A thread for boring computer questions.

but your advice is crap

perhaps but then my computer is working properly

shh.

just sorted that problem. for anyone else in future the solution is to press f12 when booting and get it to boot from the cd-rom. my problem was that i tried to do the reinstall direct from windows (which sticks a load of temp files on the pc, preventing you from formatting the drive which contains those temp files).

I have just had Office 2007 installed. On the previous version of Excel I was able to add a button to my toolbar so that Paste Special: Value could be done with a single click.

Is this possible in Excel 2007? If so, how? Doing Ctrl+Alt+V to bring up the Paste Special dialog box and then selecting Value is doing my head in!!

I have an old Mac or two -- not super old, but a few years old -- that have given up the ghost, for various reasons, and I'm pretty sure they would be not worth spending the money to fix. Is there a way to convert such computers into cash?

I don't think so, casuistry, from a uk viewpoint. Charriddee is the easier way, although i'm sure the charrideeers will be making money first.

I have an old Mac or two -- not super old, but a few years old -- that have given up the ghost, for various reasons, and I'm pretty sure they would be not worth spending the money to fix. Is there a way to convert such computers into cash?

The most common reason people think that their old Macs have died is PRAM battery death. It's a $7 fix, in most cases. Now, it's certainly possible that you have other issues, but if you want to sell the Mac, it's worth checking out the easy fixes first.

One of them, a laptop, seemed to no longer want to accept electricity into its life, and it might just require a bit of soldering to get the thingy fixed. The other, a Mac Mini, is acting very oddly about its harddrive, and seems unable to write to it properly -- or thinks it can't? I had to hook it up as a slave drive to reinstall the OS, and it still wouldn't actually DO much.

I am not a techie enough to fix either of those things -- or, I am lazy. So I would rather sell to someone who would be interested in fixing, or something.

The first one sounds like a bad PRAM battery. This is somewhat tricky to replace in a laptop, since it requires hardware most people don't have on hand and careful attention to the disassembly guide. The second sounds like an easy fix you could handily perform: Replacing a hard disk.

Both of these Macs are worth VERY little if sold as-is. The salvage market for Macs is just about as good as that for automobiles, i.e., not very.

Going on the supposition that you don't have any Mac geek friends who owe you a favor, I'd recommend that you take the items to a Mac repair shop and pay the small fee for an estimate on repairs. Then you can make a decision based on a sound set of financial criteria and dispose of the matter once and for all.

Oh, no, I'm pretty sure based on being able to get it to work if I hold it just so that it isn't a PRAM thing. But I could be wrong. But if salvage isn't worth very much, that's fine then, I will not worry about it.

What would I need to do to replace the hard disk? Sigh. I not a "physical parts" kind of person. I will install RAM but I use Macs so that I don't have to tinker, you know?

Once you realize that modern desktop-style computers are basically legos, it's a lot less intimidating to deal with them. Macs make things just a bit harder, but it usually winds up to be a problem of remembering where the various screws were removed.

http://www.applefritter.com/Mac_Mini_Take_Apart_Guide

Well that might be doable. If you can save me the agony of figuring out what HD to get... that would be sweet of you.

lol "legos" when surely you meant "lego". no need to thank me.

I'm 95% sure that something like this is what you need. It's 4200 rpm, SATA, and notebook-sized, which is what the Mini uses. If you have any doubts, buy it from a place you can easily return it to.

By the way, you could get a faster disk, say 5400 rpm or 7200 rpm. The only real risk is that it could overheat other components, possibly destroying them over a period of time.

Wait, could I salvage the harddisk from my deadish iBook? Hmm...

Again thanks a googleplex.

A good question, but probably not. I don't believe that any iBooks had SATA disks.

There are a few disks on eBay now for around $50, and some salvage shops might have them for less.

How do I embed an image link to a youtube video on IL* (instead of a text hyperlink), if I can?

You can't.

ty

what is zotero and can you eat it?

what is ruby on rails and can you eat it?

what is solr and can you eat it?

functional plus definitions for oral fixations pls.

how do I shot sound with xbox 360 connected to dell wfp 2407 over hdmi?

: (

seems I might need one of these (£35)

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51HbsBc72lL._SS400_.jpg

as opposed to the plain old hdmi to dvi-d cable (£3) I have which has no audio out

ive got this damn mrofinu1000106.exe virus, avg told me about it so i vault-ed it then went through the registry deleting any suspicious things. thing is now, my whole pc is running real slow so im betting it's still out there, lurking. what's the best simplest easiest way of getting rid of this? (for free)

http://www.netbsd.org/

get a mac

get a mac for free

Why is Solaris such shit? Is the reason being a Solaris admin pays so much is that you have to custom edit your .bash_profile to sett yr $PATH to:

/usr/gnu/bin:/usr/ucb:/usr/sfw/bin:/usr/X11/bin:/usr/openwin/bin:/opt/SUNWspro/bin:/usr/bin

Yes, indeed the "shittiness" of an operating system is judged solely on the placement of its executables, nothing else.

Also, news flash: If setting yr path is giving you severe probs, Solaris has a few spankings in store for you.

Hey fuck you buddy, I know what I'm doing. There's just so much that isn't setup sanely out of the box.

The default apache layout is shamefully bad.

yeah woop wooop linux and mac and all that but what's a good virus-hunter-killer for windows that's also open-source and good like what firefox is?

Ubuntu

no not you

ok fixed, if anyone has the same problem just go here for a solution: http://www.spywareinfoforum.com/index.php?showtopic=114890

s.rose, makin ilx less of a haven of prickery '08

I have Windows XP and use Mozilla Firefox (3.0). My computer consistently runs painfully slow despite me updating and running Ad-Aware every day to get rid of spyware, and despite me updating and running a scan with AVG every day to deal with viruses (which it never finds). I am nowhere near maxing out the GB on my computer. Sometimes in frustration I bring up the Task Manager to find out what the fuck is eating up the CPU and sometimes I find that programs I just closed are still running there.

Any ideas?

Also, I have Windows Defender, but I don't remember if I tried to turn that off or not because it kept annoying me that it never tells me what it's doing.

Maybe you should defrag your HD. Speaking of, what are the better/faster defragmentation tools?

Oh hi boring computer guys. I have a stupid stupid stupid problem.

Whenever I try to use alt-tab, it seems like every 1-2 seconds (I've tested this and it's pretty consistent) it cancels out as if something's trying to grab focus. I've tried closing pretty much every process I can think of and of course I've rebooted a few million times and removed a bunch of shit from my startup, but still, something must be grabbing focus (although nothing actually, you know, pops up).

WHAT THE FUCK GUYS

I have Windows XP and use Mozilla Firefox (3.0). My computer consistently runs painfully slow

maybe you have a slow computer? what kind of chip is in it? which flavor of XP do you have (home or professional)? does it have 700 windows patch updates on it? you might also need more RAM. the side of your hard drive shouldn't have very much to do with your speed unless you are very short on RAM and it's using your hard drive for virtual memory and you're out of space there.

also, firefox for windows, pre-3.0 at least, ate up my cpu cycles on my xp box all the time. it had a memory leak or something.

i solved this all by buying a mac

enough posts from me

I would so move to a mac except this is my work machine

call your helpdesk.

our 'help desk' is a dude who sits down the row form me, and he has no idea

my company's way small, see

Downloaded a windows (XP) update and now can't access firefox/thunderbird even though it appears that I'm connected. Did a system restore and it's back working fine. The update included malicious software removal tool, any opinions on this anyone?