COMPUTER HELP!!

“Got my new Dell today but my old monitor comes up all fuzzy and weird.Is this a screw up with the new Dell(windows xp) or just hardware incompatibility problem??
My monitor is 7 yrs old.”

“Could be your monitor, but maybe you should right click on the desk top and go into properties. See your settings and see where the colors are set at. They should probably be at least 256 or 16 bit at minimum”

“cant navigate on the new system at all cuz the screen is all fuzzy and warped!!!Couldnt even shut down pc or do alt/ctrl/delete-had to unplug it!!”

“when the system was booting up there were several screens for Dell products etc that came up fine then windows xp logo came up and that was fine But when it came time to actually go to windows xp thats where the fuzziness and warpage came in!!”

“I just bought the dimension 8250 a month ago too. Yours sounds like it should work. You may want to call their tech support and let them run you thru it. Probably the safest and most efficient way to tackle it. Good luck, Davex”

“Try booting in safe mode. You should be able to navigate and change the settings for your monitor”

“dave, just about every laptop in our company has had that problem,,,IT had to do a lot of work on them late last year,,not sure what the problem was, but dell was good to get it fixed pronto,

I suggest calling their customer service”

“thanx hodge.how do u oprate safe mode?”

“Just before Windows starts, press F8. You should see a choice of options. You'll need to use your up & down arrows keys and 'enter', to select safe mode”

“Hey guys and dolls... This is unrelated to earlier tech questions but I thought I'd recycle the thread ID. (I hope I don't get a "no timewarping warning). At home, I'm running XP and I've tried to use the facility for clearing out old temp files and the program bombs, as in just stops and vanishes. I tried using "cleanmgr" in the RUN field and that didn't seem to do anything, though when I went to Task Manager it showed it running (using 100% CPU) Numbers were changing (Kernels, threads, that kinda stuff) so I let it run all night. Six hours later, no real change. It may have been busy but I think it was twiddling its thumbs.
Anyone know what I'm talking about and can you offer a suggestion related to this? The "delete old cookies" thread didn't help. I've got 30 gig, half of which is used. I'd like to reduce the junk.

Thanks.”

“Limpy - Did you manage to get rid of some cookies? Of course that's a relatively small amount of disc space.

In general, I guess you've already done the 'disc clean up' routine by right clicking your drive and clicking 'properties'.

So, you've deleted temp internet files. Have you thought about reducing the size of your internet files cache. By default, I think it's like 10% of your drive, which is totally unecessary with big drives and high speed, that we have these days. Also, do a search for *.tmp Those temp files should be okay to get rid of.

Also, have you looked at the amount of space allocated to 'System Restore'. Once your system is up and running smoothly, there's no reason to have more than a few restore points. You can always create one before making major changes to your system.

Is your drive partitioned, or is the entire 30 gig on "C" drive? I keep my OS and programs only, on 'C', and have turned off system restore on my other drives, which have only data anyways and would be unaffected by a restore. Restore's nice to have, but it sure can chew up the disc space if you let it.

Another thing to consider would be to invest in a 'cleaner' program from McAfee or Symantec etc. They will weed out a lot of dead stuff that may be cluttering up your registry as well. McAfee make a good Uninstaller, which is handy if you add and remove a lot of software

Just a few ideas...”

“Thanks Hodgie, that info will prove useful.”

“I am having major computer problems and I can't figure out what is going on. Any help will be greatly appreciated! I'm ready to throw my computer out the window and it is a fairly new computer. I have a Dell P4, 28gb hard drive with 24gb free, 256 RAM and 2.20 GHZ.

The problem is that my computer should be alot faster than it is. Its not my internet connection because everything I try to do is SLOW. I tried using disk cleanup last night and I had to click on it 4 times for it to open and when it finally did it took about 5 minutes to run. That leads to another problem. I can use disk cleanup almost every day and average around 12,000 KB of temporary internet files. I don't know alot about computers but I know that sounds like alot and I don't surf that much.

Also programs such as outlook and powerpoint tend to freeze up on me. They both take a long time to open and when they finally do it will say "not responding"

I thought I had a virus but I have scanned my computer several times and haven't found anything.

Any suggestions?? Anybody??”

“

Try pressing control+alt+delete and choose the task manager. Click on the column header for "CPU"; this will bring up the programs that are using most processor time. The closer that number is to 100 will reveal the most CPU intensive program you are running.

If that's a bust, try sorting your processes by memory usage. If you only have 256Mb, look for programs that are approaching that amount of memory required. Under the 'performance' tab you can see if you're swapping out to disk a lot (that is, if your resident programs take up more memory than you actually have and some of it is stored to the hard drive -this is slower by orders of millions in magnitude).

If everything is cool so far and you've already run all your virus scanners and other helpful things, then I suggest that you download Ad-Aware from www.lavasoftusa.com. It will find a huge majority of the bad programs you have running and undesirable data living on your machine and will allow you to clean it out.

By the way, this textarea is too small for me to remember what I just said.

Good luck

”

“Thanks slack... I think I figured out what was draining my memory. I had a program installed from Mcafee called personal firewall protector. My free trial ran out and I did not think it was still running on my computer. However it was using 99 % CPU usuage. I deleted the program and wa la.. a much faster computer! I think I'll keep it!”

“system idle process is also using 99 CPU usage.. its a program I need to keep though, right?”

“LOL - system Idle is when the system is not doing anything....”

“I know this isn't bping related but I need help and am running out of options. My boss has asked me to backup some of her e-mail from her computer and put it on her laptop. Here is the problem. She is running outlook express 4.0 for Mac. It doesn’t have an export mail feature, and it looks like this version is pre *.dbx files. The only option I have been able to find is to go through each e-mail file individually and click “save as” and a save each as a separate file. There are about 1500 emails I need to copy, so this option will be very time consuming. Any suggestions?”

“nobody?”

“Sorry. Not a Mac guy.”

“Can you highlight all the emails at one time and save them into one file?

I'm not a Mac person either...”

“No, you can only save one at a time.

Thanks for the suggestion though.

BTW - I'm not a Mac person either, but my boss is.”

“Why isn't she doing this herself, if she's the only mac user?”

“Because she knows very little about computers, so all computer questions in the office go to me. I should get two paychecks each pay period, one for being a computer administrator and one for my real job.”

“i posted a question a while back about putting slides on a CD, now I can not find the thread.
anyone remeber where it is?
I checked under all the computer question threads and nadda..”

“What is the computer question? Every time I look for a old thread, I can never find it. I don't know what I am doing wrong, but that search button does not work for me.”

“i have old slides from the 70's that treebeard took
of subway graffiti and i want to use it for school and i need to put it on cd then to powerpoint”

“I tried to scan them last night, but to no avail. The scanning bar runs across the glass plate, but doesn't give enough back light to show the image...”

“You’re going to need a slide scanner and save them as a jpeg or tiff file (I would go with jpeg). Once they are saved in PowerPoint you will want to go to the "Insert" menu and select "Picture" then "From File".”

“If you have a flatbed scanner that can handle slides, then you would scan them into a file and insert them into your powerpoint. ( if you need me to be more specific, say so - I will email you)

If you have slide projector, them cast them on a wall and photograph them with a digital camera. ( not a great quality way of doing it, but it is one way.)

Lastly, if you actually have a slide scanner, use that.

If you have any questions about the parameters and setting about any of those ideas, let me know. I will gladly explain in greater detail. You will just need to let me know what kind of software you have. (if you need the answer quickly, let me know, I have to get my groove on and go and pick up my daughter.)”

“I think we have one here at work. I will try on monday!

thanks for your help.

if not then i might have to go to a photo shop”

“Staples may be able to do it!”

“just take a small flash light and direct in between the white box....

Someone you know must have a scanner that can handle slides. It is pretty common.”

“A regular scanner won't work. Some have a seperate light in the lid that you expose by taking the inner cover off to scan slides or film.

CompUSA has one for $50 after rebates.”

“hmm, I can't log into Trail Talk with netscape. Now I have to use explorer.

Anyone knows what the problem is? Just happend, never had this problem before.”

“anyone?”

“Cookie problem maybe?”

“hmmm... let me delete them to see.”

“duhh!!! thanks :) Netscape blocked the cookies all of a sutton, not sure why. I haven't changed anything.

it's fixed now.
I hope IE comes up with a new browser, I really like the tabs in netscape.”

“Anyone know if a GeForce 2 graphics card will support DirectX 9.0?”

“I need help... I've got a virus, of some sort, i'm not sure.

First off, i can't open task manager it tells me that it has been disabled by my administrator?? I am the administrator on this computer.

Second, i can't run certain utility programs, they open and then dissappear.

and third, something happened to my yahoo messenger, it usually remembers my password, but it no longer does... and instead of showing up as little dots when i type it, it shows up as the actual word.

what does this mean? and what should I do?”

“Go to: http://housecall.trendmicro.com/ and let them scan your computer for FREE. Very rep company & many gov employee's use it. PC-Cillin from Trend is the best.”

“I ran that housecall thing... didn't come up with anything.

I believe it was a .scr file extension that contained the virus, or whatever is on my computer right now. Anybody?

How do i regain control of my task manager?”

“I would be concerned, since the description says it is a password stealing trojan. Hopefully it just got your yahoo messenger password and nothing else.”

“yeah... that's what i'm hoping.... i'm working on clearing it up, the jackass is holding a conversation with me right now”

“The guy that stole your password is holding a conversation with you?”

“sorry. I'll knock it off.”

“thanks violin, you threw me for a spin there.

and yes, the guy that stole my password was talking to me, telling me he had control and everything...”

“That's pretty bold of him. I'd tell him he picked the wrong person to hack, how you aren't real familiar with "this email machine, I only use it to talk to my brother way out there in Callyforn eye a, it's the darnedest thing". Anyway, good luck.”