Ah, that's what I suspected Hiltops. TYVM.

Jeff, I'm so close now :-)

Any help would be great. I have A V G and also spamfighter on my computer both free. Now the last few weeks i have been getting 1000's of spam most go into the spam folder, but all of a sudden i am getting loads of new spam. which i block straight away The spamfighter tells me i have reached full, is their anyway i can clear out the spamfighter and is their anyway to try and stop all the spam, would changing my e.mail address work. thanks Mary

I'm not familiar with those programs so can't comment on them.

If you are having 1000's of spam emails, then you have either been careless with your email address, are very unlucky or you may have or have had a virus that broadvast your email address to the world.

Changing your email address would stop it, so long as you don't mind people not being able to contact you. It would not be a good idea to email all of your contact list with your new address, because there is a good chance that your address has found it's way on to the spammers lists because a compromised computer has your name in the address book.

Some ISP's have spam filters, and some of them work OK but some not so good - DYOR

What email client are you using? IMO, the best is MS Outlook (not Outlook Express), if you want a good free one then download Mozilla Thunderbird. Both of these has the ability to apply rules to incoming emails and permanently delete them. If you are getting so much spam, I would suggest a rule to put mail from your contact list into your inbox, a few rules set up to recognise some of the most common words in the subject lines - these should permanently delete the emails. The remainder should be sent to the junk folder for manual deletion.

There are also a load of paid for solutions many of which will work but again, DYOR.

Thanks for that optimist, will give it a go. and then I will go and have a word with the guy's in p c world and see what they can sell me to sort it out.

A couple of points.

Should you try a different email client, you should be able to run it at the same time as your existing client so reverting would be easy.

There are plenty of anti spam systems available but I would be surprised if PC World either stocked the best or had the expertise to advise you. Try Google.

Jeff, you win. I haven't had time so have got permission from Mrs Clearly to leave the PC on. Also have MT4 mobile on my phone now so can watch my trades.

SC (Flossie!): PCs are designed to be left on and like to be left on. They don't much like being turned off and on anyway -- that's when they get stressed. I have a whole network of stuff at home left on and the critical bits on a UPS.

It is sensible to ensure that they have good ventilation, fans are turning, and they're not full of dust and cr@p.

Cheers

MM

I have an interesting problem on a friend's PC. I can use windows email on Vista and Firefox (which I am using now) When I use Internet Explorer it behaves as though I had no internet access. When IE asks me if I want to diagnose the problem it comes back and says that the internet access is fine and asks if I would like to browse now, but still won't browse.

Not sure how to cure it, but I would suspect some sort of DNS problem.

You could check this theory by tring to browse by IP address. Enter 193.243.128.75 in the address bar and you should get to the MoneyAM home page without the need for a DNS server.

Haystack.
I had a similar problem last week after my grandaughter had been using my pc. Have you got Zonealarm fitted? There was an update & it wasn't installed correctly 'cos she cleared down when not supposed to. I un-installed Z/A & re-installed & everything OK. Not sure if this helps but thought it worth mentioning.

Haystack, check no proxy server is specified under LAN settings.

Yes, I found the problem. It was Zone alarm. It stopped IE, but let mail and Firefox work fine.

I have just noticed, while copying files to a SanDisk 4gb flash drive, that the flash drive is running a FAT32 file system while my XP is running on NTFS. Is there any particular reason for this? Is it worth formatting the flash drive & would it automatically convert to NTFS?

Check the manufacturers website.

Most flash drives come formatted to FAT32 and may not support NTFS but some can be reformatted.

It makes no difference for most things what the two filesystems are. My USB stick is FAT32 and my hard drive is NTFS and I copy files both ways regularly. If you want to boot a variety of Linux from a USB stick then it does matter, but aprt from that there is not usually a problem.

Thanks guys. It's not really critical, but I thought that 1gb of NTFS files was more than 1gb of FAT32 files due to the NTFS system being more compact. Also presumably Windows must convert the files each time they are copied to each other? I thought that FAT32 went out with Windows 98.

An NTFS file system is more reliable and can be larger than a FAT32. It will also support user permissions which FAT32 does not. For a USB flash drive, these things do not really matter because performance and reliability of the drives is so poor anyway.

@Optimist or anyone some advice please on a new server that i have just bought the problem being the backup,its running a Phenom Quad Core processor with 8GB ECC RAM, 1.8TB HDD and DirectAdmin control panel with a connection port to 1GBps the problem being the size of the hardrives for the back up i cannot fathom a way to back this beast up.
Do you have any suggestion on how i can do this its used for a File Storage server and the only way that i can see is have a matching server.
We have 3 others that are slighly smaller but only 2 are run as the 3rd is the backup for that setup.

Mega....

MB

That sounds like a nice machine.

When you get up to that size of storeage, you will need to rely on a range of strategies. And consider how valuable the data is, how up to date you need it to be in the event of a failiure and what is the cost of any downtime.

Start with the simple things, make sure that you have a good UPS and dual hot swapable PSU's in the machine, which should protect you from power failiure problems. Replace the hard drive with a RAID 5 array or better with the drives mounted in removable caddies. You would need 4 - 1TB discs (allthough 5 or 6 would be better) which would give you 2TB of fault tolerant storeage and a significant increase in disc read/write speed.

The only way to really back up your data is to mirror the entire server which should be in a different room/building/continent depending on it's value and cost of downtime.

Assuming that this is not practical, then split it accross different machines/portable disks, with only the most recent data mirrored elsewhere.

You probably don't have to back the entire disk up, just know where to get everything from. For instance, it should be possible to recreate an SQL database from the log so you may just need to mirror that in on line storeage.

Opti thanks for your quick reply it is a fair brute I pushed the server load to 29.00 (compared to a max value of 4.00 as I've set it now) and yet it was responding lightning quick,i will look into that tomorrow,what i am planning on doing as the project expand i will look at adding a load balancer across to distribute the resources across another location.
Thanks again and i will update you later in the weekend