COMPUTER HELP!!

“I have an older Dell (OptiPlex GX110) and the fan is on a pivot that swings up so you can get to things behind it. I'm not sure if your computer is the same, but it may be worth looking at.”

“On one of my computers I have to unscrew the power supply from the frame to get to the memory slots behind it. Glad I don't swap out memory often.”

“so anyone know what a Cylinder Limitation jumper (CLJ) is??

I know a jumper, and i saw the diagram, so I know the jumper is different from the CLJ...”

“Cylinder Limitation is used when the operating system or BIOS cannot use a drive larger than a certain size. Don't use it unless your computer doesn't see the drive...
The cylinder limitation jumper basically causes the hard drive capacity to appear smaller to the system BIOS in order to eliminate the problems that occur when the BIOS is unable to detect a hard drive larger than 32GB.”

“thanks, I don't need to use it then.
Never heard of it. Always thought it's a formating issue.

I think it's time to invest in updated computer books.”

“Hey gem what cindy said about CLJ
As for how to add memory if you give me the model number of your Dell I'll see what I can dig up for ya :)”

“thanks!!!

it's the dell dimension 8100. I can't remember when I bought it, I think it was about 2 or even more years ago.

I opened it up, and the whole fan and even the electric box is in a green (or was it blue?) plastic casing. right almost behind it are the memory bank. (in front of the mem bank are the slots where the cd rom, hard drive, etc.. is located.

a really stupid design.”

“Does the whole unit maybe slide out?”

“My sucky Dell Optiplex--the whole thing slides out. There's a release lever at the bottom of the tower.”

“I haven't forgot about ya lady, just had a hectic few days at work....I should get home fairly early tonite...hopefully I can find some answers for ya :-)”

“hey...I just appriciate the help, so take your time :)”

“You have mail :)
oh and next time
DON'T BUY A DELL!!!!!
lol”

“What's wrong with Dell? I bought my computer 4 years ago and haven't had a single hardware problem.”

“nothing actually unless you wanna upgrade or replace something....
they are a real PAIN to work on!”

“I guess it depends on the model. Mine has been real easy to work on. Most of the unit slides right out of the housing so I have access to most every thing from all sides. When I doubled the RAM on it, it almost took longer for me to take the chip out of the shipping box than it was to install it into the computer.”

“UPluver...I haven't received any mail... :( where did you send it to?”

“I've got a Dell and it's been no problem to work with. Of course, I got a mid-tower model. If you get one of the smaller cases (and doesn't the Optiplex fall in that category?) you can expect it to be hard to work in.

One thing I did notice about my dell was the lack of a case fan. There's a CPU fan of course, Pentiums have to have one (CPU's didn't used to have to have a fan, you know, not even a heatsink) but no case fan, so I liberated a case fan from one of my old, gutted boxes and put it in there to move the air around a little.”

“Can I ask another computer question since I see that there is someone out there that seems to know something about computers?
My XP computer will not get past the screen that says it was shutdown improperly and wants to either boot in safe mode, or normal or something else. Any selection comes back to that screen. I don't like windows!!!! The disk that came with the comp. says that it will format the drive and reinstall XP. I would like to get some stuff off of the computer without reformating the drive. Can anyone help???”

“Take the drive out of your computer, install it as the slave drive in another computer, and copy off the files you want. Then put the drive back into your computer as the master, reformat it, and reload XP.

Also, there are probably businesses in your area that will help you retrieve the data from your hard drive for a fee. Check the Yellow Pages.”

“I am on my 3rd hard drive with my 4 year old Optiplex. Just bought one from a local place that has been in business for a long time.”

“OK, so one of my wife's friends knows I do computers, and tells my wife she's having problems with hers. It won't do anything, she says, and I can't get my email.

So she brings it to my wife, who brings it home. I set it up, power it on, do a virus scan and a spyware scan, and it seems to be pretty much okay. I take it back over to her house and she meets me at the door in a slinky black negligee oops, no, I mean, I set the computer back up at her workstation, and turn it on. It boots up, pops an error message up on the screen, and immediately shuts down. Oh boy I think, Sasser worm. But wait. It didn't do this at my place, and it doesn't make any sense at all that the virus would work here and not at my house. So I look over her setup and see what she's got. I notice they have a UPS, and yes, sure enough, they have a serial line from the UPS to the computer to tell the computer to shut down when the UPS is almost out of power. I unplug the serial cable, turn on the system, and voila! it boots and works normally. Apparently, the UPS died and kept telling the computer to shut down.

I asked her why they had a UPS. Hell, I don't have one and I do this for a living. She said the salesman at the store told them it was an absolute necessity. I told her that was BS, that all they really needed was a good surge protector, not a UPS. It made her even more disgusted about the computer. But she was grateful that I had fixed her computer, and immediately called my wife to let her know what a genius I was.”

“They call people that know about computers 'amazing brainiacs', bitpusher. ;-)”

“Hey, I need all the people I can get calling my wife and telling her I'm a genius.”

“lz & bit - I imagine it does depend on the model and to be honest I've only worked on 3 or 4 of them but they were all a pain!!
I think I ended up having to buy Dell parts for every one of them to get them to work right...well all except one of them...I decided it was cheaper to just build a new one than to replace a Dell motherboard :)
But then again maybe I'm just to picky cause I don't like Packard Bells or Compaqs either....lol”

“If you can get your hands on a regular XP installation disk....not your restore disk!! you can reinstall windows without losing all your other data...if not you're either gonna have to do what bit suggested or depending on where in IN you're at bring it to my house :-)”

“I tried to connect as slave on other computer. Would not recognize the second drive. Checked jumpers, cables. Messed with it some last night and am thinking that the drive is dead.
Gonna boot it out a window.”

“But then again maybe I'm just to picky cause I don't like Packard Bells or Compaqs either....lol"
UPluver
10:33:49 PM
09/02/04

Want to by a Comcrap Laptop Paper weight. The power supply burned out in it and it was cheaper for me to by a new computer than it was to fix it.”

“by = buy”

“LOL....no thanks lz, I have a whole house full of paperweights!!”

“hey upluver!! thanks for the pdf file. Helped alot.

who in the check likes packard bells and compaqs anyway? pleaaazzzeeee!!!”

“Gem - welcome :)
And I gotta tell ya...I have ppl ask me to fix their Compaqs all the time....maybe I just need to hang out with a smarter group of ppl??? LOL”

“I also have a Packard Bell 486 75Mhz, with a whopping 16MB of RAM and 560MB HD, sitting at home collecting dust. It has an original copy of Windows 95 on it. The funny thing is, this computer still works.”

“lz- I remember when I first got a PB 486 66 with 16 meg ram and like a 340 meg hd
I thought that was the greatest thing ever ... lol”

“How come my cousin, Bones and I can not share a computer? If he logs on then my window switches to his information.

It's bad enough I have a slow connection to TT but this "problem" seems like a specific TT issue, no?”

“One word...cookies. Of course, I am assuming that you are talking about your TT login.

If you are talking about another person sharing your computer, you should have separate computer accounts and that will keep your cookies separate.

Don't mix your cookies.”

“when you log off, the cookies will default to the last user that was logged in. This is the most common means of a troll outing hisself accidentally.”

“or you can always "log off" the website.. so it won't matter WHO is using the puter.”

“I've lost all my bookmarks in Netscape.

• The file, "bookmarks.html," does not show in a search.
  
• A search for "bookmarks," did not yield anything significant, except an old list that was saved a few years ago by one of my daughters.
  
• My Recycle Bin is empty.
  
• In IE, which I used to use, the Favorites are still there. That list was one of the bookmarks in Netscape.
  
• A text search for "Duluth," a word in one of the bookmarks, did not yield anything signigicant.

I did have some problems during the past two days.
1. My road runner (cable) went out, slowly, for an hour or so. I say slowly, because I was able to do a few things with long delays before it went out completely.
2. I brought IE into play and got lots of pop-ups, etc. and after trying to delete them, I ended up having to shut down the system and restart. I quit using IE a year or more ago because of problems with it, but have used it a few times recently with only minor problems.
3. After the above problems I ran Spybot and Ad-aware.

Is there any way to restore the list of bookmarks? Thanks.”

“Oops, I should have read your whole message. Sorry.
last edited: 11/19/04 9:27:49 AM”

“My computer was "in the shop." It came home and all of a sudden had desktop icons for -- OMG, coincidence??!?! > SPYBOT AND AD-AWARE!

Are they shareware or what?”

“Yep. Well, someone said that Spybot was recently bought out, so it may not be shareware anymore. But adware and spyware are such big problems now that I would imagine any computer shop would install and run them simply as a matter of course.”

“Does anyone know haw to totally wipe a hard drive clean? I am trying to wipe everything off so that I can start over on an older computer.”

“I remember once doing an fdisk in DOS and wiping the operating system off”

“Check out this page, Lt. It looks to have a pretty good breakdown of what you need to do.”

“Thanks”

“Oh #&%!$ now it say operating system not found and my windows disk won't boot”

“Is the BIOS set up to ever boot from the floppy? I think with some of the new BIOS's you can set them such that they will never check the floppy drive. Boot into the BIOS and check the settings. Personally, I would set it to check A:, then C:.”

“Help”

“How do I get to the Bios? And it is a CD not a floppy, it doesnt have a floppy”

“Ah, then it may be set up to not boot from the CD.

Usually you access the BIOS by rebooting the computer and pressing F1 during the bootup. A lot of new computers don't say anything during the boot, which sucks. Do you still have the documentation?”