A thread for boring computer questions.

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?

Wait, where's the question?

xp update might have changed/turned on XP built in firewall and restricted those programs from reaching the internet for some reason

Never thought of that, I use zonealarm firewall and checked that to see if it was blocking access but looked ok. Will try installing update later and see if windows firewall blocks access.

zonealarm kinda sucks, yr better off just using the windows firewall

It's a conflict with zonealarm apparently http://forums.computeractive.co.uk/thread.jspa?threadID=138881&tstart=0

unzipping .BAD files, how do i?

there are 3 different things that use .bad extension, which is yours?

look at the start of the file (easier in unix...) and see what the file is rather than trusting what the extension says. it may just be a zip file with a cheeky extension change.

% jacko -i -m sooo.BAD

#whois .BAD

it may just be a zip file with a cheeky extension change.

i think this is most likely the case, thanks!

Hai I'm at some governement employment commission place and I want to turn on the volume so I can listen to music (like muxtape or hypem or streaming mp3s) thru my new earbuds but I don't have access to the control panel or volume or anything. (Windows obv.) CAN I HACK THIS?

if it's not under start->programs->accessories->entertainment, then... i dunno.

exe file is at windows/system32/sndvol32.exe ?

Yes, it is.

But if they care about it that much, they'll have disabled it in your hardware profile. In which case I think you're stuck.

No I don't have access to Run and my only accessories option is System Tools --> IE (no add-ons)

I really know nothing about computers but I figure there must be a way.

xp

If you don't have "Run..." or My Computer, try typing "C:\Windows\System32" (without quotes) into the IE titlebar.

Disallowed!!

Well looks like I'm fuxored. But thanks.

ipod

word

Can anyone think of a way of converting a FAT32 partition with Windows XP installed on it into an NTFS one, possibly by cloning it, formatting it as NTFS and then copying back the files?

No worries, answered my question.

http://www.aumha.org/win5/a/ntfscvt.php

I have UTF-8 encoded metadata that I need to convert to non UTF-8. Does anyone know if there is an encoding that will handle UTF-8 gracefully, e.g., turn accents in UTF-8 into accents in the standard character set for Western languages? I tried ISO 8559-1 and I still get funny characters.

UTF-8 is the encoding you seek.

hmm... depending on yr data/tools/skillset... there are a few programmatic ways that might be a bit more effective to convert utf-8 to ascii.

sometimes, if there's only a few problem characters... running a search and replace in any decent text editor is a plausible choice.

it depends on the exact problem.
m.

msp, I think that's possibly the best example of begging the answer that I've ever seen.

Anyways, the problem is not the encoding. UTF-8, or more broadly, Unicode, is a universal encoding, in that every character of every language is (theoretically, at least) represented. No, the problem is yr display device, which appears not to support UTF-8. You can either choose a different display device or you can discover which encodings are supported by yr display device of choice. If you are using a terminal-type application, then the solution may be as simple as choosing a Unicode font that supports the "funny chars" you want to see drawn correctly.

Also, if you were really using ISO-8559-1 instead of ISO-8859-1, I'd expect that you'd not see what you want to see.

UTF-8, or more broadly, Unicode, is a universal encoding

Unicode is a character set. UTF-8 is an encoding. Unicode characters in UTF-8 are one to four bytes long. ISO-8859-1 (Latin 1) is a character set and encoding in which all characters are one byte long. Provided your data only contains characters that are available in Latin 1 there's no reason why it shouldn't be desirable or possible to convert UTF-8 encoded characters to Latin 1. Some solutions here: http://www.unicodetools.com/

Thanks, ledge. That was exactly what I needed - the tools to do the conversion. I had been trying to do it with an XML editor and I don't think it was working. Thanks!!! I will try it out today...

This is going into a database that does not support Unicode. :(

Believe it or not, Unicode is an encoding: This is why characters from the Universal Character Set (perhaps you were thinking of this, ledge) each have Unicode numbers, this being the very definition "encoding". The Unicode encoding is kind of a meta-encoding, in that it's not generally directly implemented, but instead, is referenced by encodings such as UTF-8, UTF-16, and many other more obscure encodings.

youn, the easiest way to transcode yr data is to load it into a database which does support UTF-8, then extract it in the encoding you require. Perhaps if you included the information that you are transcoding for a crappy database in yr question, you wouldn't have gotten a slightly snarky answer from me.

on my work PC, you can access servers through the "my network places" function, which basically operates as a simple SFTP program. is there a similar built-in feature on macs, or do i have to download a separate SFTP program?

Macs come with command-line SFTP, but you can download Fugu if you want a GUI.

Fugu.

Note that if you are not actually using SFTP, but instead, accessing CIFS shares, then OS X does come with similar functionality built into the Finder.

begging the answer? i'm just trying to know the requirements before i try suggesting a solution. furthermore, sometimes people already know the answers to their problems. they just need to identify what the problem actually is by talking about it.

sry for treading on yr question answering turf.

on my work PC, you can access servers through the "my network places" function, which basically operates as a simple SFTP program. is there a similar built-in feature on macs, or do i have to download a separate SFTP program?

You're talking about SMB sharing, which OS X has. Under the System Prefs there's a "Sharing" or Network area, to the best of my recall, which will allow you to turn on or off Personal File Sharing. As for finding other computers on the network, that's sometimes a function of being logged into a Windows domain and you should be able to still connect directly even if you can't see the directory with smb://machinename

a mysterious red line has appeared across the center of my computer screen. it is actually slightly off center. it is a vertical line. i tried restoring my computer to a previous state, but that has not removed it. very very strange.

probably a monitor problem then

CyberDuck is less clunky than Fugu

i've used fugu and cyberduck and they both suck compared with the program i have on my work pc (winftp)

MySpace question...So I found an html code for MySpace and changed the background color...Now I want to add an animated gif on that background. What code do i put in? FYI, here's the code i've been using:
http://tinyurl.com/6eszrt

Codes for Changing your Myspace Background Image

http://www.davesite.com/webstation/html/myspace_backgrounds.shtml

> Now I want to add an animated gif on that background.

it's like the 90s never happened...