ScinteX

Hi Katie Try this (for the big chippie thing LOL): http://support.dell.com/support/edocs/systems/ins5100/en/sm/palmrest.htm#1084976 Im not too sure on the warranty side of things- you might find the warranty is no longer... dont know if that matters to you or not! Also, the 9200 should fit since there is a 5150 that ships with this GPU. So I'm guessing that the 5150 has the same housing for the video that the 5100 does .... at least I hope so! good luck 8)

I'd remove it unless you are using the paid/full version. It is known to install spyware in the free mode. From http://www.safer-networking.org/en/articles/download-managers.html FlashGet (1.40, spyware-infected or paid mode) FlashGet can be installed in two modes - one ad-sponsored, one ad-free shareware mode that needs registering. I tried the ad-sponsored version, and indeed it did install Cydoor. The interface by the way reminds me strong of one of the other tools I tested (screenshots will be added later to this article). With only 5 simultanous download connections, it was only half as fast as Download Express, but it can be set to use up to ten. My opinion about this one is that you can get better download managers for free. If you dont mind it collecting info and about you and targeting you with crud then go for it! I'd use another download mananger such as umm i dunno... Download Plus

But if you only have one partition where else r they gonna go?!!! If u put an image on your PC then it will overwrite the data..... As far as seeing the files goes- in Windows Explorer go into Tools/Folder Options/View tab and check "show hidden files and folders". Then uncheck "hide protected operating system files". You can now see the Application Data in your user profile folder.

Please no more sims 2 I will die if I see anymore its affecting my well being!

Theres also an excellent utility on Nonags.com that shows you a visual representation of your disk. This way, you can easily see where all of the space is being taken up. In addition, I have found two things that take up disk space: System Restore (can take up a bit) And then the most EVIL of all utilities that lots of companies use (UK: Tiny, Gateway, PCs from PCWorld) - Second Chance. This little g1t took up 8Gb of space on a relative's machine! (her disk was only 20Gb anyway lol).... Anyway I will be quiet and give you the link to the utility I mentioned: http://www.win.tue.nl/sequoiaview/ This is also available via the Nonags website (scroll down the page to Sequoiaview): http://nonags.imd.it/diskmg.html ~S

oh mate sorry i didnt see this earlier... it wasnt in my "X forum topics since your last visit view" Oh well i am here now Prev checks loads of stuff & it appears to work on SP2, since I have had it running on my box for about 3 weeks now. Prevx say "...Windows 2000, XP on all service packs"..... http://www.prevx.com/ To be honest it has not flashed up warnings all that often, which I guess is a good thing. However I am sat behind a hardware firewall so who knows what is actually hitting me but getting filtered out by the firewall box! The most common warning I get is when a program is trying to execute in a "protected" folder. Typically, this is a temp folder of somekind (Windows temp folder or maybe another designated cache like IE's temp folder -> when using Windows Update). The program appears to monitor malicous activity that it thinks shouldnt be happening. Therefore it is hard to say what it stops exactly (With examples) since it doesnt use signature files as such. Wow this is hard to explain! The FAQ is really useful : http://www.prevx.com/prevxhomefaqs.asp Prevx do "monitor" events generated from the program. This is private and they do provide a detailed synopsis of why/what/when the program phones home. It is not malicious- it helps 0-day attacks and such. You can turn off the phoning home bit (see FAQ and/or http://www.prevx.com/PrevxHomeAudit.pdf). You could also use your firewall to stop it if you dont like the idea I suppose..... I am not quite sure exactly how this thing works, but I have been a bit crafty and downlaod various bits of code from the net that *attempt* to break Windows XP. I tested on XP SP1 and Prevx killed the process. On SP2, results were different- SP2 was not interested in the slightest and the code had no affect. I can only guess that should I ever get stung by a buffer overflow exploit in XP SP2, Prevx would catch it. Some background info on the web: http://www.wilderssecurity.com/showthread.php?p=96050#post96050 http://www.techzonez.com/forums/showthread.php?t=9739&goto=nextoldest http://netsecurity.about.com/od/readproductreviews/fr/aapr091904.htm An old article, but interesting all the same- probably the closest thing to how it works! http://news.zdnet.co.uk/internet/security/0,39020375,39118610,00.htm

Funny you should mention it- I have just been playing with Server 2003. It is annoying when stuff doesnt work on 2003. But then again, only a handful of home users would run 2003- thus businesses usually go for the corporate editions etc. Prevx dont seem to mention 2003 on thier site. Then again I would imagine that as a business you'd contact them and they would make it work... what a pain for us lot- I know we are "home users" but we tend to play with all sorts of things and join the "big boys" with thier servers editions etc!!!! But hey no biggie- and as u say, not a waste.

I felt a little guilty when I posted my last thread about the Sims 2 (cos it was useless and mainly ranting! LOL) - so here's a more helpful version Read all of this 1st, before you do anything!! When you have done reading, consider all of the ideas here. You dont have to do these in order- I suggest leaving DirectX until last. In fact you dont have to do anything I type here Check your hardware This tool is handy as it gives you an indicator as to if the Sims 2 will run at all on your PC. Keep in mind that even if it says u r ok, does not mean that the game run wonderfully. Download the Checker Tool here http://sims.servopro.com/downloads/download.php?download=http://sims2.servopro.com/TS2SysReqc.zip Update Graphic Card Drivers If you do not know what your graphics chipset is, click start, run, and type dxdiag.exe and press enter. Click the display tab- now you should see what kind of graphics chipset you have (something like Intel, nVidia, or ATI, which you can find under Manufacturer). Intel nVidia ATI Once you arrive at the appropriate site, depending on how it is set up, you must enter your windows version (98, Me, 2000, XP) which you can find on the System tab in dxdiag.exe (listed under operating system). You must also provide the graphics chipset (should be something similar to Radeon, GeForce, Intel Extreme, etc, which you can find on the Display tab under chip type). Download the file they suggest and run it. After installation, RESTART your PC. Reinstalling DirectX Bit of a dodgy area this one since DirectX is so integrated within the Operating system. However work ya way through this as it may help First, make sure your Sims 2 disk is in the drive. Afterwards follow these steps. Open My Computer. Right click on the Sims2 icon and choose Open. Double-click on the DirectX folder. Right-click on the DSETUP.dll file and choose Copy. Close this window. Open My Computer again. This time, open your C: drive (usually called Local Disk). Now open the WINDOWS folder. Open the SYSTEM32 folder. Right-click on an empty space in the folder and choose Paste. Now try running the GAME installation again- and click the right options so that DirectX is installed. Reboot, try and run the game. If the issue persists you will need to reinstall DirectX. You can get this program either off the disk, or from Microsoft's website. Either way, make sure you have the DirectX installation file handy. Go here http://downloads.guru3d.com/download.php?det=522. This comes down in RAR format. if you cannot open it, download WinRAR here http://www.rarlab.com/rar/wrar340.exe READ THE "IMPORTANT.TXT" FILE! Please dont flame me because you hosed your system with this. When you are done, reinstall DirectX 9. To use the DirectX installer on the disk: Open My Computer. Right-click on the Sims2 icon and choose Open. Open the DirectX folder. Double-click on the dxsetup icon. This will install DirectX 9.0c on your system. OR Double click the file that you downloaded from Microsoft.com. Refresh Rates People have been having problems with forced refresh rates. As I have said elsewhere in these very forums- Sims 2 really hates being run at high refresh rates. The refresh rate determines how many times your monitor refreshes its image in one second. Usually this is somewhere between 60Hz and 75Hz (1Hz is equal to one cycle per second, so 60Hz would be equal to 60 cycles per second). People have stated that refresh rates other than 60 Hz will not be supported by the game. The game simply changes the refresh rate to 60 Hz and changes it back once the player quits the game. The problem originates when there is a program that is FORCING a refresh rate and does not allow the game to change it. This may be the cause of graphics problems that so many people are having. Uninstall or disable any tools that you have that force/tweak refresh rates. Another related issue can be that your monitor refresh rate is set higher than the game's resolution. Setup your display to run at 60Hz and see if the problem is resolved. Hope one of the above works for you

No probs, happy reading

Hi Alec! Well you are in luck.. well kinda.....I don't actually know but still I might be able to help.... I am going to say something stupid.... "pity you aren't using Internet Explorer". HAHA! x) The reason? Well, if you open up your Favorites folder in Windows Explorer and change the view to "Thumbnail", Explorer will provide you with a preview of the site for each link, if your internet connection is active. From there you can just delete the links with no preview. Might take a while with your links though ;( Silly question, but are you on the latest version of AM Deadlink? I notice that they have fixed quite a few bugs (like UTF-8 encoding with Opera and some odd cookie problem). FYI latest version is 2.05 (December 2004). Ok time to cut to the chase...an easy way to check your links. This method does have a "limitation" as such - it won't work with IE (hmmm may do if a utility can create a HTML file from your Favs folder...). Anyway, hopefully it will work with Opera. It is nessesary to export your Bookmarks to HTML. I can do this in FireFox via the "Manage Bookmarks" screen. I assume Opera can do it too. Hopefully you will end up with a bookmarks.html file. Now, the easy bit. Download XENU fom here: http://home.snafu.de/tilman/xenulink.html Once installed, click "Check URL" and point it at your bookmarks file. It works as a spider on live internet sites as well as local files. Job done The only pain in the you-know-what is that the dead links have to be removed manually. At least you wont loose years of valuable bookmarks! I find all link validators to be a bit picky. XENU is really good however it isn't 100%. For example it doesnt seem to like "%" in the URL occasionally.... and some URLS that redirect you get logged as an error even with the option "treat redirect as error" off....I had XENU spidering over 6 million links on my workplace's website! Also, the right-click "show in browser" link is great for double checking the results Good luck!

hey alec no probs, always a pleasure. Just heading over to that link now....

Sweet! & u r most welcome

Hi TechWiz, Just for the record we tend to be a civil community who welcome guests to the forum. So welcome to you- and if you could maybe do the same to others, we'd appreciate it. Not everyone can be geniuses ~Scin~

Ive never setup a wheel in that game but I would imagine that the setup of game functions such as those that you mention would be roughly the same as how I setup them up when using a gamepad: In the game options, go into "Controls" (you can do this in the the game itself by pressing Escape key, then Options) or before the game starts - its in the manual anyhow. Once in there, highlight the function (shift up/down, world map, nitrous etc.) and press "Enter". Then press a button on the wheel and that fucntion will be assigned to that button. Should work....

hi, Sounds like spyware to me- there are subtle differences between spyware, trojans, worms and viruses.... But anyway who cares about that lol lets just try to fix it. Download Ad-aware from here: http://www.lavasoftusa.com/support/download/ And then Spybot from here: http://www.safer-networking.org/en/download/index.htmlom And then CWS Shredder from here: http://www.softpedia.com/get/Internet/Popup-Ad-Spyware-Blockers/CWShredder.shtml Run them all (with Internet Explorer closed) and clean away. Ad-aware is pretty good at restoring various settings to thier former glory. Give it a whirl and you should be fine.

I dont think that is quite the case. For example, software can quite easily (if badly written) cause such an error. However, I see yor point and I would agree that sometimes certain components can cause such an error. Typically this is usually a CPU or chipset issue. Id like to point out that this is the way the software is running on a pc - it is not usually the case that you need to throw your mobo in the bin labelled "divide by 0" and that this error will happen all of the time with every program Descent 2 is old, hence the problem. A possible fix for Descent 2 is to right click the shortcut to the game (on the desktop) and click Properties then Compatibility mode. Try each one and see what happens. Its an old game, so to be honest anything could be causes the error- this suggestion is an increibly long long shot :x

Ouch!! LOL ok ive just witnessed a little hottie... and no im not talking about a nekkid lady pic Just had a call to sort out a little PC at work- it has a Prescott 3.20E in it.... 82c!!!!!!! Apparently that is usual of this cpu running at 100% for a little while... So... im renaming that cpu to 3.2BBQ-E 8) Lotus... i think u r doing good since we have 15 of these cpus and they all must run over 60c easily- i just checked 5 of them. Saying that though they are all in very small slimline cases from HP... nasty

Hey Jo, rofl@"bright bunch" hehehe A long shot... i had the same problem as u but with another game. It could be your sound drivers. I had chosen (some say wisely) to get the latest sound drivers for my onboard sound. However, all games but one ran fine. So.... are the sound drivers something to look at? Another thing to try is DX diagnostics. open a run prompt (Start-->Run) then type dxdiag and press ok. Go through each tab, clicking "test" wherever possible. This will test all of your video and sound thingies Also this tool may show up something: http://sims2.servopro.com/TS2sysreqc.phtml Click on "download version 2.5" for the software. Another catch-all thing is to make sure that you have the latest graphics drivers- these are usually obtained from a site like ATI, nVidia etc. I have on occasions seen it where the only drivers to work are from the PC manufacturers site (dell, HP etc.) so maybe you could try there too. Also some information regarding what the crash actually entails would be useful- I know u say it restarts but we can do something about that.... Click Start/Run and type Sysdm.cpl, Advanced Tab, Start Up and Recovery/Settings/System Failure/Unmark "Automatically Restart"/Ok/Ok. When the problem happens again, u may see a blue screen instead of rebooting. If u do, note the error message since that is useful. Let us know how it goes, or if u have any other questions. If Im not here (u never know...although it is 3:30am at the mo lol) another one of the bright bunch can help i am sure

Hi, I assume that when you say "D:" you mean it is a partition? i.e. a slice of one physical harddisk? If it is a partition you could just delete it then recreate it maybe? If it is a physical disk I'd run it through scan disk or similar to check for bad sectors etc. In the Device manager I have the same as you but also (in my case) "C-Media AC97 Audio Device". Something you can do in DM is to right click "sound, video and game controllers" and then "scan for hardware changes". If nothing happens (nothing new detected), click View then "show hidden devices". You might see a new entry that is greyed out. If so, right click it and enable it. Finally if all of that fails then its something to check out in your BIOS. As they are all different you'll have to look in your BIOS manual or have a hunt around yourself in there or refer to the vendor's website Good luck

Hi Donna, and welcome.... and dont you dare say "about bl00dy time too"!! hehe just joking.... Using Google, there are many people with this problem. Also, the error can be displayed for any package so theefore it is a general read error from the CD. There is no magic wand fix for this issue I'm afraid. Apparently you dont need a DVD-ROM drive for the Sims 2. However there is a DVD edition out now so if you have got that one it may have something to do with it. I would suggest either the optical lens in your drive is dirty or the CD is a "bad one" (so thats a trip back to the shop) . I had a similar problem with a client who could install the game on her laptop but not on her desktop. It would be handy to try your CD in anoher PC if possible in order to determine if it is your drive or the CD. A final option is to copy the CD and see if that helps things... however thats tricky at the best of times.

So the issues would be....... Preset or any graphic file Types allowed (jpeg/gifs/animated gifs) Secure (nothing like a 10mb bitmap going up and down ) and for that matter hyperlinks etc. and other scripting I guess should be removed/dealt with/trapped (phpnuke had a prob with injecting of code...) Bandwidth Maybe a limit on the dimensions to keep things tidy Mods should be able to remove them if seen as inappropriate/or a approval queue (like the email addy idea but based in the site for mods to allow or reject) Maybe a minium post count before a custom one is allowed Alec, on your cascading issue, i guess that would be including a bit of code that inserts the avatar much like the current sig stuff... but dynamically. Therefore, a call to the database to get the path/filename then a bit to render it in the php. I guess that then a database issue *could* arise .... hmmm and also a bit of restructuring... and some page rewrites...I am sure this issue could be more techincal than any of us realise! -Apart from Philipp of course

with the amount of hits this thread gets it makes u wonder how far these nasties have got! Oh dear ;(

u r most welcome

wow alec u type lots! hey no bad thing. I hope u feel better- its nice to type stuff out. Maybe we could ask for a therapy forum? Im not taking the mickey ... how about it for those moments when we get that annoyed with our pcs -we can seek the reassurance of others?! However, u mention an example regarding teatimer. Well, I was on the hunt for a tool that could "see" in my index.dat file. For the info of others, thats the IE file thats hold some telling data about the user. So anyway I found a tool on a good looking site that looked fairly professional. So I install this little proggie and before I know it is trying to change lots of IE related stuff; mainly directing stored urls to www.superwebsearch.com to name but one. As it goes, I wasnt too concerned since I use Opera or FireFox all of the time. However, teatimer alerted me to the changes as they happened - as I clicked on 'deny' my original settings were kept and never changed. On a side point; as I am a little concerned about what else may have changed elsewhere on this box, I just restored last night's images of my disks just to be safe This dodgy download of mine isnt a particularly malcious program but it just shows that this tiny teatimer extension to Spybot is useful. Yes I thought the buffer stuff was an interesting feature of prevx ... what with SP2 and all that hype. Slightly off topic but for what its worth I personally would go with a buffer 'sploit as last on my "i want to be hax0r" list LOL. After all, misconfiguration and social engineering is so much more fun But with SP2 and DEP it usually means the programmer has to either be a bit tidier or just do things in a different way. Not the fault of the programmer of course Right... lets see what other probs ppl are having elsewhere in these forums! Cyaaaaaaaaaa

Yep the MBM is great, although they are (have?) stopped/ing support for it. If I remember rightly SpeedFan is another....