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Seagate has changed DiscWizard!! The new version doesn’t recognize a Momentus in the BlacX formatter and says no Seagate devices and thus won’t install. What do I do now?
Any help appreciated.
jspence@pobox.com

Hybrid hard drives finally come of age Our Dell laptops are getting a little long in the tooth – 3 years old (Win XP). I used the advice from this article to push the useful life out for at least a year or until we can upgrade to was Win 8 and the touch screen computers. Everything worked as described and the machines are somewhat faster plus now we have painless complete backups.
BTW, I added another GB to ram (3gb) and that has helped as well.
Many thanks for this useful and complete article!!
jbs/

The person with the HP printer problem could consider using an old PC to run XP. Attach the printer to that PC (with XP drivers) and
then share that printer as a network printer.

Thanks for this particular column. I bought the powerline modules that you talked about and they work fine without a hitch. We only use laptops and after reopening them, the wireless ones took a noticeable amount of time to reconnect to the network but that was BEFORE the powerline modules – now instantly!!

My only question is – can I plug one of the modules in a house next door or is there a filter (transformer) somewhere that would prevent that??
Thanks.
jbs/

As an aside, get rid of the Belkin router!! Search the internet and you will see what I am talking about. I’ve had three – the original was replaced twice!
If there’s anything that was installed by Belkin, uninstall it.
One good thing came out of this – I spent a lot of time with Belkin India and learned a thing or two about shooting problems.
Nice, friendly and courteous Customer Support – too bad the router stinks.
Good luck.
jbs/

I checked again after reboot – the culprit was DHCP Client wasn’t starting. Still don’t know why since it was set to Automatic.
Anyway – thanks for YOUR help. And do post the list.
jbs/

I performed the steps you suggest – (flushdns) successfully flushed cache – (release) ip address has already been released – (renew) an error occurred on wireless. The RCP server is unavailable.

I finally got a connection – I went to started services and compared them to the good dell and found that DHCP, network connections, network dde, smtp, tcp/ip helper were not started. Once I did that – the renew worked and I got an ip address.

One additional thing – I was getting “limited or no connectivity” on the wireless and that must have been due to one of the services not being started.

Thanks for the suggestions. Note “start services.msc” from “cmd” starts started services.
jbs/