends on what yr router supports. If it talks SNMP, you can use MRTG to get excellent pretty traffic graphs, but it won't be broken down by client IP. Many consumer broadband routers have web interfaces, and on some, you can track DHCP leases.

Getting a nice breakdown of traffic-by-IP-or-MAC would probably require a costlier router than you are willing to invest in.

of course, if you like to download kiddie porn having unsecured wireless at home is a good defense!

Sorry, I can't find anything on yer Flash problem but I don't use Flash anyway.

My wireless thingo is restricted to certain MAC addresses. That, together with WPA, prevents 99.5% of all hax0r attempts. I can't tell you about tracking apps though.

I stupidly left my work laptop's AC power cord / adapter in my hotel room, when I was at a conference.

If I order another from the Dell website, it's $$. But, if I get it from here, it's much lest costly. But these sites scare me. Do you think it's legit and not some knockoff? (I want a Dell converter so the warranty still applies, blah blah blah)

"N" key on my Acer laptop stopped working completely. Started to go a while back, took the key off and adjusted it a couple of times. I think I might have fucked up the sensor somehow this time because now it doesn't respond at all. Anything I can do? Kind of urgent.

avoid words with N.

does it work with the key casing off?

usb keyboard = £7
virtual keyboard = £0 (http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/using/accessibility/oskturnonuse.mspx)

Can you replace the keyboard? I put a new keyboard in my Dell laptop just last night.

also

|\|

does it work with the key casing off?

Yeah, actually it does. Could I just need to replace the little rubber thingy?

OK, so I've been noticing how cheap express card flash drives are recently. Would I gain any speed and battery life benefits if I moved my OS, applications and SWAP to one of these?

OS X, will be leopard as soon as 10.5.2 comes out.

Jon Williams, I demand you come and rubbish my scheme.

ahem

Swap on flash is a bad bad bad bad bad bad bad bad idea. Also how fast is a card express interface and does it work as a boot device?

Booting is apparently not a problem with Leopard, some reports of failures with Tiger.

I think that swap might be an issue though

http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20040809191855264

worth a shot

Definitely thinking about it. I guess it is a choice between buying Flash or Time Capsule when I come over next. time capsule has it's attractions as it means i can ditch the G3 iMac doing fileserving duties and free up some space and power.

Flash has limited read/writes so bad for swap, also not as fast as HDD.

SSD on the other hand but they are $$$

I thought SSD had limited rewrites too.

I don't think flash has limited reads. I would imagine that the I/O is bound by cache and media speeds much greater than drives which are designed for high-throughput.

xpost

SSD does but there's some controller block relocation logic that makes this more "theoretical".

Oops no idea why I mentioned reads.

NAND flash which is what most SSD are is better on the writes.

SSD has re-writes but the maths mean it's immaterial, I think:

See here.

I am trying to write a simple bat script to empty a folder but I can't get past the stupid prompt that comes up. Tried ECHO Y but it doesn't seem to work :(

del "D:\Folder Name\*.*"

/f

i mean /q

del c:\test\*.* /q

thanks!

i'm having a problem with my laptop, a dell vostro 1500 and want to format it and reinstall windows so i can start from scratch. however, i want to format the whole c: drive so im not installing windows on top of an installation that already exists.

i have a few different discs for all this:
1) operating system (reinstallation cd) xp pro2
2) application (for reinstalling dell mediadirect 3.3 on dell inspiron 1520 computers)
3) dell drivers and utilities (for reinstalling dell vostro 1500 computer software)

im not sure what the mediadirect cd is at all.

so i put the xp reinstall disc in and got up to the bluescreen section asking about deleting partitions. it has 4 different options:

-: Partition1 (FAT) 110mb
C: Partition2 (NTFS) 146883mb
F: Partition4 (Mediadirect) (FAT32) 2557mb
E: Partition3 (FAT32) 3075mb

i tried to delete the c: partition but i got the message "cannot delete this partition as this partition contains the temporary setup files that are required to complete the installation". i'm confused about those other 3 partitions too, should i delete them first then the c partition?

how can i force it to completely wipe this c: partition?

get a mac