Optimist I have two different ISP one is Virgin Media cable, the other is Pipex telephone which connects using the USB modem

In that case, throw away the USB modem and get an ADSL Firewall/Router for your Pipex connection.

That way, for most of the time you will have two broadband connections always connected and if one goes wrong then all you have to do is swap the network cables from one box to the other in the event of a failure.

An enhancement to this would be to add an Ethernet router which would give you some degree of load balancing and automatic fall over should one connection fail.

Assuming that you don't want to buy an Ethernet router, you could achieve a similar effect by connecting both ADSL routers to your network, make sure that the router you use for Pipex has DHCP disabled, is on the same subnet as your Virgin router but has a different IP address. Then manually add that address as an extra default gateway in the advanced TCP/IP properties of each machine on your network. The Virgin link will be used normally but if it goes down your machines will switch over to the Pipex link although you may have to reopen the browser.

I've just been checking some of my movie, mp3's files etc, since i've had to format a few times recently it looks like I've lost most of my codecs that played these files, I've installed K-Lite mega pak, Divx 7 and WM9codecs, but still a few are not working, cant even get WM11 to download the codec it's self even thou the settings are told to automatically.

Strange thing is some of the files are backed up on different harddrives even my portable HD, which does not play a few of these files but on the main one they play OK., some play sound but no video or vice versa, upto the recent formats all played fine

Cant even find out would these files were encoded with from properties etc

1: What other codecs should I try and download etc
2: When I burn the files and the codec is not installed does that have an effect on the playback on DVDs that play avi's Divx etc

R69,

You might find http://www.soundtaxi.info sorts out some of your problems.

I have the Pro version.

It's a while since I looked at that site and it has certainly progressed over the last year.

TP

RG69,

If you're not totally wedded to WM11, try VLC instead - http://www.videolan.org - it will play pretty much everything other than Real Media files. For mp3, I would heartily recommend MediaMonkey - http://www.mediamonkey.com

ThePublisher, zzaxx99 thanks ;-)

Have any of you folks tried this system for reducing the bulk of Windows?

http://www.nliteos.com/index.html

I heard of it through a photographic site as a way of getting more on to a small computer.

TP

TP

I tried it sometime ago to make some highly customised Win XP SP3 install disks and although it appeared to work and indeed the Install disks worked, I had a few problems with the resulting Windows machine. This could have been due to a fault with nlite or perhaps I tried to cut out too many things. Anyway, I would not recommend it unless you have several machines to setup and you need them all to be the same. Even then, there are Microsoft tools (especially for Vista) that will do a better job.

nlite uses slipstreaming which is an extremely useful Microsoft utility. If you want to create an up to date installation disk with all the SP's- which is well worth doing, then use the slipstream utility on it's own

They say things come in threes, how about 5 or even 6's

few months ago one of my monitors stopped working then my two pc's got hit with viruses, got one working but other will not allow me to install windows or gain any access thru dos, setup etc
and last few days both my dvd player and dvdrecorder 160gb HDD have packed in remind not to go out crossing the road

So now looking for a monitor 24", DVD player thats plays all formats divx, xdiv and all types of disks and a dvd recorder HDD with freeview or freesat

hi I asked you a few weeks ago about what to do about all the 1000's of e. mails i was getting. well, i uninstalled outlook express and now use hot mail. well now when i turn on the computer and sign in it says i have 705 unread e mails how can i get rid of them now, Thanks for any help
Mary

Mojo47

There may be a delete all button on your Hotmail account, otherwise you have the choice of deleting them all manually or creating a new Hotmail account.

If it is a recently created account that has attracted so mush spam then you have to consider why you get so much. Either you are not careful with your email address or possibly you have a trojan virus on a computer that you are using.

I think she might mean on the user log on page beneath your ID it tells you how many unread emails you have.

hi all the 700 odd e mails are on the old outlook express i havent used my hot mail account yet, I cant see any place left that is left on the computer that is still anything to do with outlook express, I know what you think not very good is she xx

So where are you seeing the 700 emails?

A bit of grammar and punctuation effort might help yet again.

I get a little fed up with people taking not much of a jot of an effort to see that others can fairly clearly understand what it is that they have written - and then maybe edit it up a bit to improve things.

Here are a few examples, where a bit of punctuation can change the meaning of the words and thus, more clearly help the writer to tell a much more accurate story:-

Woman without her man is nothing

Woman, without her man, is nothing.

Woman! Without her, man is nothing!

Woman without Herman, I's nothing!

Thejobsarenowhere

The jobs are nowhere.

The jobs are now here.

Many years ago, someone in Czarist Russia was given a prison sentence.

He happened to come upon the sentence written: "Pardon impossible, to be sent to Siberia."

The man stealthily erased the comma and put another one in: "Pardon, impossible to be sent to Siberia." He was freed.

Hi optimist. All of a sudden i started to get lots and lots of spam, and i am talking thousands, I have a filter but their was so many new each day. anyway the only way i thought to stop it was to get rid of outlook express, and go with my e.mails was use hot mail so I un installed outlook express, and got a hot mail address, but now when i open up the computer and go to sign it it tells me i have 700 emails unread. I havent got anything on the computer to delete them so any idea would be helpful and thanks a lot

As for you smart arse exce line If you cant be helpful SHUT UP

Mojo

I've just looked at my Hotmail account. At the top left hand corner of the messages list in the Inbox there is a select all check box. You should be able to check that and then click the delete button which is almost above it. That will probably move all the messages to the delete box so you will then have to got to that and do the same to delete them permanently.

If it is a new Hotmail account, how have you managed to receive 700 spam messages?

Mojo - the issue ExecLine is highlighting is that we'd probably like to help, but it is difficult to understand exactly what is happening, and without that understanding it isn't easy to offer what might be the correct solution. I think you're saying that you uninstalled Outlook Express in favour of using web-based Hotmail, but it isn't clear whether Outlook Express was downloading email from Hotmail in the first place or whether you were using a different email address at that time. Getting huge quantities of spam emails can happen to an account sometimes, but if it happens to two different accounts within a short period of time I'd be wondering whether your computer has been compromised with spyware (for example) in a way that would mean any email address you create is likely to suffer the same fate.

If this is just one address, I wonder whether it is random spam, or whether in fact your address has been Joe Jobbed - and these hundreds of messages you are seeing are actually spam messages which mail servers are returning to you as undeliverable, incorrectly believing you to be the sender.

I don't use Hotmail very much but I don't recall their email filters being very good. One possible solution would be to forward all your Hotmail mail to a Gmail address where Google's filters will get rid of most of it to begin with, and filters can be created to handle the rest. I think you may be able to send from Gmail using your Hotmail address (Settings/Accounts/Send Mail As...) avoiding the need to use the Hotmail interface at all.

The company I own was a victim of a joe job a few years ago and we received thousands of emails every day. We got around the problem by routing through Gmail.

mojo, I can sympathise to some extent with Exec's post though I might not have phrased it exactly in the same way. It is difficult to understand what you mean partly because of imprecise language and punctuation, and partly because you are not giving enough detail on what is happening. E.g. when you say "sign in", is that into your computer or into Hotmail? What is telling you you have 700 messages, the PC or a Hotmail web page? What is the exact message, and is it a window with a window title? Your previous email address was not a Hotmail address? Etc. etc...

Hi I havent used the hotmail account yet and their is no messages in it. the 700 messages i think are in a in box someplace on the outlook express system. have they come in while i was uninstaling it ? I dont know it just comes up when i am signing in on the computer. Ok i was a bit sharp with you exec line but you know what its like when something is wrong you dont know how to explain it or fix it