mjwebb007

My wife has had a recent flurry of virus/spyware activity at work. Unfortunately because of her job she has to look at a lot of gaming websites (especially in other parts of the world) that are not necessarily bad but who knows. Her fairly small company has a guy who is contracted to do their IT work. Her computer already has Norton 2006 on it. I downloaded and installed CCleaner, SpyBot, Ad-Aware 2007 and A-Squared Free. The IT guy wasn't enthusiastic about CCleaner but said not to call him if it caused problems. He directed her to download and install AVG Anti-Virus Free to "backup" Norton. I'm not sure why I think this but isn't double stacking anti-virus software a bad thing? Otherwise why wouldn't every magazine and website tell you to download multiple anti-virus programs like they do with spyware removal/protection software? I personally feel the guy has embellished his credentials and is less of a true IT guy and more of a misdirected enthusiast but that is for another posting. Please advise...

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.

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.

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 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.

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 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.

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 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.

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 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 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.

I have two different systems I am trying to build both based on Asus 680i SLI boards (Striker Extreme and P5N32E-SLI). Both have boards that have been sitting for a while. I have reseated all cards and all RAM (even swapped out a couple of sticks). I know my PSUs are good (have a PSU tester and they both show good on all wires). Both are booting up and I get the DVD spinning up but the BIOS never shows up. I have not swapped out video cards (The Striker is in SLI with two eVGA 8800GTXs and watercooled so that is no easy task) but neither one of them even gets to the point of showing the BIOS nor do they sound like they are going much past the DVD drives posting and an initial hard drive initialization. Could it be something as simple as the BIOS battery is dead? I am pretty sure all the hardware is good so I am kind of stumped.

Both of these boards have previously worked with the current hardware. I tore them down in one case because I had a cable that fried (wasn't connected to anything other than the PSU at the time so I know it is not the hardware being damaged) and in the other case to retrofit back to air-cooled from watercooled. The Striker does stop on the RAM Init phase of the boot up (shows on the LCD poster on the back) but like I said, it seems as if the BIOS is not even intializing at all (it gets past CPU Init but stops at RAM). That is what I thought about the battery but figure the BIOS resetting every time would be kind of a pain.

Just wanted to get some opinions on best universal remote to use with a Media Center PC (whether MCE 2005 or Media Center within Vista). I like the Logitech Harmony stuff but want a remote that is most compatible with the Windows software. I am trying not to use the Microsoft remote and want macro capability. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated. Thanks.

Just wanted to get some opinions... I have a Fujitsu Stylistic 5020D Tablet PC. Processor Upgrade Question: Currently it is equipped with a Pentium M 733 (1.1 GHz 2MB L2). I am pretty sure I can upgrade to any of the socket compatible Pentium M processors but I think I will leave that alone since I kind of like the ULV aspect of the processor (Tablet is rated for around 6 hours and it pretty much does that). But please let me know what you think about that. Memory Upgrade Question: 512MB DDR-333 Installed. Ordered 2GB of Crucial DDR-333 to add some horsepower. Really no questions about that. Hard Drive/OS Upgrade Question: 40GB 4200RPM Fujitsu HD installed. Ordered a WD Scorpio 120GB 5400RPM HD. Stuck with 5400RPM for battery drain and capacity reasons (less drain than a 7200 and came in a 120GB size). My question on this topic is it has Windows XP Tablet Edition 2005 on it. I want to upgrade to Vista Home Premium. First I don't have my Tablet disc (got tablet from my mom when her doctors' office upgraded their systems, so no one has any idea where the recovery disc and WinXP discs are) so I am not sure how feasible it is to just clone the drive from the 40GB to the 120GB (which would be necessary if I was just swapping out the hard drives). Second does anyone have any idea if Vista's drivers would support this tablet? I would ask Fujitsu but they have pretty much already stated they are only producing drivers for current models. If Vista is not an option, any suggestions on easiest way to clone the drive? That is enough for now I guess. Thanks.

Thanks for the info. I know about the ReadyBoost ability and since my Tablet has a MS/SD slot on it I am planning on using a 4GB MemoryStick Pro card for that. I read that 4GB is the max and they recommend maintaining at least a 1:1 ratio (i.e. if you have 1GB use at least a 1GB flash media). It is my understanding that you can use any type flash media as there are some Vista-ready motherboards that have a chip built in already (Asus has some) and I have seen some testing where people used SanDisk SD and MS Pro cards... I also think my tablet is powerful enough and will use the Vista Advisor software to figure it out. Unfortunately I can't get Fujitsu to tell me whether Vista drivers support my hardware. They want me to by a new Vista capable model. That program works when going to a larger hard drive right?

I am pretty sure the end connector is the master and the next one down it slave but I know people who have hooked them up the other way and not had a problem (I think with newer hard drives, the on-board firmware doesn't really care which one it is and the jumpers are really an easy way for the relatively "simple" BIOS to figure out which one is Drive 1 and which one is Drive 2). And for the original poster, pretty much all IDE ports are 1 connector but 2 channel meaning you can have two IDE devices plugged into one port. This is why a lot of computers have the CD/DVD drive on the slave connector and the hard drive with the OS on the master connector.

Alright. Just need some suggestions or someone to give me a virtual slap and tell me to get a hold of myself. I am currently doing a build (primarily gaming rig but need some added functionality as well). I have (2) legal copies of WinXP Pro and WinXP Pro x64. I want to eventually upgrade to Vista Ultimate when it and third-party drivers mature a bit. So my plan is to create 3 partitions and install each of the copies of Windows I currently own. Then, in a couple of months I want to upgrade one WinXP Pro to Vista Ultimate. First question, do I install the regular Pro versions (renaming the Windows directory on the second installation) then install x64? Second, is there really a reason to even install x64 with Vista in the upgrade pipeline? My only real reason for that is to see how 64-bit gaming is (the inqusitive part of me wants to know). Another option would be to only load 1 Pro version and the x64 then upgrade x64 to Vista so I still have the stable version of WinXP Pro on the computer. I pretty much want to install one version of WinXP Pro so that I know I have an OS that works. The x64 is really to experiment and the second XP Pro is to later upgrade to Vista. Any suggestions/comments are appreciated (and as I said before you can tell me to come back from Saturn if that is where this plan really is).

And..... if someone could tell me where to find an Asus Striker Extreme for sale that has it in stock.... I could actually START my build...

Quad boot? What OSes? As far as hardware, I will have two Raptor X's in a striped RAID array divided into 3 partitions. I plan on making these partitions during the initial install of WinXP Pro. I had seen in the past where you should start with the oldest OS install first because as each OS comes out, its boot loader becomes more sophisticated (which is how I planned to do it). I will most likely get the Vista Ultimate upgrade vice the full version which is why I was going to install the second WinXP Pro. Does that make sense or will I just be able to do a clean install since I will have a COA/Key for each OS? And thanks for the input.