Computer help please

“I love my kids.... Let me just start out by saying that. But I love my 24 inch monitor too, just in other ways.... Is there any way to repair magnet damage to a monitor? Let's get technical, I can open the case, I do know how to discharge a monitor. After that I don't know. Please help.”

“Did you try degaussing it? Sometimes there's a button on the monitor's control panel to do just that.”

“Don't know about this, but supposedly this is a cure:

http://www.woil.ws/fixmonitor/”

“That's essentially a degaussing. If the monitor looks like some of the really bad ones on that page, you may need to use a degaussing ring, as the built-in degausser on the monitor won't be enough to do the trick.”

“My first thought was sinking the drill bit into the monitor screen! :-)”

“I might as well chime in with my computer question here. I recently bought a cheap e-machine to replace my old Compaq. However the diskette drive on the Compaq is corrupted (can't get it to work, plus it would take dozens of diskettes to copy all the files I want), it doesn't have a CD burner, and I had a lot of art files on it that I still need. We have a router that my son has hooked to his xbox so he can play games in his room, and I was wondering if I got a USB-to-USB cable & connected the old box to the new one, if my new computer would be able to see the files on the old one. Anyone have any advice on this? I don't want to spend the money on a cable if this is a hopeless case.”

“Are you running Windows XP on both? If so: http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/using/setup/expert/crawford_november12.mspx”

“no my old computer is running Windows 98. Does that make a difference? I think it has some kind of network software on it but I never used it for anything.”

“I know you can transfer files over a serial cable with Windows 98. It's just been too long for me to remember.

Geeks?
last edited: 7/19/05 5:21:30 PM”

“omhahiker,
Just take out your hard drive and plug it in to your new case. You can use the old drive for extra storage even. It's not hard, and there's very little chance that you'll do damage to your computer even if you mess up, so go for it.

If you're having trouble, you can buy an external hard drive enclosure that hooks up via USB for $20 give or take.”

“if both machines have a network adapter integrated on the motherboard or a network card installed. Go buy a network cross over cable. Set up both machines to share files, then move the files from 98 to XP.”

“Get a Jump Drive that you can plug into the USB port. Copy your files to it and then plug it into the other computer.

http://www.supermediastore.com/supermediastore/lexar-usbflashdrive.html
Shop around, Office Depot sometimes have them cheaper.”

“DocNice, would your advice involve any soldering or is it just a remove-the-screws-and-slide-in kind of procedure? I want to keep the old computer & take it out to my store to tweak & print photos (after deleting most of the programs & files on it). Soldering is something I would not want to do...

Thanks everyone for the suggestions so far, I am a programmer but not a hardware/network person. How would a network cable be labeled in a store? And I have never heard of a Jump Drive. What do those cost?”

“I like StoveStomper's suggestion best. You can get a 512MB drive for about $30 on sale.

Go to http://www.salescircular.com/ , select your state and look under "USB Storage".

They are very handy to have for carrying around work, music, photos...”

“one large hammer”

“Swapping the hard drive can get messy, especially with older machines that don't have the auto-selector between master and slave.

I think the simplest solution is to pick up one of those USB "thumb" drives with like 128 MB of RAM (storage space) or so -- I don't think they're too expensive, and you can move your files that way.

Here's a good one that doesn't need any drivers. Just plug it into an available USB slot and it creates a drive letter on your machine you can copy files to. Then plug it into the other computer and you can copy the files from the drive letter it creates there.”

“PhantomSoul, that looks like a good & cheap option. Do you think it would work if I plugged it into my Windows 98 machine? Have you used this yourself?”

“Sometimes, on Windows 98, you have to install drivers to get the thumb drives to work, regardless of whether they say they need drivers or not. I had to do this to get my thumb drives to work on a Windows 98 box I have. But it's an easy task.”

“...for hijacking his thread. I hope someone can help him too. I love my kids too but they were the reason I had to buy a new computer. Too much downloading on my dinosaur machine & it just wouldn't perform anymore.
last edited: 7/19/05 8:29:52 PM”

“Yeah, it'll work on the Windows 98 machine. You may have to install a driver on it, but the software comes with the thumb drive along with instructions for what to do with it.

As for the 5.x Windows machines (Windows 2000/XP), they already have generic USB drivers installed that will enable the thumb drive on them.”

“What pakratz said about the crossover cable and the sharing the entire drive you want to copy from.

A USB thumb drive would also work....it's just not quite as convenient for transferring a large amount of data (anything over the thumb drive's capacity).”

“Those of us who remember having to use 16 of these:



to back up a 640MB disk drive (that was half the size of a washing machine) have a different definition of "convenient", lol...”

“I remember.”

“For a short time, my life revolved around those friggin' things.”

“Anyone know how I can fix my computer’s cup holder?
”

“The first computer I ever wrote a program on

Only we didn't have the fancy-dancy floppy drives, we used a cassette tape for backup.”

“One of these washing machines?



That was back in my college days.”

“Bitpusher stirred some memories of storage:



All the way back to the Hollerith 1890 Census Tabulator.
Paper Tape.
And, of course, there was
last edited: 7/20/05 9:32:09 AM”

“Ah, those great days.”

“Yet another old classic war story.

It seems that there was a certain university that was doing experiments in behavior modification in response to brain stimulation in primates. They had this monkey with a number of electrodes embedded in it's brain that were hooked up to a PDP-11. They had several programs that would stimulate different parts of the monkey's brain, and they had spent over a year training the monkey to respond to certain stimuli.

Well, eventually the PDP developed problems, and field service was called in. Due to some miscommunication, the field service representative was not informed of the delicacy of this particular setup, and the people running the experiment were not informed that field service was coming to fix the machine. The FS representative then booted up a diagnostic system I/O exerciser. After several minutes of gyrations, the monkey expired, its brain fried.

The moral, of course, is "Always mount a scratch monkey."”

“And, of course, there was Paper Tape”

“When I was 15, I was in a computer club formed by IBM in Tulsa Oklahoma...Learning to use punch cards, and programing using FORTRAN and COBOL...(Shoulda made a killing during Y2K...but stayed with the US Gov instead).”

“Remember when we had to use these things?

”

“Ah, yes, SuperTroll. Tulsa and memories of Boston Ave.(1962-3). And no bars in Oklahoma! BYOB to private(?) clubs and buy it back drink by drink.”

“From: daemon@felix.UUCP (The devil himself)
Subject: How many floppies can you put in a drive?
Date: 10 Feb 89

I once worked at a company that released a version of UNIX on a series of seven floppies for installation on micros. These micros tended to be sold into doctor's and lawyer's offices where there were never any computer literate folk (and thevendors were always scarce when the end users needed them).
Hence we had many amusing phone calls on our 800 line placed by secretaries trying to load UNIX.

One afternoon the following awaited us on our return to lunch:

"I'm following your instructions exactly, and I am still having a problem. I have placed floppies 1 through 6 into the floppy drive, but I can't stuff floppy 7 in no matter how hard I try!"

Our directions said "Insert next floppy". We forgot to say "Remove floppy and insert the next".

We spent the rest of the afternoon seeing how many floppies we could stuff into a floppy drive.”

“Wow, bringing back some memories.

Almost my first computer (I got the later "4A" model): http://www.old-computers.com/history/detail.asp?n=54&t=3

Almost my second computer (I got the later 130XE model not mentioned): http://www.old-computers.com/history/detail.asp?n=46&t=3

Better marketing and management and the Atari line would have killed the IBM PC. Ataris were much more advanced than PCs at the time.

I still have my old TI and Atari.”

“WOOHOO!!!!! Tech, it worked. I was skeptical and worried I might make it worse but the monitor is almost back to normal. I don't want to rush it so I am taking it slow. I never like to degauss a monitor repeatedly so I gave it five treatments last night over the course of a few hours and will do a few more today and it should be back to normal.”

“Glad to hear that worked out, squirrelbait. I'll have to remember that myself if I ever need it. I have 2 young kids, so you never know...

LCD and other monitor technologies are quickly overtaking the old tube tech. I'm sure my current TVs and monitors will be the last tube-based displays I ever own. So this may soon be a lost art.”

“I think so, but they are cheaper for now. I got the monitor for free because it was being disposed of in favor of LCD. I have two others that I need to repair to get them working.”

“Can I jump in here now with a I'm-computer-illiterate question?

For work I have to send in large files via email attachments. Since I have dial-up, this can take a while. Last night I sent in a file around 1 a.m. then went to bed. It usually takes 20 to 30 minutes to send from my outbox. This morning at 8 a.m., it still showed that it was in my outbox and that I had lost my connection at some point. So I reconnected and let it go. Around 9:30 my office called me to tell me to stop sending the file. They had received it over 40 times. WTF??? It never showed that it had left my outbox. How do I fix that?”

“Which email program are you using? Outlook Express?”

“oh boy, that's a hard question. I use msn. Does that answer it? I hear people talk about OE, but I don't really know what that means. (I am pathetic, I know)”

“Can someone more familiar with MSN help Ruby out?”

“Poor Ruby! You are lost. ;-)

Please go to your mail program and tell us what is showing on the very first line at the top of your monitor.

If you are using Outlook, it will read something like "Inbox- Microsoft Outlook".
last edited: 7/20/05 11:29:33 AM”

“MSN Mail - Inbox - Offline - MSN Explorer



FYI, unless it was inadvertant, I have done nothing at all to my email settings, etc. I think some evil person virused me.”

“That's not MSN Hotmail is it????
Is it Web Based like Yahoo Mail?
last edited: 7/20/05 11:40:20 AM”

“Yes, I think it is.”

“I quit using Hotmail a long while back.
Sorry, can't help you with current problems.”

“oh well. So what program do you all recommend using? I need to change anyway.”

“The person who virused you was Bill Gates, who insists on distributing his crappy software (that does weird stuff on occasion) through free portals.

That said, I use Outlook Express because it came with my computer. Mozilla is free, but you sorta have to be tech-savvy to set it up.

Are you wanting to change email providers altogether, Ruby? I dunno if MSN will let you use another program to get your MSN email.”