A thread for boring computer questions.

serious qn

how do I make my internet faster? is upgrading the only option? I was in the apple store today and ws like woah

If you can get virgin cable there's a 50mb option which is wau fast. Otherwise try adsl2 (o2/be).

oooh I'm on virgin; I'll give them a call

thanks stet

<yahooanswerstypebullshit>My mouse is frozen in the center of my screen! Waht are do!

It's a laptop touch pad. I don't have another mouse to test if it's strictly the touch pad or what. Um. It's like this at start up every time. And I couldn't figure out how to disable/enable it in the control panel. Ummm.

I think that's all I got. System restore???

Is there a key combination to lock the pad whilst you type? Maybe you've done that by accident.

try reinstalling the touchpad drivers?

get really used to alt+tab and tab?

System Restore to like 4 days ago seemed to work, hopefully whatever went haywire doesn't resurface. I don't think it was some key-combo lock (though I've pulled that shit before), it was only ever locked on startup and only did so like 1 in 3 startups, wasn't til just tonight that it was locked dead center every time. Well, hopin.

This is more irritating than boring: I think ppl are on my network. It's running hell of slow today. The only time it ran more slowly was when

a) old roommate was torrenting
b) when new tenants downstairs did same (they had the password because I gave it to the old tenants for their last few days...then I changed it)

how do i find out if ppl be creeping on my network? it's WPA2 protected, and closed, so it shouldn't show up on anyone's computer

>:(

login to the router through the web interface (perhaps at http://192.168.0.1/) and there will be some way of getting a list of "connected clients" or something like that. you should recognize each one. check MAC addresses to confirm if unsure.

is anyone having problems with windows media player, since the last update? mine crashes all the time, randomly, when playing playlists of avi files.

or what's a good alternative avi player?

http://www.videolan.org/vlc/

thank yoo!

is there any easy way to sync files between two computers and a usb drive? I use it to go between my work comp (PC) and my home comp (mac) so something cross platform is needed

Any ideas on why my desktop would be getting a tremendously slow internet connection while both laptops in our house, run off the same modem, are fast as can be?

Running speed tests on this desktop has download speeds around 0.62 Mbps, both laptops are consistently in the 13.0-16.5 Mbps range. I'm puzzled.

My computer is getting very full of music files. What hard drive should I get/what do I need to know about hard drives?

Thanks.

So it seems my desktop went back to pretty reasonable internet speeds last night, though for the life of me I'm not sure why. I tried the usual easy suspects - rebooting, powercycling the modem, clearing cache and cookies, but none of that seemed to help. Then I FINALLY managed to get McAfee uninstalled after weeks of trying (this really is the worst virus ever and I hate PCs that come with it preloaded) and cleaned up my startup programs. None of that seemed to help directly, but after a bit it just suddenly got a lot better. I'm sure all my maintenance helped though.

Why, when you copy multiple files from one folder to another on Windows and there are duplicate files that might be overwritten and it asks if you want to replace a file, do you get an option to say "Yes For All" but no option to say "No To All"?

So you end up sitting there through hundreds of files clicking "No" each time the wee window pops up and stops the process...

I don't get it!

http://lifehacker.com/379519/answer-no-to-all-when-copying-files

Wow! Thank you. Shift+click here I come. I may have googled it eventually, but somehow never did. Much obliged.

Oh, I have needed that so many times, and it actually existed, undocumented? (smacks head off desk)

Thank you koogs.

Wow is seconded! Wish I'd known that a few years before I migrated away from XP, which was yesterday. Still good to know, thanks.

Ok, hopefully there is an easy answer I'm missing here... but I'm stumped. Trying to print out the step by step directions from Google Maps, but every time I click on "print" it brings up the pop-up and only prints the map itself. There used to be an option to choose whether you wanted to print the map or step-by-step directions, but this seems to have disappeared. Any ideas?

should be a bar across the top with text only as an option when you hit print. make sure you don't have javascript turned off.

The blue bar is there, but there's no options in it - just a blank bar. Javascript is enabled.

So weird. Got around it by just using the Firefox print option for now.

So I got a new PC a few weeks ago and it's all been going fine....UNTIL, I noticed that some of the time it won't load a web page properly for 5/6 minutes. It basically changes the favicon and the new address comes up but nothing changes in the rest of the display, the site you've come from stays displayed.

Is this a firewall issue? I'm running Firefox and a McAfee firewall that came with the computer. I tried checking the settings but Firefox seems allowed to have privileges etc.

Anyone got any ideas?

If I want to teach myself how to use Linux from installation and possibly with things you do with a server, what hardware should I buy at the lowest possible cost for the greatest value?

Do you have a computer already? Setting up a virtual machine in something like VMWare is a much easier way to do that sort of thing, especially bootstrapping.

stet's right, a vm is fine for this. i use ubuntu inside virtualbox on a winxp box every day.

try a livecd, all the major distros do them. it boots from a cd (or dvd). you'll skip the installation aspect but... there are memorystick versions that'll let you save your changes too.

if you must have hardware then linux'll run on nearly anything. i have a 433MHz Celeron with 128M of ram that is quite happy with it. netbooks are fine. even a sheevaplug (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SheevaPlug) can run a media server...

or maybe just buy a new hard drive and swap your current one out whilst you're exploring.

My wife and I have an old (about 6 years old) Powerbook. A few years ago, I accidentally poured water into it and it developed some issues (mainly some of the keys not working), and we ended up buying a new Macbook because I was going back to school and needed a reliable computer. The Powerbook was mostly left in a closet. However, now I work from home and my wife doesn't have a job = we have been using both laptops, with my wife on the Powerbook. All of the keys are working again, which is nice. However, it's very sluggish. I don't know if this is because of the water incident, or just because it's an older laptop with lots of crap on the hard drive.

Basically all we need the Powerbook to be able to do is run the Internet and maybe run Word, but hopefully at a better speed. What can we do, in terms of clearing files off the computer or whatever, to try and make this laptop run faster? What is the most efficient way to do this? Is there a way to just zap everything off the hard drive, or reset it to factory standard or something? Is this a bad idea? I realize that if this is a physical problem, there isn't much we can do.

I'm guessing it's a G4, so you won't be able to run Snow Leopard on it, but Tiger or vanilla Leopard will run fine.

The absolute best things you can do to get it working smoothly are to max out the internal RAM and put a fresh OS install on it.

Oh, and use Click2Flash. It'll make internet browsing far more bearable.

Absolutely seconded. RAM upgrade + fresh install works wonders. It's amazing how many of my friends have gotten new computers because their old ones "broke" or "had a virus" but in reality were just bogged down and un-tinkered with.

Well this might be a dumb question but: RAM is just memory, right? Couldn't I just get more memory by clearing off all the crap (files and programs we never use) off the computer? I don't really want to invest more $$$ in this laptop if it's just running slow because of physical issues.

that would give you more virtual memory yeah, but won't be as good as a real ram upgrade. it's a pain in the ass to upgrade ram on old Powerbooks iirc

clearing files and programs gives you more hard disk space - this is not the same thing as RAM. If you get more RAM then your current programs will run a lot nicer.

actually i don't rc. should be pretty easy

hm alright.

installing new RAM in a PB G4 is pretty straightforward: http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=95132

buy the parts from crucial. this thing will point you in the right direction: http://www.crucial.com/store/listmodel.aspx?pl=PowerBook&mfgr=Apple&cat=RAM

do that, then wipe and reinstall. it will go like the clappers.

it's worth nothing however that RAM prices for PBs are currently rather high because nobody makes DDR RAM anymore. that said, you can probably buy whatever's cheapest at the moment and it'll downclock automatically.

this seems to be the cheapest deal going right now. however there's one review saying it didn't work too well in their powerbook, and pny is kind of a budget brand.

otherwise, this seems to be the best option if you don't mind paying a little more. crucial is a very big deal in the ram business and you won't go wrong with em imo.

if you have a 12" buy 1 stick, otherwise buy 2 sticks for maximum benefit.

when creating smart playlists in itunes, is there a way to make the criteria default to album rather than artist?

also on macbooks F7 is the displays button; where is the displays button on the normal apple keyboard?

Say you've got two PDFs exported from InDesign. One has ten grayscale images, the other has ten color images of the same pixel dimensions. You export them using the same preset, "Smallest File Size." Why would the grayscale PDF file size be 3x larger?

are the grayscale and colour images different sizes (in bytes) as JPGs/in photoshop, etc.?

the greyscale will be indexed and lossless, the jpeg will be lossy.

The images in both documents are native Photoshop files, no lossy file formats used in my ID documents. The color images are CMYK.