Greystone
I have had the same problem a few times. It is often a stuck key (alt or ctrl). I usually give a bit of a bang on the table and reboot.

Thank you all. A good slap and a reboot has restored sanity to my keyboard - obviously a female machine I have here - very expensive and difficult to understand.

Trouble is, G, it'll win in the end - they always do.

Amongst my overnight spam was a message that claimed it was sent by my own internet mailbox ***@****.com

I have a Dynamic IP with BE Unlimited. I rarely re-boot my PC and only ever re-boot my router when it loses my broadband signal. Should I be re-booting more often?

With regard to my address list I don't use Outlook so I'm pretty confident that aspect is safe.

I always thought it was impossible to cheat a false 'from' message on e:mails due to the SMTP system. It seems not.

TP

It's very common to fake the from address - I would say that 99% of the spam I get has a faked From address, often my own (why the morons figure that I'm likely to open an email that apparently comes from myself, but which I know I didn't send, I have no idea).

Google "fake from address email" and the 3rd or 4th link has a video showing how to fake the from address. Another great contribution to the internet.

Thanks zz,

Now I know.

And, as you hint, another handy resource for the prankster in my soul.

TP

when i open a fresh page using IE it takes about 18 seconds to open,
then when i start looking, the pages open up very fast as it was before,
the only thing i can remember doing before this happened was a disc defrag,
all the scans has been done,(AVG,SpyBot,Super-Antispy,cleanup)

any ideas how to get the first page in IE to open up within 2 secs,homepage i use is google.

sc

scussy,

Have you tried changing the home page to blank?

TP

yes tried many homepages,still the same 18 secs,firefox is instant,so was my IE,maybe it was a microsoft update,ill check the other pc's later,on lappy at the mo.

scussy,

Again a basic question.

Have you cleaned all the cache's and similar?

TP

strange it now opens as it should,nice and fast,

sc

Stop press News for Windows XP users.

It seems that one of the recent updates to Windows SP3 has resolved the DHCP problem with (mainly) wireless routers whereby a default gateway would not be set, thus rendering XP SP3 machine useless with a number of WiFi access points.

We discovered this today during an off-site meeting using a LinkSys Vodafone WRT54G3G 3G wireless router which had proved inaccessible to one of our number previously, now suddenly worked after the latest Microsoft updates to his SP3 laptop.

I defragment the disk on my pc every week to keep it running efficiently but on the last occasion the process could not be completed and various files were left unfragmented. Tried to find a free programm to download to repare but so far no luck. Anyone any ideas?

Rgds
Photo

Try SmartDefrag from Here

Take a bit of care. There are other things about to download, which are nothing at all to do with SmartDefrag.

At the site above: Click on the 'Download Now' button - the one with the funny green'white symbol and where it says 'Tested spyware free'.
Note: Do not click on the green 'Download Here' button on the same page in the advert below, where it says 'Recommended Download'.

The best defragmenter is Diskeeper which is a beefed up version of the one supplied with Windows. You do have to pay for it but it's woth it and they do a 30 day trial. If you want a free one, then PortableApps.com have one that also has the advantage of not needing to be installed (however, I haven't used it yet).

More important, is why your defrag failed. If it is just a random error then you should be able to re-run it. The most common reason for files not to be defragmented is lack of free space and/or a fault on the disk. If you think the latter is possible then back up all of your data and run Chkdsk.

If you have plenty of free disk space and no faults, then consider which files still need to be defragmented. If they are rarely used files with only a couple of fragments/ file then it does not matter. If the page file is fragmented, then this needs to be defragmented, most programs will not do this though the better versions of Diskeeper will and there are workarounds for other programs.

I have been using Smartdefrag. I sometimes find that there are files that are still fragmented. If I run it again straight away then this usually solves it or at the least there are much fewer files still fragmented.

I have had to run it three times to get 0% defragmented. It may well be a lack of a contiguous space big enough for the file to be defragmented.

The space free may be quite large before the first attempt, but it can be in so many small pieces as to be difficult to use by the defrag process on the first attempt and will only be usable when it is itself one large area.

I have just developed a fault with the Login for BTYahoo. When trying the Login programme it will just sit for several minutes with the Task Manager saying "not responding" but will eventually get me in. On Log out the same thing happens i.e. appears to hang but eventually Logs Out.

Thought at first it was AVG and then Yahoo servers but immediately switching off computer and restarting seems to solve the problem which leaves me with a fault in the Login/Logout programme???? which has come from where? and how do I fix it?.

any ideas anybody?

Thanks for all the help and advice, I'll give it a go this w/e.

Photo.

I'm going to have to replace my existing hard disk which is a Maxtor 6Y080L0. Not being terribly clever when it comes to hardware, I'm finding it difficult to work out exactly what kind of a replacement I should look for. I'll probably need an ATA-133 type drive. Can anyone recommend a specific replacement drive please?

EDIT: I notice there aren't too many of these drives available...ATA-133 is getting long on the tooth, I guess.

There are still some ATA-133 drives around, but it may be cheaper to buy an IDE to SATA adaptor.