A thread for boring computer questions.

What if two people wanted to link to the Companies Act?

Sucks to be the other person?

That is a crazy suggestion which would quite clearly never happen.

czn:

http://icanhaz.com/

The worst kind of boring computer question on the planet... the boring networking question.

So, here's my situation: yesterday around 1pm, my Internet stopped working at home. Nothing seemed to make this happen, it was pretty much random. I've got an ADSL connection, through Canada's Bell Sympatico, and the modem's a "Speedstream 6250." When I look at it, there are 6 total lights: Power, Ethernet, Wireless, DSL, Internet, and another one whose name I forget (I can't check now because I'm sitting in the front of the house stealing the weakest imaginable connection from a neighbour... i'm afraid if I get up, I'll lose it). The first three lights are lit up, but the DSL light is not. It blinks a couple of times every minute or so, but never stays lit up. From my research, I've learned that this is due to it being unable to connect via the hpone line. I've tried a new cable, a different phone jack, tried unplugging everything and replugging everything, but it's not working.

Here's where it gets more complicated... when we signed up for Internet, we were at a different place with a land line. Then we moved, called Bell, and they switched everythng to the new place, but we're now with Voice over IP for phone (I DO NOT RECOMMEND THIS BTW). So, I can't call Bell support, except from my cell phone which has no minutes or from a pay phone which I did and it didn't help b/c I couldn't give the guy my specifics like modem serial numbers and shit... so what the fuck do I do? The guy was saying "if your phone is down, your internet won't work" and I was like "DUDE VoIP = THE OTHER WAY AROUND". But I guess there's no way for me to know if, like, my house line has been snipped or something... or, for that matter, who to clal to fix that. Or how to call them since I have no phone.

SOS. SOS. SOS. SOS. SOS.

You can have DSL without use of a land line in the US? So you have the line but they block you using it for voice calls? That's interesting - you can't do that in the UK. Sorry - this doesn't help you. I'm not sure what would help you. Borrowing someone's mobile phone, I suppose.

Is your phone busted? Have you reset the phone?

I think he's saying that he doesn't know if his landline is busted because he can't make voice calls on it anyway - he only uses VoIP.

Yeah, and that's why I'm asking about the actual handset. At work we rely on voip, and sometimes my PC loses its connection. The only way to fix it is to reset the voip phone.

(i'm assuming it goes wall outlet -> voip phone -> PC)

Ah, right - got you.

The Bell.ca site's pretty worthless for troubleshooting info. It does say to turn the modem off for at least 30 seconds and make sure there's no other electronic equipment within 12" of the modem. I was trying to find out if you should still have a dialtone, even if you don't have a land line (this is a law in California, you have to be able to dial 911). You can chat with their support on-line, fwiw.

Another thing you can do to check if it's the wiring inside your house that's bad - find the connection box for the phone line on the outside of your house. It will have a phone jack in it - get a long phone cord and plug the modem into that. If you get connectivity, the problem is most likely in your house wiring. If you're in a apartment, this is a serious challenge btw; it's not so difficult if your in a house with a single phone line.

You can have DSL without use of a land line in the US?

-- Alba, Tuesday, 23 October 2007 10:54 (4 hours ago) Bookmark Link

Okay got it, it's called naked DSL.

(I too am not in the US)

sorry I didn't respond sooner, but he connection was really weak from my neighbours so I couldn't get on long enough to post and I jsut got tired of trying.

You can have DSL without a landline in Canada, too, apparently... because I did for about 9 months, until the other day when my Internet broke :(

The way the VoIP works on my end is that it's a box that connects to the all-in-one modem/router, so if the problem was only with the voip box, it wouldn't affect the overall workings of the DSL line. It goes wall -> modem/router -> then to the voip or to the xbox or to the computer.

I haven't yet been able to find an outdoor phone jack, although I did find what appeared to be some sort of cut line, although I think it may have just been a cable line? It's definitely strange, though, and I have no idea why it's cut... does anyone know what an outdoor phone wire would look like? Or the cross-section of one, for that matter?

Agreed that bell.ca's support site is garbage. In between having to steal a connection last night and that site being mostly useless anyway, I got nowhere with it. I did try the no-equipment-near-it thing and the powercycling too, but no dice. I will see if I can get a live chat with one of them, but so far they've been useless on all fronts. I got finished with their level 1 tech last night, and their level 2 tech was supposed to call 30m later, and never did.

I'm in need of help:

Vista won't let be uninstall some programs. Certain programs have to be installed by right-clicking the installation program, and selecting "install as an administrator", or words to that effect. If I want to uninstall one of these programs by using the add/remove programs in the Control Panel, it won't let me because I'm not an administrator.

For those who love closure, I *might* have solved my problem, after another long, drawn out conversation with bell's support team. Apparently, my account is not a "naked" or "dryloop" account, so this is why it's not working. I'm not sure how that makes a lot of sense, because I (thought I) didn't have a dial tone for the past 11 months and it's worked fine. So I need to call their accounts group or whatever, and turn ym regular DSL account into a dryloop DSL account. Which costs nothing. Except a shitload of my time, apparently. And then, if that doesn't work, I have to start over.

nate,

please contact your administrator.

will m. - for future ref - an outdoor copper phone line (in the US and probably also in Canada) is a 4-wire (green & red, black & yellow) unshielded but typically with a drain (uncoated silver wire) in a gray poly oversheath. If you're on a fiber optic run, it's hard to say what the wire will look like, generally they're coated with orange kevlar-type stuff.

Ok so I've had this problem for over a year now, and it's finally starting to driving me crazy. I got a Titanium Powerbook 17" about 4 years ago way before the switch to Intel processors. A couple of years later, I upgraded it's original 512 Mhz to 1 G. I'm not sure exactly when, but it was around the time that I upgraded to 10.3 and 10.4 that my fans would go on after about 5 minutes of working on the machine, and would never go off unless I shut it down or put it to sleep. When I set my processor speed to Reduced in System Preferences however, my computer becomes extremely slow, even opening ILX takes about 3 seconds on a stable cable connection. I've used about 4 different programs to verify my disc and fix permissions, which doesn't seem to do jack shit. Since I cannot afford another machine right now, what should I do, should I downgrade? Thanks.

starting to drive ... obv

You upgraded the CPU in a powerbook? Bad, bad mojo. Put the original CPU back in if you still have it.

Heat variance tolerance is very slender in all lappies; it's even tighter in Powerbooks. Installing a CPU a PB wasn't designed to take will probably shorten the life of everything else in the PB, not just give you noisy fan issues.

Were there ever 512MHz processors? I think maybe Jena means 512MB RAM.

Yeah, maybe not. The PB can not only deal with 1G of RAM fine, it will probably run cooler with it (less disk paging).

I think maybe Jena means 512MB RAM.

that's what i meant, sorry

No point slowing processor down. Have you looked in Activity Monitor to see what % of the CPU is actually being used when the fan's going crazy? If it's *not* high, then it suggests that it's a fan control issue, rather than your Mac actually getting overloaded with work. If the load *is* high even when you're doing nothing, then look at what processes in the list are using all the CPU's resources.

If you are comfy taking the PB apart, then you might try that and see if you have some kind of obstruction blocking the airflow. You might have a dustball or something. I've taken apart a couple of PBs, and it's definitely harder than taking apart a PC, so you might want to have a geeky pal along for the ride.

when i buy a new harddrive, no external. can i write the stuff thats on my old one to the new one?

do i have to make copies on cd's first and then write them to the new one? i found this rather cheap samsung HD with 400 GB, and ive decided i need it to fulfill my digital collector needs

Every OS in the universe should allow you to copy stuff directly from one hard drive to another, even vista.

I once solved a fan problem by taking my pc apart and hoovering its insides. There was hell of dust.

Yeah I don't feel comfortable opening my computer up like that, but my situation is pretty desperate. Even when I only open Firefox, it'll bounce in the dock about 8 times, then the fans come on and keep going.

Anyone know how I uninstall an Ubuntu guest that I'm running through VMWare?

isn't the whole guest just a directory that you can nuke? or a disk image that you can similarly delete?

http://communities.vmware.com/thread/105077

Just delete the virtual hardisk and start again.

NAS and HD media streaming

it's not really there yet, is it?

basically what i want is:

* a huge hard drive which mounts wirelessly via 802.11n, is attached via HDMI to my TV, and has a nice interface for playback.

Have you heard the one about the Western Digital media storage drive designed for sharing, that doesn't let you share your media?
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/12/07/western_digital_drm_crippled_harddrive/

yes, and also about the Seagate FreeAgent drives that don't wake up in linux (the buggers! i bought one a month ago)

Question:

Sometimes when i get given MS Word Document forms to fill in there are premade Blanks to click on and type to fill in (they look like black rectangles).

How do i make those?

Thanks in advance, Nerds!

I still can't find the right button. I'm sorry if i upset any nerds, please do help!

OK, here's an odd problem: My Mac Mini is acting very odd. First, the iTunes database keeps getting corrupted for no clear reason. Then, it wouldn't update to 10.4.11 -- it would download, and then say the file didn't match up, checksum-wise. Even when manually downloaded.

I reinstalled 10.4(.8) and it still did it. I attached it to my MacBook like a harddrive and was able to get it up to .11, but it STILL is screwing up with iTunes and it STILL is failing to mount dmgs. The dmgs work fine on the MacBook, though, so something is very wrong.

(Also, it's out of warranty.)

Any idears?

Slumpman, read the Help for "Create forms that users complete in Word". There are templates and fields involved. You can get a similar effect by using Tables, but making a form keeps the user from changing fields you don't want them to change.

bge: [ID 801725 kern.warning] WARNING: bge0: ddi_regs_map_setup() failed

So I have no network:/

Where are network settings actually stored? I was trying to set up my new mobile to act as a bluetooth modem (in 10.5.1), and was messing around with the port settings, and the whole system hung. When I restarted, finder had tanked. Luckily, I was able to restore the entire system from Tiome Machine (yay for TM) but I can't get my old mobile to work.

I thought if I could find out where the old settings for the bluetooth phone and modem and network settings were stored, I could just restore the fiels from a time when the old phone worked and hey presto. But I dinnae know where exactly they're kept...

Casuistry: try reinstalling 10.4.0 (or whatever is on your DVDs) then running the Combo updates to 10.4.6 (http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=303410) and then from 10.4.6 to 10.4.11 (http://www.apple.com/support/downloads/macosx10411comboupdateintel.html) before restoring any backup.

Also, are you sure your hard drive has space? What you're seeing sounds like the kind of weirdness a full drive might give.

I have done that, and it has massive amounts of space.

And I haven't even "restored any backup" -- I've just tried to get iTunes to parse the music folder into a database.

I am having nic problems with both ethernet and wireless, with both Solaris and Red Hat..

1. The bge0 interface was initially recognised by Solaris but vanished on reboot (appeared to be a driver issue) The iwi0 interface was succesful first time. Had to do a sys-unconfig and both disappeared altogether

2. a scanpci now no longer returns EITHER card

3. same thing in red hat, neither nic appears when i run lspci