You just cant do without a man, eh Hil

Twotanks, not your fault, it's just that Ruth's graph is too wide for the screen so the graph sets the page width and all the text obeys that.

Thanks Seymour

How long does a complete defragmentation of a hard disk take on other people's PCs. I did a 40Gb drive and it took 9 hours. Is this a record?

Haystack, mine normally take about 20 mins (80GB drives) but they are not very fragmented. If the drive is full it can take ages also if virus checking or similar are running it can take much much longer, in fact I have seen the MS defrag give up because of contant retries with virus S/W.

I switch off all the start-up items and then defrag whips through my 12Gb in a matter of a few minutes

When defragmenting the 40Gb drive I stopped all processes and removed the swap file as well. The disk was very badly fragmented. It did seem as though at least half of the disk had to me moved around. It is the first time that I have defragemented it in a couple of yrears of heavy use. One of my sons loaded a game on it the other day and it took 1Gb. PCs are just going to have to get bigger.

They are going to have to get bigger. I'm thinking of upgrading my dual floppy Amstrad to a 20Mb hard disk.

Hey Kayak, no need to go that far, all that upgrading will cost a lot of cash.

I happened upon the following truly excellent IE Help Site. The depth and variety of stuff it covers is totally amazing! It is so big the site owner, Sandi, has divided it into sections. Here are just three of them:-

Here's a link for Bugs, Glitches and Stuff-Ups

Here's another one for Bugs, Glitches and Stuff-Ups Page 2

And yet another for Bugs, Glitches and Stuff-Ups Page 3

Here's another link which you can use to quickly test if you have any "parasites" installed on your machine:-

Parasite Detector

If you want to know what parasites are, this link should give you a reasonably good idea

Haystack

Go to http://www.executive.com and download a trial of Diskeeper. it is an enhanced version of the defragmenter that ships with WinXP. They do a cut down version that is free to use but you will want to buy it.

I have a big problem with excel 2000 running on a laptop with XP pro. the app fials to start and brings up the usual 'please tell microsoft about this ...' box.

When I click on details the 'Error signature' reads as follows;

Appname excel.exe Appver 9.0.0.2719 ModName; mso9.dll

etc


Ive tried a dll fix; no luck
Ive tried uninstalling MS office 2000; no luck
Ive even tried to uninstal MS 2000 and instal Office97; still no luck.

Any ideas?

thanks

Neil

Try this site. It gives a description of all the programs in the task list when you do a ctrl-alt-del. I got rid of a few like mdm, rnapp, mediadet, lvcoms.

http://www.answersthatwork.com/Tasklist_pages/tasklist.htm

ok I thought my MS excel problem may have people stumped:-(

Heres an easier one; A friend has an old wrod95 doc that he password protected, the password got forgotten long ago. Where can I find a cracker? Ifit was Word97 or 2000 it wouldnt be a problem as theres loads of working freebies out there but it seems that word 95 is just to old for anyone to bother with these days.

thanks

Neil

robber: plenty of hits in Google although I didn't check whether they were free:

http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=%22word+95%22+password+recovery&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&hl=en&meta=

robber, do a google search in groups with "word 95 password crack" and you will get a number of hits. depending on exactly which version you may find an easy way (email it to yourself from within word) but it may need some cash to solve this one.

Re the Excel problem, you havnt given enough information for a techie to solve the problem, again I suggest Google group search.

Sorry this isnt much help.

PS I am not a techie ;-)

Robber

If the password is a short one you could write some VB code to try all combinations. Chances are you can leave it running and get it open in a couple of days.

If it is a long password or has punctuation characters then this would not work as the time could run to weeks

thanks guys, google search came up with loads of hits for win95 crackers. Trouble is none have worked to date.

Spaceman, agree about the lack of info re the excel problem but Im quoting most of the info that the MS report is displaying, and Ive tried lots of seaches for similar problems but found very little to help.

thanks for all the input though, its appreciated.

Neil

robber, have you tried the Microsoft site? I only ask because I had a problem running (I think) excel 97 on w98, and it was a known problem - there was a fix on the Microsoft support website.