Dirty Harry

Does this make any sense to anyone - all suggestions wellcome... Out of the blue I got serious problems with my cable connection, which was (then) through a linksys router and static IP's on my home LAN running XP as the OS on the two internet connected PC's. So I switched to DHCP and plugged the cable modem directly into my main PC, but the problem stays the same. The cable company guys swear everything is in order in their end and claim that something is blocking traffic on my end. I reverted to a month old backup, switched the cable modem - but still face the same same problem. The problem is that I cannot reach certain websites. They just refuse to display (with IE6) while most sites work OK. To make it even stranger, I can't even ping some of the sites, whereas others ping just fine, but the sites are not necessarily the same. For example; I cannot ping ntcompatibe, but I can view it alright in IE (sometimes some sideframes don't display though). On the other hand, I can both ping and view yahoo.com. Microsoft.com I can neither ping or view, BBC shows up just perfectly everytime. I had zonealarm installed when this sh1t started, but it's now uninstalled and every reference to it deleted from the registry. Everything had worked just fine for months before. Where the h-ll should I look for the problem ? Or, as I tend to believe, how can I find evidence for the cable guys that the problem is not on my end ? H.

There are several sites on the net that let you download readymade bootdisk images. Do a search on google along the line of "bootdisk image" or try hitting sites like www.bootdisk.com H.

I run a network at home and would like to be able to shut down (power off) the other PCs from any other station. What is the easiest way ? Apparently this should be possible through a vbs script, what should this look like / do I need to have some software running for it ? Harry

I 've seen it and removed it with a program called HijackThis, found at http://www.spywareinfo.com/~merijn/index.html Another one I'd recommend is CWSHredder found at http://www.spywareinfo.com/~merijn/files/hijackthis.zip H.

My personal two reasons I visit less than before 1) the new forum engine is annoying. Maybe its better than the old ones for the admins & mods, but for me as a user its not. 2) The eternal novel writing about any- and everyhing is annoying (prime example above). A lot of it is allright, the guy is definately helpful but there is much too much of it. And the darn double carriage returns... But hey, the web is a free place, everyone votes with their mouse click. And I'm not inteding to start a flame war, just giving an honest answer to the question asked. H.

Yes, a NIC is the Network Interface Card (or chip) Onboard or PCI its still more or less the same circuitry for this purpose. Tech terms, try "dual broadband connection" in Google, spits out 178.000 pages, and the first ones look pretty relevant. I guess, however that your major problem will be to do it with one connection being "secure", i.e. VPN. H.

Quote: (NOT ethernet connections, there is quite a subtle difference, as WAN is actually like a phone connector which is a little smaller than the ethernet connector (RJ45), but else the look pretty much alike. No idea what you're talking about. My Dlink router connects to my ADSL modem with standard ethernet cable, RJ 45 plugs in both ends. Never seen it done any differently. As to the original question of this thread, I'd guess, altough never seen it done, that you should be able to do it with two NICs (if onboard or PCI shouldn't matter), but then you need to find some software that does the load balancing in order to get any benefit out of it. Dunno how that would shake out. It was done with modems, long, long ago when ppl still had those things. But if one of your connections is through a VPN tunnel I doubt that you'd get it to work H.

A movie (in the cinema) is running at 24 fps. Any complaints about the picture quality ? H.

This forum is going downhill...

Yeah, and worst of all the novelists keyboard is still broken, produces only double and tripple carriage returns... The benefit of defraggers, best or worst, seem to be an item which is based on faith. Sure in some conditions they can be useful, but I haven't seen much evidence on how much they actually speed up what. I've had harddrives running without defrag for years, and seen no improvement at all after defragging them. But it feels so logical so ppl want to do it. Has anyone seen any interesting tests on this ? H.

There are plenty of port monitors etc that show and log all in- and outgoing traffic filtered in various ways, like Network Spy. DUmeter shows you bits in and out, to just name another one that comes to mind. There are similar freeware utils, I'm pretty sure. But a program that pops up only when your shares are accessed doesn't come to mind. If its an allowed user who connects to an allowed share I'm not even sure how the various windows flavours handle & log the fact he's remote, but I'm pretty sure you can log it (in NT/XP) , and then use a differnt app to show the logs. But realtime freeware popup, can't help you there. H.

After a hibernation the PC boots normally (from BIOS), but then it loads a big hibernation file (hiberfile.sys) instead of loading the OS. You can crank out the power cord if you want when the machine is hibernated. Think about it like loading an image of your system state, which is written to disk as you power down. It's beyond me how someone could claim that that would hurt your HD. The only drawback is that it wastes quite a lot of HD space. Actually suspending the machine (sleep mode) is even handier, a weak current is keeping the data in RAM, and the machine comes back up really fast. Microsft explains it in this Knowledge Base article. If you want more info, do a little ggogleing around Hibernation, Power Save, ACPI, power state or similar. H.

Dscaler beats any other TV software hands over fist, and its freeware too. Find it at http://deinterlace.sourceforge.net/setup/index.htm There is a list of supported cards. H.

I find using favourites is, well, kinda impractical, especially when you have lots of them, want them on several machines and you change and reorder them frequently. I tend to collect links more "permanent" on locally stored html pages per topic, but up[censored] & maintaining them is a getting a bit tedious (editing the html manually or drag & drop in a WYSIWYG editor like Frontpage, Dreamweaver et al). I like to keep my links in a table like order, sorted manually. Anyone aware of a software tool that would do something like this: - let you make and save links on predefined (local) web pages on the fly - enable you to sort (move) links from one (local) web page to another, or within one. - enable you to easily edit the name of the link / change the URL - some help would also be a tool that can create a simple html page from just one folder within favourites, or a easy to use menu maker. And no, I do NOT want to switch browser from MyIE2 on top of IE, but I'd be happy to use one to manage my favs. H.

Bump.

Just use Total Commander (was Win Commander). It will search for a word (=content) in dir + subs and list all files where found. Windows search will also work, depends on how many hits you expect. It could get cumbersome if you have a 100+ positive search results. H.

Quote: No, I didn't install anything. It just happened not to work all of a sudden. Then it cannot be fixed. Only thinngs that are caused by something can be fixed. H.

One of the good things with this forum is that there were never any avatars here. And mmore important, no grafic sigs either, which makes it even better. H.

Why do you want to reassign? Its perfectly normal that they are on the same IRQ on a ACPI compliant PC running XP. And it works fine, too. H.

What you could do is simple: 1. boot from floppy (win98 as above) 2. Run flash program from floppy (same flopyy as in 1 or other) - The flash program will ask you which ROM file to use, well 3. Switch floppy to the floppy containing the ROM file To make it clear, when you have started the flash program, it is in the RAM. You can take the floppy where it is out, and put in a different one with the ROM file. H.

I've figured that it adds the executables in the same order you use them, if you have it set to 9 items, then it shows the last 9 proggies used, regardless of how many times you've used them. But, as you mention it ,sometimes I've felt that some hang around more permanently than others but haven't looked into it. If you right click and delete those you don't want to have there, are you saying that not used programs show up by themselves? It sounds like something is screwed up in your regisrty if it adds non-executables, like readme files, never seen that. BTW, not that I wan't to hijack this thread, but does someone know of a hack/program to add cascading folders to this same place or to the "sticky" part of the startmenu? H.

You need to install it as a network printer on the w98 box, not as a local one. I had exctly the same setup (BEFSR41, W2K/W98 but two HP printers on the W2K box), and it worked fine. H.

1. MS can write whatever they want, that does NOT mean it stands in court in every (or any) country in the world, and in all situations. But, granted, your case would weaken if what you bought was clearly marked "not for resale etc", but wether MS can leagly stipulate this *against a second buyer* is doubtful in many countries. It might hold against the original buyer, who is knowingly reselling it, but if you buy it without knowing that...It also says "may not be...used for any purpose other than demonstration, test or evaluation" which would indicate that you are not allowed to really use it at all, if you took that literally. Most bigger PC stores carry loads of OEM stuff, one could argue that thats just an industry standard for cheaper stuff w/o manuals etc. And fact is, if you got your hands on that software by buying it from anyone else than Microsoft the section you quoted is already violated. It is transferred in breach with the EULA, isn't it ? 2. The term "not for resale" does not necessarely mean that a legal owner cannot sell it. It just (perhaps) means that it should not be (=is marked not to be) in the resale channel, or maybe that the original owner, say a large PC manufacturer, has bought it with a contractual obligation ("agreement") not to sell it further as such and thsi is marked on all copies. That is not necessarely binding (in court) for an individual who has aquired the software in good faith, altough it is likely to be binding for the original purchaser. That MS could refuse to let you use the product on these grounds is in many places highly doubtful. It would be an odd law that would give the manufacturer the right to pick and choose among the owners of their legitimate products on the basis of what they could have found out long after the purchase. If you bought it in good fate, how could they say you should have known what the EULA contains? The goods is not counterfeit either (for which MS is of course not responsible), its perfectly legitimate. Dunno if its meaningful to speculate on global legal matters that much further but I wouldn't take the word of the EULA so seriously, just because you have to press F8 to accept it. Its bullying and intimi[censored] customers by MS, and I doubt they are really after individual users with these. From what I've gathered MS has been fairly relaxed with reactivating XP, I doubt they want really to start shutting off PC freaks on the basis of a phone call. H.

Quote: Software isn't generally allowed to be sold on once its purchased at retail level so whether its OEM or otherwise shouldn't make that much of a difference. Slowly, slowly... Obviously the situation differs from country to country. In most western societies there is a varying, but fairly large respect for private ownership and -rights. The basic principal is the same, once you have bought something, you own it and can do whatever you want with it, for example sell it. Granted, immaterial goods are be a bit different but still... Normal XP licenses are, if I recall correctly (?) not tied to the computer in the sence that you couldn't buy another new PC and legally install it there, as long as its off the first one. A OEM license might be tied to a particular computer, but what if you upgrade it. When do you need to buy a new licence, when you switch monitor, floppy drive, mobo, CPU, HD, cables or all of the above ? I'm not talking about the XP activation now, just when could MS in court strip you of your ownership by claiming that your license isn't valid anymore ? And what if you bought XP and all or some parts of the PC it came with ? Another minefield here is that few people bought anything from MS. You walk into your local friendly PC dealer (seller) and you buy something (you're the buyer). The basic contractual situation in most countries is between you two, and consumer protection laws give you an quite large degree of freedom to be ignorant in many places. Say you show up in court, say the desktop colours where all wrong, the seller refused to take it back in a opened package (as stated) so you sold it to your friend. In many countries it would be a hard time for any big corp to prove that you had to be aware about all the fine print you were surprised to find AFTER you had bought the product. Basically the deal was entered before the fine print, and then the fine print is a separate contract between you and MS, and legaly binding in a varying degree, and secondary to the legislation. This would also in many countries be judged on a case by case basis, a grandma buying her first computer stuff would be likelier to successfully claim that she couldn't be expected to know than someone working as a contract lawyer. I would be very interested to hear about a court case, anywhere in the "free world" where the court is actually sanctioning a consumer level, end user license or similar which severly restricts your ownership by prohibiting your right to sell the product as used. Even more interesting would be to find a case where the court enforces the producers decision not to let a second legal owner use it (i.e.. MS not activating it). It is likely that there is specific software related legislation in some countries, to this extent - would be interesting to know. Can someone point to such a case ? Anecdotal evidence is of litte relevance. I **guess** the legal route would be to claim that the software is consumed wwhen installed, but if it's still there, and MS would acivate it for the first owner on a new PC... The situation for a second legal owner should not be that different. Product activation, which gives MS the possibility to prove that it has actually been installed is a new thing, with Win 2000 it would be extremely hard to make a case against a second owner (as opposed to user) Shakti, if the court says YES, and Microsfot NO its pretty obvious that in that specific case the court wins. Contracts in breach with the law are not valid. Can you point to any articles about court cases where MS has refused activation of a used product, not that I doubt that they would try it ? I'd be surprised if they can win in court. Another story is that it can take time and be practically difficult to get the court decision enforced, and that you might have to carry every single case to court if MS refuses to comply. H.

Glad if its of any use. And yes, I was a bit lazy not posting the link... H.