mta

makes you wonder what we are using right now in our day to day lives that we don't give a second glance at that could be banned like the Fluoroscope? smartphones? soy milk? (it's just plain wrong) and what about those other past major blunders; asbestos lead paint

doesn't Word have an Avery label template that prints Jewel box covers?

great find. i'll be trying it out the next time i have to remove crapware in safe mode. as you say hazelnut, i had plenty of times when it would have come in very handy, hope it works as good in practice as it sounds...

a lot of 'wake up' problems seem to stem from a motherboard - power supply incompatability. the internal smarts of both don't talk to each other as they should. i've had success in the past by changing the power supply unit to a more modern one - but that's a bit drastic. a far simpler way as Kroozer states is to turn off the power save modes. if you use the sleep, stand-by or hibernate options to save the environment, even in low-power mode, the unit is still sucking the juice. turn it off and be done with it. if you use those modes to get the quick Windows start-up, then sadly you'll be without that option.

@login123, doh, thanks for that, i forgot about being able to boot from an ISO cd. @razlecast if i understand it correctly, the 120gig drive came out of a laptop and you put it into an external enclosure. the capacity of it suggests it's about 4 or 5 years old and the fact it was used externally suggests it may have been 'bumped' while plugged in (very common) i'm thinking the drive itself may of had some physical damage, like the read head hitting the platter surface. which will make data extraction all that much harder. does the drive make a clicking noise? (another nail in the coffin if it does)

one downside to us only having MS all these years is that we know the programs well and have a swag of data written in them. having just started using Ubuntu, I am finding it hard to get my data across to the Linux platform and still be able to use it in all it's glory. especially my Excel spreadsheets which have pretty in-depth formulas which the open-sourced Excel wanna-bees can't handle. we are tied to MS even when we try a different OS, we still want things to behave like Office.

looks like that FixIt only clears the contents, which suggests the file itself would still be fragmented. i guess it depends on the method of 'clearing', it may simply delete and recreate the file or maybe write 0's to it.

another way to defrag those 2 files without using DF is to 'delete' them, so to speak. for hiberfil.sys; start a Command Prompt as Administrator and type powercfg -h off if you don't care about hibernation power save mode, leave it there. the file is now gone. if you do want it back, powercfg -h on for pagefile.sys; go to Control Panel, System, Advanced tab, Advanced button, tell it you don't want a Pagefile, reboot the PC (it'll be a bit slower with the pagefile) and go back into Control Panel and set it back up, either Custon and System Managed (it changes a bit depending on your Windows version, plus I'm not on my Windows Pc at the moment so that was from memory)

best chem set ever had warnings on what NOT to do. so, of course, being a kid and bullet-proof, that's a red flag to a bull. the instructions actually said; Warning: Do NOT let potassium permanganate mix with mineral oil and ethanol. it took a bit of experimenting (exactly what the set was designed to teach) but in the right combo the result was spectacular to a 12 year old.

unusual name for a folder! based on that, could it be related to a memory card?. has the card been removed?

@keatah, anything you would suggest to help razlecast? any tips or tricks, programs or methods she could use?

i used to only use Corel, especially WordPerfect, but found when i was sending out my resume, companies only wanted the Word format. so i was forced to learn it and have only used Office since. I've tried OO but have found it cannot handle anywhere near all of Excels 300'ish formulas. you may not like Office but if it didn't have the monopoly, and the inherit standard it has forced on us, image all the competing formats; Libre, OpenOffice to name a few. there would be half a dozen different standards. I'm yet to see an other contender come close to matching Excels power. (but I do hate the damn ribbon, geez, how hard was File, Edit, View, Tools.....)

love 'em or hate 'em (pretty neutral myself - happy to sit on the fence ) can you seriously imagine a world without Microsoft, or more specifically, without Office. there are lots of Word equivalents that seem to be very capable of opening .doc files, but I've yet to find a replacement for Excel that will open my .xls files and not bugger up the formulas.

@razlecast, not so much specific help, but something to consider. just in the last couple of weeks i have built a PC with just Unix on it (ubuntu 12.04 to be specific) and I have so far used it 3 times to access drives that Windows could not and managed to recover al lthat data. if nothing else helps, consider that as a Plan B.

when i first started using .vhd's and XP Mode under Win7, i thought killing the .vhd and starting a new one would be a quick way to defrag it. you know, like the pagefile. yeah... don't do that, whole world of hurt. just a warning to other young .vhd pups out there....

OK I did not know that. That's how little I've had the need to eek out those extra few electrons. Overclocking never was my thing, if I needed a faster PC, vid card, ram or whatever, I just brought one. But I do understand the 'geek value' in making something perform like it's dearer rival but for the cost of it's poorer cousin.

sorry nodles, i don't use it. in fact, don't even know any PC that I've seen it on either. the few MSI mobo's and graphics cards i do see, the user hasn't loaded afterburner.

Whow, that's a unique way to 'advertise' your product. "Yeah, I know it sucks, but gives us another try... Please !!!"

and how many of those names the OS has during developement actually make it to consumer release - i think none. so Blue will be Win9 or some other hat picked, roll-off-the-tongue, catchy word.

all valid points Alan_B, guess we'll have to wait & see - bit like Windows Blue. only rumours at this stage and may never see the light of day. (ps: thanks to whoever editted my #8 post - not sarcastic, really thanks - i wasn't sure with that being a Monty Python quote, for those that picked up on that, whether it might have snuck through - so know i know)

seems all a bit pie-in-the-sky at this early stage. Blue so soon after Win8, a free OS - all new territory for MS. but good find Hazelnut. that's the first i've heard about it. be interested to see what my monthly mag says about it next time.

ooooh, you lucky, lucky b****d! i'm still waiting for my Pi. but to get back on topic, maybe the big end of town is thinking the sudden rise of the SBC (single board computer) like the Pi could capture some of the market. how many times has anyone changed just their CPU? for me the answer is maybe 2-4 times. i've had PC's that when the PSU has gone, it's taken out the processor as well (but not the mobo - weird) so if we can't swap out a processor - will we care?

as a general rule, you normally on delve deeper and go into Event Viewer when something more obvious like an error message pop-up window or some program not working, is happening. the stuff in Event Viewer is meant to help a technican (call us geeks or nerds if you like) troubleshoot an issue. hopefully giving him(or her) a straw to grasp to help solve the problem. and even then, the stuff in there can get pretty heavy. the Event logs tend to simply fill up and gather dust. i can count on one hand (well, maybe two) the number of times i've had to look in them to help figure something out. @grits2, if your only concern is the stuff you have found in Event Viewer, i would suggest you are worrying over nothing. as hazelnut states, as long as you are getting no other issues... quick test to settle any nerves you may have; open up all your Office programs (Word, Excel, Publisher, what-have-you) and give them a bit of a run. if anything 'pops up', let us know...

cant see FF not working on XP sp1 effecting too many people. although i see heaps of PC's still with XP, i can't remember the last one that had sp1, they all have sp3 that i come across.

If Windows thought is was of concern it would have popped up an error window at the time of the event. It thought it bad enough to log it in Events but not bad enough to tell you about it. That, to me, tells me you can ignore it.