Robbie

Philips must have one of the most user-unfriendly sites when it comes to finding what you want... Philips have a small program to load onto your computer that checks to see if any of its installed products have been upgraded, it's called Philips Intelligent Agent: http://www.storageupdates.philips.com/en/pia.html download it and run, it will check to see if there are any updates (drivers etc) to any of the Phlips products on your computer (my DVD drive is also a Philips model - when I ran that I found a firmware update which has made my DVD drive run better).

congrats Andy- well deserved!

I prefer a clean reinstall too - in fact I have an image of the factory shipped Windows XP system stored on disk, and backed up to another TWO disks and have used it to reinstall everything after I had a major computer problem last year - to ensure the problem was properly dealt with I wiped the entire hard drive using a program called DBAN (not for the faint hearted! - it wipes everything - literally, all partitions including the system recovery partition as well as the user partition etc leaving the computer with a hard drive that has nothing on it, no partitions or anything else - completely blank). I then started the computer, inserted the disk at the prompt and it then formatted the hard drive, created the recovery partition and then unpacked everything to the user (C:) partition. I had everything backed up I needed - all my data, the exe files for all my software etc, so I had the computer up and running smoothly quite quickly with only the Windows Updates to worry about. Obviously that was done because of the problem I had at the time, now I would just use the destructive recovery in the system recovery partition to return the computer to its factory state and then reinstall that way. The image disks are just "insurance". My system recovery solution allows the creation of a backup image disk (only one though, as per Windows licence), this is what I did when I first bought the computer then I just copied that disk twice for further peace of mind - all three copies work fine.

I have recguard running on my computer too, but it would appear that the recovery solution it protects has been made by a different company as mine has three options (as in that screenshot above), one of which definitely doesn't do anything other than reinstall all the factory shipped applications and settings, whilst leaving alone any software I have downloaded such as firefox, thunderbird etc. It does, however, reset any pre-installed software back to its original version eg Adobe Reader, iTunes, which mean I have to then update. Anyway, glad to hear you have sorted out the problem, hopefully it won't occur again!

hmmm... that doesn't seem great if the files corrupt for any reason and the computer has to be restored to its factory settings. This is a screen shot, from that pcangel website of the first screen I see when the computer boots into the System Recovery partition - I dare say many people with HP type computers will have much the same... http://www.pcangelsolutions.com/screen01grand.jpg other screen shots are at http://www.pcangelsolutions.com/advantage.htm

many computers ship with a hidden partition that allows the user to be able to reinstall Windows either with or without destroying personal data etc that is held there (as opposed to shipping with a Windows XP disk). Perhaps that is what your brother did? On my computer it is reachable by repeatedly pressing F10 at computer startup - all of the 3 options then will restore the application software and pre-installed software back to factory settings. One option just resets everything without touching personal data, one option moved personal data to its own file structure and the ultimate option destroys all personal data and leaves the computer "as new". All options do require all Windows updates to be downloaded once again - and the longer the computer has been owned, the more updates there are... The recovery solution software on my computer is marketed by PC Angel http://www.pcangelsolutions.com/index.htm

I have a Live Distro CD of a Linux operating system called Slax that I keep handy in case I ever had problems starting the computer and had to access the internet in an emergency (for example to seek urgent advice from here). It runs directly from the CD and unloads itself into, and runs directly from, RAM, without needing to touch the hard drive. Although it also will have no AV program and firewall running, given how it runs it should be safe to run - it runs at computer startup (you need to change the BIOS settings to run the CD). http://www.slax.org/ It also doubles as an emergency data recovery method as, although it is not possible to save anything to the CD (when you close down Slax everything is lost, as it is stored in RAM), you can navigate via the Explorer in Slax to your C:Drive (or whatever) on the hard drive and upload data you need to an online storage program, or email the data to yourself. It is handy, albeit slow, if you are no longer able to boot into the Windows partition / hard drive etc.

has anyone ever managed to get this firewall to be able to work properly and have their computer start up quite quickly? Until May 2006 this was a great firewall, I try it now and again and it slows my computer down by quite a lot... it slows down my startup by about a minute. I would love to be able to go back to this but it is so slow (is it something to do with vsmon.exe?). I use Comodo but I would prefer it if ZA could work properly...

I've never heard of National Shed Week - it must be a big thing in Yorkshire! What does the winner get?

yeah, it was the optimisation (if I remember) that was slowing it down. How do I change the defaults? All I ever do is click on the JkDefrag Application (after extracting all the files from the zipped folder) to make it run...

I downloaded the new JkDefrag v3.9 and have had to go back to 3.8. It takes an age to run, it runs to 99% then jumps back to 25% etc before eventually crawling to a finish and more importantly there were still one or two fragmented files after all this (when I then checked using Windows XP's own defrag option). I ran it 3 times as a test, one after the other and it took almost 35 minutes! Doing the same with 3.8 takes less than 10 minutes to do the same... 3.8 runs smoothly, so I'll stick with that.

here are some more nasty sounds relating to disk problems... http://www.recovery-bg.com/symptoms-hard-d...ta-recovery.php

at least with Big Sam we should have a decent defence for a change. As long as he doesn't forget that as well as an attack there is a midfield and that long ball football isn't the only way! As for Talktalk - yeah, there is no proxies involved so I'm not sure why it should show that you have two IP numbers - that's a bit puzzling.

Which ISP are you with Dennis? Is it NTL / Telewest / VM? If so, they use proxy cache servers to speed up access to the web. Sometimes sites can see your "real" IP address, other times sites see the proxy IP address, which can be used by several thousand people at the same time. That's why sometimes sites like Google will temporarily block users of a particular proxy number for a while - it thinks it is under attack when it's just lots of different users trying to access the site with the same IP address. This site explains more and also lists alternative proxy cache servers (assuming it is ntl ot telewest you are with you are with). http://homepage.ntlworld.com/robin.d.h.wal...ncache.html#ntl

oh, and if it is possible to create a bootable CD-R what files do I need? Thanks!

I tried to find a way to recreate the same boot disk using a CD disk but could never find how to do it... I thought it wasn't possible to re create a bootible floppy on CD...?

Floppy disks... the way to go forward! A few years ago when my computer had a floppy disk drive I was able to create a startup disk that loaded things like ntldr from the floppy to be able to boot up the computer. All I had to do was change the startup sequence in the BIOS so the computer looked for a floppy disk drive first. I've just bought an external FDD and would like to recreate the same disk but I'm not sure what files I used to have as the emergency startup disk. Does anyone know which files should be there or can they point me to a website which has this information? Also, will the external (USB) FDD start as if it was an internal FDD and therefore I can change the BIOS settings if it was ever needed? Thanks for any help!

Thank You! That's exactly what I was after. I searched the Microsoft database and couldn't find anything...

or more specifically, the context menu you see when you highlight a file, folder etc in Windows. The menu has various options, including one titled "Send To", then there is a sub menu with various options. Is it possible to add an item to this sub menu? I back up and copy to disk all my important files and folders at least once a week. However every night I copy the files etc I use to a folder I have titled "Backup". Once a week I then copy this folder to disk. At the moment, to get the files and folders to this Backup folder I have to use the copy and paste method. Ideally I would love to be able to use the Send To option, if I could add this Backup folder to that sub menu. Does anyone know if it is possible and if so could you tell me how to do it?

Going Underground by The Jam. A UK number one back in March 1980, flopped in the US though.

I've used the SLAX Linux Live CD, it's a good bit of fun to play around with and very handy to use on the two occasions when I've ran DBAN to wipe my hard drive and I've quickly wanted to check something on the internet prior to doing a format and reinstall of Windows. http://www.slax.org/ I'm not sure if I'd want to load Linux onto my hard drive though, I'm happy enough with Windows, and SLAX as a backup to run in RAM when needed.

some files in the Firefox profiles folder have changed name with this new release, most notably the "signons" text file, which contains encrypted passwords has been renamed to "signons2". May be useful for people who like to securely delete this file, either via CCleaner or as I do, via the on-demand part of Eraser.

https://www.mediamax.com/Brands/MediaMax/home/home.aspx allows 25GBs of free storage for videos, photos, movies, music and files. There are paying options too, if larger file space is needed.

Eraser is slow because it wipes ALL the free space, every time it does a free space wipe. Any program that just wipes, say 20% because it has already has wiped the other 80% and which is still unused, must be very trusting of itself. How can it possibly know that it isn't leaving some deleted files untouched?

I've always found a quicker way of reducing the dimensions is to use one of Windows PowerToys: Image Resizer http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/downloa...ppowertoys.mspx (you need to scroll down) it allows the user to quickly resize without having to launch MS Paint - it can be used via the context menu on a picture file. It allows the user to specify a custom size.