Sampson

I am not familiar with that Bios, but does it have a standby function? If this is a dual processor system, why are you running XP? W2K is the preferred OS for dual processing. Did you use W2K previously and switch over? XP generally does not address both processors. Its forte is being able to access HT enabled systems in the P4 line.

This is not a recommendation but a suggestion. Since Microsoft is going to pack CA's Etrust EZ Antivirus into some of its OEM versions of Windows, you might want to check them out. I use CA's EZ firewall and virus protection. It works nicely. If you are looking for free but good virus protection AVG and Anti-vir are also good. You will get any number of suggestions, but I suggest CA's first since Microsoft seems to be cheek and jowl with them.

I believe what peterh meant was "free up memory" not as you have understood "free memory." It would be helpful to know the kind of motherboard you are using so that you can be better helped. In any case, your motherboard has a graphics chipset integrated into it. It may or may not have video memory as part of the chipset, but when it needs more memory to run higher resolutions, it borrows memory from your RAM. What peterh is suggesting is that if you put in a graphics card with its own video memory into a slot of your PC, it will not need to borrow RAM from your system. In this sense a new graphics card will "free up" the memory that was once used by your inboard graphics on the motherboard. Here's the problem - peterh has suggested that you purchase an AGP card, but we don't know how old your motherboard is. When you look at the slots on your motherboard, especially on older boards the AGP slot is usually brown. On really old boards, there is no AGP slot. On less old boards there is an AGP slot but it may only support 1X or 2X boards. If this is the case, you would want to buy a PCI card. If it can support 4X, you can use most of the AGP graphics cards available. Your motherboard has a limit to the amount of memory it can hold and each slot has a limit as to the size (64K, 128K, 256K or 512K) of the stick. If you know the kind of motherboard you have, you can usually find these through a Google search. On old motherboards (BX types), in general there are three slots and each slot can carry a maximum of a 256K stick. Again, while this is typical of an "old" board, each manufacturer configured them differently. There is a difference in the kind of memory DIMMS, SDram, etc. That too is specified per board. Hope this helped.

It is better than no firewall, but it is hardly as sophisticated as other third party vendors like Sygate, Zone Alarm, etc. First, you need to eliminate the viruses, trojans, and spyware off your computer. There are a number of free virus softwares that you can use - Anti-vir and AVG come to mind. You will also need Ad-aware and Spybot Search and Destroy. Also, install Spyware Blaster. You would serve yourself well, if you are on a broadband modem by installing a router between your computer and your modem. It will kill the random pings that set software firewalls off.

It isn't just the amount of RAM, it is also the kind of RAM and how it is rated. All this is dictated by your motherboard. You only have so many slots, and denpending on the age of the motherboard each slot will only accept certain sizes of RAM to a maximum for that motherboard. Finally, the refresh rate and "speed" of the RAM varies. It is a general rule of thumb that you buy your sticks of RAM in the same increments per slot. Your RAM will only run at the "speed" of the slowest stick. So, while you may keep your present RAM, don't spend money on better performing RAM. The old RAM will not allow you to enjoy any higher performance speed wise though RAM hungry Windows will love the extra breathing room.

It may be a heat issue. But, since it can reboot after you have upped the FSB, (and the processor is no worse for the wear) it is quite possibly the memory. It may not be stable at that speed and it too may be exceeding its heat specs.

Get the larger drive. Most backup software for tape drives come with compression technology built in. However, compression is variable. Most graphic files are so compressed that they cannot be further comptessed. The larger drive will accomodate the borderline compressed data to be stored. In addition, since you are going with a raid system, I would suggest using Raid 5. It takes three disks to run Raid 5 but the advantage is that if one of the disks go down, the system will continue to run and after replacing the failed drive, the other two disks will restripe it. I know this seems like a "belt and suspenders" scenario, but if your data is that important, you'd be better served going Raid 5.

1) What kind of card are you running? 2) What drivers are you installing? 3) Do you uninstall the drivers first, reboot, and then reinstall? 4) Generally, the only hardware failure is the fan. Some of them have intermittant fans, some run full time.

This is one of several utilities that might let you delete the files: http://www.dslreports.com/forum/remark,7374516~root=sware~mode=flat

The keyword here is "completely." As peterh suggested what was once known as "98lite" can remove a number of components such that IE appears to be eradicated. The biggest advantange will be gaining some space on the hard drive. But, a healthy amount of "IE" that is necessary for other operations will remain. Keep in mind that Windows update will not work without some specific IE components. You can go instead to the download section of Windows Update and get the newest fixes, but the convenience of Update will sometimes be impaired if not broken.

Most games don't perform all that well on a laptop. Sony Vaio's are a good case in point. Sony is quite proprietary and the drivers are often tweaked for performance for their machines. Nine times out of ten they are biased toward DVD and media presentations. Games are not a priority. You can take peterh's suggestion, but don't be surprised to find yourself coming back to this board wondering why your DVD is not performing adequately after installing a particular game.

If you are using IE, right click on the e icon on your desktop and choose Properties. Click on the Connections tab. Click on the Advanced button. Perchance McAfee was using a proxy connection. Change it to direct connection.

Read this: http://msn-cnet.com.com/Windows+update+h...subj=ns_5326707 Then read this: http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;878474 There is a known problem with SP2 and AMD installations on some computers.

The MX440 is a really neat little card. It works well with DirectX 8.0 and with some 9.0 implementations. The Gainward variety can be overclocked through the utilities provided by that company and so it can in many ways exceed expectations, but its design preceded 9.0. My guess is that it simply can't process fast enough. Memory has little to do with this since most of it is used for higher resolutions. If you you know someone from whom you can borrow a newer Nvidia card, you might try it. It sounds like you have tried everything else.

It sounds like your firewall is still using the IP address assigned for your computer through the router. If you are running SP2 turn your firewall off. If you are using a different firewall have it ping to find the new address. If it doesn't, turn it off also. Then, power down the computer and pull the plug on the modem. Wait about 2 minutes. Then, power up the modem (if it is not USB) and wait for it to acqire the connection to the ISP. Then, power up the computer. Then, should get your desktop talking to the provider.

Reinstall protowall. It apparently locked down your ports and when you uninstalled it, they remained locked. Reinstalling it will at least let you see what is blocked so that you can unblock them. What you need to do is Exclude certain programs or sites from being blocked: 1.Open up Blocklist Manager 2.Click on Check Sources and then on Download Blacklists 3.From my pwconns.log file I would copy the text "Department of Environment DOE-CA" 4.In Blocklist Manager I would choose Edit > Find and then paste in the text and choose Find Next 5.Once you have the entry you are looking for right-click it and choose 'Add to Exclusions' 6.In the Exclusions Manager window choose Add > Save > Exit 7.Now press the Download Blacklists button once more 8.You will notice that the Deny has been changed to Permit 9.Press F9 to export the Protowall Blocklist 10.In Protowall choose File > Load IP Table and choose the ipfilter.p2p file

I agree with adamvjackson, in which case unless you are having a problem, it is best left alone. A second alternative to going into BIOS through windows is the following: 1.Click Start, point to Settings, point to Control Panel, and then click System. 2.Click the Hardware tab, and then click Device Manager. 3.Double-click to expand the Computer branch. Note the type of support that you currently have. 4.Double-click the computer type that is listed under the Computer branch, click the Drivers tab, click Update Driver, and then click Next. 5.Click Display a list of known drivers for this device, and then click Show all hardware of this device class. 6.Click the appropriate computer type (do not change from non-ACPI to ACPI computer types), click Next, and then click Finish. This is a hardware reset and you will have to reboot, which means that it is possible to throw something out of kilter and force a re-install.

The designation 40/80 is the size that the tape will backup normally/(or)compressed. Depending on the software and the OS when data is read off the hard drive and stored on the tape, you can do a one to one backup or a compressed backup. Depending on the files the compression will be greater, for example, with databases and some .exe's and will be almost negligible with .jpegs and most graphic files since they are already pretty well compressed. Go for the larger tapes. In the old days when you had to format those things, you could spend a day doing nothing but that. Backing up to tape is a physical process and so despite advances, these will still take time. Despite the fact that you can do full backups at night, somebody has to swap out tapes. While they can be set to make only the most recent changes, you will soon learn to basically dedicate certain tapes for certain drives or folders. Despite the fact that it almost doubles the time always allow verification. I have just one question, why did you make your drive Raid1? While it takes three drives, Raid5 might be the better way to go if your data is that important that you want to store it on tape.

If, in case, you do not have a PCI-express slot, you might also thing of the 6600GT which will have an AGP interface, but it is about $50.00 more expensive - Review here: http://www.hardocp.com/article.html?art=NjYw

The card you are interested in is just fine if you are not interested in playing games or doing serious video. It will work very well with most applications if all you want is a card set for a business environment. If you want a gamers card, you should look at other Nvidia choices. If your funds are limited and you want a newer card and are interested in video but not particularly in games look at Nvidia's 6200. This is a review: http://www.hardocp.com/article.html?art=Njc0

Something is amiss with your hard drive. For whatever reason (and it may have something with burning a CD that had a buffer overrun) the Adaptec driver either got corrupted or something paged to the swapfile left an open pointer connected to the Adaptec driver. Boot into safemode and run Chkdak first. If that doesn't cure it, see if you can first move the swapfile, erase the old one, then move it back. Finally, you may have some Ram going soft, so you might try some of the free software to test out your Ram.

Be sure that both machines have at least one subdirectory as shareable (in Windows Explorer a little hand appears by that subdirectory). If they are still not seeing each other, the SP2 firewall will need to be configured. To see if that is the problem, temporarily stop the firewall from running on the SP2 machine. If they see each other, you will know it is Windows Firewall that needs to be configured.

It really depends upon whether you use Outlook Express to access your mail on Yahoo. Free mail accounts on Yahoo cannot be accessed directly by Outlook unless you use a special add-on. So, if you are not using Outlook Express the likelihood that your computer was used to send the emails drops to practically zero.

Clearly there is a problem with the indexing of your files on the hard disk. This kind of thing happened a lot with W98 because the file allocation pointers were left open when renegade programs didn't close them. While chkdsk would fix this from DOS, sometimes it became critical. Anyway, this could be a symptom of a corrupted or damaged swapfile. You could try relocating the swapfile and erasing the old one and then placing it back to see if this will clear up the problem for a start.

To help you, a little more information is needed. Are the three computers connected to a cable/dsl modem through a router or do you have the other two computers connected to the XP2 computer which has access to the modem? If it is the latter, you will have to go into the firewall and ajust the IP addresses so that it can recognize the computers attached to the XP2.