A thread for boring computer questions.

Haha I ran AVG on Friday. It found 1,002 - that's ONE THOUSAND AND TWO, folks - viruses on my PC! Mainly trojan horses, but a handful of dialers too.

I've deleted the lot, natch, and done the msconfig thing, and still there are pop-ups on start-up, and problems finding applications (especially the defrag button), and now I've just installed my digicam picture viewer and suddenly AOL won't connect to the interweb anymore! Argh!

Or - can you justify buying a new one?

*Blushes*

Express is a smaller and slightly slower wireless transmitter, but it does something Extreme doesn't do, it allows you to play music wirelessly into any old stereo (and it plugs right into the electrical socket in your wall).

I think this is right.

What is the difference in speed between the two?

A little backstory-I currently have my Powerbook anchored to cable modem in the corner of my house, but considering long-term costs I am thinking of getting Airport (our only phone jack is in the kitchen) and switching to DSL. I just worry about everything slowing down.

http://images.apple.com/airportexpress/images/index_speed12162002.gif

http://images.apple.com/airportexpress/images/index_speed12162002.gif

You might also find this useful: http://scribbling.net/how-to-fix-moms-computer

try HERE maybe you can find out what kind of speed difference to expect for the privilege of saving a paltry $40 a month

I've actually got a Linksys that I'm about to hook up in a week or two, to a home network of two (2) macs. Do I actually need to mess about with MAC spoofing? I actually have zero idea abbout setting it up, all I know is that I can point my browser to the router's address and there's some web-based admin form.

type: telnet hostname/IP

Ken L: yeah but you can also just go to your web broswer and type in telnet://your.address.here and it'll work too, launch the program for you if you don't want to remember to find terminal.

A) If you are doing the MAC cloning you have to have your computer physically linked to the router, do not do it over wireless.

B) If you are updating the software for the hardware you also cannot do this over wireless.

C) You cannot do B anyway using a Mac.

Not paying attention to these three steps will result in your router being completely fried. The upshot is that they send you a replacement immediately, for free, because their website DOES NOT TELL YOU THAT YOU CANNOT UPDATE SOFTWARE USING A MAC.

Or you could just use encryption and/or limit access to known MAC addresses like everyone else does.

The I386 folder most likely, because it's not guaranteed; it's just a name, but almost certainly contains the installation files for Windows. This is not the same as the windows installation itself, which will be in c:\windows\ or c:\winnt most likely. I take it you bought your PC with Windows pre-installed by a vendor such as Dell?

What it does is if you want to install some new feature of Windows that are not installed by default, it can install it from the I386 directory rather than from the Windows CD. Assuming you have a Windows CD (and a CD player), then that will suffice and you don't really need the I386 directory.

Alternatively, if you're worried about it, you could try compressing the I386 directory (right click, properties, advanced, compress files...)

I got a plotter, today, for free.

problem is, I think, the plotter's driver doesn't work with anything beyond windows 98 and I have XP.

is there a way of running a copy of 98 from inside XP?? or something??

what else could I do?

I looked online (a bit) and was told it wouldn't work.

I think I may have found a driver that will work.

how boring!!

If you can find a driver for say NT4, then there's a possibility, but even at that it's probably likely to fail.

Have fun anyway.

A "plotter" you say! Do they still exist! You'll be coming home with a drum printer and a wireless next.

I think I have found an NT-based driver that, apparently, "works very well with XP".

since I dropped & broke my external hard drive, on sunday, I have no copy of autoCAD to give it a whirl with, though!!

ta!

Either that or everyone on slsk has become a total asshole and stopped sharing, and no one is interested in my files either. The first option seems totally sensible to me, knowing people, but the second seems strange especially considering the new albums I just added.