A thread for boring computer questions.

1. Can you install Microsoft Office 97 in Windows XP? I ask because I'm buying a new computer and I want to save money on this software and am happy to use the old versions.

2. I don't use Excel much, but when I do I spend ages going right click/insert/entire row/ok over and over because I want to create several new rows. I am sure there must be a simple way to create more than one at a time. What is it?

2. select a number of rows equal to the number you want to insert, then do insert row as per, and it'll insert multiple rows (i found this out like two weeks ago, it rocks!)

It's getting really buggy now, and I keep having to enter my settings every time I start it up, which is a real pain. I have the most recent update. Am I shutting it down the wrong way? Does anyone else have this problem.

Can't find much about this on the slsk boards.

you're running 1.0.7. right?

i feel for ya pal.

There's quite a bit of discussion of the "missing preferences" problem on the slsk Mac/Linux Discussion board, and the threads there have a lot of good suggestions.

Still I occasionally run into this problem and the sure fire way out of it is to quit nicotine the second the prefs disappear and then do the following:

1. in a terminal window, cd to ~/.nicotine
2. delete the file named config
3. rename config.old to config
4. Fire up nicotine again - you should still have your preferences and queue lists.

It's handy if you want to go an invisible folder - like ".nicotine" in the above example.

I've tried zipping them with winzip but it doesn't seem to make any difference to the file size. Help. Please. Must. Join. Download. Revolution. Sense. Of. Self. Fading.

Installed the Alcatel Speedtouch 330 software and plugged in my ADSL modem, everything’s fine.

Downloaded the patches from ‘Windows Update’. Everything’s A-OK.

It’s a brand new box, so it’s got Norton Antivirus 2004 and Norton Internet Security on it. A year free, or whatever. I know it’s probably crud, but it’s free. I run a virus scan. It’s a novelty, seeing as I haven’t run a proper virus check on a computer I own in about five years. Heh. The screen locks up when it gets as far as checking the folder ‘c:\drivers\videoatiradeon\driver’. “Pfff”, I think. “What a load of crap,” and carry on.

Installed Office 2000 and set up my email, everything’s fine. Woo. Yay. I go to bed last night, fulfilled and looking forward to an exciting Saturday of sitting in front of the monitor waiting for all my mp3s and divx’ed episodes of ‘24’ to copy across to my new machine.

This morning, I installed ‘Grand Theft Auto III’ from my housemate’s CD. Uh-oh. It installed fine, but the game crashes – the machine just resets itself – after a minute or two, every time I run it. I start to think there’s a problem with the machine’s graphics card. No ‘blue screen of death’, no frozen screen, it just goes black and starts rebooting. I run the game four or five times and the PC crashes every time, around about the point where it has to load the first chunk of in-game ‘speech’. I’m not sure about the graphics card thing, though, so I check my CPU and motherboard temperature. I run a programme called SiSoft Sandra, which says the CPU is running at 42°, which is fine (apparently). So that rules that out, I guess. Though what do I know, eh?

So I try installing everything off my Macromedia MX Suite CD to put my mind at ease. Fireworks, Flash and Freehand go on fine, but Dreamweaver results in the same ‘reset’ that playing GTA:III resulted in. I try again – it locks up halfway through. How could doing a simple install make the CPU run too hot?

“Hmmm”, I’m thinking, “the machine’s only restarting itself when the hard drive is being accessed. It’s looking like a problem with the hard drive rather than the graphics card or the CPU”. But maybe something’s up with that crappy Norton Antivirus/Internet Security thing. I run that again. It locks up at the exact same point that it did before. I let the computer reboot, and I run it again. Same thing happens. Now I’m confused. I’ve got three different things I think could be wrong with my brand new ‘pooter.

So am I right in thinking that it’s Norton fucking with my programmes? Should I get rid of it? Or is my hard drive messed up? Shit, could it even be that the CPU fan is broken and the chips are running hot? What’s the likely solution, aside from turning on the telly and eating a big bowl of icecream whilst you guys come up with some advice and a clever idea?

No, really. That’s what I’m expecting to happen. And a big thumbs-up in advance to anyone who can help.

What can I do?

However before you go poking around too much. Take it back to the shop and get it fixed or replaced under warranty.

I've been having the usual problems with nicotine crashing and losing my prefs and userlists and so on, so I did a bit of playing around to try and remedy this (trying all of the recommendations on captnswing.net like removing the prefs and using a different command to open nicotine from x11). All of a sudden, every icon on my desktop became an iPod icon (only one of them should be) and then disappeared when I ran the cursor over them!

The upshot of all of this is that I seem to have lost everything on my desktop. Not only that, but my free space has gone from 3-4gb to 12gb, and I only had a handful of word files and one or two apps (clutter and coverstar) on my desktop, so where did the extra memory come from? What the hell is going on???

If you were running a PC, I would say that it sounds like something nasty is deleting all your files, or that maybe there's a problem with the hard drive itself. On a mac...dunno.

Also both of my browsers are running super super slooooow.

you should do this every couple of weeks or so, and especially whenever you upgrade or install anything!

^ anyone care to figure out why the menu (with a Boredoms link) doesn't show in IE?