You could also try resetting the BIOS parameters to the factory defaults. Just guessing as I don't know Athlons.

Skg/Kayak,

Thanks for the help. Been out all day so will try your suggestions.

Thanks again.

Fundy, that HP problem could be nasty which is probably why not much has been posted. It sounds like a probably hardware fault to me.

I would open the box and pull all the cards (except Graphics) then restart and see what happens, if its OK put the cards back in one at a time and reboot until you find where the problem is. If it fails with no cards then remove the memory sticks and try booting with each one in turn.

If the motherboard has inbuilt graphics and a separate graphics card you could remove the graphics card as weiil in step 1 above as long as you make sure you have switched graphics to the onboard adapter first.

Anyone else having Internet connection problems? Some sites are accessable, some partially, some not at all?

skg

skg83239 - just before reading your post, I was marvelling at how much faster everything is loading this evening!

So it looks as though your loss is my gain:-) Sorry!

It maybe my new ISP, Bulldogbroadband. More speed, less data.

I need advice on a quick back up system to my office computer as we are running
an internet based data base and we are going to be charged for every 200mb at 25 per month and that appears to be like throwing coins into a whishig well.
And does anyone know if the 10 pc in the office can be covered under one anti virous licence or do they have to carry on paying 29 pa to Norton.
I just use avg and zone labs on my lap top as advised by spaceman.

Bresie

Have a quick look at http://www.btpcbackup.com/pricing.html

Bresie

If you have 10 PC's in an office, then you should really have a server to control security and data storage then all you have to do is but a tape drive on the server and back it up each night.

Norton do a server based AV package. It would have the advantage of being able to manage the AV status on each computer but may not save much money on your individual Norton licenses. I know of someone who uses Panda AV on mulitple computers. It seems to work well and consumes fewer resources than Norton. I think it was also cheaper. See http://www.pandasoftware.com

Thanks for the info ,we run on a wireless network using pipex for broadband anytime and the main office dell computer acts as the server as file sharing
is only used by the staff on a limited basis.
Should we buy a tape back up for the main dell and can it back up just the new files or does it do all sever files each time.

Bresie

If you were to buy a tape backup unit, it would probably come with some backup software although you may want to purchase a better program.

Any reasonable backup program will allow you to choose exactly which files or directories that you want to save and will run automatically at a set time each day. It's also useful if the system can send out emails if something goes wrong.

If you have a fairly small system, you can get a DDS5 tape drive for a few hundred quid which will backup around 70GB, then all you have to do is save the entire hard disk.

Using 10 PC's and having one as a server is stretching things a bit as Windows only allows 10 share connections. If you were to have a central server (running Windows Server 2003 or similar) acting as a domain master, you could use that to control access to the workstations and also use roaming profiles which would automatically save everyones settings and documents back to the server when they log out. You may need a hardwired network fo that but again, 10 PC's on a wireless network is pushing it. What you really need to decide is how much a couple of days without computers will cost the business.

thanks opo

Hello all , simple question.

Can I take a hard disk out of one computer , chuck it another computer and expect it to look and work exactly how it did in the first computer ?

Both PC's are of a similar age etc and both run Windows 98.

Cheers

Dil, probably that will work with W98 and similar computers. Plug and Play might try and install stuff it finds but its so long since I used 98 that I cant remember how good its P&P is.

When you say "look and work exactly" if the graphics card and screen resolution are the same it should look the same, if the first machine has any devices that are not in the second one then it might not work the same, obvious really.

What if the second PC doesn't have a SYSTEM.INI file. Is this something that swapping the disks will fix .... I've screwed up a bit :-)

I'm a simple soul (as many may have observed) !!!

I have bought a couple of webcams which I thought it would be simple to set up so that I can see live video of my son/daughter/grand-daughter and they could see me. It all seemed as if it should be straightforward. NOT SO !!

Having said that, I've discovered a site called Conquercam which allows me to post to my website but I keep having to refresh the stills it sends and I'm not very happy with that. Not really what I've seen other people have on their sites. I thought this webcam thing was all the rage - and simple to set up.

I've also been on a site which suggests that I use Windows Media Encoder - which I duly downloaded but in order to post to my website it asks me things like my Publishing Point - which I can find no reference to - unless I use VirtualBasic to programme a publishing point etc. etc.

I can see myself in all my glory (with and without thong) - how do I share this image of adonis with others?????

Anyone got an idiots guide to how I set up a live video webcam, as simply and effectively as possible.

mg

Dil

If you swap hard disks, you will transfer the entire system to the new computer. As Spaceman has already said, Windows will try to adapt itself to the other machine but this may not work and will almost certainly stop the hard disk working on the original computer.

If it is only system.ini that is fouled up, then you could try to copy that file to the non working computer using a DOS boot disk or you could run the setup disk and select the repair option. If this works you will have to update all security patches so only do it behind a seperate firewall.

If you want to transfer the OS from your other computer safely, buy a new hard disk and use a disk management program to copy the OS to the new disk. That way you don't lose the original computer.

MG

Sorry I can't help very much apart from confirming that in my experience web cam software seems very unreliable. If you find a good solution, please let us know.

MSN Mesenger works fine (sometimes) for point to point video and sound. It can have issues with some wireless routers. The Yahoo product should also worked but have not tried it.
skg

Dil, I might have misunderstood what you are trying to do, I agree with optimist if you put the hard disk from one pc into the other and leave the original hard disk in the second, that's a bad thing to do and could lead to a mess. If thats what you planned then I also suggest dont do it.

This is one of those problems where a IT person (eg me) might well do something completely differently to what is recommended for a non IT, I would do it but then I would be able to deal with the consequences. Apologies if I have caused confusion here.

MG, web cams live streams can contain a lot of information and use a lot of bandwidth, in addition if you have Broadband and do not have fixed IP addresses it is a pain to set them up for live streaming anyway as the public DNS records need to be dynamic if you want to allow secure access. In my experience this is very hard to setup reliably. There are a number of products that are supposed to help with this but I have not found them reliable.

If you are just sending stills then you can still hit problems as you have found, different ISP's have different methods of allowing users to update their web space and in some cases the updates take a while to appear on the site.

What should be OK is to use the webcams with something like MSN messenger to do video chats but again the bandwidth use is fairly high, it will be OK with Broadband but not with dial up.

This is an area of technology that needs the next generation of equipment to work well, when we have a better DNS system with much more bandwidth and dual processor (or dual core) then this should all work well. Say another 2 years...