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December 5

Do web hosting accounts have bandwidth caps?

I am testing my website's bandwidth speed using Speed Test Pro http://speedtestpro.net[1] and it shows that my maximum bandwidth speed for my website is only 1.9 Mbps. My Internet connection using Speed Test Pro again shows my speed as 3 Mbps so I know it is not my ISP that is slowing it down. Does shared web hosting limit your maximum bandwidth speed? Or do I have something setup wrong on my web hosting account? It is a cheap web hosting account, but their website says they have a 100 Mbit connection to the Internet. I am confused and very frustrated, can someone help, please. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Jakelittle11 (talk • contribs) 01:20, 5 December 2007 (UTC)

Some providers have caps. It's also possible that the account have a set cap for how fast a single computer can download.

Does the website say they have a 100 Mbit connection, or does it say that they have dedicate a 100 Mbit connection for your site. If it's the former then you share those 100Mbits with other users of the provider, so you only get a fraction of the connection. In the latter you still share with other visits to your site. In addition there is loss,latencies and overhead involved when sending anything over the internet, so you will never get the a throughput equal to your bandwidth, see Throughput.

You might want to try at different times to see if this affects things, expect connections to be better when fewer people is on the net. Taemyr (talk) 08:37, 5 December 2007 (UTC)

radio auction

how do I get an application to enter the auction for the 700 mhz spectrum?

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/01/technology/01google.html?em&ex=1196744400&en=6c9bd6fe4276d660&ei=5087%0A —Preceding unsigned comment added by 12.217.195.89 (talk) 01:54, 5 December 2007 (UTC)

Look here (http://www.ofcom.org.uk/static/archive/spectrumauctions/3gindex.htm) it would appear that you submit a fax to the radio communications headquarters at Docklands. Of course this is a UK ofcom radio auction but similarly contact the area that are auctioning the spectrum and they will direct you how to do it. This (http://www.ntia.doc.gov/osmhome/osmhome.html) might be the owners of US ones. ny156uk (talk) 18:17, 5 December 2007 (UTC)

The FCC is responsible for the auction. You would need to register with the FCC. You would then have access to their Auctions Portal. Of course, you would also need several billion dollars in spare change. Information on the 700MHz auction can be found here. — Matt Eason ^{(Talk • Contribs)} 18:24, 5 December 2007 (UTC)

Runescape

What is the first second and third most expencive thing in runescape acording to the grand exchange?thanks--76.235.183.66 (talk) 02:31, 5 December 2007 (UTC)

Please do not crosspost. Lanfear's Bane | t 13:29, 5 December 2007 (UTC)

Freeware video converter.

I know this has probably been asked before but I've been googling for an hour with no luck. is there a half decent windows video converter that can rip a dvd to mpeg4 with a few settings like compression and screen size would be nice, the aim is i want to synch a dvd to my iphone. the only tools I can find have lousy trial periods only allowing you to convert 5 minutes, or some other catch like big watermarks. Surely there must be a basic tool that can do this for free.. Vespine (talk) 02:50, 5 December 2007 (UTC)

Typical, spend an hour searching, almost give up, post the question, and five minutes later happen across what may be the answer, a program called "handbreak".. Well if anyone has other suggestions.. Vespine (talk) 03:11, 5 December 2007 (UTC)

For the benefit of anyone else searching, that software is called HandBrake. --LarryMac | Talk 13:26, 5 December 2007 (UTC)

you could try Super (software) - most flavours of video - not sure about from DVD tho . Boomshanka (talk) 03:13, 5 December 2007 (UTC)

How to select particular columns of a particular row in VBA Excel

I have an excel sheet having data in rows 1 to 15 and columns 1 to 7. I a generating a code in which i need to select a particular row on basis of a condition. If the condition is true, the columns 1 to 7 of that particular row need to be selected and do some formatting on those columns. I want to know the code by which i can select columns 1 to 7 of a row in VBA excel.

Try this (http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa221576(office.11).aspx) Range("1:7").select should work but Vba is really picky so it might take a few tries (can't try on my machine as no excel at home). ny156uk (talk) 18:14, 5 December 2007 (UTC)

Computer memory related to hard disk

When we see the properties of our computer it display some less capacity of hard disk comparision of its original capacity (ex. if hard disk is 80 GB the computer show only around 74 or 75 GB) Why? —Preceding unsigned comment added by San sharma (talk • contribs) 09:08, 5 December 2007 (UTC)

80 to 74 or 75 is about the ratio of binary gigabytes (2^30 bytes) to decimal gigabytes (10^9). The Gigabyte article has some background information on this common confusion. --tcsetattr (talk / contribs) 09:39, 5 December 2007 (UTC)

• There's also some loss of useful space where the operating system will reserve some disk space for its own purposes. --Sean 13:51, 5 December 2007 (UTC)

When you format a disk, some of the space needs to be used for the file system/index. 68.39.174.238 (talk) 02:11, 7 December 2007 (UTC)

Recovery of hard disk

I format my hard disk without taking backup. Can i recover my data? —Preceding unsigned comment added by San sharma (talk • contribs) 09:29, 5 December 2007 (UTC)

It depends. You can assume that any date that has been overwritten is lost. This means that if you used wipe options when formatting everything is lost, it also mean that if you have written stuff to the hard disk(this most likely includes booting the computer with this drive as primary) then some of the data is lost. Other than that you might want to take a look at the tools described in Data recovery#Tools. Taemyr (talk) 10:13, 5 December 2007 (UTC)

Difficulty booting Linux in VirtualBox

I'm using VirtualBox to emulate Debian so I don't need to use another computer just for the sake of being able to experiment with Debian. However, there is one thing that seems to prevent the installer/Debian from loading. When I boot into the installer, I can't get into any of them except using installgui since they get stuck at tsc clocksource has been installed and only after resetting the virtual machine several times I managed to get past the clocksource freeze. Sometimes, I see a line saying that the "timer is running x% from normal - aborting" and that usually causes the freeze. I even got a kernel panic stating a sync problem. Even if I manage to get past that and install Debian, I have to perform the reset several times again as it wouldn't get past the few lines after the clocksource has been installed. Only through luck/many resets I could boot Debian and begin using it. What actually went wrong during the booting process causing it to get stuck at a line? --Bruin_rrss23 (talk) 09:47, 5 December 2007 (UTC)

EDIT: I've just upgraded to the latest version of VirtualBox so the whole thing managed to boot up (only panicked once), only the thing just lags and the clock seems like UTC+16 hrs. It's totally asynchronous except the audio since the clock runs slower while under load. Anyhow, I've already solved the problem, so no need to reply here. --Bruin_rrss23 (talk) 13:36, 5 December 2007 (UTC)

Overnight

Sometimes I leave my pc computer on overnight. Always it is incredibly sludgy next morning and takes a while to limber up. Why? I have checked it as OK with Adaware SE and spyBot. I run Windows XP and AVG. - Kittybrewster ☎ 10:16, 5 December 2007 (UTC)

Often, it has "paged out" everything you're interested in using in favor of whatever it was doing overnight. See virtual memory. It seems slowish until your programs and data get paged back in again.

Atlant (talk) 12:48, 5 December 2007 (UTC)

Windows XP has a habit of moving any program or parts thereof that aren't actively being used to the swap file. By leaving your computer on overnight, almost everything will be considered "not in use", and will be swapped out. The "limber up" time is Windows finding out what you're actually using, and bringing them back off the hard drive. --Carnildo (talk) 23:06, 5 December 2007 (UTC)

That leaves the question: what is running overnight that uses all main memory? Windows does not page anything to the swap file unless it really needs the memory for something else. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 84.187.70.206 (talk) 02:24, 6 December 2007 (UTC)

File indexing daemons? Screensavers? Virus scanners? --Mdwyer (talk) 04:36, 6 December 2007 (UTC)

Rarely my Apple Mac has the same problem, but it comes up to speed quite quickly. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 88.111.25.42 (talk) 09:17, 6 December 2007 (UTC)

The only things that work overnight (I think) are MailWasher (collecting new email junk) and AVG (updating and searching for viruses). Maybe some URLs update themselves. - Kittybrewster ☎ 10:00, 6 December 2007 (UTC)

I can't speak specifically about Windows, but some virtual memory paging algorithms are "free space greedy" and wil try to increase the free space even if nothing is competing for space at that instant. They do this on the theory that you never know when there will a sudden demand for free space (for example, to launch a new program) and, hey, you haven't used Word for eight hours anyway!

Atlant (talk) 13:33, 6 December 2007 (UTC)

Windows is super duper non-free-space-greedy. Vista fills all but about 40MB of my 2GB of memory with cached data based on their secrit algorithmz to predict what data I'm going to want next --ffroth 00:06, 8 December 2007 (UTC)

downloading directory tree from Apache autoindex

Hi, I want to download a directory tree from an HTTP server. The directory and its subdirectories do not have index files, and all are displayed by Apache web server's mod_autoindex, so their format is predictable. I could use something like wget -r, but I want to avoid the "Parent Directory" (I don't want it to go up and download the entire web site.) and the "Name", "Last Modified", etc. sorting column heading (they are just duplicates of the same directory) links that are generated by autoindex. In fact, I don't really need to save the generated autoindex page itself. Is there a good program out there that can do this? Thanks, --131.215.166.100 (talk) 12:16, 5 December 2007 (UTC)

wget has -np to avoid going into the parent directory, and you could construct a list of patterns for -R to reject the alternate sortings. --tcsetattr (talk / contribs) 21:20, 5 December 2007 (UTC)

WinZip

Where can I find an older version of WinZip? I updated my Winzip, and the new versions are only available for free for 45 days. This was not the case with the older versions. Funsides (talk) 17:58, 5 December 2007 (UTC)

This may be time to change to TUGZip or 7-Zip instead of Winzip. -- Finlay McWalter | Talk 18:02, 5 December 2007 (UTC)

With version 10, Corel now requires you to purchase an upgrade on each major update. --— Gadget850 (Ed) ^talk - 18:06, 5 December 2007 (UTC)

The Zip patents have expired, so pretty much anyone can make a zip program. I think InfoZip is now the standard, but their windows tools pretty much suck, in my opinion. I don't use 7-Zip, but I have heard good things about it. Finally, you could actually buy WinZip. I know, I'm talkin' crazy. --Mdwyer (talk) 04:35, 6 December 2007 (UTC)

I tried 7-zip also but never understood how it works. Funsides (talk) 06:50, 14 December 2007 (UTC)

At the WinZip page on Oldversion.com.--droptone (talk) 15:52, 6 December 2007 (UTC)

Software installer

Thinking about WinZip... we use an older version of WinZip Self Extractor as a simple software installer for deploying drivers. Can anyone recommend a simple installer package that might be better and available under GPL or the like? --— Gadget850 (Ed) ^talk - 18:33, 5 December 2007 (UTC)

NSIS? It's not GPL but it's like GPL. --antilived^{T | C | G} 19:12, 5 December 2007 (UTC)

Why is my PC running so SLOW?

I like to think I know quite a bit about computers but my PC has got to the stage where it is really beginning to annoy me as it seems so sluggish compared with other computers I use, for example my laptop, which has a lower spec and the same O/S seems like gresed lightning compared to this PC. I have upgraded virtually every part of it and it still seems slow. It's not particularly noticable for general tasks although opening Firefox takes about five seconds which seems like ages but when I try and do anything more demanding, it doesn't want to know. Movie editing and games can be painfull slow, we're not talking about the latest FPS games with richly rendered 3D graphics here but games a few years old. Even 16 bit SNES games (played on an emulator, yes I do have all the original games but it's a real pain having to keep dragging the old consoles out and going behind the TV to plug them in). These only use like 16Mb or RAM so not exactly resource intensive! Trainz 2006 and Roller Coaster Tycoon 3 also run like snails when I try and do anything beyond the most basic tasks, Trainz only needs 32Mb of graphics RAM which is much less than I have. It is making these games completely unplayable. What is supposed to last a second in the game lasts three seconds, it doesn't drop frames, just serves them a lot slower than it should do, the graphics freeze in between frames while the audio just stutters.

Here are the vital stats:

CPU: Pentium 4 - 3.00 GHz
Motherboard: ASUS P5PE-VM
RAM - 1GB DDR400 (in one module I think)
GFX: GeForce FX5500 AGP Card with 256Mb RAM
Audio: Creative Audigy Platinum
HDD: 80Gb; 25Gb free. This 80Gb 'drive' is a partition of a larger (250Gb total) drive.
O/S: XP Pro

Could it be any of the processes I have running? I'm not sure about some of them listed but here is what is running in Task Manager after a boot up where I have loaded nothing other than Firefox, Notepad and the processes that Windows starts up out of the kindness of its heart without being asked:

ALG.EXE (3,168K) What is this?
AVGAMSVR.EXE (308K) something to do with AVG antivirus?
avgcc.exe (240K)
AVGEMC.EXE (1,644K)
AVGUPSVC.EXE (596K)
CRSS.EXE (3,608K) what is this?
CTHELPER.EXE (5,508K) what is this?
CTSVCCDA.EXE (1,152K) what is this?
E_FATIACE.EXE (2,048K) what is this?
Explorer.EXE (18,660K) Win XP 'GUI'
firefox.exe (32,280K) Should Firefox really be using 32Mb RAM?
jusched.exe (2,060K) What is this?
KHost.exe (11,708K) What on earth is this?
KService.exe (12,078) ditto
LSASS.EXE (1,128K) What?
MsPMSPSv.exe (1,328K) What is this?
notepad.exe (2,996K) running in order to type in processes running
NVSVC32.EXE (2,674K) What?
SERVICES.EXE (3,844K)
SFAgent.exe (10,556K) SpamFighter (email filtering) agent I think?
SFUS.EXE (5,128K)
SMSS.EXE (372K)
SPOOLSV.EXE (4,268K)
SVCHOST.EXE appears five times, uses up about 35Mb total
System (220K)
System Idle Process (16K)
taskmgr.exe (4,208K)
WDFMGR.EXE (1,548K) Eh?
WINLOGIN.EXE (892K) Is this dodgy?
wscntfy.exe (1,744K) What is this?

All the above processes are apparantly using 229Mb of RAM in total - why is over a quarter of the RAM being used before I even do anything? I would very much appreciate any suggestions. Upgrading to Vista is not something I wish to entertain as the benefits are dubious and the prices even more so. Going over to Linux is not practical either - while I would dearly love to bid farewell to Bill Gates and his empire, most of the software I have only works with WinDoze. GaryReggae (talk) 22:00, 5 December 2007 (UTC)

A windows machine using only 229Mb just sitting there sounds pretty good to me. Is the computer slower now than when it was new? It could easily be some form of malware slowing you down, or it could just be normal windows slowdown over time. If practical in your situation, you might consider wiping clean and reinstalling the OS and all your apps. Of course, it'd probably pay to try less invasive fixes first. Friday (talk) 22:07, 5 December 2007 (UTC)

Try installing Linux as a dual boot and see if you can use your programs with WINE. --Duomillia (talk) 22:10, 5 December 2007 (UTC)

A slow windows machine is not unusual, but your machine still has a pretty good spec, so it should zip along nicely if you take care of what is running on it. The first step should be to do a complete scan for viruses and run a spyware scanner (I use the free version of Ad-Aware, but there are others available). As for the list of processes, I think the following are supposed to be there for windows to run: CRSS, Explorer, LSASS, SERVICES, SMSS, SPOOLSV, SVCHOST, System, System Idle Process, WINLOGIN. And these other programs are there because you said you are running them: Firefox, Notepad, taskmgr.

To try to find out what the other stuff is, search for each program on your disk, right-click on it and select properties to read the version info. Many programs have version info in them (for example, my notepad.exe says "Copyright Microsoft Corporation..."). See if you recognise these programs as belonging to Microsoft, your video card maker, your anti-virus or anti-spam, your printer maker, etc.

Take a hard look at your system tray. Are all those updaters, checkers, configuration tools, etc. really necessary. Many of these things in the system tray get started at boot time and if you don't need them they just make your computer slower. There's a tool in XP (maybe called msconfig) which lets you modify what starts up. Use it to cut out the unnecessary stuff; and remember ... Is it really that important that Java runtime checks every day that it is the latest and greatest? Or that you have the ability to call up Real Jukebox from the system tray as well as the start menu?

Maybe your disk is highly fragmented. Delete your temporary internet files, delete the temporary files, and empty the recycled folder before you start.

After a good clean up, maybe you won't have to reinstall windows :-)

Astronaut (talk) 00:48, 6 December 2007 (UTC)

Thanks for your replies so far:

@Friday: Reinstalling Windows helps a bit but it's a lot of work to keep reinstalling all my apps and I only did it last in September this year.

@Duomillia: I might give Linux another try as I wasn't aware of WINE and not being able to run my Windows apps was the only thing that put me off it. I've got a few spare HDDs (although I'm not sure they're much good, 20Gb is probably the best of the bunch) so I'll have a play around with Ubuntu or something.

@ Astronaut: Thanks, I will do a virus and spyware scan (I must admit it often doesn't get a chance to do a full system scan) as well as a proper defrag. As for the system processes, it appears ALG is the MS Application Layer Gateway service (whatever that is), all the ones beginning with AVG are AVG antivirus files, CTHELPER.EXE must be related to my sound card as it is from Creative Labs, CTSVCCDA.EXE is again fro Creative and something to do with CD-ROM access, E_FATIACE.EXE is related to my Epson print/scan/copy machine, JUSCHED.EXE it appears is Java Update, I have disabled automatic updates to this in the Java Control Panel as I will update it manually, KHost and KService, each of which are using up 12Mb of RAM are soething to do with Kontiki Peer-to-peer software which is something to do with the BBC IPlayer; I have disabled them on startup as I only use them occasionally and don't need the to start up every time! MsPMSPSv.EXE seems to be something to do with Win Media Player which I rarely use as I prefer WinAmp. I can't see any way of disabling this as it is not in the list in MSConfig (I'll come onto that later). NVSVC32 is related to NVIDIA so I'd better leave that as it is, SFUS and SFAgent are related to SPAMFighter although I don't see why it has to run all the time, it only needs to run when I am in Outlook but there is no way of disabling it. WDFMGR is another MS driver thing, WSCNTFY is 'Windows Security Center Notification App' which is annoying but I guess unavoidable.

Onto my System Tray now, all I have is the icon for removing USB devices, TaskMgr, Security Centre, AVG and Epson Status Monitor 3. Interestingly, I've just noticed my audio settings systray icon has vanished but I can access that fro the Start Menu anyway.

Now onto the contents of MSConfig.exe. The Services list is worrying long but it all looks like mainly MS and AVG stuff. Now for the Startup tab, here is a list of the contents: NVCPL (NVIDIA), NWIZ (NVIDIA again), NVMCTray (NVIDIA again), UPDReg (Creative Registry Update), avgcc (AVG), CTHELPER and CTXFIHLP (both Creative), E_FATIACE (Epson), SFAgent (SpamFighter), MSOffice Common Startup.

As I say, I will run a virus scan, spyware scan and defrag now and let you know the results. Thanks again for all your help.GaryReggae (talk) 07:22, 6 December 2007 (UTC)

Well after several hours, Spybot Search & Destroy has finished searching and found 68 items!

AdRevolver - 12 entries - This is just a Cookie

AdViva - 1 entry - Another Cookie
BFast - 1 entry Another Cookie
BurstMedia - 2 entries - more Cookies
CasaleMedia - 5 entries - Cookies again
CommonName - 1 entry - Quite a nasty one this, apparantly it hijacks searches and displays pop-under ads although I haven't seen any evidence of this although then again I don't use Internet Explorer (at least very rarely)
DoubleClick - Cookies x 3
FastClick - Cookies x 6
HitBox - Cookies x 10
MediaPlex - Cookies x 4
StatCounter - Cookies x 18
TradeDoubler - Cookies x 3
WebTrends Live - Cookie x 1

I have 'fixed' the lot using Spybot although I don't think there was anything that could be causing slowdown apart from perhaps the CommonName one. Now onto the Defrag which will probably take hours although there shouldn't be much fragmentation as I haven't deleted or moved much stuff on the Win partition since I did a fresh install.GaryReggae (talk) 11:52, 6 December 2007 (UTC)

Late I know but:

Assuming the file names are legit (AVG should ensure they aren't viruses):

• ALG.EXE (3,168K) — Application Layer Gateway (Builtin Windows Service): You may be able to stop this and get away with it if (Like me) you're obsessed with a clean process list.
• CRSS.EXE (3,608K) — Client
• LSASS.EXE (1,128K) — Local Security Authority System Service (Built in to Windows): This one very deeply rooted, I'd leave it be.
• SERVICES.EXE (3,844K) — Obviously runs some services (Built in to Windows).
• SMSS.EXE (372K) — Session Manager System Service (Builtin): Don't try too much around this or you many not be able to login!
• SPOOLSV.EXE (4,268K) — Spooler service: If you stop it, Windows wont see any printers!
• SVCHOST.EXE — Service Host: Some belong to services you can stop/disable, some don't. NEVER try and kill a SVCHOST process without saving your work: If you kill the one that belongs to RPCSS (Remote Procedure Call), Windows will tell you it has to shut down in a minute (If you got hit with MSBlaster, you'll know what that looks like)!
• System (220K) — NTOSKRNL housekeeping (Don't really know, can't do anything with it either!)
• System Idle Process (16K) — Housekeeping: This is what makes the sum of all process time add up to 100, this one usually hangs out around 99 % CPU when the machine is idling (Unless you have SETI@Home or similar).
• taskmgr.exe (4,208K) — Obviously, Task Manager!
• WINLOGIN.EXE (892K) — Windows' Login system and activation checker: Screw with this and it'll screw with you(r user account)!
• wscntfy.exe (1,744K) — "Windows Security Center NoTiFYer": That annoying "shield" in your systray that wants you to install updates, automatically update, install Windows Defendant, update your AV, turn on Windows Firewall, enable UAC (On Vista), etc, etc. Open Security Center, click "Change how Security Center notifies me" and uncheck all 3 and it should go away.

Other processes:

• Explorer.EXE (18,660K) Win XP 'GUI'
• firefox.exe (32,280K) Should Firefox really be using 32Mb RAM? — If that's truely all its using, that's amazzing.
• jusched.exe (2,060K) — Java Update Scheduler: If you install Java, it has this run at login to see if there's an update to annoy you with. You can get rid of it by opening Control Panel > Java > Update and telling it to NEVER check for updates.

WRT these:

AVGAMSVR.EXE (308K) something to do with AVG antivirus?
avgcc.exe (240K)
AVGEMC.EXE (1,644K)
AVGUPSVC.EXE (596K)
CTHELPER.EXE (5,508K) what is this?
CTSVCCDA.EXE (1,152K) what is this?
E_FATIACE.EXE (2,048K) what is this?
KHost.exe (11,708K) What on earth is this?
KService.exe (12,078) ditto
MsPMSPSv.exe (1,328K) What is this?
("Microsoft PMSP Server", PMSP="Personal Messaging ..."?) NVSVC32.EXE (2,674K) What?
("NV SerViCe 32") SFAgent.exe (10,556K) SpamFighter (email filtering) agent I think?
SFUS.EXE (5,128K)
WDFMGR.EXE (1,548K) Eh?
(Maybe "Windows Driver Foundation ManGeR")

Goto Start > Search and search for the file names. If they turn up in a program files directory, that should tell you more about what they are. If they turn up in \WINDOWS\System32, rightclick and select "Properties" and then "Version" tab and go through the entries (any) that are there. Company name, etc may tell you something. 68.39.174.238 (talk) 02:06, 7 December 2007 (UTC)

O blast it!, I completely missed your huge block of text above; ignore what I've got there, it's all redundant... 68.39.174.238 (talk) 02:09, 7 December 2007 (UTC)

I left the defrag process running overnight and I was wrong about how fragmented the Windows parition was, it was pretty bad although my data partition didn't really need doing. I have defragged both and still things are running slugishly. I will have to try plan B...experimenting with Ubuntu. GaryReggae (talk) 14:14, 7 December 2007 (UTC)

Personally I would perform a registry scan. My PC was also going slow until I scanned and found out that my registry had >5000 serious problems. Also, SVCHOST.EXE has been known to overload and use up 100% of processor time and anywhere up to 300,000KB RAM space. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 86.162.11.5 (talk) 15:52, 8 December 2007 (UTC)

Resolution in HDTV

I have a chance to get a good deal on a Panasonic HDTV that has resolution described as: 1366 x 768.

I see a reference in Wikepedia that if the resolution is not "1080" (presumably 1920 x 1080)the HDTV may not be compatible with computers (I would presume for showing things like photos on the HDTV display from a computer)

Can anyone shed some light on this. The articles I have looked at do not mention 1366 x 768 resolution.......Gary B. —Preceding unsigned comment added by GSBens (talk • contribs) 22:25, 5 December 2007 (UTC)

Yes it will be compatible with computers, as long as it has a VGA or DVI input. It simply means that the TV is only capable of 720p and not 1080i/p, and will be scaled down if such content is displayed. --antilived^{T | C | G} 02:25, 6 December 2007 (UTC)

Personal experience -- if you've got a laptop, try to hook it up in the store. I've got a Westinghouse that reports the same resolution as your panasonic, but for the life of me I can't get it to run from a computer at the native resolution. The best I can do is 1024x768... --Mdwyer (talk) 04:31, 6 December 2007 (UTC)

Depending on your graphics card adding the custom resolution should be a relativly painless task. If you have an Nvidia card then this will be of use. With an ATI card you will have to use a program called Powerstrip, unless there is something I have missed (I seem to vaugly recall a button to add HDTV compatible resolutions in the catalyst control panel.) If not (or you have another brand of graphics card) then look up a program called Powerstrip. With regards to connectivity there is a good chance the TV will have a DVI connection, and if your graphics card has DVI outputs then just plug it in. Otherwise you will be looking for some sort of converter. If it only has HDMI then you can find HDMI to DVI cables for a small price at most good electronics stores. I am willing to bet there are HDMI to VGA cables as well although I have never looked. TheGreatZorko (talk) 10:49, 7 December 2007 (UTC)

Hard disk partitioning question

I'm about to upgrade my Linux system to an altogether new one, which has a bigger hard disk. Previously, I used to have my hard disk partitioned so that about two thirds were root (/) and about one third was home (/home). But then I found out that my digital photographs filled up my entire home partition. So I bought a new hard disk solely to store them. Now I have about 5.4 GB in use in root, 1.4 GB in use in home, and a staggering 28 GB in use on the new hard disk (almost all of it is digital photographs).

My new hard disk will be bigger than both of my old ones put together. Should I keep with the current partitioning (root, home, and digital photographs), or combine the latter two together, so that one sixth would be root and five sixths would be home?

All the above is ignoring the boot and swap partitions. Their size is negligible in comparison to the root and home partitions. JIP | Talk 23:59, 5 December 2007 (UTC)

I know most distributions suggest some elaborate partitioning scheme but - it's bogus. The filesystem is a lot better at assigning space to your data than the partition table. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 84.187.70.206 (talk) 02:17, 6 December 2007 (UTC)

Distributions suggest elaborate schemes so that an overflowing log (in /var) or process writing to /tmp can't bring down the whole system. It prevents a user filling their /home directory from impacting other services on the box. It isn't totally bogus.

Now, that said, I personally don't do the partitions. I have a tiny /boot, a sizable swap, and the rest is /. --Mdwyer (talk) 04:30, 6 December 2007 (UTC)

On my Linux box I have two partitions (plus swap): a big one containing /var and /home and a smaller one containing the rest. The idea is to split off the mostly static OS files from the mess of frequently changing stuff under /var and /home, thereby hopefully reducing fragmentation and seek times. I haven't really checked if it has any actual effect, but certainly it works no worse than any other scheme I've tried. Of course, the down side to this setup is that I had to make /home a symlink to /var/home — though I suppose I could've used a bind mount instead. Anyway, I have found that, for certain infrequent but occasionally necessary operations, such as OS reinstalls or even data recovery after a disk failure, having multiple partitions is convenient, simply because it allows you to work on the system in more manageable chunks; the exact choice of how to set up the partitions is of secondary importance there. —Ilmari Karonen (talk) 05:12, 8 December 2007 (UTC)

December 6

Desktop icons in Mac OS X

I was wondering if it's possible to have desktop icons on the desktop? I know you can drag the icons from the Applications folder but is there another way to have them in both places? Knowing me, I'll delete the icon from the desktop and accidentally delete programs... --139.184.222.105 (talk) 00:12, 6 December 2007 (UTC)

Oh would "Make alias" do it? --139.184.222.105 (talk) 00:26, 6 December 2007 (UTC)

Yes, that's what it's for. Algebraist 00:26, 6 December 2007 (UTC)

Although what you really want to do is use the dock for the applications that you use most frequently. You can right-click (ctrl-click) on any running program to add it to the dock or just drag the application icon to the dock. Donald Hosek (talk) 18:25, 6 December 2007 (UTC)

Maybe maybe not. Dock's one paradigm; icons on the desktop is another. They should do whichever they prefer. --24.147.86.187 (talk) 01:13, 10 December 2007 (UTC)

top-level domain I can't find in directory

I got an email the other day from a ".cp". At first I thought it might be a country code, but I haven't been able to find it on any domain lists. Googling was mostly ineffective as it appears to be ignoring the ., or that is communicating some kind of command I'm unaware of. Is anyone familiar with .cp, and if so, what is it? Natalie (talk) 04:44, 6 December 2007 (UTC)

It doesn't exist. Furthermore, according to ISO 3166-3, the list of former country codes, it never existed. It's either a typo (for .co, Colombia, maybe) or just a lousy forgery. --tcsetattr (talk / contribs) 05:48, 6 December 2007 (UTC)

I have gmail - is there an easy way I can see the actual top-level domain? Natalie (talk) 14:19, 6 December 2007 (UTC)

Of what? Where it came from? There's no way you can tell- it could have gone through a dozen servers from its original source. --ffroth 18:22, 6 December 2007 (UTC)

There's still the chain of "Received:" headers, and at least some of them won't have been forged. Gmail's GUI changes from browser to browser, but at least on Safari, you can view the headers by clicking on "more options", then "show original". --Carnildo (talk) 22:46, 6 December 2007 (UTC)

md5 as password

How secure would it be to use the md5 checksum of a file as a password (assuming that the file is reasonably unique and only possessed by the password's owner, and also assuming that an attacker may know that the password is an md5 checksum (but nothing about what sort of file the checksum was generated from))? 69.123.113.89 (talk) 05:21, 6 December 2007 (UTC)

See MD5#Vulnerability. For most purposes it would be secure, if you're really paranoid use SHA-1 with salt or even SHA-512 with salt. --antilived^{T | C | G} 09:08, 6 December 2007 (UTC)

It's not really a good idea, at least if you plan on keeping the file around. If an attacker can access your computer and knows that you MD5'd a file there, they can recover the password just by hashing every file, which wouldn't take very long. (If they can't access your computer, and the file is not something common (like Wikipedia's logo image or something), the hash is effectively a random string of 128 bits.) See book cipher, one-time pad, and CSPRNG for more on this sort of approach. --Tardis (talk) 15:53, 6 December 2007 (UTC)

Help me get rid of an "Open With" function

http://img508.imageshack.us/img508/8923/openkw9.png

Why does the Open With function pop out when I try opening C:/?

AlmostCrimes (talk) 07:48, 6 December 2007 (UTC)

You probably don't have any software that can handle PNG files installed - I'm not sure if Internet Explorer does or not but Firefox (a different web browser) can open them so if you don't have anything suitable installed, try Firefox, it's free and IMHO better than IE. If you DO have soe software than can deal with PNG files installed, double-click it in the Open With box and make sure the 'Always open using this application' box is ticked, then you won't see the prompt again. GaryReggae (talk) 11:51, 6 December 2007 (UTC)

He's getting the Open With prompt when he tries to open C: in Explorer, not when he tries to open that PNG file. Sorry OP, I don't know why it's happening — Matt Eason ^{(Talk • Contribs)} 12:05, 6 December 2007 (UTC)

Looks nasty. Some kind of shell extension not working. Reinstall xp and select "repair". --ffroth 18:20, 6 December 2007 (UTC)

Open Control Panel > Folder Options > File Types and scroll down to the file type "Drive": It should say "N/A", along with Folder, etc, etc. If it's not there, hit "New", "Advanced >>", then scroll down to "Drive" and select it and hit enter. Alternately, hit "Browse..." in that box that comes up and go to C:\WINDOWS\explorer.exe and select that (Since Windows Explorer (Not IE) is what drives should open with anyway). 68.39.174.238 (talk) 01:46, 7 December 2007 (UTC)

I've had a similar problem where drives or folders would open the Search Companion. The fix for that problem is described here. You might consider carefully investigating the registry to see if it's the same thing with your problem. --Bavi H (talk) 03:42, 7 December 2007 (UTC)

http://img235.imageshack.us/img235/890/problemeh0.png re: 68.39.174.238, if I understand your directions properly then it's already not associated with any file type?

Bavi, when I did as your link said and changed the registry entry for Default in the appropriate root folder (Drive) the problem still persisted. Thanks for the help everyone, but I'm still stuck at a dead end. I can still access C:/, just that I have to use explore by right-clicking the start button instead of My Computer, which I'd vastly prefer.

AlmostCrimes (talk) 14:28, 8 December 2007 (UTC)

Try the drive association fix from Windows® XP File Association Fixes --— Gadget850 (Ed) ^talk - 14:47, 8 December 2007 (UTC)

Still doesn't work. Not vitally important, but it's annoying as hell. AlmostCrimes (talk) 17:25, 8 December 2007 (UTC)

That is what I was referring to, but it seems like it already is associated correctly. What happens if you tell Windows to open C:\ with Windows Explorer? 68.39.174.238 (talk) 20:06, 8 December 2007 (UTC)

If I browse -> C:\WINDOWS\explorer.exe on the Open With box then yes, my C:\ opens up fine. Subsequently the Open With still persists, though, and Windows Explorer isn't on the drop down list. AlmostCrimes (talk) 03:41, 9 December 2007 (UTC)

Forum administrators and privacy

To preserve my privacy, I am using two IDs in a web forum. Can the administrator of that forum find me or identify me someway that the two IDs belong to same person? 2) When I register in that forum, they send a email to verify that it is my email address. If I click on that link, will my name given to my email provider be visible to administrator? Or will my name be visible only if I reply to that mail sent by administrator? Eventhough I register through two email address for two different forum accounts, in both my email accounts, I have given same first and last name.

Can you understand what I mean to say? Thanks. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 59.92.115.105 (talk) 08:59, 6 December 2007 (UTC)

Yes, admins can tell the two ID's belong to the same person, by matching up the IP's between the two, and no, they probably won't get your name just from sending you the confirmation email, nor clicking the link. However, unless the admin knows that you're in some way suspicious or something they won't be bothered to match IP's and things, especially in large forums. --antilived^{T | C | G} 09:05, 6 December 2007 (UTC)

What you are referring to is a sockpuppet acccount. You may have honest reasons for using one - so don't assume that I'm implying you are trying to use two accounts for deception. It is often possible for users (non-admins) to detect sockpuppet accounts. It is common for a person to use one account to say something and then quickly use the other to back up what they've said. After repeating this many times, users recognize that the two accounts work together. Then, if they use the same language - especially the same typos - it is more obvious. Worse, users get confused and sign their messages with the wrong account's name. So, if you really want to ensure the users don't recognize you are using two accounts you need to keep them separate. As for your name, if you haven't given it to the website in some other means, they don't have it. Clicking on a link in an email doesn't send any information about you that the administrators didn't already have (and put in the link). -- kainaw™ 16:06, 6 December 2007 (UTC)

• As an ex-forum moderator, multiple accounts would often flag up within a close IP range, and by using forum software AND conventional web IP tracers can confirm this. Even from wide ranging IPs, I could normally tell the same person using alt accounts. Moderators Intuition ;) 86.154.89.103 (talk) 01:10, 9 December 2007 (UTC)

Unicode composition ...

I'm trying to figure out the algorithm to implement Unicode Normalization Form C, but I'm confused when it comes to how the omposition stage id supposed to works: on this the standard says:

"If C is not blocked from the last starter L and it can be primary combined with L, then replace L by the composite L-C and remove C"

.. but if I "replace L with L-C, then remove C", then (to my puny ind, at least :-) I;ve would be just addeing, then immeduatey rnoving "C", which put me exactly back where I started.

Am I missing something? —Preceding unsigned comment added by RussPott (talk • contribs) 10:47, 6 December 2007 (UTC)

• Try searching for "Unicode Normalization Form C" on Google Code Search. --Sean 15:06, 6 December 2007 (UTC)

Reverse DNS = (random).phx.gbl

I just checked my website's log (I have a temporary log to see who's browsing my page) and found an entry from MSN crawler, with the hostname (PHP's $_SERVER["REMOTE_HOST"]) ending with .phx.gbl. Since .gbl isn't a valid TLD, I'm wondering why/how Microsoft does this. --grawity ^{talk / PGP} 12:25, 6 December 2007 (UTC)

I have seen nothing official as to why Microsoft is using the phx.gbl domain. I've seen claims that it isn't Microsoft at all. There is a theory that it is a botnet run through MSN Messenger. As for how, Microsoft is powerful enough to create any TLD they like. It may be a Windows thing. Whenever I try to lookup a phx.gbl domain on my computer (Linux), I get "No match for domain". Microsoft can easily hardcode Windows such that gbl domains to use their personal DNS database. -- kainaw™ 16:10, 6 December 2007 (UTC)

The direct lookup doesn't work, but the reverse (nslookup <IP>) does. Also, it is MSN, because the UA starts with "msnbot". --grawity ^{talk / PGP} 16:32, 8 December 2007 (UTC)

"powerful enough to create any TLD they like" may be true, but not without some kind of public record. The simple truth is that reverse DNS is easily forgeable. Sign up for a "business" account with some ISP, ask for a few static IP addresses and have the reverse DNS authority delegated to your own nameserver. Then put in whatever PTR records you want. You can say that your IP address's name is this.phx.gbl or that.wikipedia.org or the-other.microsoft.com. (You might get sued, but that's another topic.)

These deceptions are easily detectable though. Back to the web server log - the server gets a connection from somewhere, let's say 69.246.218.176. It does a reverse DNS lookup and finds that the name is "c-69-246-218-176.hsd1.in.comcast.net" (an unimaginative name which completely misses the point of having hostnames in the first place, which is that they're supposed to be simpler than the numbers they map to, but that's a rant for another time). Does this mean the source of the connection is actually located at comcast? No, it just means the person who controls the reverse DNS of that IP address has put the name "c-69-246-218-176.hsd1.in.comcast.net" in as the answer to the query. If we want to know for sure, we have to do a regular ("forward") lookup on the name and see if we get back the address we started with. And we do, in this case. Now that the reverse and forward lookups have been compared successfully, it's possible to say with a high degree of confidence that the connection actually came from Comcast.

Grawity's web server apparently skips the verification and just logs whatever the reverse lookup says. That's not good. Unverified reverse DNS in your log is worse than no reverse DNS at all, so I'd say if you can't find an option to make it do the verification step, disable the reverse DNS lookups completely. Let it log IP addresses, and you can look up the names later. And then you'll know which IP address is giving you the bogus reverse DNS replies, which is the first step to finding out who's behind them. --tcsetattr (talk / contribs) 20:24, 6 December 2007 (UTC)

It's not my server, it's Apache on rootshell.be. --grawity ^{talk / PGP} 16:32, 8 December 2007 (UTC)

One more tip, since REMOTE_HOST was mentioned: the corresponding variable which would contain the IP address is REMOTE_ADDR. If you can log both of them, it won't matter so much that the hostname is unverified. --tcsetattr (talk / contribs) 20:28, 6 December 2007 (UTC)

I use $_SERVER["REMOTE_HOST"], ["REMOTE_ADDR"] and ["HTTP_X_FORWARDED_FOR"]. --grawity ^{talk / PGP} 16:32, 8 December 2007 (UTC)

No more my documents

Hi. I was working with a large number of folders in My Documents. Windows Explorer (I work with xp x64) was getting slower and slower and there was a folder in the Bin that would wouldn't be completely deleted (it wouldn't empty the bin). The explorer crashed and was accessing the memory like crazy. I left it so for half an hour with no changes so I finally stoped the explorer process through the Task Manager and restarted. Now the My documents have disapeared (luckily they are still on C:). What happened and what can I do to have my documents back on the desktop as it used to be (I think). Do you think there might have been damage done? Thank you. 80.200.149.148 (talk) 15:32, 6 December 2007 (UTC)

If you're missing the My Documents shortcut on the desktop, you could try restoring it by right-clicking anywhere on the desktop and selecting Properties. Go to the Desktop tab, and click Customise Desktop and make sure that the My Documents checkbox is ticked. --Kateshortforbob 23:29, 6 December 2007 (UTC)

Convert IFF ILBM to PNG/GIF?

Is there a Linux utility to convert Amiga IFF ILBM files to a more contemporary graphics format? PNG would be preferred, but GIF is OK too. BMP is a last resource but best avoided. JPG is right out because it's lossy. JIP | Talk 19:13, 6 December 2007 (UTC)

I know you specified Linux, but if you don't find a Linux utility, you might try IrfanView under Windows. My copy lists IFF ILBM as a file type it can work with, and it can save in dozens of formats. I don't have any such files available though, so I can't check on how well it works. --LarryMac | Talk 19:37, 6 December 2007 (UTC)

netpbm has an ilbmtoppm. (And in case you're not familiar with netpbm, ppm is its intermediate format for color pictures. You'll then use ppmtogif or pnmtopng) --tcsetattr (talk / contribs) 20:31, 6 December 2007 (UTC)

Turns out I already have this netpbm thingy. I will have to try it out. Thanks. JIP | Talk 07:20, 7 December 2007 (UTC)

computer questions

(moved from Humanities desk)

1.which procedure would you use to open a folder in the Folders window and display its contents?

2.to copy a selected file from one folder to another ,you could use what method.

bonnie tola —Preceding unsigned comment added by 72.68.40.71 (talk) 19:16, 6 December 2007 (UTC)

I'm assuming you use Windows. Open up Microsoft Explorer and navigate to your folder. That answers question 1. As for question 2, repeat the aforementioned, click on a file, choose "Copy", navigate to the target folder, and choose Paste. Or you could do it faster by opening a Command Prompt window and typing "copy \path_to_file\filename \destination_path". In the unlikely event you use a non-Redmond system, open up a terminal and subsitute "cp" for "copy" and real slashes for those idiotic backslashes. JIP | Talk 20:09, 6 December 2007 (UTC)

By the basic nature of the question, I feel that JIP should have told you that you "navigate" by double-clicking on folders with the pointer (that little thing the mouse moves around on the screen). There are some operating systems that let you do this with a single-click instead of a double-click. I do find it rather interesting that a person could locate and post a question on Wikipedia without having any idea how to open a folder. Of course, the big blue "e" doesn't require you to open a folder. -- kainaw™ 20:58, 6 December 2007 (UTC)

FIPS codes?

According to , the U.S. Census Bureau's Factfinder website allows the user to search places by FIPS codes. However, I can't find such a place on the website. Can someone find somewhere on the website that I can search by FIPS? Nyttend (talk) 19:58, 6 December 2007 (UTC)

Perhaps the U.S Census Bureau's FIPS lookup does what you need. Certes (talk) 19:20, 10 December 2007 (UTC)

"(talk)" appears now (sometimes!) in WP signatures

Do you have any idea how I find out what the "thing" is that was changed so I can change it on my own Mediawiki powered wikis? I've run myself ragged on Mediawiki and obviously not searched for the right thing.

Fiddle Faddle (talk) 23:08, 6 December 2007 (UTC)

It's a default now for IP addresses, see Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2007-11-19/Technology_report, MediaWiki:Signature and MediaWiki:Signature-anon if you've updated to the latest version with those strings. 68.39.174.238 (talk) 01:37, 7 December 2007 (UTC)

Many thanks. Fiddle Faddle (talk) 07:48, 7 December 2007 (UTC)

.albm file extension/format - How to convert ?

I have received a file which is supposedly an archive of images (the images are vintage 1997 or so), which has an extension .albm ... searching the web suggests that this is an HP proprietary file format used with the HP Photosmart devices and possibly others. I have not found a convertor I can use to unravel it though... supposedly File Juicer (http://echoone.com/filejuicer/) can, but that's for Macs and I am on a Wintel platform... some sites suggest Konvertor (http://www.konvertor.net/indexe.html) but that URL seems dead. Any ideas? Thanks! ++Lar: t/c 23:52, 6 December 2007 (UTC)

Google finds any number of places that allow you to download the trial version of Konvertor (I found http://www.logipole.com/download_konv_us.htm, although I've no idea if it's a trustworthy site). If that fails: as a wild stab, copy the file and change the copy's file extension to .ZIP - a remarkable number of "custom" archive file formats are really just zip in disguise. -- Finlay McWalter | Talk 00:01, 7 December 2007 (UTC)

I should have mentioned that I tried the .zip trick (it's an oldie but a goodie) and that didn't work. I will try searching for Konvertor harder instead of just relying on what someone else said the link was :) ++Lar: t/c 00:31, 7 December 2007 (UTC)

If all else fails, search the .ALBM for the strings JFIF and GIF: maybe the format is as simple as a concatenation of existing file formats, with a little proprietary directory on the front. If that's true, it's not rocket science for someone to code up a splitter that pulls out each JPEG or whatever. -- Finlay McWalter | Talk 00:47, 7 December 2007 (UTC)

If it's not compressed, data recovery software such as PhotoRec might do the trick — just tell it that the file is a disk image of a failed disk. —Ilmari Karonen (talk) 03:08, 8 December 2007 (UTC)

Try file (Unix). --122.57.210.186 (talk) 02:18, 7 December 2007 (UTC)

The Konvertor link works for me; the lsit of supported formats shows it will read .ALBM files. --— Gadget850 (Ed) ^talk - 14:08, 7 December 2007 (UTC)

I got a copy of it and it can see into the archive, there are pictures in there all right, but it blows up trying to get the pictures beyond thumbnail. So I need to hack more. :) ++Lar: t/c 16:40, 7 December 2007 (UTC)

December 7

compiling python source code to an executable file

I am a beginner python programmer and I want to compile a source code file (with extension .py) to an executable file (.exe), can anyone tell me how to do it? Thanks in advance.--George (talk) 02:23, 7 December 2007 (UTC)

If you're on Windows, use Py2exe. It emits several files, so you might want to then make an installer with NSIS which yields a single exe file. -- Finlay McWalter | Talk 02:30, 7 December 2007 (UTC)

And, for reference, if you were shipping for Linux you'd package your Python code in a package (DEB, RPM) that had dependencies on the Python system and any other packages you needed. I honestly don't know what you'd do on MacOS. -- Finlay McWalter | Talk 02:33, 7 December 2007 (UTC)

You can also use cx_freeze (no article yet), as mentioned on Frets on Fire. --antilived^{T | C | G} 10:42, 7 December 2007 (UTC)

Virus

Sir, When I scan my computer, and if it founds any virus, it has one option saying that to "move to quarantine" I just want to know that what is "quarantine" and if I move that virus to quarantine where does it go? and after then is my computer is safe from that virus? I am using Bitdefender Anti virus on my pc. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Arvindshivanand (talk • contribs) 06:42, 7 December 2007 (UTC)

Quarantine means the infected file will be moved to a selected directory (very often within the subtree of the anti-virus application) and maybe renamed (its extension will be changed to signify that it's infected and/or to hide its real contents). Quarantine is a way of semi-protecting the PC from the virus within the file if the file is sensitive enough to care for because it contains any data important to you. Personally, I almost never choose to quarantine infected files - if they're repairable, try to repair them, if not, rather delete them if they don't contain sensitive data. Good luck! --Ouro (blah blah) 07:10, 7 December 2007 (UTC)

RTC modem - where RTC is...

Hello, dear Refdeskers! I have a quick question - in the phrase 'RTC modem', what does RTC stand for? Real time something? I am just not sure. No, a bit stumped rather ;) Thanks and cheers! --Ouro (blah blah) 07:06, 7 December 2007 (UTC)

RTC? It usually means Real Time Clock in the electronics field. --antilived^{T | C | G} 10:39, 7 December 2007 (UTC)

I know, I have thought of this already. But does 'real time clock modem' make sense? --Ouro (blah blah) 11:21, 7 December 2007 (UTC)

Since when does marketing lingo have to make sense? Just look at "Blast Processing" or measuring power of consoles in bits. TheGreatZorko (talk) 11:41, 7 December 2007 (UTC)

And this refers to what? --Ouro (blah blah) 13:35, 7 December 2007 (UTC)

RTC can also stand for Real time computing or Real time control - I doubt either of those are it either. Is it perhaps just the manufacturer's name or something? SteveBaker (talk) 16:55, 7 December 2007 (UTC)

It seems to be used extensively in Europe (I found many search results in French and Spanish), and there were many pages that seemed to be comparing it to ADSL. Perhaps a cable modem of some type, but I could not find anything definitive. I also saw the term "real time communication" in my searching, but not in a clear enough context to make the leap to "yep, that's what it stands for." My gut feeling is that it wasn't a manufacturer name, but I'm pretty sure my gut fails WP:RS. --LarryMac | Talk 17:10, 7 December 2007 (UTC)

I can tell you that it's definitely not a manufacturer's name. The term is taken from an instruction manual of another device, where the RTC modem is used as a means of communication of the device with a computer terminal as opposed to a direct cable connection. The manual also suggests that this modem connection is a dial-up connection. LarryMac and SteveBaker, thanks for your input, guys... --Ouro (blah blah) 17:39, 7 December 2007 (UTC)

Hunch 've just wikipedia'd over to fr.wiki where I saw that RTC can refer to fr:Réseau téléphonique commuté (and the manual was originally translated from French). Could it be that it denotes a telephone (phone-line) modem? My gut gives a slight nod. --Ouro (blah blah) 17:44, 7 December 2007 (UTC)

That fr article has an English link under "Autres langues", which points to Public switched telephone network (PSTN). In English then it should be "PSTN modem" which would be just a slightly awkward way to refer to a plain old phone line dialup modem. --tcsetattr (talk / contribs) 21:25, 7 December 2007 (UTC)

In my head, this fits, and Google returns a hit or two for 'PSTN modem'. Just now also I've done a search for 'RTC modem' only for French-language sites... looks promising this. --Ouro (blah blah) 07:24, 8 December 2007 (UTC)

Virus

Sir, I am usinf Bit defender anto virus 2008 i my pc. It has detected 19 viruses in my computer from which 3 have been deleted, but rest of are not deleted . What should I do delete those viruses. Iwant to know how to delete them. One more thing, that, if Anti virus detects some virus it has one option "move to quarantine" . What is "quarantine" and if move the virus in quarantine , is my computer is safe from that virus?

I will be waiting for ur response.

Arvind Kumar —Preceding unsigned comment added by 122.161.45.160 (talk) 07:28, 7 December 2007 (UTC)

The quarantine question had been answered above. As for the viruses that had not been deleted, the question would be easier to answer if we knew what messages are you getting from Bit defender - why isn't he removing the viruses? What kinds of viruses are they? Sometimes specific patches or programmes are required in order to delete really malicious software. --Ouro (blah blah) 07:55, 7 December 2007 (UTC)

There is a possability that there are infected files that are currently in use, and cannot be closed. Restart the PC in Safe Mode by pressing F8 during boot, just before the first Windows loading screen appears, and chosing "safe mode" or "safe mode with networking". Run the virus scan within safe mode, and see if that removes the viruses. Before doing this however I would back up any particularly important documents just incase the virus scanner removes an important Windows file, although this is unlikely. If this fails to remove the viruses I suggest downloading a trial of Eset NOD32, which is a professional level virus scanner and generally regarded as the best virus scanner on the consumer market, and if that cannot remove your viruses then I have no idea what will.

With regards to quarantine this is incase an infected file is needed for the continued operation of software or the operating system, so it can be put back allowing the user to back up his data, even if the file is infected. TheGreatZorko (talk) 10:39, 7 December 2007 (UTC)

Moving location of My Documents and the like

I recently shifted back to Windows XP after using Vista (nothing wrong with the OS, just my soundcards drivers under the OS) and had moved Documents, and Music (the Vista names for My Documents) to another drive. This was trivial and involved right clicking on the Documents icon and chosing a different location for it. Now back on XP Windows insists my My Documents folder must be located at C:/Documents and settings/<name>/My Documents, and right clicking on the folder doesn't seem to work. How do I move the location of My Documents to where they are now? (That being F:/Music and F:/Documents) TheGreatZorko (talk) 11:02, 7 December 2007 (UTC)

See [2]]. --— Gadget850 (Ed) ^talk - 11:22, 7 December 2007 (UTC)

Oh hey that button wasn't there before. It's exactly like Vista! Does this work with My Music as well? I'm not on my home PC at the moment and this PC doesn't have a My Music folder. Hell I'm not even sure it has a sound card.TheGreatZorko (talk) 11:36, 7 December 2007 (UTC)

It should work with the 'special' folders witin My Documents too. I always use this button as I prefer to store my files on a separate partition as it saves all the hassle of oving them every time Windoze decides it needs reinstalling. 62.249.220.179 (talk) 14:08, 7 December 2007 (UTC)

Re: Unicode composition ...

This should really be a follow-on response to an existing question titled "Unicode composition ...", in which I wanted to respond to who- ever suggested that I look into "Google Code Search" by saying that doing so didn't really help me, but I couldn't figure out how to respond to existing questions on the "Reference desk" (some help on which would be greatly appreciated :-) - which probably makes me seem pretty stupid, but I should explain that I'm still quite "dim", having not fully recovered from a massive brain hemorrhage a few years ago.

So, for the same reason, my original question still stands:

If the normalization standard says, regarding composing after decomposition: "[the last starter] L is replaced by the composite L-C.then C is removed", wouldn't doing so leave me where I started, with just "L"?

Am I missing something? what, then, does the above statement actually mean? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 58.105.122.191 (talk) 12:14, 7 December 2007 (UTC)

Symbain for Pc--Linux for mobiles

Any idea if there is a live boot symbian version for PC??would it be faster than windows?How about any of other free open source fully loaded OS for Mobiles?? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 59.92.240.72 (talk) 13:55, 7 December 2007 (UTC)

I don't know if it helps, but according to this article, Symbian Operating System is a proprietary (Symbian OS does not seem to be open source.) operating system that runs only on ARM processors (Symbian OS does not seem to be designed for desktop/notebook computers). Does your PC have an ARM processor? --Kushal^t 17:41, 7 December 2007 (UTC)

Firefox URL bar

Suddenly the url bar is not reflecting the page I am visiting (eg http://en.wikipedia.org ). How do I re-set it to do so please? On the left end it has a google G; on the right end it has a magnifying glass. - Kittybrewster ☎ 15:07, 7 December 2007 (UTC)

That is the search engine bar, not the URL/Address bar. It shows whatever you last searched for. -- kainaw™ 15:15, 7 December 2007 (UTC)

Where is my URL bar? - Kittybrewster ☎ 15:16, 7 December 2007 (UTC)

It is difficult to say. Have you tried closing Firefox and re-opening it? It is possible a javascript hid it if you didn't purposely hide it. -- kainaw™ 15:18, 7 December 2007 (UTC)

Right click in the blank space of your navigation bar, choose 'Customize', look for something called 'location', drag it up to your navigation bar. --Elliskev 15:19, 7 December 2007 (UTC)

Brilliant. Thank you. - Kittybrewster ☎ 15:26, 7 December 2007 (UTC)

quick and straightforward path to a small-scale ecommerce site selling PDFs?

Problem: I have a relatively small-scale e-commerce site that I started as a student at my University. I sell publications that are saved to PDF files that people can buy one at a time, or buy subscriptions and see everything on the site until their subscription expires. Unfortunately, I am no longer a student (graduated) and the rules prohibit me from using the University servers anymore, because making money off this site is no longer consistent with my educational experience as a business student (since I am technically no longer a student).

Request: I do not have a lot of money and the site doesn't really generate outrageous revenue, but I'd like to keep it going. I went to the bank got my business name setup and all that stuff, but they told me I need to give them the webserver address and site and URL with a privacy statement and a bunch of other stuff. I already have a few subscription customers, and I'd like to keep things going without disrupting their existing subscriptions.

I'm wondering, is there a pre-fab turnkey solution that will work for me? I've looked at some "small business DIY ecommerce" type sites, but all of them seem to assume the merchant is selling and shipping some kind of product. All I am selling is the right to download and print PDFs, either "one at a time" or with a timed subscription that expires at a specific duration.

TIA for any infos. NoClutter (talk) 20:02, 7 December 2007 (UTC)

Sounds like what you need is a web hosting provider. They come in all shapes and sizes; I'd suggest comparing and perhaps getting quotes from several providers to see which one might fit your (current and future) needs best. Word of mouth, so conveniently available online these days, may be useful in determining which providers are the most reliable and easiest to work with, provided of course that you always take it with the grain of salt it deserves. —Ilmari Karonen (talk) 04:15, 8 December 2007 (UTC)

December 8

Coloured text in console mode

Is there any provision for coloured text in the standard, cross-platform C libraries for console mode? What about C++? NeonMerlin 02:45, 8 December 2007 (UTC)

• The closest thing to this will be ANSI escape codes. Post back if you don't get the hang of it. -- Sean —Preceding unsigned comment added by 70.144.151.247 (talk) 03:10, 8 December 2007 (UTC)

There are libraries, such as curses, that will help you with this — it's not standard in the sense that e.g. libc is, but it's fairly well established and available on pretty much any system that has a console mode at all. —Ilmari Karonen (talk) 04:10, 8 December 2007 (UTC)

DSL 10-day warmup?

I just installed DSL in my home and the modem had an interesting sticker on it. It said, "Attention! To achieve maximum speed, leave moden connected for 10 days." Can someone explain what this is about? The thought of a computer device needing 10 days to do anything is rather astounding. --208.189.34.45 (talk) 02:48, 8 December 2007 (UTC)

The modem itself certainly won't need 10 days to "warm up". The only explanation I can think of is that your ISP is, for some reason, limiting the connection speed for new installations and removing the limit after (at most) 10 days. I'm not sure why they'd do that, though, unless perhaps it's to deter users from working around some elaborate traffic shaping scheme that needs several days to decide whether your connection speed should be throttled or not. —Ilmari Karonen (talk) 03:00, 8 December 2007 (UTC)

The explanation I've heard is that it needs to monitor the connection to determine the speed it can handle. Since that may vary with the load, it's necessary to monitor it over a long period of time to check what speeds work at various load levels. StuRat (talk) 03:53, 8 December 2007 (UTC)

Card Making Program

Is there another program besides Microsoft Publisher to make and print cards? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 67.121.107.55 (talk) 03:48, 8 December 2007 (UTC)

Sure, see the list of desktop publishing software. Many word processors — especially presentation-oriented ones like Apple's iWork — can probably also do it to a varying degree. —Ilmari Karonen (talk) 04:55, 8 December 2007 (UTC)

Space of hard disk consume by operating system

Why operating system consume some part of hard disk which is don't shown by computer? —Preceding unsigned comment added by San sharma (talk • contribs) 04:21, 8 December 2007 (UTC)

It'd certainly be nice to have an operating system that didn't consume any disk space, but that doesn't seem likely to happen any time soon. (Although one might, perhaps, consider an OS running from a live CD to qualify, and some older computers, such as notably the Commodore Amiga, did store a significant part of their OS in ROM.) As for the space not being shown, I'm not sure why that would be the case — perhaps it's so you wouldn't be tempted to go around deleting those important files in order to "save space". —Ilmari Karonen (talk) 04:48, 8 December 2007 (UTC)

There are lots of ways for the OS to leach away your disk space:

• The software that makes up the operating system itself requires some disk space.
• There are overheads involved with storing files on the disk. A file that contains (say) 12,345 bytes first gets rounded up to some exact number of disk blocks (suppose a disk block was 1000 bytes, a 12,345 byte file would actually require 13,000 bytes). If you have a lot of tiny files, the disk will fill up faster than if you have a few large files.
• Each file needs a corresponding directory entry of some kind. Some file formats reserve space on the disk for these directory entries (in Linux/Unix they are called 'inodes').
• Most disk drives have some bad blocks - these are redirected off to some other places on the disk resulting in some 'lost' space.
• Space must be allocated on the disk for 'swap space' - a place to park programs that are sitting around in RAM but not running at the moment.
• Increasingly (especially with laptops) the manufacturer will partition off a section of the disk drive for a copy of the operating system so that you can restore the OS from it rather than having to carry CD's around with you.

I'm sure there are bunch more ways.

SteveBaker (talk) 17:50, 8 December 2007 (UTC)

Based on an earlier question, I think the questioner is referring to the part of the hard-drive capacity that is "don't shown by computer" (i.e. an 80 gig HD showing as 74 gig where not all of this is to do with 1024 vs 1000). I think it has something to do with the filesystem --Seans Potato Business 22:42, 8 December 2007 (UTC)

Then all but the first and second things on my list above. SteveBaker (talk) 01:10, 9 December 2007 (UTC)

Video Encoding

Any idea wether we can combine Xvid or Divx video with M4A audio into one video file with Avi extension?? Also what are the best settings to encode a video for playback in a nokia E62??59.92.248.15 (talk)

Photoshop pixelation effect

I'm a moderately experienced Photoshop user, but I can't figure out how to make this effect. I'm looking for an arty pixelation, like the Rubik's Cube sculptures of Space Invader (as found here: [3] I want to make one of these sculptures, but I'd need a guide first. Anybody know how to do this? Thanks! -ParkerHiggins ( talk contribs ) 04:50, 8 December 2007 (UTC)

For simple pixelation just use the mosaic filter, or down size the image using bicubic interpolation and then upsample the image, using nearest-neighbour interpolation. Then you can add the grid by drawing a single grid and make that a pattern and repeat it. That's just one way of doing it.--antilived^{T | C | G} 09:30, 8 December 2007 (UTC)

Is huge amount of physical RAM necessary for getting better FPS in games?

As for as today's latest games are concerned, do they really require about 2GB of memory?.I have 1GB+xfx 8600GT(256MB)+Pentium D 3.00GHz running winxp. I don't get sufficient FPS as shown in benhmark. The difference in config of theirs and mine seems to be RAM and processor. I guess cpu doesn't meddle much here as an issue. Can I get more FPS with another 1 GB RAM?. or is it time to go for high end GPU?.Thanks in advance —Preceding unsigned comment added by Balan rajan (talk • contribs) 11:57, 8 December 2007 (UTC)

Well, it depends what games you want to play, and if you have Vista or XP (Vista eats RAM). Definitely upgrade your CPU before RAM or GPU though, that's what's bottlenecking you most (even if you use Vista). Dual Cores are pretty inexpensive nowadays. · AndonicO ^Talk 12:00, 8 December 2007 (UTC)

I'd make a general statement that Windows eats RAM. I run Win98 on a machine with 512 mb RAM - enough to have switched off the swap file altogether. Satisfied with the results. --Ouro (blah blah) 13:46, 8 December 2007 (UTC)

No - the frame rate isn't the thing that's driving RAM requirement. (Trust me, I'm a game designer!) It's to do with the amount of content in the game. If the game says it needs 2Gb on the box - then that's how much you need. There is no incentive for game designers to demand more memory than they need. As a games company, the more demands you make, the fewer people can run the game, the fewer games you'll sell and the less money you'll make - and it's definitely all about making money. So if it says you need X Gbytes- then X Gbytes is what you need. If you try to run with less than it says on the box, the game MIGHT still run - but be swapping from disk. If that happens then the game won't run smoothely at all and will in all likelyhood be almost unplayable.

The reason games need more these days is because graphics chips are getting faster at a rate that is outstripping even Moore's Law and every time the speed of the hardware doubles, you can draw twice as much stuff in the scene and therefore you need twice as much memory to store it (unless you are planning on drawing a lot of the same thing over and over - but that's getting unacceptable to games players too). Worse still, in addition to the throughput rates going up, the display resolution that people are using is increasing too - and that means that you need higher resolution textures - and higher resolution textures need more storage space. As if that were not enough, we're also being tempted by things like high definition lighting algorithms that need more of the graphical data to be stored in floating point instead of single bytes - which can double or even quadruple your storage needs at a stroke. Sadly RAM sizes are not increasing anything like as fast as Moores Law - and our needs are increasing more rapidly than Moores Law - so overall, we're being squeezed into tighter and tighter spaces and having to get more and more creative about saving RAM. There is a game-complexity/quality versus RAM-needs trade-off - and where that trade-off is set depends on another trade-off which is that if you demand too much RAM then fewer people will be able to run your game - but if you set the quality bar too low in order to use less RAM, then it won't be such a good game and you'll sell a lot less. One of the attractive things about writing games for consoles like the Wii, Xbox360 and PS3 is that you know exactly how much RAM every user has - so no more ikky trade-offs.

The CPU speed and the GPU (graphics card processor) are both critical to getting a high frame rate - if you have the required amount of RAM then either the CPU or the GPU is the bottleneck. Which it is depends on the game you are playing and the setup you have. If the GPU is the bottleneck, then it may either be the GPU's pixel draw rate or it's "vertex processing rate" that's limiting you. If it's the former, then reducing your screen resolution even by a small amount will dramatically improve your frame rate ("fps") - so it's always worth trying that to see if it solves your problem. If the game goes faster when you reduce the display resolution - then a newer, faster graphics card might be the way to spend your money. If reducing the resolution doesn't help then it's hard to say whether the CPU or the "vertex processing" stage of the GPU is limiting you. Worse still, if you have an older motherboard with an AGP graphics card slot then it's possible that the AGP performance is the limiting factor and neither CPU nor GPU upgrades will help. That's much less likely to be the case if you have PCI-express with the graphics card plugged into the 8-lane connector as it should be.

Sometimes, the feature-set of the graphics card matters a great deal. There is a feature in the game I'm working on now that works really elegantly on cards that support "full floating point" math - but has to be implemented differently for cards that only have "half float" math. The alternative implementation is a lot more complicated - and therefore runs more slowly. However, there are other games that don't need full floating point support which run just fine on either sort of card. So switching out to a more fully-featured card - even one that is a bit slower in raw performance terms - would probably speed my game up a little bit (not a whole lot - but noticably)...but with other games it might slow them down. A large fraction of my job is avoiding ikky problems like this!

As you can tell, this is a horribly complicated business.

SteveBaker (talk) 14:44, 8 December 2007 (UTC)

..Unless you're Microsoft and hardware manufacturers are paying to you exaggerate system requirements --ffroth 21:52, 9 December 2007 (UTC)

I'm sorry - I should have started by saying "Never, ever, buy ANYTHING from Microsoft". SteveBaker (talk) 23:35, 9 December 2007 (UTC)

You can buy their products, just don't buy the crap they spew daily --ffroth 00:05, 10 December 2007 (UTC)

I wrote a more detailed explanation of games performance on my private Wiki here: http://www.sjbaker.org/wiki/index.php?title=Graphics_cards_and_Games SteveBaker (talk) 17:30, 9 December 2007 (UTC)

2D designer program

hi,

does anyone know of a free/internet downloadable 2D designing program...something like the actual program 2D designer.............?

thanks.....--84.67.229.4 (talk) 12:15, 8 December 2007 (UTC)

How about looking here for starters? --Ouro (blah blah) 13:52, 8 December 2007 (UTC)

The standout winner is inkscape - but there are a lot to choose from. Just make sure that the artwork is stored in SVG and you can fairly easily switch from one to another until you find the one you like best. SteveBaker (talk) 14:08, 8 December 2007 (UTC)

MKV problems in Win Vista

Hello there. I'm just wondering if anyone here has the same problem, or how I can fix it. Thing is, I cannot open .MKV files on my PC (running x64 Vista). I can play them on my mac, works fine, but on the PC.. nah. I'v tried the might VLC player and a load of 3rd party codecs, with no success. Not even the Media Player Classic worked. Oh, yeah, one player did work - the one in Azureus (bittorent client). Though that one isn't the most optimised player and it can't play HD videos w/o lagg.

Vista just ain't compatibe with MKV? 90.231.145.160 (talk) 15:57, 8 December 2007 (UTC)

You need a MKV splitter to use the container format in directshow players like Classic. As for the actual media you need the different codecs that the audio and video are encoded with within the container. --ffroth 21:31, 9 December 2007 (UTC)

JPEG, web spiders and the wonderful Avril Lavigne

I wana download images from http://avril-images.net but the site is is a weird format and all the links are javascripted, meaning that normal web spiders like httrack dont work for it. It uses Coppermine Photo Gallery. I have no idea how to do this. All I really want is to download all the JPEG images from the site, not the html. Any good programs for this. Thanks xxx Hyper Girl (talk) 16:11, 8 December 2007 (UTC)

Probably a bad suggestion, but cant you just use printscreen, or Snippet? 90.231.145.160 (talk) 16:13, 8 December 2007 (UTC)

Completely tangentially, check their copyright status first before you download them if you intend to do anything at all with them, of course. :) ++Lar: t/c 18:20, 8 December 2007 (UTC)

I have Windows XP and wget. Entering the following command at the command prompt seems to work:

for /l %n in (1,1,22474) do @wget -nc -p -A jpg http://avril-images.net/displayimage.php?pos=-%n

It takes a long time though. I gave up after around 500 files. --Bavi H (talk) 00:48, 9 December 2007 (UTC)

Points for whoever can find the worst picture of her. Or do I already win? Also please tell me you realize that celebrities are never the people that they portray in their work. --ffroth 00:30, 10 December 2007 (UTC)

Thanks for your help everyone! I haven't been able to get wget going yet (I'm not very good at compiling source code) but I'm working on it. ffroth, I do realize that celebrities put on a certain amount of acting in their public life, but I think Avril is one of the more "real" celebrities around. Hyper Girl (talk) 10:24, 10 December 2007 (UTC)

So download a binary. --ffroth 03:53, 11 December 2007 (UTC)

Shell script - Windows/DOS or Unix/Bash

I need a script (either DOS or UNIX ,I don't mind) to look through a directory and all subdirectories, if there is only one .jpg file in the directory to rename that file 'folder.jpg', while keeping it in the same directory. Simple I'm sure, but scripting is not my forte. Can anyone help? Jooler (talk) 17:20, 8 December 2007 (UTC)

• Something like this should do:

for dir in $(find -type d); do
    num_jpgs=$(find "$dir" -type f -name '*.jpg' -maxdepth 1 | wc -l)
    if [ $num_jpgs -eq 1 ]; then
      mv -i "$dir"/*.jpg "$dir"/folder.jpg
    fi
done

It's not tested, so back up your directory first! --Sean 18:14, 8 December 2007 (UTC)

Hi Thanks, but it complains that the maxdepth should occur earlier on the line and it doesn't work with directory names with spaces in. Jooler (talk) 18:49, 8 December 2007 (UTC)

This should take care of most of the weird filename problems.

find . -type d -print | while read -r dir; do
  if [ `ls -f "$dir" | grep -c '\.jpg$'` = 1 ]; then
    mv "$dir"/*.jpg "$dir"/folder.jpg
  fi
done

It'll still barf on filenames with newlines, and there's a race condition between checking for a single .jpg and expanding the glob. If I wanted to fix those problems and make it really robust, I'd switch to perl. --tcsetattr (talk / contribs) 21:35, 8 December 2007 (UTC)

Thanks, that's just the ticket. Jooler (talk) 23:04, 8 December 2007 (UTC)

Installing python modules, windows

Howdy, I am working on installing python modules on a windows XP machine. I have tried to follow the instructions here, which seem to be to 1. decompress the file, 2. use the DOS commandline to navigate to the folder, and 3. use the command python setup.py install from the commandline. Each time I try this, however, I get the error "'python' is not recognized as an internal or external command, operable program or batch file." The python interpreter (through the IDLE Gui) runs perfectly however. Tried restarting after decompressing the file, but with no luck. Any thoughts on what I could try next? Thanks, --TeaDrinker (talk) 18:19, 8 December 2007 (UTC)

Got part of this one figured out; I had to add python to the path (not part of the installation process, I guess...). Now it is a whole new problem; it builds (using python setup.py build -c mingw32), but does not install (the command python setup.py install -c mingw32 gives me the error "invalid command 'mingw32'"). Any other thoughts? Thanks, --TeaDrinker (talk) 21:20, 8 December 2007 (UTC)

It seems that you're trying to install a Python extension written in C; you'll need to get a compiler for it (like the MinGW it seems to be trying to use) so that the Python module can compile itself. However, if it manages to build, maybe you just need to pass it some other program's name (instead of "mingw32"); I'm not sure. Are there any *.c files in the module? --Tardis (talk) 16:11, 10 December 2007 (UTC)

Laptop choice

Laptops

Which brand is the best in terms of performance and which package deal is considered the best?

1) Sony Viao 2) Acer 3) Hp 4) Compaq 5) Or Lenovo notebooks

Kindly let me know the rationale behind the choice of the laptops? Garb wire (talk) 18:43, 8 December 2007 (UTC)

Why not consider AppleMac amongst your choices?--88.111.112.161 (talk) 19:33, 8 December 2007 (UTC)

Didn't 3 buy out 4? 68.39.174.238 (talk) 20:02, 8 December 2007 (UTC)

They're now their brand, yes. I'd go with five if I didn't have the possibility of getting a nice tasty Apple. --Ouro (blah blah) 20:23, 8 December 2007 (UTC)

PC World said the fastest Vista laptop is a MacBook! See here [4] --208.189.34.45 (talk) 00:54, 9 December 2007 (UTC)

• Hate to bring up the Mac/PC deate again, but the new macs have bootcamp pre installed, meaning you can run both OSs on a fast portable system for what is ( in my mind ) a healthy price ( about £700 ) 86.154.89.103 (talk) 01:13, 9 December 2007 (UTC)

Oh really? There's quite a few laptops for less than the Macbook's exorbitant $1099 starting price with a Core 2 Duo, a gig of RAM, and a decently sized hard drive. -Wooty [Woot?] [Spam! Spam! Wonderful spam!] 04:14, 9 December 2007 (UTC)

But you only get what you pay for!

gag --ffroth 00:40, 10 December 2007 (UTC)

Why are you not considering ASUS laptops?217.168.5.7 (talk) 19:16, 10 December 2007 (UTC)

Word.docx

I have received a document name.docx which I understand is Word 2007. How do I open it using word 2000? What do I need to download? - Kittybrewster ☎ 18:52, 8 December 2007 (UTC)

Get either Word Viewer or the Office Compatibility Pack, both from Microsoft. Hope this helps! CaptainVindaloo ^{t c e} 19:03, 8 December 2007 (UTC)

Crashing of windows explorer

My windows explorer hangs every time i open up the windows.... My computer Whats the problem i m faced with? 19:09, 8 December 2007 (UTC)~

You'll have to give us more details - like, what OS are you on, which version of IE are you using, and whether you've recently installed something that you've downloaded from the web. First things you can do that are always good are a) switch to Mozilla Firefox and b) download NOD32, a relentless anti-virus app. --Ouro (blah blah) 19:41, 8 December 2007 (UTC)

The moment I open 'My computer' after a transitory period of say 5 minutes, it gets stuck.... Hangs virtually , how to avoid this from happening? 16:16, 9 December 2007 (UTC) —Preceding unsigned comment added by Garb wire (talk • contribs)

What software is running in the background? What operating system are you using? Did you install anything new recently, especially downloaded from the Internet (from an unknown source)? Of the more obscure, is your system in order hardware-wise? Does everything that needs a cooler have a cooler? Is the place clean and safe to operate electronic equipment? --Ouro (blah blah) 18:35, 9 December 2007 (UTC)

LAN

how would i be able to establish a LAN connection between my computer and laptop so that I and a friend would be able age of empires (rise of rome) multiplayer without an internet connection. thx70.51.60.87 (talk) 20:46, 8 December 2007 (UTC)

Find the ethernet ports on each computer and onnect a cross over cable between them. Then you will have to configure the network, with a fixed IP number on each. You can use 10.0.0.1 on one and 10.0.0.2 on the second. Use the same netmask (255.0.0.0). I don't know about age of empires though, what it needs. If one computer is missing an ethernet socket, you can use serial to serial port connection. Graeme Bartlett (talk) 21:32, 8 December 2007 (UTC)

With fairly recent PCs you can use a normal ethernet cable rather than a ethernet crossover cable, as the NICs will almost always have autosense capability. -- Finlay McWalter | Talk 23:02, 8 December 2007 (UTC)

Ipod Video Converter

What are some reliable free video converters that are available for download that can convert avi video to mp4 so they can be put onto an ipod? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 76.87.200.184 (talk) 22:34, 8 December 2007 (UTC)

Try HandBrake, MediaCoder, or MEncoder. -- Finlay McWalter | Talk 22:58, 8 December 2007 (UTC)

Also try iTunes itself. If it's viewable on your computer, then you can use iTunes > Advanced > Convert Selection to iPod format. --208.189.34.45 (talk) 01:00, 9 December 2007 (UTC)

iSquint does this very easily and quickly as well. --24.147.86.187 (talk) 21:52, 9 December 2007 (UTC)

December 9

svchost.exe

I am using windows xp. How can I check my svchost has not been hijacked? it seems very busy.. Kittybrewster ☎ 02:03, 9 December 2007 (UTC)

Well, the obvious way is to run a virus and malware scanning program. Have you tried that? --24.147.86.187 (talk) 19:21, 9 December 2007 (UTC)

Ipod

Whats the difference between a flash memory nano and a hard drive classic? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 222.154.102.58 (talk) 03:45, 9 December 2007 (UTC)

The classic iPod uses an actual hard drive with moving parts. It has higher storage, but is more vulnerable to corruption and damage. The flash memory of Nano iPods is lighter and less prone to magnetic damage. The density is less, so it can not hold as much information. However, the technology is rapidly advancing, and flash-based memory is already used in some laptops. Hope this answers your question. 76.99.111.234 (talk) 04:42, 9 December 2007 (UTC)

I believe that also Flash Memory uses a lot less power than a conventional Hard Drive as the flash memory does not need to 'move'. Don't quote me though :P Tiddly-Tom 10:23, 9 December 2007 (UTC)

School tracking program

I heard that some schools are using programs or some way to monitor everything a user does on a network. How is this done? And if possible, are there any popular known programs that do this? Thanks, Valens Impérial Császár 93 04:32, 9 December 2007 (UTC)

On the internet? That's easy, Squid cache can log everything going through it. --antilived^{T | C | G} 06:19, 9 December 2007 (UTC)

Locally? If their code is running on the machines they can see whatever they want --ffroth 23:31, 9 December 2007 (UTC)

Graphics Cards

Hi, I have this computer with the NVIDIA GeForce 8400 GS TurboCache with PureVideo technology graphics card. Is this sufficient for hi-end games or should I look to change it? Could anyone tell me if the motherboard could take 2 graphics cards as I have an old computer which had 2 graphics cards, I don't know how good but the other computer is but it is not very old and was pretty expensive. Also, I have 3GB of RAM - Do you know if I could stick in another 1GB and if it would be any advantage? (I am running Vista) My old computer was an Evesham Axis Dominator Plus if that helps. I couldn't easily find what graphics cards I had in my old computer, so if anyone knows it would be useful to know even if I could not put them into my new computer. Thanks, Tiddly-Tom 10:20, 9 December 2007 (UTC)

No 8400GS is a budget graphics card. Having 2 of them won't do you any good either. If you want a computer for gaming you really should be building it yourself. --antilived^{T | C | G} 10:41, 9 December 2007 (UTC)

I was not thinking of having two of them - but 2 of whatever is in my old PC which was sold as a gaming PC. Tiddly-Tom 10:46, 9 December 2007 (UTC)

On my mother board there is room for 4GB of RAM - is it worth taking some out of my old PC which is not used an put it in this one? Also, on my mother board there are:

• 1x PCI Express 16X.
• 1x PCI Express 1X.
• 2x PCI.

I don't know what this means, could I have 2 graphics cards? —Preceding unsigned comment added by Tiddly Tom (talk • contribs) 10:56, 9 December 2007 (UTC)

The card you have has a pretty recent chipset - but it's the 'budget' version, which generally means it has slower pixel fill rates. Probably, your best bet with this card is to reduce your display resolution when playing games. Adding a second card (using the nVidia 'SLI' approach) will double your pixel fill rate and allow you to run at higher resolutions again. However, polygon rates will probably not improve any. You'd need to use both PCI-Express slots - but notice that one is a 16x slot and the other only 1x - so performance of the card in the second slot will not be good. Personally, I'd just drop my display resolution and wait until the next generation of cards appears sometime next year. But as usual, I have to point out that different games have bottlenecks in different places - if they are CPU-limited, then no amount of messing with the graphics card will help. If it's GPU/vertex limited then buying a higher end card will help, if it's GPU/fill-rate limited then adding a second card will help (and so will reducing display resolution). SteveBaker (talk) 15:13, 9 December 2007 (UTC)

I wrote a more detailed explanation of games performance on my private Wiki here: http://www.sjbaker.org/wiki/index.php?title=Graphics_cards_and_Games SteveBaker (talk) 17:31, 9 December 2007 (UTC)

What CPU do you have? If it's halfway decent get a 8800GT and be happy. -Wooty [Woot?] [Spam! Spam! Wonderful spam!] 20:52, 9 December 2007 (UTC)

Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 (2.4gHz) - Another question - Do you know if there is a noticeable difference in picture quality between HDMI and DVI? Thank you. Tiddly-Tom 07:09, 10 December 2007 (UTC)

No difference, believe it or not, except that HDMI carries audio on the same cable, so it may help if you've got a cabling mess back there. -Wooty [Woot?] [Spam! Spam! Wonderful spam!] 10:56, 10 December 2007 (UTC)

WHOIS error

On a WHOIS what does "ERROR: IP Range Reserved by IANA.org" mean? DuncanHill (talk) 13:43, 9 December 2007 (UTC)

Some IP blocks haven't been (and some won't ever be) assigned by IANA. So if you whois on 192.168.0.1 (part of a block of non-routable addresses intended for use inside intranets) you get back that the block is assigned to IANA. -- Finlay McWalter | Talk 13:46, 9 December 2007 (UTC)

I got it when doing a WHOIS for vandal 78.146.191.98. DuncanHill (talk) 13:48, 9 December 2007 (UTC)

Could it be that the lookup service you used wasn't good at handing non-US registrars? dnsstuff.com is, hands the query off to RIPE, and says the IP is part of a largeish block owned by Opal Telecommunications Plc in Manchester. -- Finlay McWalter | Talk 13:54, 9 December 2007 (UTC)

OK thanks - I just clicked on the first WHOIS thingy at the bottom of his talk page. DuncanHill (talk) 13:59, 9 December 2007 (UTC)

The WHOIS link on IP talkpages now goes through Sam Spade.org [5] instead of DNSstuff.com. Apparently, DNSstuff.com changed their business model some months ago. [6]. I'm not sure what this error means, as you can run the same IP through DNSstuff.com age get a valid return. For example; User talk:78.146.191.98 gives the error with Sam Spade [7] bur returns properly with DNSstuff [8]. --— Gadget850 (Ed) ^talk - 18:18, 9 December 2007 (UTC)

Pixelating SVG?

I thought the whole point of SVG images was that they didn't pixelate and look all ugly when you blew them to big sizes. So what's going on here? —Angr ^{If you've written a quality article...} 20:55, 9 December 2007 (UTC)

You're blowing up a rasterized PNG made from the SVG. The actual PNG on the page that the page links to ([9]) is only 1024 pixels wide, but it is being displayed much wider than that. My guess is that there is a hard limit of some sort on the size of the PNGs that Wikipedia's SVG renderer is putting out. In other words, you aren't really blowing the SVG up to a large size: you're rasterizing it (using Wikipedia's internal rasterizer) as a 1024 pixel PNG and then blowing that up to 1500 pixels. --24.147.86.187 (talk) 21:45, 9 December 2007 (UTC)

Yes - I agree with 24.* but you can download the original SVG and display it in something like Inkscape and you'll get the benefit of zero pixellation. Wikipedia probably caps the size in order to prevent denial-of-service type attacks that you could cause by tying up it's CPU's and memory by demanding a 100,000 x 100,000 pixel display or something. SteveBaker (talk) 23:28, 9 December 2007 (UTC)

Ok, cool. Thanks for your help. —Angr ^{If you've written a quality article...} 05:25, 10 December 2007 (UTC)

Actually, as far as I can tell, if you go to the Image:USA_Counties.svg page and click on the link just beneath the picture, it actually does send the SVG file to your browser if it thinks you have an SVG-compatible browser (I have Firefox - so it does). This is especially obvious if you bring it up in the Konqueror browser because it draws SVG's V-e-r-y S-l-o-w-l-y so you can be 100% certain that it's not displaying a raster image. Wikipedia appears only to produce the cruddy PNG version for the preview or if it doesn't think your browser can display the SVG version. What puzzles me is why it displays the pixellated version in your sandbox - even though my browser can handle the SVG. Perhaps it's because you forced a particular resolution by telling it you wanted 1500 pixels. Weird. SteveBaker (talk) 00:25, 11 December 2007 (UTC)

Beep

I've been trying to make my Java program beep by outputting (char)7, but I don't hear anything. My headphones work fine, since I can listen to music, so I figure it's something in the computer. Any ideas? Black Carrot (talk) 21:53, 9 December 2007 (UTC)

The BEL character outputs to the internal speaker, not the sound card. Many newer PCs don't have a speaker. --— Gadget850 (Ed) ^talk - 23:01, 9 December 2007 (UTC)

Also, it is your terminal emulator that issues the beep when it receives that character. So your terminal emulator may not support it or has it disabled. --Spoon! (talk) 23:06, 9 December 2007 (UTC)

What should I do to make it beep audibly, then? Black Carrot (talk) 23:11, 9 December 2007 (UTC)

As Spoon! notes, what a BEL does is up to the terminal emulator. For me (on XP) the Netbeans terminal ignores BEL, but the cmd.exe one beeps. To be fairly portable, use Toolkit.getDefaultToolkit().beep(); instead - that plays whatever the platform thinks an alert sound is (for me, on XP, it's a dull Bonk sound, as set by the sounds applet in the Windows Control Panel). If you want more control than that, you'll need to play a sound clip yourself using javax.sound - see http://java.sun.com/docs/books/tutorial/sound/playing.html -- Finlay McWalter | Talk 23:31, 9 December 2007 (UTC)

Thanks! That worked perfectly. Black Carrot (talk) 23:49, 9 December 2007 (UTC)

A non-beep sound would work, too. I'm just trying to get a rough metronome-type thing set up in it. Black Carrot (talk) 23:12, 9 December 2007 (UTC)

Here's a metronome that plays a WAV file every 1000 ms:

import java.io.*;
import javax.sound.sampled.*;
public class Main {
   public static void main(String[] args) {        
       try {    
           File infile = new File("C:/bip.wav");
           AudioInputStream stream = AudioSystem.getAudioInputStream(infile);
           DataLine.Info mydlinfo = new DataLine.Info(Clip.class, stream.getFormat());
           Clip myclip = (Clip) AudioSystem.getLine(mydlinfo);
           myclip.open(stream);
           for(int x=0; x<20; x++) { // 20 beeps
               myclip.setFramePosition(0);
               myclip.start();
               Thread.sleep(1000); // 1000ms == 1 second
           }
       } 
       catch (Exception e){
           System.out.println(e);
       }
   }
}

I made bip.wav using Audacity's generate function (sine wave, 0.1 seconds duration, 880Hz, amplitude 0.5). -- Finlay McWalter | Talk 00:10, 10 December 2007 (UTC)

Note, though, that your code only beeps approximately once a second, not exactly. The actual period is likely to be slightly longer, due to the time spent executing the loop, though it could also be shorter if Thread.sleep() was consistently returning early. If you want the average period to be exactly one second, which might be desirable for a metronome to keep it from drifting out of sync, you'd need to make the loop something like:

long nextBeep = System.currentTimeMillis();
for (int x = 0; x < 20; x++) {  // 20 beeps
    myclip.setFramePosition(0);
    myclip.start();
    nextBeep += 1000;  // 1000ms == 1 second
    long delay = nextBeep - System.currentTimeMillis();
    if (delay > 0)
        Thread.sleep(delay);
    else
        nextBeep = System.currentTimeMillis();  // we're late, catch up!
}

You may also wish to catch and do something useful with InterruptedException, e.g. to allow the user to stop the metronome. —Ilmari Karonen (talk) 01:03, 10 December 2007 (UTC)

THAT TAG IS AWESOME since when has wikipedia had that now?!?! --ffroth 07:42, 10 December 2007 (UTC)

Tag?? Thanks, Ilmari, that's helped a lot. Black Carrot (talk) 11:40, 10 December 2007 (UTC)

b&

Is there something on IRC that can tell you which channels you've been banned from? Vitriol (talk) 22:11, 9 December 2007 (UTC)

No. Change your hostmask to evade bans. Also, nobody says b&, it's called +b --ffroth 23:29, 9 December 2007 (UTC)

PSP VIDEO PROBLEM

I have a video that is in, as it says in the properties, MPEG-4 (.mp4) format. It works on my PSP prefectly. I have another video that is in the exact same format as it says in the properties. However, this one isn;t supported by my PSP. I know that there are many different types of MPEG-4 subformats, such as part-14 and part-10, and I am under the understanding that the PSP only suports part-14. Maybe this is the problem, if the 2nd video is in part-10 or something. However, when I go to convert the 2nd video on PSP Video 9, it is not supported there, and it will not convert. What should I do, and why will it not play on my console? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 75.23.77.208 (talk) 23:54, 9 December 2007 (UTC)

mp4 is a container format. It's likely that the 2nd mp4 contains video in a format that your PSP cannot decompress --ffroth 00:00, 10 December 2007 (UTC)

How would I fix this? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 75.23.77.208 (talk) 00:02, 10 December 2007 (UTC)

Re-encode the video from one format to the other. What kind of computer do you have? It will affect what program will be the one you want to use. --24.147.86.187 (talk) 01:10, 10 December 2007 (UTC)

December 10

Opera = Firefox + 20+ extensions

Isn't firefox, where loads of people not working together, all make their own extensions that can be downloaded and interfere with each other, a sure fire way to end up with a crashy browser? —Preceding unsigned comment added by Seans Potato Business (talk • contribs) 00:21, 10 December 2007 (UTC)

That's why extensions on the official site are thoroughly tested before being made available publically. Also, I think there's some sort of namespace system in the plugin system so that plugins can't really interfere with each other. --antilived^{T | C | G} 00:35, 10 December 2007 (UTC)

And don't forget that installing plug-ins is entirely voluntary (they don't self-install) and that most (all?) of them are open-source anyway (can be fixed if broken even if the person who made them stops working on them). They're also automatically easy to install and uninstall, unlike IE's plug-ins. --24.147.86.187 (talk) 01:08, 10 December 2007 (UTC)

Function keys in Mac OS X

F11 is the de facto standard way to get full-screen display of a browser. But this won't work in default Mac OS X, as the system uses this key to minimize all windows. (And this is just one example of how OS X key assignment seems to compete with software-specific key assignment.) The obvious way around this is to change the OS settings so that what was F11 is now something else, or (since there's anyway Shift-F11 for a trivially slower alternative) just to disable the function. However, while I could easily do this with my own computer [I'm not using it right now and forget the OS version number; it's the version before the present one], the option isn't available for the higher-numbered function keys in a slightly older version [the version before mine] in th' missus' computer.

Am I overlooking some other option? Is there perhaps some escape key combination that means "Please pass the next keystroke to the active application just as you'd pass a regular keystroke (letter A–Z, etc.): don't clear the desktop, reduce the volume level, show all the windows in miniaturized form, etc." -- Hoary (talk) 10:31, 10 December 2007 (UTC)

If you are asking "is there a way to disable Exposé, then yes, go to System Preferences > Dashboard and Exposé, and you can re-assign the keys that Exposé uses or you can disable them altogether. --24.147.86.187 (talk) 22:28, 10 December 2007 (UTC)

Chess symbols in MS Word

How do you get symbols for chess pieces in Microsoft Word? Bubba73 (talk), 03:06, 10 December 2007 (UTC)

I found a chess font and installed it and it works on my computer. I made an HTML file and it works. However, will the HTML file work for other people who have not installed the chess font? Bubba73 (talk), 03:53, 10 December 2007 (UTC)

No, it won't. SteveBaker (talk) 03:57, 10 December 2007 (UTC)

See Chess symbols in Unicode. --Spoon! (talk) 04:09, 10 December 2007 (UTC)

If I paste these into my Word Doc, make an HTML file, then everyone should be able to see the chess pieces, right? Or do I need to forget the Doc file and work only with the HTML file and insert the codes? Bubba73 (talk), 04:28, 10 December 2007 (UTC)

What you mean isn't completely clear. I think you're contemplating use of MS Word in order to make a web page. This is always a bad idea, as MS has a very screwy idea of what "web page" means.

See Chess symbols in Unicode, as recommended above. You just type in what's in the "HTML" column. For example: "&#9812; is a white king". Or you can copy and paste the character. If you do the latter, UTF-8 must be specified as the character encoding system in the HTTP header or a META tag. -- Hoary (talk) 07:33, 10 December 2007 (UTC)

I have a Word Doc file that uses some chess piece symbols. I want to make an HTML file for the web from it, using the "save as". I'm not comfortable with using HTML directly. For instance, I don't know how to specify UTF-8 as you said. Bubba73 (talk), 18:28, 10 December 2007 (UTC)

If I insert one of the codes (e.g. "♚") into the HTML document in Word or my HTML editor, I get the literal strig and not the chess piece figurine. Is there a setting in Word to tell it to interpret it correctly? Bubba73 (talk), 19:26, 10 December 2007 (UTC)

Well, changing the font to "Ariel unicode MS" and then pasting the figurine works on my computer. I'll have to see if it works for others. Bubba73 (talk), 19:37, 10 December 2007 (UTC)

No, it doesn't work when viewed on other computers. Bubba73 (talk), 19:47, 10 December 2007 (UTC)

The problem you will certainly be up against is attempting to use a word processor as an HTML editor. As stated before, Word has a very unique concept of what a "web page" is. It is very obvious to me when I hit a Word-version of a web page. It looks very odd with weird symbols, bad spacing, and extremely tiny letters. Using an HTML editor, you can type &#9818; and it will be shown as a chess character. In the HTML, you see the ampersand, pound sign, numbers, and a semi-colon. In the web browser, you see the character. To answer your question directly, I seriously doubt that there is any setting in Word that flips HTML-code on so you can see &#9818; and then turns it off so you can see ♚. Also note that Unicode must be installed to see Unicode characters. Most computers have it now - but not all computers. -- kainaw™ 19:59, 10 December 2007 (UTC)

I think you are perhaps overly-concerned about typing in HTML. If you use notepad, you can do it quite easily. If you'd like to try, I wrote a simple guide to writing HTML that'll get you going very quickly: http://www.sjbaker.org/daddy_math/html.html - my son learned to do it when he was 10 years old - and it didn't take him an hour...so I think you can manage it! SteveBaker (talk) 23:52, 10 December 2007 (UTC)

Steve - ten year olds are much better at learning than most adults, and your lad (if I remember rightly) sounds like an exceptionally bright ten year old! DuncanHill (talk) 23:56, 10 December 2007 (UTC)

Shhhh! I'm trying to get someone to learn HTML! SteveBaker (talk) 00:28, 11 December 2007 (UTC)

HTML is cake, even today's half-emo preteen pop diva whateverthehecktheyarethesedays kids know it for myspace customization or whatever. I also learned it at 10, it's super duper easy --ffroth 02:45, 11 December 2007 (UTC)

Well, using an HTML editor is not a good choice for me. (1) I'd need to learn HTML, and I know little about it (2) I need wysiwyg for normal editing - I need to see what it will look like to a browser, and with Word I can format it the way I want it (mostly), and (3) I have an HTML editor but it doesn't have spell checking, which I desperately need. And if I did a spell check on the text of the HTML file it would flag a ton of HTML stuff as spelling errors. Bubba73 (talk), 03:35, 11 December 2007 (UTC)

using telnet

ok im just starting to learn about computers, and one of the problems i have is with telnet. i use windows vista and i already have the telnet client active. lets say i want to check my email from gmail (i don't use outlook or anything btw, only webmail). i would open up a command prompt, and then what would i type? and on my older computers when i type telnet, it comes up with a white terminal telnet window, but on vista it just appears inside the black dos window with microsfot telnet. any ideas on this? any help is appreciated, thanx! 63.24.154.141 (talk) 03:12, 10 December 2007 (UTC)

Gmail requires encryption so you can't use telnet for that. You can for example use telnet to get the main page of Wikipedia. Just type telnet en.wikipedia.org 80, and then another cursor pops up, there you can type HTTP commands. To get the main page, you can type GET /, and telnet will spill the HTML source code of the main page down your screen. Telnet only allows you to directly talk to servers, but you have to know how to talk to the servers yourself. Read up on the protocol you're trying to use and experiment. --antilived^{T | C | G} 05:00, 10 December 2007 (UTC)

ok so it allows a direct connection to servers but only if the servers allow it. the code above worked, but i couldn't see what i typed when i tryed to type get /. is this normal? and so telnet doesn't work with gmail. but would it work with something like ssh? and would telnet work on other mail servers (yahoo, msn, hotmail etc...) or do they requre encryption too? (btw this is the same person just with a differnt comp) 63.28.158.210 (talk) 23:24, 10 December 2007 (UTC)

Usually servers won't allow connection to the telnet port (21) for security reasons, but if you're just using telnet to talk to the server by typing the actual commands instead of using a software to do it, you can telnet into a port for another protocol, such as HTTP, which is what is done above. Telnet connects to en.wikipedia.org at port 80, which connects you to the Wikipedia HTTP server. Can you post the output straight after you've typed that command? It should say connected to ---.wikimedia.org and give you a prompt for you to type things into. SSH is also encrypted, so you won't be able to use telnet for it (SSH is actually supposed to replace telnet for remote controlling other computers). Hotmail and Yahoo and MSN don't have POP3 access, so I don't think it will work. --antilived^{T | C | G} 02:25, 11 December 2007 (UTC)

About ram requirement for getting good FPS

I asked my doubt listed in 5.7 that if more ram is needed for getting good FPS, I still have this doubt. As steve baker mentioned a detailed explanation about the stuff, I looked into his article/essay on the real bottleneck for getting good gaming results. I could well understand those facts but I'm not clear with one point steve and that is about Virtual memory.If I have say 1GB RAM and the game I play demand 1.5GB as recommended config, then whilst playing my pc may try to write data into HDD due to insufficient ram and this may add time delay overhead while playing.Wouldn't this delay might cause drag or drop in FPS?, since the transfer rate for HDD is very slow compared to RAM!. Also please answer me this that if 512 MB of RAM is demanded for a game, then does it mean I should have 512 MB free memory out of 1GB or exclusive 512 MB physical RAM chip?. Sorry for a delay in posting...Thanks —Preceding unsigned comment added by Balan rajan (talk • contribs) 06:51, 10 December 2007 (UTC)

"Paged" (microsoft term) memory is extremely slow.. tertiary storage is millions of times slower than cache and thousands of times slower than RAM. Also system requirements list how much total memory you're expected to need, not how much you need to set aside for the program itself. --ffroth 07:34, 10 December 2007 (UTC)

Right. I'm trying hard not to confuse you here. IN GENERAL: Adding more RAM won't make your game go faster. HOWEVER: If there isn't enough RAM for the game to fit in - then the OS will start swapping and that will KILL your games performance - it won't just be slow - it'll literally stop for seconds at a time.

The typical behavior of a game that's run out of physical RAM (and is therefore using the disk drive for swapping) is that it will be literally unbearably slow - like 5 seconds per frame or something - and the disk drive light will come on every time the game hesitates like that. Some games don't need all of the RAM they demand for all of the time - so they might run for a while - then suddenly stop working for a few seconds, then carry on working smoothely again. At any rate - having less memory than the game needs is never a good idea. The only possibility is that the game manufacturer imagined that he had to require enough space for the game - plus some other stuff like maybe a browser and an email or chat client to be running at the same time. That might mean that you'd be able to get away with a little less than the required amount providing you're very careful to shut down everything other than the game...but to be honest - I doubt that's going to help much.

But if you have enough RAM that the game is running at (say) 5 frames per second or better - then it's obviously not swapping and adding more RAM is unlikely to help.

One way to see this to go to your control panel, select Admin Tools, then open the "Performance" widget. You should see some scrolling graphs indicating what's going on inside your machine - if not click on the 'System Monitor' entry on the left then on the 'View graphs' icon at the top. The yellow line ("Pages/sec") shows how much swapping is going on. If there is a big yellow blip on the graph, your computer just moved something to or from the disk drive because it didn't have enough RAM. So start this graph running and start up the game. Once the game is playing and you are experiencing slowdown, quickly pop up the Performance widget and see if there is a lot of activity on the yellow line. If there is - then perhaps you've got a RAM shortage.

SteveBaker (talk) 15:38, 10 December 2007 (UTC)

What is the difference between Monitor refresh rate and FPS?

I'm unclear of the fact that some I heard saying that the graphics cards frame rate is restricted by monitors refresh rate. For example say if a monitor like an 15 inch CRT can make 60Hz of refresh rate at 1024 by 768 pixel resolution then wouldn't my gpu card be able to send data beyond 60FPS when VSYNC is turned to on?. Esp I heard this problem on LCD where the refresh rate is only 60Hz.also does VSYNC have some other meaning?...please anybody try to post your reply anything you know about this. Thanks a lot —Preceding unsigned comment added by Balan rajan (talk • contribs) 07:19, 10 December 2007 (UTC)

That's right, if your monitor is only refreshing the screen 60 times a second, you can't see more than 60fps. If VSYNC is on, the graphics card won't even push a new frame until the monitor refreshes, reducing tearing (which I don't mind anyway) and also the apparent frame rate (which I do very much mind) --ffroth 07:40, 10 December 2007 (UTC)

In an ideal world, you'd have all of your interactive software refresh the screen at the exact same rate as the monitor itself repaints the screen and have the graphics card set up to swap it's video buffers during the monitors' vertical retrace period so you don't see a visual glitch. However, there are two considerations that result in people not doing that:

1. With 'twitch response' type games where very precise shooting behavior is required of players, some people find advantage in increasing the frame rate above what the monitor can actually redisplay. This makes one or more horizontal 'tear' lines to appear as you see the top half of one frame of video and the bottom half of another - this reduces graphics quality - but it makes the game software iterate faster which reduces the delay (the "latency") between pushing a button on the joystick and something actually happening in the game world. This obviously demands a really fast computer (or an older game where the demands on the system were not as high). Some people set the refresh rate of the monitor up to 72 or 80Hz in order to get lower latency without making the graphics look worse.
2. If (as is commonly the case), the game cannot maintain a solid 60Hz frame rate (with a 60Hz monitor), the policy of locking the buffer swap to the vertical retrace results in the game frame rate being forced to be an exact submultiple of the monitor rate. Hence, if the game COULD iterate at 59Hz, clamping to the vertical retrace will force it to run at 30Hz. Worse still, if the game's freame rate changes from frame to frame (say it varies between 59Hz and 61Hz) - then clamping frame rate makes it jitter between 60Hz and 30Hz which is even worse. If you don't clamp to the vertical retrace then the game can actually run at 59Hz but just as with speeding up the frame rate, this results in a horizontal tear line in the image. So which works best depends on the user's preferences.

SteveBaker (talk) 12:34, 10 December 2007 (UTC)

can I instal and work on VB 2005 and VB 6.0 simulatneously ?

I have been working in VB 6 so far, and now I have got VB 2005(.NET Framework 2.0). I'm thinking of using both of these application software since I have previous programs and some new projects to be done in VB6 whereas I need to run VB 2005 also for some client's projects. So I'm now unclear that if I can run these two installed onto the same OS.Also by installing VB 2005, will VB2005 affect the VB6 tools such as "package and deployment" in anyway?...Please help me. Thanks —Preceding unsigned comment added by Balan rajan (talk • contribs) 07:24, 10 December 2007 (UTC)

The VB 6 IDE and VS 2005 can coexist, and will not conflict. Splintercellguy (talk) 18:02, 10 December 2007 (UTC)

User Agent Information

My user agent information shows the following in the website whatsmyuseragent.com

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.1.11) Gecko/20071127 Firefox/2.0.0.6;MEGAUPLOAD 1.0

Will this be the same for everyone using Firefox 2.0.0.11? Any idea why I am getting that 'MEGAUPLOAD 1.0'? What does rv:1.8.1.11 and Gecko/20071127 say? Once upon a time, I installed Megaupload toolbar, but uninstalled later. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 59.92.112.197 (talk) 08:38, 10 December 2007 (UTC)

rv:1.8.1.11 is the build of your Windows, Gecko denotes the layout engine of Mozilla (and the build). Megaupload must've left something behind (some software usually uninstalls in full but leaves behind in the registry some info that says they've been installed here before, certain time-trial and shareware software does this). --Ouro (blah blah) 09:34, 10 December 2007 (UTC)

rv:1.8.1.11 is the version of Gecko. --Spoon! (talk) 11:42, 10 December 2007 (UTC)

Thanks :) I'll correct myself then. --Ouro (blah blah) 16:52, 10 December 2007 (UTC)

(From the asker of the question) Thanks for the reply. If anyone of you know how to get rid of that MEGAUPLOAD 1.0 from my user agent, please tell. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 59.92.119.195 (talk) 18:34, 10 December 2007 (UTC)

This might help you: User Agent Switcher. It's a Firefox addon. G'luck! --Ouro (blah blah) 21:10, 10 December 2007 (UTC)

Or just go into about:config and search for the useragent, and change that instead. --antilived^{T | C | G} 22:48, 10 December 2007 (UTC)

How do you use a jar file?

Hi! I neeeded to download a *.JAR file as I need it to use it on Template:Image label begin, but, how do you run such a file? --41.201.169.19 (talk) 13:12, 10 December 2007 (UTC)

JAR is a Java archive file. You'll need to have at least the Java runtime environment (JRE), or possibly the development kit (JDK). --LarryMac | Talk 14:32, 10 December 2007 (UTC)

Once you have it, the command line "java -jar filename.jar" should run it. Friday (talk) 15:42, 10 December 2007 (UTC)

Canon RAW in Photoshop CS

Dear Wikipedia contributors,

Can Photoshop CS open up all of Canon's RAW extensions? Thank you 71.18.216.110 (talk) 15:13, 10 December 2007 (UTC)

No it won't. New cameras (such as the 40D) save to .CR2 which you won't be able to open in CS. You'll need at least CS2 with Camera RAW 3.7 and then upgrade to 4.3 here. --Fir0002 23:44, 10 December 2007 (UTC)

Kindle

How does the Kindle access the Internet? Does the owner need to supply his/her own WiFi? If so what does it mean by free access to Wikipedia included? Am I missing something? Is Amazon offering its own Wireless subscription service? --Kushal^t 16:51, 10 December 2007 (UTC)

Kindle "downloads content over Amazon Whispernet, which uses the Sprint EVDO network." --LarryMac | Talk 16:55, 10 December 2007 (UTC)

Thanks. --Kushal^t 17:49, 10 December 2007 (UTC)

The important thing is that the Kindle DOES NOT GIVE YOU ACCESS TO THE INTERNET! It uses a cellphone-like connection to Amazon headquarters (which they pay for) which gives you access to just the few websites that Amazon choose to provide. One of those is Wikipedia - there are some blogs and some other services - plus Amazon.com of course - but you can't (AFACT) stick in any old URL and get access to it. Someone who played with one for 10 minutes told me that he couldn't edit Wikipedia using the Kindle - only view it! This makes me suspect that you are actually getting a mirror of Wikipedia - not "the real thing"...but that's hearsay evidence. But it's OK - if Santa is is listening, I still want one for Xmas - I have been very, very good this year. SteveBaker (talk) 23:43, 10 December 2007 (UTC)

You want one? Haven't you seen that side-by-side comparison of the Kindle's terms of use and RMS's "The Right to Read"? --ffroth 02:47, 11 December 2007 (UTC)

Text-to-speech on Java using Microsoft voices?

Does anyone know if there are any open-source Java programs/libraries that can use the voices built into Windows XP/Vista?

Thanks!
Sam 18:52, 10 December 2007 (UTC)

Caesar IV

Moved from Entertainment Desk. Rockpocket 19:21, 10 December 2007 (UTC)

I installed the Caesar IV game in my pc and started it. The game started but all I see is white screen though I can hear the music running in the background. When the music stops the Caesar IV cursor appears but the white screen is still there. I can move around the cursor and could even blindly press the menu buttons of the game. But I cannot see anything. What could be wrong? The total display memory of my pc is 64 MB (I got this info from the DirectX diagnostic tool that one gets by typing "dxdiag" in the "run" program in start menu). I got the same problem previously with harry potter 3 but when i modified certain settings like color depth in the .ini file I could see everything again. I tried this with Caesar IV too. But it didn't work. Can you help me out? Thanks. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 59.89.21.98 (talk) 09:05, 10 December 2007 (UTC)

See the related posts on Sierra's forum: [10] --— Gadget850 (Ed) ^talk - 21:59, 10 December 2007 (UTC)

Ipod + Limewire

I get some music via Limewire and upload it from there to the Itunes music folder (File, Add Folder to Libary (the folder my Limewire tunes are in)). The songs all display in the main Itunes music folder. My question is, can I transfer these tunes to an Ipod without any problem? I want an Ipod but don't want to spend a few hundred on something that doesn't work for me. (Note: I'm not talking about the Shared Limewire tab that comes up in like the middle of the sidebar, I mean I have uploaded them into the main music folder). Thanks! DoomsDay349 22:05, 10 December 2007 (UTC)

Yes, you can transfer any old MP3 no matter what the source to your ipod. --24.147.86.187 (talk) 22:13, 10 December 2007 (UTC)

If you look at the iPod article and also (http://www.apple.com/ipodclassic/specs.html/) the apple site you can find a list of all compatible music-storage files. Basically you should be fine. ny156uk (talk) 23:20, 10 December 2007 (UTC)

unicode characters

how would i type in unicode characters if i didn't have a numeric keypad? is it the same if you typed it in using the number row? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 63.28.158.210 (talk) 23:04, 10 December 2007 (UTC)

Good question. My new keyboard doesn't have a numberpad either.--SeizureDog (talk) 23:59, 10 December 2007 (UTC)

Computer start up process

Hi, I am currently using Windows Xp opearating stystem.Whenever i turn on the computer a lot of "unwanted programs" start up automatically.My question is :Where are instructions to start up these programs are located? Can I customize edit which programs to start and which programs not to start?202.70.74.161 (talk) 23:31, 10 December 2007 (UTC)

Start > Run > type in "msconfig" > navigate to "startup" tab (last one) > choose the services you want to startup --Fir0002 23:38, 10 December 2007 (UTC)

Memory Speeds

Hi,
Can anyone point me to a comparison of memory speeds (approximate read/write speeds in MB/s) which includes a standard 7,200RPM HDD, a 10,000RPM HDD, RAM (something similar to say Corsair 8500 C5D), a USB key (reasonably good one - USB 2.0 obviously) and a 16x DVD. Thanks! --Fir0002 23:37, 10 December 2007 (UTC)

Places like this (http://www.storagereview.com/php/benchmark/bench_sort.php) and tomshardware (http://www23.tomshardware.com/storage.html). This one compares a 7200rpm hDD with a Raptor HDD which (as i understand it) is a faster setup than normal (http://www23.tomshardware.com/storage.html?modelx=33&model1=117&model2=138&chart=32). ny156uk (talk) 00:22, 11 December 2007 (UTC)

I'm especially fond of List of device bandwidths. It's telling you the maximums though - so remember to tone down the numbers it gives in the face of reality! SteveBaker (talk) 00:31, 11 December 2007 (UTC)

Thanks Steve - that's perfect! :) --Fir0002 00:50, 11 December 2007 (UTC)

To my door. I've been good, honest. --ffroth 02:49, 11 December 2007 (UTC)

December 11

Sansa C140 MP3 player Frozen

My sansa c140 was doing just fine yesterday. Today I loaded it up to my PC to upload more music. When I opened Drive E all the music was gone but I was able to upload a few new mp3. After I disconnceted it from my computer it would not go past the Sansa opening screen. Now the only way to shut it off is by disconnecting the battery. And even when I connect it to the computer the screen likes up but the PC doesn't recongize that any device is even connected. Please help!

Ok so I've left my mp3 player connected to the USB whenever I use my computer and suddenly my computer recongized it. I tried to take advantage of it by using the downloadable fixers but it didn't work. Now my computer wont recongize it any more.

I was thinking about formatting it..but that erases EVERYTHING. If its ok to do that let me know and I'll try it if it ever pops up again.--Gosplan (talk) 00:38, 11 December 2007 (UTC)

Function Key not Working after Hibernation

I'm running XP on a Vaio Laptop. Most of the time when I suspend or hibernate my computer, the function key, and the controls that go along with it (including the secondary volume keys) do not work...what would be the reason for this? A glitch? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 140.180.2.110 (talk) 01:12, 11 December 2007 (UTC)