You'll be wanting to read the "freeserve disconnections countrywide" thread :-)

http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/56/32286.html

You must keep your PC up to date with Microsoft patches - visit www.windowsupdate.com regularly or install the auto-notification program to download updates automatically. The patch to protect against this exploit is several weeks old.

edit - click here for a cleanup tool specific to this problem.

Not a major problem - but any ideas re my post 701?

skinny - a program which loads on startup is crashing, probably something you don't need since you're not noticing any other problem. See DocProc's post in reply to extrovert a few below your question. Uncheck one of the startup items, reboot and see if the problem goes away. If not, try the next one etc etc.

the troll - thanks I'll try this evening.

thanks for your advice kayak/spaceman, things great and speedy now
peter

Velocity - I've just heard from a pal with the same problem. He thinks its a virus called MS blast which he can't delete as it changes the registry. Will post further if he finds the answer. Good luck

ON EDIT

Go to www.f-secure.com/v-descs/msblast.shtml

where you can download a zip file and instructions on how to remove the virus

Thanks v. much all - now been online for a (presumably worm-free) 20 mins so it seems to have sorted itself out at last which is a relief as it was seriously messing with my karma :-)

Cheers
V

Velocity,

check out slashdot.org for a thread on this latest exploit (which was patched by MS back in June I believe), has details on how to fix it and how to kill the shutdown timer...

J.

Dead PC

We had a close lightning strike last weekend and the mains went all over the place. It took out my BT HH box and an ISDN router. My main PC was OK as I use surge protected sockets but my spare PC is dead. I tried a new ATX power supply today but all that happens is the processor fan turns for a second and then everything's dead again.

So probably a damaged m'board then. Is there anything I can do to check this other than buy a new one ?

cheers

Take out the network card and any modem first, just in case they are dead from having been connected to the comms when it blew up, and are affecting the motherboard. If it still doesn't work then it very probably is the motherboard and possibly the CPU too.

If your second PC is just an older PC then the cheapest and easiest thing to do is probably to buy the same model of motherboard second-hand on eBay (sometimes older but new motherboards come up). Obviously you won't have the latest model but then again you won't spend ages planning the upgrade. Same for the processor if you have to change that, except that there you can move to the fastest supported by your motherboard. This is often a lot faster than is specified in the instruction manual since the motherboard does not actually see the processor speed, it is internal to the processor.

Thanks Kayak, looks like a new motheboard/CPU then. I might go for a speed increase - the old one was 466 Mhz Celeron.

Kajman

Check whether your motherboard will take a full Pentium proccessor this would be even faster.

I have a little networking problem:

Have a company laptop, running NT4, configured to be part of Domain UVW. Now have a home network, running ADSL via a router. Works great apart from, when I boot into the "run with network" hardware profile to use this, it takes an age to time out the search for a domain controller - like 6-10 minutes.

Potential solutions:Change the timeout value in the search for a domain controller (how?)Set up the other PC on the network as a Win2K server instead of Win2K Pro, and set this up as a domain controller, with a domain also called UVW
Problems:Laptop can also simultaneously be connected to work network via ADSL - seems likely that having two machines as domain controller for the same domain name is going to cause conniptionsDon't want to install Active Directory, under any circumstances - can Server be set up as domain controller without created AD set-up?

Problem two:

Buffalo router, was IP address 192.168.11.1 - now not replying on this address (works fine, but I need to access the config program to set up WEP), suspect I may have changed the address while fiddling. How can I find out the current address? Is there a tool that will list all the used IP addresses on my LAN? I know it's going to be 192.168.something.something - but rather loth to sit there pinging every combination until I get a response

zzaxx99

I don't think that setting up an independant server with the same domain name would work. This would be too easy a way to get round the NT security.

You can setup Win 2K Server without active directory.

When I take my laptop away from my domain I leave myself logged on and put the computer into hibernate. I am using XP though.

Can't help you with the timeout setting.

Re Buffalo router. Have you tried IP address 192.168.0.1

Didn't think the duplicate domain name was a goer - the more I thought about it, the more problematic it looked.

My first thought was that sleeping the laptop wouldn't work for me, as I have to reboot to a different hardware profile, but actually, I'm wondering if that is really true... I'm using NT4 on the laptop, which is infinitely worse than XP for coping with being docked/undocked/re-docked somewhere else, but I'll give it a try and see what happens...

Re: the router - that's about the only one I can rule out - that's the modem! :-)

zzaxx99

You could set your home computer up as a backup domain controller to your works one but your Company should have some objections to this.

Just tried it - sleeping it doesn't work - nice idea though.