Replies

“In the future, ISPs might have to revisit download/upload bandwidth allocation.”

For cable providers (that is traditional cable) the upload channels were placed in a relatively small frequency band
so that they could use the same cable for both download of data and television and upload of internet data. The
distribution amplifiers were designed to follow suit. After you have reached the capacity of that upload band, there
is very little that you can do without redesigning the entire cable plant and replacing a lot of equipment at both
the customer premises and in the street. That costs big bucks.

FIOS and other optical providers may have provisioned their networks differently and have wider bandwidth to
play with.

Securing credit card accounts is a fixable problem: (1) Use virtual, one-time only card numbers with time and dollar limits for on-line purchases (2) Use PIN priority EMV (chipped) cards for brick&mortar purchases. This likely won’t be done without government intervention. Consumers may not have to pay for fraud but they are largely left on their own to clean up the mess. Next October, the banks will shift as much fraud liability to merchants as they can. Merchants will attempt to shift that liability to consumers. We’ll see what happens.

Well, after all the discussion, I went back to the laptop with a brand new Knoppix 7.3 disk. I rebooted the system and up popped the Knoppix prompt. You could have knocked me over with a feather. The ONLY thing that I did differently was to activate the built-in Administrator account. Perhaps running HWsetup as the REAL Administrator rather than as an ordinary user with Administrator rights makes the difference. In any case, I can now boot up from DVD and that’s all I care about. Or perhaps I am really insane and living in the Twilight Zone!!!

Thanks to everyone for the advice. It’s nice to know that people pay attention to the threads here.

I have not consulted Toshiba Support about this. Using HWSetup APPEARS to work when I change the boot order to ODD. It just won’t boot from the DVD (and I tried a few). I didn’t try using the Windows 7 DVD, since I am currently running Windows 7 and what I wanted to run was alternate systems like Knoppix and ultimately a System Rescue disk when my hard drive fails. So, perhaps I need to explore several avenues. And, there could be something wrong with the system itself. It’s out of warranty and it’s not my favorite laptop anyway. Sigh!!!

“as the full instructions say – when you first switch on you will momentarily be presented with the options to press (usually) F2 or F12.”

….. or not! I have a Toshiba Satellite P755D laptop. It even has a HWSetup option to change the boot order. Except that it always boots from the hard disk. You can’t access the BIOS any way at all. Some internet research led to the discovery that this laptop was one of a family of models called “Legacy Free”. Oh what a marvelous way of telling you how you compare to pond scum. So, if the hard disk is broken enough to start the boot process but not enoiugh to bring up windows, you’re up the creek. You can’t also set up a dual boot system or boot something like the Network Security Toolkit. I have no idea what happens if you remove the hard disk entirely. That’s not something I consider routine maintenance. So, I can’t tell if the repair disk that I created will in fact even boot. One posting suggested that if you removed the hard disk, you could turn off the “Legacy Free” setting. I can’t vouch for that.