Replies

Agree with Jerry, try Everything Search Engine! Coupled with Clint’s suggestion of organization AND descriptive file names (I throw everything into a file name I might search for later, and add more description to files I’m sent or download) it makes it easy to find files. This is a MUST for Vista and XP!

This may be helpful, it disables the auto-restart in Windows so only warnings are displayed that you need to reboot. You can then restart when YOU want to to!

1. Click Start and type gpedit.msc
2. Press Enter
3. Go to Local Computer Policy -> Computer Configuration -> Administrative Templates -> Windows Components -> Windows Update
4. Double-click on “No auto-restart with logged on users for scheduled sutomatic update installations”
5. Enable it!
6. Reboot the computer

Cheers,

Nathan

Best you can do is use a faster way to get Explorer to open after you insert a CD. Win+E will open explorer, but even better would be to make a shortcut to the CD drive on your desktop, and then in the shortcut properties put a shortcut key, like Ctrl+Alt+E to open your E drive. Now you can insert a CD/DVD, press Ctrl+Alt+E and Explorer will open to the drive.

Nathan

I rarely want to search content, just file names, so have been using the program ‘Everything’ by VoidTools (Freeware). Works great, fast, work on flash and portable drives when they’re plugged in. File names only, but supports wild card searches. Displays results as fast as you can type!

At least the built in Win 7 searches blows away what XP could do speed wise.

Cheers to all you Loungers,

Nathan

A number of years ago I went through all my floppies, chucked 75% of them, and copied the rest to my HD, one folder per disk. I burned the disk to DVD, and printed out the folder names to store with it.

For transport I keep an 8GB MicroSD card in an extremely small USB reader in my wallet, mostly full of apps to help fix PC’s, and have never looked back (it’s like having over 5500 floppies in my pocket!).

I’ve had so many floppy disks fail, especially going from PC to PC, that I was quite relieved to be rid of them. I do have a usb floppy in my arsenal for the odd floppy that shows up in my travels though!

As far as I know, you can’t download the Google Photos Screensaver as a standalone install. It is bundled with Picasa. If you uninstall Picasa the screensaver is NOT removed. The fade & zoom effects are certainly part of the screen saver, and not reliant on Picasa, I just meant that you had to download Picasa to get the screensaver, and that the screensaver had nice effects!

I agree that the arrow keys should not close the screen saver, wish they would put them back!

Cheers,

Nathan

It sounds like your not putting the http:// in front of it. Open your browser and type in http://192.168.1.1

Nathan

I recall that on the old versions of the Google screen saver moving the mouse or using the arrow keys would not close the screen saver like it should, but bring up options to go back or forward through the pictures. The new version ‘fixed’ this behavior so all keys and the mouse close the screen saver.

HOWEVER, they did leave the feature available with one key, the space bar. So, if you want to go back and look at a picture, hit the space bar first, then the arrow keys.

(FYI for others, Google Screen Saver comes with Picasa, and can display pictures with a nice fade and zoom effects from any folder on your drive and/or images from your online Picasa albums)

Hope that helps!

Nathan

Highly recommend Process Explorer from Sysinternals (Free!). It will show much more detail on the processes running. You can download it from Microsoft, just google Process Explorer Sysinternals and it should be the first hit!

Cheers,

Nathan

Ahhhh DOS. Still use the command shell quite often. Funny how fast a dir/s goes by now! Remember the bytes free would be something like

25,652,843 bytes free

Now it’s

1,462,540,533,760 bytes free

Oh, how time flies by!

Have you tried other USB drives? Does it show up in Computer Management under Disk Management (if so, right-click on it and assign it a drive letter). If you have a mapped network drive, sometimes the USB drive tries to assign the same drive letter.

If this is the only drive you’ve tried, the controller could be shot. You could probably pull the drive out and put it in a new enclosure and it might work fine. I’ve also seen power supplies for enclosures fail to the point that the drive would spin up but it would not work.

Nathan

Is it time to give up on Windows? I think it completely depends on what you use Windows for, and if there is an alternative that better suites your needs with a smaller learning curve. From the feedback I’ve read/heard from others, Windows 7 is the most stable version of Windows they’ve used, and it’s been, for the most part, a positive experience. For others who like to tinker under the hood, it is a little more frustrating.

A few things to keep in mind though. A few hours spent to learn and tweak the system to your liking is really no more than you would probably spend learning the ins and outs of a new car. And while I see your point with the analogy of the car, I think that it would be fair to say that, ‘under the hood’ most new cars have grown just as complex as the Windows 7 OS. It would take me hours of research, new tools, and help from others to learn to do all the things on my new car that I could do in minutes on my old car.

Best of luck!

Cheers,

Nathan

Are the audio drivers up to date? Another process could be causing a problem, perhaps the screen saver is kicking in after 10 min?

Agree with CLiNT. Autorun would not be the issue as it only occurs when you actually insert a disc. When an application tries to access the DVD drive and the tray is open, Windows will pull the tray close, so some program is likely scanning the drives in the background, which is highly suspicious. If a few Malware scans come up clean, try using closing apps in the system tray, if could be a poorly written camera application scanning for a camera, etc. You could use MsConfig to stop those from loading.

Make sure the username and password you are logged in as on the XP box are the same on the Windows 2000 server. Even if the share is open to everyone, if the username you are using exists on both systems, and the passwords are different, it will not connect.

Nathan