Replies

Yes, I almost used the words of your College colleague, but thought they might be considered rude! But I do hate anybody messing around with my settings!

Chris

If I have fully understood your intention, it seems you wish to resize the user’s window to the image size. My understanding is that if you do this, at least in a tabbed browser like Firefox, you permanently resize the browser window, so that the user then has to resize it again to his/her/its preference. This is a pain!
I tend to avoid sites that play around with my preferences; to change a user’s window size (or other settings) without permission is to me unacceptable practice, although I’m sure others will disagree…

Chris

Chris

You could perhaps consider moving some of the files on C: to D:. For example, you can change the location of the virtual memory from C: to D: in System Properties. That may release as much as 2GB if you have 1GB of RAM.

In addition, you may move the browser cache – this may not have so much effect, depending on your setting, but in my case would release 150MB.

Further you might be able to remove the Uninstall information files resulting from installing Windows patches – in my case that would free up 16MB. In addition, there may be as much as 490MB in a folder i386 as a result of installing SP2. This could probably be moved to D:

Also clean up the drive, empty the Recycle Bin, and so on.

As a final solution, you could uninstall some programs, then reinstall them on D: – most programs allow you to install on another drive. For example, moving Office 2000 on my system would release 343MB. Moving the Adobe Reader: 75MB. Given that if you reinstall Windows, you’d have to reload all your programs, you might save time by doing it this way.

Afterthought: I guess this is a notebook, so it might be set up with hibernation. I don’t know if it is possible to move the hibernation file to D:, but you could shut that off and save another 1GB or so

Chris

In PowerDesk (if you are still interested), click Options – Customize Toolbar. Works like Customize in the Explorer

Chris

There may be some occasions in which one wants to view a PDF file in a browser, but I have yet to encounter such. So I have found the most simple solution is to set the Adobe Reader so that it does all the things that PDF Download says it does (Stop PDF files crashing your browser; Stop PDF files taking forever to open; Make PDF files download like other files in Firefox).

This can be done in Adobe Reader 8 by going to Edit – Preferences – Internet, uncheck ‘Display PDF in browser’

Chris

So glad to find this – it applies also to Excel, and it was taking an age for that program to open.

However, it was not quite so simple to carry out the instructions, since for some reason my AVG is installed in the “D:Program FilesGrisoftAVG Free” folder. regsvr32.exe won’t accept the long folder names, and I gave up trying to work out the ‘old’ names for these folders. What I did was to find AVGOFF2K.DLL (you can use Search to get there), then copy the file to the root directory (in my case D:/). Then all I needed to do was to Run “regsvr32.exe /u D:avgoff2k.dll”.

You can always delete the file after you’ve used it. Or leave it there in case you want to re-activate the plug in, with “regsvr32.exe D:avgoff2k.dll”

Chris

Might I suggest Clipomatic. I have found it very useful, for me completely replaces the Clipboard. You can download Clipomatic for from here…

Chris

Tony,

That indeed confirms the version installed, but does not confirm that that is the latest version. Once the foot shooting has passed, perhaps it would be good to remove all the previous versions of the page that confirm you have the latest version, otherwise someone could obtain and install e.g. a copy of v 2.0.0.9, see the ‘you have the latest version’ screen, and believe they were up-to-date. Indeed, it would perhaps be even better if the previous confirmation screens were changed to indicate that it was NOT the latest version.

Chris

Sadly that confirmation that you have the latest version gives little confidence. If you now reinstall to v2.0.0.9, it will also take you to the same description.

Chris

What I’m not clear from all this is: do the standard AV programs (in my case, AVG) protect and clear this Storm?

Chris

I’m confused – as normal!

Why would you not just edit the shortcut keys (with Winkey?) to return them to the standard. According to Winkey, there are only 9 standard settings which are listed. It shouldn’t take too long to do this?

Or am I missing something (as usual)?

Chris

After talking to Acer service, I found the solution. As I suspected, the hard disk on 6291 is a SATA (whatever that means) and the Windows XP disk does not include SATA drivers. The drivers need to be loaded from a floppy (!) by hitting F6 at the start of the process. Files to produce the floppy are hidden on Acer’s European web site. There is no information or explanation offered anywhere, apart from a Readme.txt.

It amazes me that in the day and age, one needs a floppy to load Windows on a notebook! The Acer folk blame it on Microsoft, and say that the 6291 is ‘only’ Vista certified, and not certified for XP (although they don’t announce this fact).

An alternative suggestion of slipstreaming the drivers onto a new Windows CD is covered here. Seems like plenty of others have had the problem!

Anyway, thanks to all for the usual quick support. Sorry to have introduced a red herring. But I’ve learned a little from it. Now to borrow a USB Floppy drive. I certainly don’t want to buy one…

Chris

Rory,

Thanks. A bit of progress. This has got rid of grub. But the same problem remains.

I have the impression that this computer uses an SCSI or SATA hard drive (don’t know which – or the difference!). And I am using a quite old copy of Windows XP SP2 (although never installed). Would this perhaps be a driver problem?

Chris

Rory,

Thanks for your thoughts.

Using an old Win98 bootable CD, I managed to run Fdisk. This only found 10GB out of the total 80GB. I set this up as a DOS partition but problem remained. Tried formatting the partition, problem still there.

I’m at a loss!

Chris

Big Al,

Thanks for your thoughts. This was indeed one of my first suspects, but there doesn’t seem to be anything in the BIOS setup which would affect this. I agree that it is very strange that Windows can’t find a hard disk. Searching elsewhere suggests that Linux uses a non-standard MBR, but this doesn’t take me very far.

Should be able to contact Acer service in the next few hours, so I’ll report back…

Chris