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First thing is to determine whether the laptop boots properly or not. Do you see normal disk activity and after a few minutes, the disk should stop spinning, indicating that the laptop is fully booted. Do you have to enter a user-id? Press Enter to simulate it as you cannot use the mouse. Then, from another computer, I would create an autorun CD that would run a bios flash program.

First thing is to determine whether the laptop boots properly or not. Do you see normal disk activity and after a few minutes, the disk should stop spinning, indicating that the laptop is fully booted. Do you have to enter a user-id? Press Enter to simulate it as you cannot use the mouse. Then, from another computer, I would create an autorun CD that would run a bios flash program.

First thing is to determine whether the laptop boots properly or not. Do you see normal disk activity and after a few minutes, the disk should stop spinning, indicating that the laptop is fully booted. Do you have to enter a user-id? Press Enter to simulate it as you cannot use the mouse. Then, from another computer, I would create an autorun CD that would run a bios flash program.

First thing is to determine whether the laptop boots properly or not. Do you see normal disk activity and after a few minutes, the disk should stop spinning, indicating that the laptop is fully booted. Do you have to enter a user-id? Press Enter to simulate it as you cannot use the mouse. Then, from another computer, I would create an autorun CD that would run a bios flash program.

First thing is to determine whether the laptop boots properly or not. Do you see normal disk activity and after a few minutes, the disk should stop spinning, indicating that the laptop is fully booted. Do you have to enter a user-id? Press Enter to simulate it as you cannot use the mouse. Then, from another computer, I would create an autorun CD that would run a bios flash program.

How do they behave with Named Ranges, absolute addresses, and addresses of ranges in other sheets?

They work well, at least in Excel 2003, I just tested the formulas: =CountBackgroundColorFromColor(MyNamedRange, 0), CountBackgroundColorFromColor($A$45:$F65,0), CountBackgroundColorFromColor(Sheet2!A1:B33,0) and they return proper results.

To delete a file in Ubuntu, it’s like for Windows: select the file and press the delete key. You can also right-click a file and select the option delete.

I don’t know how the functions will work in such cases and cannot test it right now being away from my main computer but I guess it should work. If it doesn’t, it’s not my fault but Microsoft’s fault to not make all ranges equal in functions!

What is strange is I can run Virtualbox and a linux distro with firefox inside without a crash.

This is not strange. With a virtualbox, the guest OS is completely independent from the host OS. Do all your browsers crash on the same page or same web site? Can you disable Norton and try again?

A couple of functions to get the number of cells within a range with either the same background color as a reference cell, or with an absolute color value. As mentioned, the change of a background color doesn’t trigger recalculation, so you have to force it with Ctrl-Alt-F9.

Usually, when I cannot delete a file (windows says that it is in use), I rename it, shutdown and restart windows and the file with the new name is OK for deletion. Another method is to use a boot CD like Knoppix which will give you access to the Windows file system and from there you can delete the files.

Another idea is to use an external monitor and to connect it before you boot. Press the special Fn key plus F7 (the combination may be slightly different on your laptop) so the output will be redirected to the external device.

The Microsoft dot net framework is just a set of low level programs that are used by applications developed using the .net environment. When you develop an application, you are using a lot of features and th3e size of a stand-alone program would be very big, even for the simplest programs. With the framework, you can distribute a software of a reasonable size as it can use the resources already present on your computer.

So the implications, in your case are simple: if all your software are working without the framework, then you don’t need to do anything. If some applications require the framework, then you will have to choose between them and Dell datasafe.

Upgrading to Windows 7 may solve all these problems… or not! Interactions between software are very complex and not all combinations can be tested. Unless you can put Mr. Dell and Gates in the same room and say ‘fix my computer’ you will be like a ping-pong ball.

There is a function that I like very much as it has never let me down, SUMPRODUCT. In your case, I propose:
=SQRT(SUMPRODUCT(($B$2:$B$26-SUMIF($A$2:$A$26,C3,$B$2:$B$26)/COUNTIF($A$2:$A$26,C3))^2,($A$2:$A$26=C3)*1)/(COUNTIF($A$2:$A$26,C3)-1))
$A$2:$A$26: the range with the categories a, b, c, etc.
$B$2:$B$26: the range with the values
C3: a cell containing a category, could also be an absolute value like “a”

Word 2007 is running in compatibility mode

This may explain the performance hit.