Sampson

According to Microsoft there are two possible causes for the message. The first has to do with a Pace device: http://support.microsoft.com/search/preview.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;Q314101 The second has to do with a "non approved" driver or anti-virus software component http://support.microsoft.com/search/preview.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;Q315249 See if either of these questions relate to your problem.

In general, the problems you probably have read about are in reference to the VIA drivers. If you installed W2K and defaulted to ACPI and all is well, while adding any device is somewhat like spinning the wheel of fortune, following the install procedure according to Promises' instructions, should work. Some have chosen to install their machines as Standard PC's which allows the Bios to determine the interrupts and ports because it has worked out better for them to avoid device conflicts especially with the VIA drivers. The bios drivers for Jetway website are found at http://www.jetway.com.tw/evisn/download/ . Make sure that your bios is the most recent. You might want to try a couple of search engines to see the result of Promise and Jetway to see if any have had any conflicts. Since you do have a CDRW and decide to chicken out, and if all you need is a medium for data storage, you can't really do better than that. While slower than a hard disk, the data, at least will not be as vulnerable as on a hard disk. And, if you do install it, and there are some conflicts, there are some pretty knowledgeable people on this site who will try to help.

Pest Patrol. I used to use ad-aware. It is very good particularly because it is hard to beat "free", but it just don't catch some things. FastClick and ValueClick kept making comebacks. Their so-called opt-out cookies are totally useless. Pest Patrol, however, is not free like ad-aware but it scans for a lot more and protects you not just from annoying cookies but certain kinds of trojans and bombs also.

There probably is no software at the present time that exactly emulates the mac dock. But, this site is a project that has been chipping away at making your desktop look like a Mac. It is free http://winmac.emuunlim.com/ . Then there is the perennial Windows skinner http://www.stardock.com/ that might present some alternatives.

According to the Compeye webpage, there is no XP driver for your scanner and apparently they do not intend to produce one for it because of difficulties in Hardware compatibility and XP's interface with it - at least at this time. It would be best to look for another scanner that will work with XP than waste your time.

After booting into safe mode, change the video drivers to Standard VGA. Reboot. It should be able to come up properly (though the screen will probably look pretty crummy). Then, install the drivers for your ATI.

"Opera's built in email client however downloads messages and attachments seperately and stores them on the disk as such meaning the Real-Time Protection can scan them. Of course, this information is only helpful if you use Opera or another email client that behaves the same way..." ... and you want to continue to use a piece of software that is now extinct.

Clutch asked for experience. In my experience the worse virus was one that did not come through the network but the one sitting on the other side of the keyboard. In the corporate world this was the cowboy who had a home computer and pulled some stunt and tried the same thing on the company computer. For those whose home computers I have worked on, because they had "anti-virus" protection on their machine, they thought they were impervious and would do stupid things that no anti-virus software could protect them from. Corporate environment McAfee corporate - you do have to be clever to distribute it or you can have some real problems. When you take over as a system administrator, it is generally a system you didn't put together. It takes months to track down the bugs and sometimes they were nothing other than design flaws due to budget restraints. If the system is done right, McAfee will work its "wonders." Its little shield is a pretty good metaphor when it is working right. But, and this isn't McAfee's fault, when the system is flakey, McAfee is not your friend. Norton's corporate edition is a lot easier to distribute and seems to be more forgiving, but it also leaves you a lot more vulnerable to some who know just enough to get the system in trouble. Also, Norton seems to want its own firewall. Both corporate versions seem to suffer from apocalyptic stories, the famous "they", but sometimes you don't have the choice about what was installed before you got there so a working knowledge of either is still important. Home versions In my experience both Norton's and McAfee suffer from the same thing - they put hooks in their versions for their other products - hooks that do cause unnecessary headaches. I don't like the way McAfee uses the registry as if it is its own personal version of SimCity. I don't like Norton's desire to insinuate its .dll's and run its version of "Windows" over that of Microsoft. I always found McAfee's update easier and when you go into pay for Norton's yearly subscription, it is remarkably difficult for some new users as compared to the liveupdate they had been accustomed to. Most home users get used to the software that was planted on their machines when they got it. Many of them think of their anti-virus as actually part of the operating system. Once they've paid for it, they should never have to pay again - "it came with the system." I used to put InoculateIT on new PC's because it was free and it's updates were easy, and it did as good a job as most. However, the free version did not protect email. Then, CAI quit supporting it. I put AVG on home machines because it is free, it protects you from viruses through email or from disks, it is very good with its updates and while an ugly interface, for whatever reason, for new users, it is simple to use. I don't know why some home users think that software ought to be free or that they can trade programs like baseball cards. They just do. When Nortons or McAfee legitimately request fees for further services, some become incensed uninstall the products (no mean feat the way either insintuate themselves into a system) or get pirated versions. Or worse, come back to you and want the latest and greatest if you built their machine because it was on there when they got it. I have looked at Pc-cillin, Sophos, Dr. Solomon, F-Prot (which I found kind of neat) - but you can't beat free and effective. I do like TrendMicro's housecall as a quick scan over the net when a user has opened an email and didn't have virus protection. It is not infallible, but sometimes it is all you have for a paniced user. Bottom line: To me it depends upon the sector you're working in. Anyway you try to get around it, familiarity with a product may be just as important as the product itself - all things being equal.

Sounds like you need to install your IPS.

Do you have some kind of pop-up stopper installed on your machine? If so, you may have inadvertantly told it to exclude a site that you visit. These pop-up ads will sometimes use the similar url for a site and excluding it excludes the main site. For example, abc's news site will often bring up one of those "background" pop-ups that if excluded will also knockdown the news site itself. On the other hand, some sites can install an icon on the explorer tool bar (or in the registry without an icon being visible), which you may have excluded with a pop-up stopper.

InCD is a clever program that makes your PC think that the CDRW drive is just another disk drive. Hence, from Windows Explorer you would simply drag a file from C:\ to the Cdrom drive just as you would copy to a floppy. InCD intercepts this and burns the file onto the Rewriteable CD. It only works with rewritable CD's and it only burns the files as UDF's. If a different PC does not have a UDF reader program installed, the CD will be indeciferable to it. When InCD first came out, Nero's webpage plainly stated that it was incompatible with some VIA chipsets. This was several months ago and InCD has gone through a few iterations so this may no longer be the case. It also likes to install itself on bootup and it is a little piggy with resources devouring almost 5K.

Under Tools, there should be a selection - Repair Browser. Try that first, it is the least painless. Was there anything that happened that started this behavior - added a new plugin or something similar?

Depending on the temperature in the room, the kind of heatsink/fan you're using and the number of fans in the case, it seems a little hot. Low side would be 33-35. Standard would be 45-53 under load. Probably, anything around 55 is still good. Approaching 60 or over and it is running too hot.

I haven't checked Nero's page lately, but as a few months ago, the InCD utility was incompatible with Via drivers. That may have changed since there has been an update to InCD about mid-June. Again, I haven't checked lately so it may still be incompatible. However, congrats on getting it functioning.

It really is hard to say. If your copy of XP predated the Radeon 7500, and the system read it as an ATI card, letting it think that it was, for example a Rage, and attempted to use those drivers, the card may have balked, and the thing shut down. Or it may be that the Radeon 7500 may not have reacted properly to the generic VGA driver. It was good that you had a standby card.

Once your modem is installed so that it is recognized. Go to the device manager and look at ports. Ususally it will say Com1, Com2, and if you have internal modems - depending on their assignmemnt Com3, Com4, etc. You want to look at Properties. Your external modem should be assigned to one or the other of them. Depending on whether your mouse is PC/2 or Serial - it will be assigned. Just not the memory/drivers, etc. This should tell you if two devices are trying to use the same port.

Since it is an external modem, is it USB or just connect to a serial port. If it is a regular serial port, is that port assigned just as a serial port? Did you assign it specifically for the modem?

Put the proper cooling on that chip and then raise the voltage. What kind of Ram do you have installed? Make sure that it is at least compliant with a 100Mz front side bus. Since Ram is so inexpensive, getting some 133 would be better. It will probably not be one thing but many different factors that you will have to tinker with to get it up and going.

Knowing how meticulous you are with that machine, in your case, I don't believe it is your setup. My guess is the drive itself. Some weeks ago you tested it and you said it was "broken hearted" that it was not recognized. We had a big yuk about that. It may have presaged what has since happened. Anyways, like many who want to put in a modest burner that seems to work and play well with others, I would suggest a TDK VeloCD. Reason - they just work. If you don't want to go that route because of price, my next suggestion is, if you are using Roxio software, uninstall it, and never play with it again. It has been the bane of so many W2K and XP breakages.

Inherently no. But from the experience of some, all kinds. A lot of it depends upon your motherboard and how many other gadgets you have installed and the mysterious but ubiquitous VIA drivers on some AMD setups. On the other hand, just make sure that before installing the new card, if you are using another Nvidia card, change the video drivers to Standard VGA and uninstall the old Nvidia software first. Then, power down and put in your new card.

There is one utility from Easy Time: http://www.rawos.com/easytime/ which will give you several new options as it blends in with your control panel. It gives a number of ways to display the clock: http://www.rawos.com/easytime/reference%20guide/chapters/wplace/tbclock.htm . I don't work for this company. The price is pretty nominal.

Sounds nifty, but my question is how much confinement can a small box have before it is not only toaster size but a toaster itself.

USB is not SCSI. It eases the installation of devices for those who don't want to crack the case. In the future as mice, keyboards, parallel ports become legacy devices USB will replace their inputs. You will be demanding a lot from such a narrow bandwidth.

There is a newer bios for this machine: http://ftp.gigabyte.com.tw/support/temp/beta/5aa_i_f7b.zip . It is an ALI chipset, which in its day was nifty because it could accept so many different kinds of chips. I am not familiar with AMD chip you are referring to. The board ought to accept a K2 or even a K3. Having said this, you will need serious heatsink/fan help because those chips need the higher voltage and that means pretty high temps. You might also look at your box. If it is too small, remove the sides. Heat is going to be a problem. Should you keep fooling with it or graduate to a newer machine? Both. Get a newer machine. This board is at the end of its cycle. A new machine will probably give you the speed and stability for your most important endeavors. But, you can never learn as much as taking this board and working through the intricacies of getting it to perform.

There are several programs like Startup Cop (ftp://ftp.zdnet.com/acq/downloads/pub/zd/PCMag/startcop.zip) that are free on the net. You can even port over msconfig from 98. One of the better utilities that includes the msconfig function is System Mechanic (www.iolo.com). It is shareware. You can use it for 30 days free, then you must purchase it.