RandyC

Hi there, This is quite a tough question to answer but i'll fire it anyway to see if I can get any response. I have some very old DOS software that only displays output on a hercules video card. I want to try and get this output and place it on a modern card as trying to run a system with old hardware is proving impossible. Also I can't rewrite the software as I don't have the sourcecode. So here is my question : Does anyone know of a hercules emulator I could use to get this output onto a modern card? Any other ideas on getting round this problem would be most helpful. Many thanks ...

After installing 30 patches through windowsupdate (over 40 megs) on one of my laptops I have now found that the machine crashes when I try and reboot it. It shuts down fine its just when I want to restart xp does it crash. Is there a log that I can set up so I can find what XP is trying to close when it crashes? Many thanks ... P.S. The laptop is the sam spec as the one below except that I havn't got a dual boot on this one.

It starts up fine ... i'm just concerned that it doesn't shutdown properly (and just hangs instead of reboots). However the laptop shutsdown fine its only on shutdown am I having the problem. I will try and shutdown it in safe mode but I still won't know what is causing the problem...

I've used quite a few refills over the last four years since I got my existing inkjet printer (A HP Deskjet 610c - cheap and chearful, however when it comes to £25 for a black cartridge and £26 for a colour its not quite that cheap and chearful). The refills i've got have been mostly the same in terms of quality as they all seem to bleed slightly especially if there is bold text on the page. They also seem to run out faster then the HP original cartridges or like one of them actually dry up in one hot afternoon! Still i'll wait and see what Europe finds over this as they never used to be as expensive as this ... i've got some 10 year old magazines somewhere i'll see how much the cartridges cost for my old Canon BJ10 printer back then. RandyC

I have a 15" TFT on my IBM Thinkpad A31 laptop running Windows XP and have noticed other than one dead pixel (which is fairly common I gather) a dark smudge which only appears when viewing light colours in the centre on the screen (in the shape of a dark line about 1cm wide and 5 cm in length). I have tried the obvious (eg. cleaning the screen) but the smudge is still there. I have noticed this in the past week and it hasnt been there since I got the laptop 5 months ago. Is this a problem with associated TFTs or something faulty? Many thanks RandyC P.S. I have also noticed strange ghost images that appear only on the explorer/IE toolbar for some reason. They look like several lighly coloured blocks which are to the right of the icons on the toolbar. I have not applied any skins and am just running standard blue 'lunar'. Again I have only recently noticed this. Any suggestions on why this is happening also?

Well one out of two problems fixed as the nvidia properties is now working but still have the same problem with 3DSMAX with the windows desktop mirrored in the viewing windows within 3DSMAX. Back to 30.x drivers I guess.

These new drivers mess up big time when I use 3dsmax. I'll stick with the 30.x ones till the WHQL cert. is given on the new drivers and i'll try again ... -Carl- P.S. I was also not able to access the the nvidia display properties section as it bombed out whenever I tried to click on the nvidia tab Anyone else experiencing this?

It should work from the specifications you have given. We used to run NT4 on P133s with 32megs RAM back in 1997/98 and was pretty quick.

Good to be of service. I made the tip because the exact thing used to happen on a PC I had in the early 90s and also sometimes with the two 7 year old iiyama beasts that I have running at the moment.

Check to see if you monitor cable is put in firmly on both ends.

I'm still waiting for my HAL 9000 ... wish they would hurry up a little. It's 2002 now you know

I'll second that ... everything is fine here

Hi there, On my step dads PC running Win XP it keeps on coming up with a BSOD and in the dump message stating STOP : 0x0000007e (0xC0000005, ... ). The only hardware changes were to add another 52x CDROM drive adding to the existing one but the PC has worked fine for the 2 weeks since the install. The complete PC specs are below. I have never had any problems with the computer before now as it used to be my old PC. Specs: AMD K6/2 550 300w PSU Gigabyte GA5-AX (ALi Apollo 5 chipset) 384mb PC100 RAM 1 Aopen 52x CD-ROM drive 1 Samsung 52x CD-ROM drive IBM 60GXP 20gb Fujitsu 1gb 3com Internal Modem Diamond Viper V330 4mb (nVIDIA RIVA 128) Any ideas as these BSODs have just come out of the blue and I can't seem to enter safe mode or even repair from my WinXP cd Thanks in advance for any light you might shead on this matter ...

Ok will do, I'll try it again tomorrow. Thanks for your advice.

I tried to repair by booting off the winxp cd and starting the install program but it also BSODs. As far as I know my step dad wasn't making any changes to windows he was just surfing the net using the modem. I'll try to start it up in debug mode (i'm sure I tried to do that before but it came up with a file not found or corrupt ... something in the windows/system32 dir). I'll make a note of that file if it comes up again ...

Thanks for your advice Alien. To be honest I don't have the parts or the desire to make up a device like that (i'm staying in my old room at my parents house until I start my new job in late august, so its only a temporary problem). I think i'm going to replace these huge old, storage heater like iiyama monitors for a couple of LCD monitors when I get some cash in the bank. As for cooling the CPU i'm probably going to go for some sort of water cooling in the nearish future possibly when I upgrade.

I bet my PC CPU is between 58-61c at the moment. This room is always hot (south facing, above the boiler with all the pipes under the floor, quite small and not much ventilation). I have some cooling in there but it's as noisy as I can stand without earprotection. I'm just going to wait for it to melt and that's my excuse for a new cpu and motherboard I'm not intending to go delving in the dusty innards of my PC to clean the bottom of the CPU heatsink and reapply some Artic Silver. I'm not fussed if I have to walk around in t-shirt a if i'm on the PC for any length of time (even in mid-winter) but thats my two ancient monitors fault for pumping out so much heat. Heres a link to that picture one of you people were on about ... I might try this someday ... http://www.handyscripts.co.uk/trubador_egg.htm

Heineken is one of the best lagers I have tasted ... although this was in the brewery in Amsterdam; and in the middle of a 48 hour drinking stint.

Quote: Visual Studio.NET is so awsome upgraded from VS 6 about a month or 2 ago and it has just been great I agree its certainly a worthwile upgrade for once. Anyone tried the free J# addon yet? I quite liked the J++ IDE although a non sun standard implementation of Java which caused a few problems but easily fixed.

In the summer a cool decent lager like Grolsh,1664 or Carling Premier is good. However I really like ales like Spitfire and Speckled Hen ... although they are more of a winter drink in my book. As for spirits I enjoy a double shot straight of JDs or a decent Dark Rum now and then.

There are quite a few people having problems with gp4 it seems. I have had no problems so far ... except the odd crash when testing graphics setting to get mine to run at any decent frame rate. Certainly Mr Crammond is going to release a patch for the game which of course is no consolation for you. In the mean time perhaps try looking at some dedicated f1 game discussion boards for some answers like www.f1gamers.com for example. Other than that try and reinstall your video card drivers ... not much help I know but it could work.

Like I said hl uses a heavily modified q1 engine. When valve starting developing hl back in late 96 / early 97 they started with the q1 engine and developed that heavily, they may have taken some ideas and concepts from the q2 engine but they never applied for the license. Check the copyright on the original hl box for the id license. It's dated 1996 at which time only the q1 engine was around as the q2 engine didn't become available till very late in 97. This is a review stating "There's nothing exceptional about the engine--it's a heavily modified version of Id Software's Quake" : http://pc.ign.com/articles/153/153107p1.html

Quote: Half-Life is ran on a heavily modified Quake2 engine :] Actually it uses a heavily modified Q1 engine. But who cares? Carl

The trick is to only use one round per target ... but i'm sure your all doing that. Carl

Apparently it does ... although there are a few texturing problems with the implementation in this game. Carl