Iain

Although you will only be getting a small improvement in processor speed it may still be worth upgrading your proccessor although I would suggrst a 3.2 or 3.4 Ghz.

This level processor supports hyperthreading which I have found to be very good. As far as windows is concerned it sees it as two procesors which can reduce freezing when doing heavy proccessing. You would have to check whether your application benefits from this.

The other thing you should consider if you upgrade is whether the motherboard and memory are up to date enough to take advantage of the hyperthreading and 800 MHz FSB. As`Kayak says let us know your motherboard and memory details.

Mr E

If it is the Microsoft Messenger service (grey boxes with an OK button) you can go Admin Tools/Services , find the Microsft Messenger service and disable it, although the ports that Kayak mentioned should be closed to the internet anyway. Have yo installed XP SP2 yet?

Thanks guys. No I haven't, I am only on dial up and I heard the SP2 would take me a month to download. By closing the ports am I causing problems elsewhere?

Thanks again.

Oh Kayak, you remember the dog noise? It was somebody signing on to AOL :-)

Mr E

It only took me 14 Hr on an ISDN connection ;) but you can get an SP2 disk with many computer magazines.

As regards the ports, close them and see what happens.

Mr Euro, doesn't surprise me that AOL software is associated with dogs :-)

ta chaps.ill look in the morning and post the model number of the motherboard up for your further assistance;)

Not worth the effort to download, you can order CD here.

http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/downloads/updates/sp2/cdorder/en_us/default.mspx

Does anyone know how to test the speed of PC internet connections?
Would the sped be different for different browers?
Thanks.

axdpc
I use MySpeed for checking the speed of my broadband occasionally. Is that what you meant?
http://myspeed.visualware.com/

7thFloor, thanks, wil try :-)

O sorry for the delay but you should have mail.

I've had a hard drive replacement and now I can't seem to make my CD's or DVD's auto play anymore.

For the CD player, for example, I've gone to the properties box of the drive and under Autoplay told it to open music files with Windows Media Player with no success.

On the DVD side, I cannot play movies anymore at all. They are vob format which I thought was supported by W M Player. Because of the autoplay problem I've used explorer to look at the individual files and double click on them to make them play but no luck.

I have just brought up my Dell 4700 with xphome sp2 and Norton 2004NT . When connecting to broadband the programme asked me to switch off the firewalls and anti - virus software. on doing this i saw that the firewall on norton was ON and the firewall for MS was OFF. I completed the broadband installation and then went back and turned on the antivirus Norton and the firewall on MS. later checking i noted the MS firewall was again turned off so i turned it back on again , switched off the computer , rebooted and now MS firewall seems to be on. Was Norton switching it off?. should i have both firewalls ON or only one? and if only one , which one? I read recently that the MS firewall should never be turned off,
thanks
On a second point i have an optical mouse and am having difficulty with it jumping and particularly offscreen when near the edges , any ideas to rectify this?

maddoctor

"On a second point i have an optical mouse and am having difficulty with it jumping and particularly offscreen when near the edges , any ideas to rectify this?"

Me too. Every so often my Medion optical mouse pointer jumps about 6". This happens at random intervals about 4 or 5 times. The most annoying thing is how sometimes when I am opening a new IE browser window from a link, the mouse pointer and the new window just freezes in the middle of loading. Then I have no alternative but to just switch off and re-boot. In doing so, I lose all of today's 'History' too. I run three monitors by the way.

I also would appreciate some ideas on fixing this.

docproc , talking to my local IT guys they said with optical mouses use a flat mat blue mouse mat , not a light colour and no writing. Got one this morning and looks like things are a bit better but early days.

Maddoctor

I'm not sure about this one but I'm puzzled why you had to switch off your firewalls to make the initial connection to the internet. I would not connect my machine for a second without a firewall.Everything is probably OK but it would not do any harm booting into safe mode and doing a virus scan and a scan with Spybot S&D.

There may well be an option in the Norton Setup regarding switching off the Windows firewall. Also, Norton had some early issues with SP2, which they quickly fixed, but they are well known for sending out old software. If you run Live Update it may well fix it.

I don't know whether the Norton firewall is better than the SP2 one but my advice would be to get yourself an ADSL router/firewall for around 80 and then the one on your machine is far less critical.

As regards your mouse, have you checked the manufacturers website for the latest drivers?

optimist was connecting to btyahoo and on the cd said switiching off firewalls and antivirus recommended - was not happy myself. no option to switch off the ms firewall in norton as far as i could see. have not got spybot yet but will run virus scan , thanks.
what about one firewall or two?

Maddoctor

If you have to have anything but a default configuration then two firewalls will be difficult to manage plus they will use CPU and system resources. My personal predudice would be to use the MS one but I doubt there is much in it.

Optimist , thanks

Docproc , blue mat working :- ))))