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Computer help needed!

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Horus lord of force and fire

16:29 / 04.04.02

1) My new(ish) laptop has a funny keyboard - I hit the @ button and get a ", I hit the " button and get @. I can't even find the pound sign because it comes up with this when I hit the key # and random other keyboard-based abnormalities.

2) I can't save passwords, despite ticking the save password boxes and applying them.

I'm using Windows XP.

Help!

pointless and uncalled for

16:34 / 04.04.02

For number one you need to adjust your Character Map.

Possibly this will be found under the Start Button > Programs > Accessories menu. Otherwise you can use the find function from the Start Menu and search for it that way.

I have no idea about saving passwords. I've found the easiest way to remember passowrds is through use of my brain.

17:07 / 04.04.02

Number two could possibly be your Privacy settings.

Control Panel > Internet Options then the Privacy tab. If you've got it set to high your computer won't accept cookies. Could be what's causing the problem.

Horus lord of force and fire

17:28 / 04.04.02

I'm accepting all cookies.

I would really appreciate any help regarding how to use the character map to recognise and save what should appear on screen when I hit whichever key is meant to represent the said symbol.

18:01 / 04.04.02

From the sounds of it, your keyboard's set up to English (United States). That's why there's no £ available, and also why the @ is " and vice versa.

Control Panel > Regional and Language Options

The first tab has a label that says something like "Standards & formats - This affects how some programs show numbers, currency, date and time." There's a drop-down box there where you can change to English (United Kingdom).

Don't know about the passwords.

Horus lord of force and fire

22:39 / 04.04.02

Thank you Mr Dupre!

So I feel we will be moderating the forum soon!

00:01 / 05.04.02

And as an interesting aside, we call this # the pound sign in los Estados Unidos.

We don't even bother with this £ on our keyboards!

16:09 / 01.01.04

I don't know what I've done to my computer, but it seems to have got confused about where my monitor ends. In other words, although my mouse pointer stops when it reaches the top, left and bottom of the screen, it keeps travelling to the right as if my monitor were 5 or 6 inches wider. So I can kinda lose the pointer into this phantom desktop area; which although not a huge problem, is a little bit irritating. Does anyone have an idea of what might be wrong?

00:07 / 02.01.04

Dunno why but I rather enjoy answering these geeky questions. You've probably set up your desktop to extend across a second monitor, without actually plugging a second monitor in. Try fiddling in the Display control panel or something equivalent; it's probably fairly easy to find and sort out now you know what you're looking for. Hope this helps.

12:53 / 02.01.04

Good work luminocity. It appears that that's exactly what my problem was.
Thanks lots.

18:26 / 02.01.04

I've got a question for anyone who uses a Mac and uses LameBrain for their CD ripping software.

I just updated to the 0.6.2 version and for some reason I can't do batch encodings anymore. When I try drag aiff songs into the Batch window to change them to MP3s, it doesn't allow me to at all. This used to be the coolest ripping app and the best part is it's free.... but I'm having problems with it out the ass.

Anybody use this?

20:43 / 24.01.05

Help, me XP gurus, you're my only hope.
I'm normally a Mac user, and I'd have this worked out in a split second if this was happening on one, but it's happening on my HP box, running XP Service Pack 1.
The problem is this: The CD/DVD burner works intermittently at best. I've tried using the burning software that came with the 'puter, RecordNow, and XPBurner Pro, which is freeware. Neither is getting the job done. I'm not talking about the burner spitting out coasters instead of burned disks, or failed validation, the blighted thing never even gets that far. I just talked to the Service Desk at the store I pruchased the computer from and the representative suggested that I buy better burning software.

Can that be right?

Are they just trying to pass off responsibility and hopefully make another sale, or is burning software for XP really that shoddy?

21:01 / 24.01.05

No, it sounds like the drive is screwed. I use XPBurner Pro and it's a cracking bit of software; if you've tried three different packages, I'd say it's a hardware fault.

12:30 / 08.08.05

I’ve got a Trojan on my computer, so my copy of AVG Anti-Virus tells me, although it doesn’t proffer any advice on sorting it out (ominously, on the status report it says “Healable: NO”). What does this mean? What can I do? Nothing strange has happened yet, my PC still seems to be working fine. Will it inevitably fall over? Is it too late to back up all my stuff?

07:42 / 11.04.06

Can anyone help? Increasingly, over the last few months, video files downloaded from the web (from reliable sources) onto my Windows XP PC fail to open. To be more precise, they will play if I start VLC and select the file, but if I just double-click the file on my desktop, or even just open a folder the file is sitting in, I get a semi-crash: the screen will go black briefly, before returning me to my desktop. If I'm in Nero, and select the file, again, Nero crashes and I'm thrown back to my desktop.
This happens with pretty much every new video I download now.

What might be the cause of something like this? I doubt it's the file because I can download them on my Mac and they're fine. Any ideas? Could it be my hardware, malware, something my Bittorrent client is doing to the files...? Anyone?

09:40 / 11.04.06

Have you got AVG, Ad-Aware, and Spybot, and have ran them all? If so and you have 5-10 mins to spare, join this site and post up your problem in the Newbie Security Questions forum, and some people will almost definitely be able to help (it's where I always end up when I have problems, and have always had them solved. Some of the members there are Security professionals/Microsoft employees, etc.):

Antionline

09:52 / 11.04.06

Yeah, I have run AVG, Search & Destroy and I have Spyware Blaster running. Does it sound like malware to you then, Jack?

julius has no imagination

12:37 / 11.04.06

Your video file problem sounds like something's wrong with your Windows Media Player/DirectShow stuff. It sounds as if you get crashes whenever something tries to play or preview the videos through Windows' DirectShow infrastructure; they work in VLC because it does its own thing and doesn't use DirectShow. Probably a dodgy codec - did you install any codecs like DivX to make it work in the first place? Try reinstalling those, or removing them and installing different ones.

12:47 / 11.04.06

Ooh. Hopeful. I installed a bunch of codecs ages ago when I installed Kazaa Lite, but I don't *think* I've added or removed anything recently. I suppose I could have done so without realising though.
Now speak to me like I'm a bit of an idiot: Do I uninstall codecs like I would uninstall a program (are they listed along with my programs?) and where might I find a package of up-to-date codecs?

13:21 / 11.04.06

I'm not too sure about uninstalling codecs, tho i seem to remember seeing some in the add/remove programs thingy..

As for new codecs, go to www.free-codecs.com. I highly recommend the XP codec pack.

It comes with a program called 'Media Player Classic' which is basically the old-skool style windows media player with a few added functions. It can play pretty much everything and isn't the massive memory drain that the current media players can often be.

Hope that helps.

13:23 / 11.04.06

*Mwah* metro.tramp you're a star. You too, julius.
I'll try that tonight.

13:25 / 11.04.06

Does it sound like malware to you then, Jack?

I'm really not sure because they can mess up so many different things. I recently had to reinstall because something wasn't letting me access a couple of forums, and the one it did let me into, I got told I hadn't registered to view the forums once my password worked, so.....they can do all sorts of things, and I'm never really sure until I've checked with others.

13:37 / 11.04.06

Hmm. I’ll try Julius/metro’s solution first, and if that fails consider the more yucky possibilities.

Elijah, Freelance Rabbi

13:43 / 11.04.06

The other thing to do is right click on a video file, and choose "open with" and make sure the box is checked that says "Always use this program when opening files of this type" and set it to VLC, thus bypassing (hopefully) the MS player completely.

For the question posted above, find and download a program called HijackThis, it is free. After running it save a log file and post it to hijackthis.de

The sweet german site will look at the log and based on previous users input will tell you if anything is running that should not be, and then in the hijackthis program you can choose to kill it.

17:37 / 14.04.06

The XP Codec pack did the trick. Once again, thanks metro.

18:21 / 17.04.06

i seem to have deleted an important program.
how can i get it back?
i have a PC, and i deleted it using the add/remove.

you would be saving my life, and the lives of many of those nearby.

19:30 / 17.04.06

You didn't delete it then, you uninstalled it which has a different meaning. And the answer to getting it back it to reinstall it in the same you put it on the machine in the first place; download the installer from the net/stick the CD in the drive and go through the steps/whatever. And if you have no access at all to the original installer program in any medium then you're fucked basically.

19:30 / 17.04.06

You didn't delete it then, you uninstalled it which has a different meaning. The answer to getting it back is to reinstall it in the same way you put it on the machine in the first place; download the installer from the net/stick the CD in the drive and go through the steps/whatever. And if you have no access at all to the original installer program in any medium then you're fucked basically.

19:32 / 17.04.06

Apologies for the spectacularly stupid triple-post there. I'd fix it but it seems you can't actually delete or edit your own posts here? Holy shit.

19:55 / 17.04.06

You can, Bamba. Just click on 'Edit Post' and choose one of the options there (modify, delete etc). It needs to be agreed by a couple of moderators, but uncontroversial changes tend to go through pretty quickly.

21:52 / 18.04.06

That's not really editing or deleting your own posts then is it though? Which might sound annoyingly pedantic but isn't supposed to be, I'm just doing slight shock that something so trivial I take for granted everywhere else on the net is more of a, well, a hassle (for want of a better word) here. I dunno, being able to edit for grammar/spelling mistakes or delete for multiple pointless posts just seems a strange thing to have to bother moderators about. Granted there could be other more controversial reasons people would do such things but in my own experience 99.9% of editing or deleting is for such exactly such trivial stuff and isn't there a better use of mod's time than that? Although I admit that most of my casual half-cut protest here comes from a sort of existential horror at having such lack of control over my own words, especially here where a grammat mistake, for instance, could have such accidental power. Or where someone might type out something personal in the heat of the moment then click that Post button only to feel sinking dread at what they've done while hoping to hell that there's a mod around to help them remove what otherwise becomes a permanent revelation stuck up on the internet for all to see and marvel at.

I imagine I'll get my wrists slapped for not only thread-rotting here but for going off on such a Policy-esque tangent in an utterly unrelated thread but, well, so be it. I'm drunk and doing musing on something I genuinely never realised and am quite surprised by, nothing more.

ONLY NICE THINGS

22:26 / 18.04.06

We had a whole bunch of people deleting their posts to cripple threads or editing them to make contradictory claims. The moderator load is actually pretty light - I usually have about 4 tasks an hour, at a rough guess, and I moderate more fora than most. The aim of distributed moderation, among other things, is precisely to make people think about what they are writing before they post it - likewise the preview button.

22:38 / 18.04.06

It's worth pointing out that you might find other things that Barbelith does and doesn't do that you might take for granted everywhere else on the net. Some of those things are really valued by the community here.

It's really worth reading the wiki since lots of this stuff and more is covered there. If there's a gap, or if you're uncertain about anything, just ask. There's a Policy Miscellany thread in Policy & Help, and another new member has started this thread in the Convo for advice on finding your feet.

16:47 / 08.05.06

I've just ripped a few of my dvds onto my handsome new external harddrive. It seems to make sense, as i watch them on my ibook anyway, and don't have to carry them around whenever i travel..

But at the moment, they're pretty big at around 7-8 gig per dvd. And i can't play them cos they're in raw dvd format.

So i'm trying to encode them into a smaller format. A little research has shown that .mkv might be the best choice - different audio tracks, selectable subs, menus etc. But i havent managed to find any software so far.

Does anybody know of any software that can convert dvd files to .mkv for os x?

If not, what are the good xvid/avi ones?

thanks

17:19 / 08.05.06

I usually rip video from DVD using MacTheRipper and then Handbrake to put them into good quality and less than 1gb chunks. You don't retain the DVD Menus and Titles, but you can pick which language and audio options you want to be included in the file.

And with that folks, is my 1000th post. Sure next to the likes of Stoat and Haus it ain't much, but now I'm gonna go spam the Armoury forum in celebration. Psst, lemme in!

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