TP
Asus pre ordered. I must say some reviews of their products have been very good. Thanks for the tip - so far anyway. Any problems and I'll need you to go round :-)

kernow,

Well done. Which one are you getting?

TP

TP
Tis the Asus Laptop F3Sc-AP19XP. Didn't fancy Vista

Kernow, that's the one I think I'll be getting father-in-law as well - also want XP rather than Vista, because I'll have to sort it out when it goes wrong - and I won't have a clue with Vista. Have you any delivery date?

Vista is not perfect and possibly not as stable as XP but it is the future and has many features that make it easier to use, especially for inexperienced users.

The best Vista systems are Business and Ultimate so if you can get a good deal on either of those (beware business does not include Media Centre) then go for it. If the computer that you want only has Vista Home Premium or XP then it is cheaper to buy an OEM Vista Ultimate when you want it than to upgrade your system. However, there are downsides to the OEM version.

TP
No delivery date as yet. Thought it would be in the order confirmation. Not concerned as yet unless my HP expires.

Morning troops.

Good luck with the Asus lappies. Presumably you also came to the conclusion that they were good value.

On another matter. Sound enhancers. I've been using my Asus laptop to play MP3 files into an FM transmitter so that I can listen to them in my living room and my studio. I feed the signal from the headphone socket on the Asus.

Overnight I got a mailing from Creative (as I have their Zen MP3 player) and roaming round their site I came across this.

I'm assuming that it pulls the audio from the PMCIA socket and substitutes the sound card in the laptop.

Are these things likely to be any good? And if so, which are the best manufacturers?

TP

Optimist hi..... still got a problem

Rebooted pc and now it only gets as far as saying...under BIOS ver 1.1
SATA Primary drive 0 not found
SATA Secondary drive 0 not found
Primary drive 1 not found

it finds drive no...the HDD

but now not giving me the (beep) (beep) select f1 or f2?

so cant boot to windows

just pulled out the printer USD cable and bingo...beep beep...however the feeling is that all is not right....although nice to see my desktop again

foale

Have you got any other cables connected? If you have unplug them as well.

I've seen problems with the USB devices stopping booting before. My suspicion is that it is caused by the device taking too much power and in that case it could either be a printer fault or a motherboard fault. The workaround would be to use a powered USB hub which should get round the problem for the time being. You should be able to plug the printer back in once it has booted.

My guess is that the F1 message comes up because the BIOS has or thinks it has lost some info because of the power drain. Go into the BIOS settings, use a camera to take a picture of each screen and then reset to the deffaults. Save and exit and see if that works.

thank you sir...I will do just that

While waiting for my new laptop to arrive my thoughts turn to getting it up and running with all the dozens of bits of software I have on this machine. In the past I've always done a fresh install rather than clone exisitng as I believe that to be the recomended method? Much more time consuming digging out all those old CDs etc. and I wouldn't know how to clone anyway but is this still the best advice?
TIA

Just a comment on Asus as an OEM manufacturer. I have no experience of them, but IBM ThinkPads of late were made by Lenovo in China. My current laptop is an IBM-branded ThinkPad R52 manufactured in China by Lenovo. The ThinkPad line has now been sold to Lenovo and IBM, creator of the Intel/Microsoft PC as we know it, is out of the business.

The machine is fine, but the build quality is not as good as its predecessor, a ThinkPad 600 which was manufactured by IBM Greenock ("made in Scotland, frae girders!"). :)

kernow

I don't think there is an easy shortcut, you will have to do a clean install.

If you haven't done it already, run Belarc Advisor which will give you a list of most of your installed programs. Also, network the computers together and share the old disk with your new machine so that you can copy settings.

Before you install a program, create a directory called Setup and copy the disk to a subdirectory in that. Then run the setup program from there. Do this for all programms and downloads. It is normally quicker than installing from the CD, and next time, you have everything to hand.

kernow,

Adding to Optimist's recommendation for a directory to hold your installation disks I also have a directory for all my software downloads - plus any passwords that they need. I can then copy this folder in bulk to any new machine.

Other than the Windows software, and things like USB linked drivers, I guess that 98% of the software I use has come from a download.

TP

You can also do worse than copying it to an old hard disk and storing it in another building.

Does anybody use McAfee Security Centre?

It's installed an update on 2 PC's this week (I'm waiting for it do the others on the network) and there's now an icon in the system tray that says the computer is not fully protected. When I click on the icon to find out what's wrong it seems to list a load of problems that don't exist and I can't get rid of the icon.

Has anybody else had this?

I had something similar yesterday, Hils - a little eye thingie?
It disappeared when I changed windows before I had a chance to look at it.

A yellow eye with an exclamation mark, Chocopops. I'm glad yours has disappeared, there's hope for me yet.

Told you yesterday I had connection probs with a chart programme whilst McAfee was updating? Still don't know if it was a coincidence, but that's when I noticed it.
Didn't get the connection back until I rebooted.