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Computer help needed!

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18:06 / 08.05.06

Cheers.
I found handbrake and am giving it a little test.
Does it normally take 15+ hours?

julius has no imagination

21:01 / 08.05.06

Depends - what sort of Mac are you running on? Handbrake usually takes that long on mine, certainly, and I've got a three-year-old iBook. Still, the results look good and I just leave it running overnight.

(Incidentally, what exactly are you encoding into? Being a fan of open, standard formats, I always like using true MPEG-4, which plays in QuickTime as well as the usual free players.)

00:38 / 29.05.06

Help!

For unknown reasons, my computer has decided (only in Internet Explorer) to change the font to BOLDED Times New Roman. It's very ugly and unreadable and bold tags can't be noticed....

The problem for me is that this computer only has options and all that in Korean. The menus and everything are in the same spots as English Windows,

...so if someone could tell me what buttons to click on to get the readable font back I would be very very thankful...

02:22 / 29.05.06

Aaah! Now all the fonts in Word are gone! All the fonts are still in the windows/font directory! How do I get Word to find them there?

03:09 / 29.05.06

oops - julius - didnt notice your reply.

Yeah. I've been using mp4 a lot as it's more up to date and can handle the excellent h.264 nicely. I think the h.264 is what was causing the whole thing to take so much time, as well.

I've also been looking into the matroska container (.mkv) as it's open source (always a bonus) and can handle pretty much anything inside it. It's great for foreign films as you can have more than one audio or subtitle track in any file. You can combine different kinds of audio too so that the commentary (for example) can be nice and low bitrate and small .ogg, and the main audio left in .ac3. So i've been making matroska files with h.264 video and different kinds of audio. Unfortunately it's command-line only at the moment, and you have to use something else (like ffmpegx) to encode all the a/v. Quicktime support is lacking at the moment too, which is a bummer for fans of FrontRow.

But if i'm just ripping one of my dvd series, i'll tend to use handbrake with .mp4 for ease of use and queueing capabilities (like you say - just set it up and leave it on all night.) If i could figure out how to do multiple sub tracks and more than 2 audio tracks i could possibly be persuaded to take mpeg-4 as my preference.

05:18 / 29.05.06

Aaaaaaaaah! It's getting worse! Now the "minimize, expand, and close" buttons in the top right corner have now turned into a 0, a 2, and a r respectively and all the arrows have turned into 6s and 8s...

I've downloaded some virus scanners, but they haven't found much...

14:23 / 29.05.06

Baz - you may need to download a registry repair program (Google free registry repair). Try it - it can't hurt. Some of your main registry entries may be buggered up. Barring that, I don't know, you could try Windows repair (which sucks, but it may be your only out). Good luck.

01:13 / 30.05.06

Thanks! I think I figured out what I did. I installed that cool calendar program Rainlender (see the Wallpaper thread), not realising that it needs Windows XP.

I only have 98, so I think when I installed it, it killed something inside... I'm trying different registry fixes, but I might have to reinstall Windows or something...

10:14 / 30.05.06

I have a hardware problem, I think. It's my flatmate's PC, but I use it and I really need it at the moment 'cos I'm supposed to be job hunting.

Anyway, what happens the image suddenly blanks and the monitor goes into powersave mode. This is sometimes preceded by a weird graphical glitch of a few vertical pink lines moving with the mouse pointer.

The pc still seems to be running ok, e.g. once i was playing music when the crash happened, and the music stopped briefly but then continued.

Help please, I am going nuts.

13:06 / 30.05.06

It's likely to be either the graphics card or the monitor that's on it's way out and it'll be difficult to work out which one's causing the problem unless you have another spare monitor or gfx card to test the machine with. Sadly if this is the case then there's not a massive amount you can do, if hardware breaks then it's broken and that's really all she wrote. You could try updating the gfx card drivers, certainly it couldn't hurt at all and you might as well give it a shot just in case it is a software issue somewhere along the line.

Elijah, Freelance Rabbi

16:20 / 30.05.06

I would put my money on the graphics card having heat problems. As stated above though, there is not a lot you can do for that short of replacing the card. You MIGHT try running the machine with the side panel removed to allow a bit more air flow.

14:21 / 04.06.06

Thanks guys. We swapped in another graphics card and everything's good. Except that the new card has its own long running fault of horizontal dark lines, derived from what's onscreen. kind of smeary is the only way that I can describe it.. Not unusable, just annoying.
Any ideas on that?

14:30 / 04.06.06

First pass as always would be to update the drivers in case it's just an odd software glitch.

20:17 / 06.06.06

So i can't get on google, or yahoo, or apple.com...

And I'm confused. Cos i can get on barbelith, and a lot of other sites.

Did the devil do it?

Has he eaten google?

Elijah, Freelance Rabbi

21:01 / 06.06.06

When you cannot connect to certain sites but everything is normal on others that is sometimes a DNS router issue at your ISP.

Try browsing to:

64.233.187.99

With nothing before or after it.

21:23 / 06.06.06

wow. how did you know that?
Is that the 'secret google'?

23:20 / 06.06.06

He's a profit, he knows these things.

Elijah, Freelance Rabbi

23:22 / 06.06.06

In short:

Everything on the internet is at an adress somewhere between 1.1.1.1 and 255.255.255.255

There are ranges that the internet does not use which are reserved for private networks (home or business).

The main function of your internet service provider is letting you type in google.com and having it redirect you to the address. Sometimes part of that functionality breaks down temporarily and that is when you can get to some sites but not others.

Since the address worked then it is likely an issue on your providers side of things and will likely clear up shortly, since more people then just you will be having the problem.

12:40 / 07.06.06

To add to Elijah's advice, if you find yourself unable to access any particular website, you can check the direct IP link by going to Start, Run, type cmd, and hit return to put yourself into a DOS shell.

Type ping X where X is the domain (say barbelith.com), and hit return.
If you can connect to the IP of that domain, you'll see a series of connections, each of which starts with Reply from X.X.X.X where X is part of the IP address.

If you go to any browser (IE, Firefox, etc.), and type that X.X.X.X into the address bar, you should be able to connect directly to the site, without the need for a domain name.

21:07 / 07.06.06

I dunno if .trampetunia's problems solved now but sometimes this problem can be spyware-related. I've seen spyware that hijacks your HOSTS file on Windows and puts in redirects to another site for some of the bigger sites on the net like Google et al. This means that everytime you try and hit said sites using the URL (e.g. www.google.com) your machine looks up the HOSTS file first (which Windows always does anyway) then hits the fake redirect and ends up pointing at some bullshit ad site. And those kind of sites sometimes don't last for long leaving nowt in their place so you get redirected to a null webpage depending on how 'old' the spyware was when you contracted it. Of course if you bang the direct IP address into your browser you can still view any site properly because Windows doesn't need to do a lookup on the URL first thus bypassing the spyware.

Anyway, it's easy enough to check this out, open the file:

C:\Windows\system32\drivers\etc\HOSTS

and see what's in there. An unifected system should only have the following in there so if you see anything else you've likely got problems:

[b]
# Copyright (c) 1993-1999 Microsoft Corp.
#
# This is a sample HOSTS file used by Microsoft TCP/IP for Windows.
#
# This file contains the mappings of IP addresses to host names. Each
# entry should be kept on an individual line. The IP address should
# be placed in the first column followed by the corresponding host name.
# The IP address and the host name should be separated by at least one
# space.
#
# Additionally, comments (such as these) may be inserted on individual
# lines or following the machine name denoted by a '#' symbol.
#
# For example:
#
# 102.54.94.97 rhino.acme.com # source server
# 38.25.63.10 x.acme.com # x client host

127.0.0.1 localhost
[/b]

21:13 / 07.06.06

Gah! HTML not UBB you twat.

*slaps self*

11:39 / 08.06.06

Wow. Cheers for the advice.

It seems like elijah's advice was on the ball.

Running OS X, so spyware isn't much of a worry really.

Thanks tho!

13:02 / 08.06.06

I have a computer question.

The other day, out of the blue, my Mac Powerbook's keyboard suddenly stopped being a keyboard and turned into a machine for creating random streams of numbers and spaces.

Like, "k" became "5" and "o" became "2" and the number keys became blanks, along with most of the other keys.

Of course, when this happened, there was no way to type in any administrator passwords or anything. I could use the cursor to select chunks of text and edit menus to copy & paste, but couldn't Command-click or Cntrl-click.

It fixed itself after I held the power button down for a long, long time and restarted the machine.

What happened? What do I do if it happens again?

Elijah, Freelance Rabbi

13:41 / 08.06.06

I'm at work so I don't have a Mac in front of me grant, but on my fiances powerbook there is a CTRL function which remaps your keyboard so you can touch type number enties like you would on a full sized number pad. We didn't know about it until the cat did it for here while she was working and it freaked her out.

I don't remember what the command was, but I would assume that is what happened.

13:48 / 08.06.06

Really trifling computer related question: I’ve lost one of the little grey feet on my iBook. Is there anywhere you can get replacements?

14:06 / 08.06.06

OK, what you do is, you find a central London starbucks, then you crouch behind one of the sofas with a periscope and a frosting spatula...

Elijah, Freelance Rabbi

14:25 / 08.06.06

According to a quick reading of a few forums if you call Apple they will send you more rubber feet. Also you could hit up an Apple store if there is one in your nearby.

As far as Biz's suggestion, thats how I got my iBook in the first place...

14:50 / 08.06.06

Oh, thanks people. I had a glance around my local Apple store, but couldn't see them. I'll go back and ask.

15:20 / 08.06.06

I don't remember what the command was, but I would assume that is what happened.

God, that's some brilliant functionality. I'm sure that's what happened -- substitute "baby" for "cat" in that scenario.

15:22 / 08.06.06

And, lest there be doubt, yourockyourock!

09:48 / 16.06.06

I need a new memory card. I’ve been told to get an ECC Dual Channel Memory DDR2 400MHz card but it’s ludicrously expensive (£95 for 512MB). There’s a DDR2 card on the Dixons website for only £28 (also 512MB) but it’s 533MHz and Non-ECC.

I want at least 512MB and I know it needs to be a DDR2 but would 533MHz be compatible? And can I ignore the “ECC Dual Channel Memory” bit?

11:25 / 16.06.06

You need to be very careful with RAM as what you can and can't put in your machine is basically set in stone by the requirements of the motherboard and sticking random strips of RAM is unlikely to work. The safest bet is to always put in the same spec of RAM as what you've currently got in there and just never deviate from that so whatever you've currently got, that's exactly what you're looking for now.

As for places to go, for God's sake don't go to a high street electrics retailer for tech equipment, it's madness. They make a career out of screwing people in those places and Dixons are one of the worst offenders. Check somewhere like Dabs or eBuyer online for much better prices as £100 for a 512MB stick of RAM is frankly utterly laughable.

11:41 / 16.06.06

IM - First, to save confusion in places like Dixons, it's just "memory" - a memory card is the thing you put in the camera and store photos on.

Is the machine you're trying to replace the RAM in a workstation or a server? ECC RAM is RAM that checks for errors before it sends data - it's a bit slower and much more epensive than the normal type that you can get. However, if that's what you've already got in your machine, and you want to add to what's there, or that's all your computer's motherboard will take, then that's what you have to get. You can't mix ECC and non-ECC RAM in the same motherboard at the same time.

You should check what you have in your machine already, as Bamba said, but you should also find out if your machine is capable of running in dual channel mode (most modern PCs are). If that's the case you need two similar DIMMs (memory modules) instead of the one.

As to the speed, as long as it's not a laptop, it shouldn't be too much of a problem. The system will just step down to the speed of the slowest RAM fitted.

What machine/motherboard it is you're talking about? That would go along way to answering some of the questions. Websites like crucial.com also have tools to help you choose the right version of their memory for your machine.

13:08 / 16.06.06

Thanks for the replies so far.

You should check what you have in your machine already, as Bamba said, but you should also find out if your machine is capable of running in dual channel mode (most modern PCs are). If that's the case you need two similar DIMMs (memory modules) instead of the one.

I had two 256MB strips in my machine. One of them is faulty and needs to be replaced. I’ve got a desktop, 18 months old, Dell Dimension 4700.

I just found a 512MB DDR2 ECC one for £60. But it’s 533MHz – do you think I could combine it with the existing 400MHz strip?

15:13 / 16.06.06

£100 for a 512MB stick of RAM is frankly utterly laughable.

I’ve been thinking about beefing up my G4 iBook and that is exactly how much the Apple Store tells me I need to spend. Could I get a compatible stick elsewhere considerably cheaper?

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