Quality of the computer is hard to say. All OEM machines use lower cost parts to make machines affordable. Any of them can crap out at any time. I think you would get better support from HP or Dell however. It is up to you which way to go but of the 3 I would personally go with HP.

My school bought new HP laptops and they are absolutely terrible. They are an absolute nightmare to work on and the build quality is low. The service from HP themselves was pathetic, although these laptops were fresh off the line. My brother bought a Dell like 10 years ago and it was okay (but had proprietary memory), and I have a Dell laptop for work and it is a piece of shit, so I don't like them either.

I've had good experiences with Acer, but not in the whole computer scene. I have no idea what their support would be like. If you really think support is important, then go with a Dell. I'd just post the details here before you buy so someone can tell you if you're getting ripped off.

If you're going to go with a laptop for general use, stick with Lenovo. They still make great machines and their service is better than most. I have to agree with Herring. We just switched to HP laptops from Lenovo and they are pieces of shit although the older generation HP's we had weren't bad. I was able to take home an old nx7010 that was going to be tossed and it works great. In fact that's the laptop I put Win7 on and its got no issues. Actually now that I think about it that model may be a holdover from the Compaq line. It came out around the time both companies merged so its possible.
I'm salivating for when the T61's we have are ready to be taken off the line.

Rick, you know of any app that will allow me to make an image of a cdrom then load it to a virtual drive? Wanna take a game or two with me for my flight but don't want to carry the discs.

Imgburn can make an image of the disc and you can use Daemon Tools Lite to mount it.

But be aware that some games use copy protection that prevents them from being loaded in a virtual drive and require the physical cd media. Daemon Tools can emulate some of the copy protection schemes to fake out the game so it thinks it is phyiscal media. But it doesn't always work. Check out www.gamecopyworld.com for a no cd/dvd hack for whichever game you want to use.

Ok, situation:

-Doing a power point slide for a presentation

-Did it in school's library and saved it
-sent it to my e-mail to then work on it at home

-At home i have Presentations, which is a different Powerpoint but nonetheless it opens PP slides

-I save the PPslides on my PC from my e-mail.

-I cannot open the file because it is a .pptx

-What the hell does a .pptx mean?

-I always opened .ppt files

-Help
-please

You used Office 2007 at school (file extensions .docx, .pptx, .xlsx, etc.), and the program that you have at home is older. Look on Microsoft's website for file converters.

Sed is correct. MS Compatibility Pack. Download and install. Now you mentioned you don't use PowerPoint so I don't know if this will work with your specific program. It should. But may not. Worst case scenario if you can't get it to work and do not have PowerPoint, download Open Office(free) and the compatibility pack with work with that and allow you to open the .pptx

They actually had to push the compatibility pack out to us at work, since all of the library and classroom machines have Office 2007 but most of the faculty machines are still running Office XP, or 2003 at best.

Mille grazie!

When I open up the Task Manager, RRT is a running application. Although, it appears, it is not using any of the system's resources. Do you guys know anything about this? Good? Bad?

I did a search, albeit a very brief one. I didnt find anything to be very substantive. But, like i said, i didnt look too hard. It appears to be a Malware Removal Tool, though i dont recall ever downloading it.

While typing this post, I decided to look in my system tray, and what do ya know? A little icon for RRT is staring me in the face. It stands for Remove Restrictions Tool.

I dont recall if i purposely downloaded this, or if i clicked the wrong thing while watching porn. Anyone have any info?

It is malware related, however there are mixed opinions on it. Download, install, update, and run MalwareBytes. Remove any problems it detects. A quick scan is usually sufficient for most problems. A full scan will take an eternity to complete.

Every time I go to restart my computer it goes into the nVidia Boot Driver and gives an error message "PXE-E61: Media Test Failure" and then gives a GUID and other codes and just hangs there, doesn't do anything. I figured out a way around this by then shutting off the computer, unplugging all my external drives (5 of them), turning it back on, then I don't get the hang screen and it boots into Vista normally. Then when back in Vista I plug the external drives in one at a time and they all show up and work fine.

Dunno. Drives are working fine, but one of them doesn't seem to want to boot on restart... or something. Any ideas?

Sounds to me like the BIOS is trying to boot to one of the external drives. If you are comfortable mucking around in your BIOS I would go in there and check the boot order for your devices.

I need help!

About a week or 2 ago any video I watch online, youtube, hulu, etc, has been giving me problems. Anytime I watch a video, in the 1st few seconds the video will freeze for a few seconds but sound will continue and then the video pops into place. Been using firefox, latest release. I've noticed memory is fine, around 100k being used by ff, but when the glitch happens it jumps to 350-700k, depending on how many times the glitch happens during the video(which will happen a ton for every video after the 1st glitch. I've uninstalled and reinstalled flash, shockwave, ff, have the newest drivers for video and audio. Ran test and got no spyware or anything. i have no clue what's going on. Also noticed when I close FF, the firefox.exe lags and closes bout 5 seconds or so in task manager. The sound'll continue too if there was a video playing.

What he said.

Since this is the computer help thread. I am looking to buy two new 500 Gb HDD's (one for my HP PC and one for my HP network drive). Both are SATA drives. Where is the best place to buy this sort of thing? I looked at Amazon but is new egg better? Who makes the better drives these days, Seagate or WD? ANy pointers would be appreciated. Thanks.

I like Newegg - I rebuilt/upgraded my PC last year through them (with invaluable assistance from Rick) and they're very good price-wise and delivery.

I've tried a couple of different Western Digital 500-gig external hard drives in the past two or three years, usually the MyBook editions in one form or another - I've found those with USB2 or Firewire connections were unstable, especially when transferring large amounts of data at once, to the point where one drive died two weeks after I installed it (they replaced it for me, but it was frustrating as hell). I switched to the 500-gig MyBook with the eSata connection, and have had no problems (knock on wood) since then, even when copying tons of data at a time.

One of my two internal drives is a Seagate 120-gig, and it's been working great for something like 5-6 years with no hint of a problem (also kock on wood), but I have no experience with their external drives.

I hear good things from a few Lacie drive owners that I know, too.

Hope this helps a bit.

I am actually looking for internal drives (I should have specified). I was thinking about Seagate ... I will take a look at some prices. I was stupid when I bought my PC and got only a 320 gig HDD and now I have a slew of music on here I am rapidly running out of space so I need to get a dedicated drive for music and other types of media.

Click to view attachment

Just trolling through.

I use my external drives for music/media -- with the eSata connection, they're pretty fast and stable, with the added benefit of being portable, if needs be. Music will eat up storage space on a 320-gig drive really quickly -- I've currently got about 430 gigs of music on my 500-gig drive, so I'm looking at a 1-TB MyBook drive upgrade.

OMG IS THAT SNOOPY?!

Nice shirt, BTW.

A good site I use for computer hardware is http://www.zipzoomfly.com. Similar prices to Newegg, but they're based in California so there's no sales tax in NJ like with Newegg. Shipping is very cheap too.

Proof I wasn't naked with the MBP.

For a quick second when I looked at that picture, I thought the box was some sort of housing or stand for the machine. I was going to say that it looked like the Apple IIe that I learned Basic on in 1982, when I was in 4th grade.

Note: Mike still uses Bank Street Writer and a dot matrix printer to prepare legal documents.

Saved on 5 1/4" floppys, of course.

Does it work in IE or is it broke there as well?

Whats the budget? If a few bucks more isn't a big deal to you, then go for a 1Tb as they average like $15 more for double the storage. I never trusted Seagate drives. I've had 2, had issues with both. WD isn't bad. If you are using them for bulk storage and super fast read times aren't important go for a WD Caviar Green http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx...N82E16822136317

If speed is an issue then go for the WD Caviar Black for about $10 more. http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx...N82E16822136284


Occasionally they go on sale and you can save about $5.



EDIT: Got a newsletter from them this morning, the WD Caviar Black is now on sale for $89 using the coupon code EMCLTMT34 (may need to sign up for the newsletter for it to work tho)

I prefer this one

Also, when you uninstalled Flash, did you use the uninstaller from their website? Try to start FF in safe mode (Start -> Run: type in firefox -safe-mode and hit enter). Click the check box for disable addons and see if it works then. Also clean out cookies and temporary files (ATF Cleaner makes it easy to do this). See if any of that makes a difference.

This seems to have done the trick - which is odd, because I'm pretty good about running Disc Cleanup (that was even the first thing that I tried when the problem started).

I used control panel to delete them. I did disk cleanup last night. Computer gets defragged weekly. I have java disabled(read that solved the problem in a previous version) and I tried cleaning out the cookies and temp files with that program. Still get the same problem. Gonna try the safe mode now. And I'm going to watch some hulu on IE later and I'll let you know if the stutter problem is happening there.



Just tried the safe mode with addons disabled, still get the freezing/mass memory leak issue.

Use the flash uninstaller to remove it. It will work better than the control panel. http://kb2.adobe.com/cps/141/tn_14157.html

Dumb question, but you aren't having problems with a slow internet connection right? That could certainly cause problems with streaming.

Tried it, re-installed flash, still the same issue. IE plays videos fine. No problems with the internet at all.

First try to disable Java in FF. Tools -> Options -> Content uncheck the box to enable Java. Click OK then restart FF and try it.


If not then in FF go to Tools -> Addons and then click the Plug Ins tab. Disable all of them except flash and see if it works. If it does, start re-enabling one by one and testing after each one to see if there is some conflicts with any of them.

Help me, somebody.

Downloading the Ricky Gervais torrent took about 36 hours. It seems that because I have a wireless router that opening a port is difficult and time consuming because it needs to be re-done every time I re-start (unless I buy the software advertised when I click the BitTorrent help, of course).

Ugh!

What port do you need to open? Opening a port in the firewall/router is easy. Open a command prompt (Start->Run->cmd then hit enter) and type in ipconfig /all and press enter. You should see something that says default gateway. Make note that number. Now open up IE or FF and type in that number and hit enter. It will prompt you for a user/pw. If you set one up it will be that, if not then check router documentation for the default user and password. if you do not have the documentation post your make/model number and I should be able to look up the defaults for you. Now you will need to find a tab that says port forwarding. Each make uses a bit different interface so it may vary. Just poke around. In Linksys routers it is usualy under Applications/Gaming. Plug in the port you need to forward and the IP address of your machine and you are good to go.


note: you may want to setup a static ip address so it does not change in the future.

Great. I will pick up the Caviar. I gotta make sure I have all of the mounting hardware since it seems that most of the packages on this are OEM without hardware.

Yeah I should have mentioned that the cheapest drives are OEM. All you need are screws and cables though and they shouldn't be too hard to find laying around.

sigh.... no luck, even with everything off I'm still getting the same issue.

This may be a dumb question but I have not updated a hard rive in a PC since my P4 so I have no experience with SATA drives. I popped my cover off today and it looks like the SATA drive that is already in there is using a different power connector than the standard. My power supply does not have any more connectors of that type, though there are a bunch of the standard 4 pin connectors. Is this going to be an issue?

A minor issue but nothing a $2 adapter cant fix. You'll need one of these. Aslo w/ SATA you do not need to worry about any jumpers for Master/Slave. Just plug in the power and the SATA cable and you're good to go. You may see a jumper on the drive but you can ignore it. That jumper takes a SATA 3.0 drive and forces it to run at SATA 1.5 speeds. 99% of the time you wont need to worry about it, but in some rare cases the motherboard doesn't like the faster speed and can't auto adjust itself so you set the jumper.

Maybe a long shot but try the release candidate of the newest Firefox. (3.5RC1). I would recommend using MozBackup first to backup your current FF profile in case you need to go back to the older version.

Ahhhh THANK YOU!!!!! Updating it seemed to have done the trick! I'll keep you posted. Dude I owe you.



edit: FUCK the same problem is back, dammit dammit dammit

In FF go to tools -> clear private data and check off everything (warning this erases all saved passwords, history, etc.) and then click ok. It that doesn't work we will probably need to create a new FF profile, its possible it may have become corrupt somehow.

My mouse gestures are no longer compatible! ACK!! I am a man adrift at sea without them. Otherwise 3.5 is pretty nice.

Install this addon. Once installed, restart FF and then go to Tools - > Addons and then in the lower right hand side of the window you will see a button to override all compatibility. Press it. Then a new window will come up to force install your addon. If you find the forced addon causes instability you can later disable the one(s) causing problems.

Okay Rick - my turn:

I finally took the plunge and bought a macbook after using a PC for years. I have been using an external hard drive to back up my files so I'm not concerned about transferring documents, songs and pictures. But what about transferring the itunes library and all the playlists? I started to look it up online and it looked complicated to me and I'm afraid to trust it. Also, and maybe this is all related, what will happen when I plug my ipod and iphone into the mac? How do I make sure I don't lose what's on the iphone?

Thanks in advance!