mjwebb007

Yeah I know. This is a friend's laptop and I didn't want to lose his pictures and files. Ended up reinstalling and finding a bad stick of RAM. Ordered him 4GB and now this thing screams. Thanks for the help.

Working on a Dell laptop for a friend of a friend. WinXP takes forever to boot... over 3 minutes. Also takes about the same amount of time to shut down. There is no task bar, CTRL+ESC does nothing. Windows key does nothing. I can get into device manager and only driver missing is display driver. I have downloaded the chipset and wireless and ethernet drivers from Dell and they install but I still have no access to anything. It is WinXP SP2. Have downloaded the ISO of SP3 to install but pretty sure that is not going to fix it. I think he had a virus and had weak AV protection. Would run SFC but can't as I have no start button. Is there another way to run the command prompt? Ran CCleaner and got a few hits but nothing stands out in the registry portion. What is the best way to scan for virus when there is no anti-virus loaded i.e. best portable external scanner? USB seems to be hit or miss as well so something I can write to CD would be better. Any additional info I can provide. I don't want to have to reinstall if I can just recover it but I think I am headed down the new install path.

I appreciate someone replying but my problem is not with creating additional user accounts. I know how to do that. As does he. I thought it was obvious when I said he has five user accounts that we both knew how to create them.

So he keeps an external hard drive attached to the docking station that is formatted in FAT32. His laptop (Win7 32-bit) is obviously NTFS. When I disconnected the hard drive, the issue improved (I could switch between one or two of the profiles a few times, then it eventually locked up). I haven't been able to find anything anywhere to help with this. Any ideas? Also, another employee has the same model and spec laptop and has multiple user accounts (including a mirror of one of his) and she doesn't have any issues.

The guy I work for is using a Win7 32-bit Dell Latitude laptop. When he goes to switch users (he has five different profiles set up), the screen often goes black and nothing happens. After I randomly hit the ESC button, the Win button, the spacebar or the mouse button (no rhyme or reason) it eventually presents the user login screen (usually after 3 or 4 minutes of the button pushing). If I don't do anything, it never comes up - left it for 15 minutes and still had the black screen. Sometimes it has the screen background for the user login screen but it just stays that way with no selectable users. He does have programs open (usually documents and Outlook 2007) when he switches from one to another, but he needs to be able to switch back and forth without powering down the computer. His solution because he doesn't have the patience I do is to shut it down and be pissed about losing the document he is working on or the website he was looking at. Admittedly there are built-in recoveries for these issues but it shouldn't be how it is. Any help would be appreciated.

I will see if she has this selected and tell her to deselect it. Thanks danleff, I knew somehow that I could count on you to answer this for me.

I use Office 2007 but am by no means an expert or even advanced user. I have a friend who uses Outlook 2007 for work and she has a format issue. She receives emails in plain text. When she gets the reply copied to her a lot of times the original email shows up as rich text in the copied email, meaing the original email was actually rich text and for whatever reason she received it in plain text. As the original email goes out to several people and copied emails show up as rich text, the original email was obviously in rich text and this has to be an issue with how her computer/Outlook is viewing the emails. Any suggestions on how to fix this? I am sure it is just something within the options that is either enabled or disbaled but I can't seem to find the appropriate option. Thanks.

I have installed watercooling blocks on my motherboard. I also have one on my graphics card. Unfortunately this prevents me from installing my graphics card in top PCI-E slot. Will it still work if I install it in one of the other two? Thanks for any help. ASUS forums and FAQs are non-existent for this motherboard....

Anybody?

I know they are kind of expensive but one or two of the new high end ASUS boards have the discrete card with X-Fi tech (I think they only do up to EAX 4.0 but that is much better than any onboard that I know of). Sort of saves you a slot too since they are made for the uppermost PCI-E x1 slot. I am not sure if any other PCI-E cards work in that slot. It appears to be a regular slot that is black (most of the others are white) but is seems to have the right spacing to be a normal x1 slot. I personally have always been an AMD fan and some of the xx50 series Phenoms look pretty promising (especially the Black Series) but AMD is still seriously playing catch-up with the Intel Core 2 architecture (I, even though an AMD fan, have a QX6700 and a B3 Q6600 that are plenty powerful). The Asus Maximus II Formula is a good board but is an Intel P45 chipset. Uses DDR2 but doesn't support SLI, it does CrossFireX. Lots of great features on this board (has the X-FI add-on card I was talking about). The new 4870 X2 cards coming out look pretty promising. I will probably use a combination of this board and a 4870 for my HTPC in the near future. Hope that points you in the right direction.

Thanks for responding. I am saying there are fully validated versions of Office 97, 2000 and 2003 on all the computers in question but I don't have the actual original install discs. This is for my wife's small business (not the owner, but she is the COO). All her installs are legal but the Office Manager who was in charge of the software upkeep recently left the company and no one knows where the discs are. They want to update to 2007 and I need to know if I can just order the upgrade versions or if I have to order full versions. Thanks for the help.

Do I need to have the original discs to install upgrade versions of Office 2007 or simply a validated registered version of the software on my computer?

I think I may have been a bonehead. Someone please let me know if I have. The 650 I have is a single tuner card (although it has two connections) so you can use one or the other, but not both. I think the simplest thing to do is to unplug the cablwe connection and try to detect the antenna connection.

I am relatively new to Vista but liked what I saw with multimedia capabilties for a rig I am building for my sister. I have an ATI-powered Theater650 TV tuner card installed. It has two coax connections. One is for regular cable and the other is a DTV/FM connection. I have the coax cable from the wall going to the cable connection and an OTA antenna connected to the DTV/FM connection. I tried detecting TV signals from Vista Media Center and all it gave me was the regular cable connection. My question is how do I get it to see the DTV connection? Do I have to choose one or the other for recording TV? I have the drivers installed but see nothing in Control Panel or Catalyst Control Center that allows me to enable/disable/choose anything. Thanks for any help.

I appreciate the info. I know about CCleaner. I use it all the time. I think it just goes back to the fact that she did something without his recommendation. I use it just to make sure the registry stays relatively clean and organized and to purge cookies. I don't actually think her computer in particular has been infected and fortunately everything we are doing is preemptive. I suggested that the all do a complete uninstall of Norton and AVG and buy a volume license for something better (Kaspersky and NOD32 were two of my suggestions). They know there is no way to defend completely against all virus/spyware but as my wife said "It doesn't mean we should just give up and not try". I am so proud of her. And the attack was minimal in that it has only affected 3 of the computers in the office. The IT guy was supposed to update everyone's computers with the latest definitions and do scans but his suggestion was to do it themselves and everyone add the aformentioned software and scan themselves. Not sure what they are paying him for. Are Norton AV 2006 and AVG 8.0 Free both real-time scanners? I am pretty sure that Norton is but I don't know about AVG.