1. Pri Slave HDD Error - press F1 to continue - TrevorF. Each morning when the weather has been cold as it has been lately and I've turned on my computer I've received the above message. After pressing F1 it fails to read some application data on drive D:. After shutting down and rebooting the problem no longer exists. My setup has two IDE drives, the first being 3.2Gb partitioned in two and the second 1Gb single partition. Seeing I keep most of my documents on drive D: I've backed them up onto drive E:. Probably is the sign of an impending HDD failure. 2. HD formatting - KenM Bought 40gig hard drive from the markets and my computer would not boot when it was installed so it could not be formatted. John Saxon kindly offered to check it if I took it to his place. He spent a morning working on it. It seems that someone had fiddled with it and returned it to the market for me to get his cast off. After much ledgerdemain John managed to recognise it and formatted it for me. Thanks again, John. However, my computer still would not recognise it and boot. John suggested it was probably the CMOS and I should download the latest version and update my October 1998 version. That I did and my CMOS is now February 2002 and all is well. My 40gig drive is recognised and all I have to do now is copy my two 13gig drives to it so I can install a DVD drive. Touch wood. 3.a. TPF www.tinysoftware.com. www.answersthatwork.com 3.b. Show and tell -- JohnS I noticed that my mouse had become very "jerky" - as it is a $20 optical from the markets - it probably did not need cleaning. So a quick look with WinXP task manager indicated that a program called "vsmon.exe" was grabbing up to 85% of CPU time once or twice in a 3 sec period. But what is vsmon.exe? A quick Google search pointed to a great site called Answersthatwork.com. This site is a gem - loads of good stuff and in particular a set of "Task-list" pages that collects items that can run in the background and their descriptions. The specific URL for the task lists is http://www.answersthatwork.com/Tasklist_pages/tasklist.htm The list indicated that vsmon.exe is a part of ZoneAlarm. As I have hit other (mostly minor) problems with ZA, I decided to remove it and try TinyFirewall from www.tinysoftware.com instead. This is now working rather nicely and the "jerky" mouse syndrome has disappeared as well. Time will tell re TPF, but it's looking good under XP (it did not fare so well when I tried it under WinME about 12 months ago). Show & Tell was a repeat of the S'side passaround of the two IDE cable types. 4. a. Comp fair 256Mb DIMM 4. b. Comp fair 40Gb HDD ?? -- AlgisK Last weekend in the Computer Fair I bought three types of items: a) Mobile HDD Racks (cradles) b) 40 GB HDD c) 256 MB SDRAM DIMM. a) The 6 cradles appear to be of modern type. The packing says that they are ATA66/100. They work fine and I find them very useful. I paid $17 for each one. b) My Pentium 200 MMX computer did not detect the Samsung 40 GB disk and, since the computer works fine with 4GB HDD (without proprietary boot manager software), the new 40 GB HDD appeared to be a "lemon". I paid for it $130 - it was the cheapest new HDD I saw in the market. JohnS kindly offered to test it (and RAM) on his modern Pentium IV computer. It did not "see" the HDD either. I did 'phone the person who sold it to me and will see them next weekend with a view of exchanging this HDD to a more expensive one that hopefully will work. c) The DIMM was intended for my "best" computer, Dell Dimension L500cx. With the new DIMM installed the machine started booting, but during the POST reached the 68MB mark and "froze". Dell supples decent manuals with their machines (at least this one). The manual says that 2 256 MB DIMMs can be installed without changing any mother board settings. The manual has a peculiar note, which reads "Your computer is designed for peak performance with specific DIMMs that are validated through rigorous testing. The system may not recognize other synchronous dynamic random-access memory (SDRAM) and may fail power-on self-test (POST)". Well, it does. John Saxon's computer recognized the RAM and appeared to work OK. The 256 MB RAM DIMM specification appears to be identical with that of Dell, except that it can run at 130 MHz, rather than Dell's 100 MHz. I am not entirely convinced that the DIMM I bought for $85 is OK. I have had some strange things happen to my computers in the past with faulty memory modules - faults which were repeatable only with one particular program. All other failures were kind of random and not reproducible. Thanks to John S for his kind help. People like him make this SIG and this PCUG really worth while! 5. Html and Agent - WendyA 6. Auto switch-on - CharlieK Charlie found that his old machine - relegated to a second office in the house, had suddenly started turning itself on at weird times. Suggestions included Virus checkers looking for updates, backups trying to run or some other housekeeping activity. Transpired to be a setting in BIOS. Although all Power Management was disabled, there was one item "Resume on Ring" enabled. Couple of tests revealed that if the modem was left on and the phone rang, the machine fired up. Disabled the setting and all back to normal. 7. Ad-aware - Philip Philip asked a general question about how to use Ad-Aware in order to control pesky advertising when browsing the net. From the discussion, I gathered that the software should be run once a week or so to update it. The further question - which I didnt ask - was how to tame Ad-Aware's intrusiveness, now that I have loaded it on my system. Every time I boot up, it fills my screen with three screens. Can it be started so that these screens just appear minimised as buttons on the task bar. Bits from the Ad-Aware manual inserted by Trevor: =================================== 1.WELCOME TO AD-AWARE! If you are new to Ad-aware, we recommend you read the manual delivered with your copy of Ad-aware.It is located in the Ad-aware folder. You find detailed instructions on how to use Ad-aware properly and a collection of frequently asked questions. 2.USAGE NOTICE Ad-aware is not designed as a cracking tool. Its purpose is to scan the users system for software components the user don't want or was NOT aware off, and provides an option to remove them. If continued use of the host application without the ad-system installed breaks its license agreement, please uninstall it. 3.IMPORTANT INFORMATION: Please close any open browser windows and other applications before running Ad-aware. Make sure you save a logfile before cleaning your system. Some advertising systems GENERALLY need two passes to get completely removed from your system. ========================== Philip also raised a question about my machine hanging on the "Windows is closing down" screen when I try to shut down. I now have installed and working Regclean, Ezyclean and End-it-all. So this appears to have solved the problem. At the end of the questions on the board, someone got to his feet and asked about the need to use a personal firewall, as outlined in Anne Greiner's notes in the latest Sixteen Bits. The only opinion I heard clearly was that if you are not on the web for long periods, this is hardly necessary. Philip 8. PCUG Home Pages - RodS 9. Format C: et al - MikeD 10. IE6 freezing - PaulH. =========== Thanks all, Trevor ****************************************************** Coffee & Chat Page, inluding archives of past meetings http://www.pcug.org.au/pcug/candc/ ******************************************************
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