Sampson

Of course your BIOS is one of the better ways of telling, but you want to see what your machine is running under stress. This page will give you a lot of suggestions: http://downloads.vnunet.com/download/processor/51.html I always thought SpeedFan was pretty good. Shows what I know. So, take this with a grain of salt - Hmonitor.

As to your speed, mediacom should give you the download and upload speeds that you should expect from regular cable and High-Speed. For example Road Runner says that its regular cable is from 1500 to 5000 with an average in between depending on "traffic". Regular cable's average is 3000 to 4600. At its high speed, it is 5000 to 8000. Its average is between 5200 and 7600.

I am confused. Generally, the cable modem is connected to the router. The preferred connection is ethernet. Then, the router is connected to the computer or computers. Again, the preferred connection is ethernet. USB can be left out completely. Generally, cable modems can use both a USB connection or an ethernet connection. If your modem only has a USB connection, perhaps, you can exchange it for one that has an ethernet connection.

Your explanation is a little jumbled. Most cable modems have the ability to use either a USB or ethernet connection not both at the same time. Your ethernet driver is governed by the maker of either the onboard ethernet or your ethernet card. I wouldn't use something from mediacom as your driver. Your best bet is to find out what kind of ethernet card you have and get the drivers from the maker or at worst use one from Microsoft. As to "high speed" as compared to "regular", it is not clear what you mean. Generally, "high speed" requires you to have a completely different modem from the regular modem. You can go here: http://www.speakeasy.net/speedtest/ to test the relative speed of your modem both the download and upload sides. "High speed" should exceed 5000 download and exceed 475 upload,

read this: http://www.ntcompatible.com/Resident_Evil_2_on_Winxp_t26822.html

You can try copying the Mss32.dll file from the System folder to the folder where Might and Magic reside. In addition, you may want to rethink using anything off of kazaa - how do you know that the files are not virus contaminated?

Did you look at this thread? http://www.ntcompatible.com/Dungeon_Keeper_-_Original_c10624.html

Found this which should help in using black icd: http://blackice.iss.net/product_documentation.php And it is connected to their search for problems database.

If you are on Messenger, this is one way it is done: go to Tools and then Audio/Video Tuning Wizard. Step through the configuration screens (where you can select your Web cam and adjust video settings) until you get to the screen that lets you adjust microphone volume. Drag the Volume slider to the left so that when you speak, there is no yellow or red in the Volume Indicator meter.

morgonia, look at the post above and try to install the game from your hard drive in case your CD or DVD drive's timing is off. IF it won't, it may be that a file is corrupt or there is a scratch on your CD\DVD.

Does your monitor support the Extended Display Identification Data (EDID)? Or does it have an incomplete EDID? If not, it may result in the screen going blank during system POST and boot up.

Inadvertantly Black Ice may have established a rule about your Secure Websites that you may need to change. 1. Double-click the Black Ice Defender icon in your system tray (in the lower-right hand corner of your task bar). 2. Go to the Tools menu and select Advanced Application Protection settings. 3. In the Known Applications tab, scroll through until you find the following Filenames: (your secure account or Application relating to it) IEXPLORE.EXE 4. If any of these applications have the word Terminate under the Application Control column, double-click the word Terminate and change the word to make it blank. 5. Click Save Changes and click OK.

Just to be sure - do you have .net framework installed on your machine?

Look at this thread to see how to install it from your hard drive: http://www.ntcompatible.com/sims_2_installation_t33849.html

Look at this thread to see how to install it from your hard drive: http://www.ntcompatible.com/sims_2_installation_t33849.html

What kind of graphics card are you using?

Have a look at this from Symantec: http://service1.symantec.com/SUPPORT/nip.nsf/pfdocs/2005020123585136 Then, if it doesn't help come back. Perhaps, you could detail the difficulty a little better like - did this happen immediately after you install Norton's. Do you have any other anti-virus protection, etc.

According to the specs of the game minimally you need 128 MB of video memory. Your VIA/S3G UniChrome Pro IGP has 64 MB. Now some of this it can steal from your regular memory, but not enough before it begins to crash. I'll be honest with you, it simply doesn't have enough horsepower to work the display of the game. That is why it blinks and many of the features can't maintain being displayed. Upgrading the drivers will not help. Yours is a notebook and while your onboard video is more than adequate for Excel's graphs, and probably most business oriented graphics, and solitaire or small non-intensive graphic games, it is not a game machine. And because it is a notebook, you can't install a better graphics card. Your best bet - don't mess up your notebook by trying to fool with the graphics tweaks to play this game. It would be better to go back to Wal-Mart and get a low end desktop - making sure that it has either an nVidia or ATI card AGP 4X or 8X that works with DirectX 9 (or 8.1) with at least 128 MB (and perhaps a Gig of system memory). I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but fooling with your notebook won't help to run the game; only it mess up so that it will begin crashing in programs that it is supposed to run.

First, how to check for your video adapter: Right click on your desktop (in any blank area). A tab window will appear. Click on the Settings tab. Then, click on the Advanced button. At the popup window, click on the Adapter tab - that will tell you what your onboard graphics card is. Then, click on the Properties button, and at the next popup window click on the Driver tab. That will tell you the graphic drivers you have installed. Before you go through and change anything to your drivers, go here: http://nwn.bioware.com/ This is the homepage for your game. There is also an update that you may want to install first to see if it will fix your problem.

There are some people who use nVidia cards and drivers and never see this message. It is sometimes known as the infinite loop phenomenon. As far as I know, no one has found the solution. Some install different drivers and seemingly never have another problem. Anyway, if you are up for it and want to see whether or not you can ever use the card. Be sure that the nvidia drivers are completely cleaned out of your system since the residue of old drivers will cause your machine to have problems. Go here and download Drivercleaner from Driverheaven: http://www.drivercleaner.net/ Use the program in safe mode in Windows. Put your card in, bring it up and install your drivers. Then, the fun begins - Most of the errors come up when using the Net or playing games. If you have the problem when surfing the net, what you will need to do is bring up taskmanager and watch the amount of memory that your programs are using. It seems that programs that use .net framework are the programs that sometimes conflict with nvidia drivers because they too use some .net programing. What I have found happening is that a program, like Cookie Crusher, which is usually very well behaved will for no reason blow up in its memory use from between 25,000 to 50,000 to as high as 250,000 in memory usage. When that happens "hello BSOD". In otherwords what is usually called a "memory error" is nothing other than running out of resources. Some LCD monitors require you to put software to run in the background of your machine, so that you can turn your monitor 90 degrees and the text flips to accomodate the rotation. Some of that software also causes difficulties. ATI also now requires .net to be installed, and those drivers are beginning to produce similar errors. Ultimately, this is something Microsoft needs to address. As you said, however, there are a lot of people who just take out their nVidia cards and look elsewhere.

@wnwilson-Change your boot.ini as above, the various processes and drivers should load to the screen, and the ntbtlg.txt should be created which you can print. @abyss123-This can be time consuming, but to find what is conflicting with your keyboard, you can do a "cleanboot": 1. Click Start --> Run --> Type "MSCONFIG" --> Click OK 2. On the General tab, choose, "Selective Startup" 3. Uncheck "Process SYSTEM.INI file" 4. Uncheck "Process WIN.INI file" 5. Uncheck "Load Startup Items" 6. Click on the Services tab. 7. At the bottom, check "Hide All Microsoft Services" 8. After checking that, uncheck all boxes in the window or click the button labeled "Disable All" 6. Click OK 7. Click "Restart" First, after reboot, if you have no problems bringing up windows, go back to msconfig and load each portion or section one at a time until you find the drivers that begin to conflict. Or, you could "cleanboot" uninstall the keyboard drivers. Then, reinstall them, while there are no other drivers that mey clash with them. Then, go into msconfig and return it to default: 1. Click Start --> Run --> Type "MSCONFIG"--> Click OK 2. On the General tab, choose, "Normal Startup" 3. Click OK 4. Click YES or "Restart", when asked to restart your computer. Possibly this would allow the keyboard to load in an address that would not conflict with somthing else.

When you ghost to another drive, XP contains the configuration or the Hardware Allocation Layer of that specific computer. Unless the computer you are trying to use the ghosted drive with is an exact duplicate XP will give you the message you received, but more often than not, it will simply not boot. You can try to Repair the ghosted copy by booting from your CD with your Windows XP system disk. If you are lucky, and several hours later, you may succeed.

One other thing. Run your anti-virus and spyware software first before you try any of the things above.

This is what Microsoft suggests: This problem may occur when the use of Federal Information Processing Standard (FIPS) encryption algorithms is enforced through the Computer Configuration Security Options policy. Some Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) implementations send a zero-length packet as the first message over an SSL connection. This behavior occurs only when a block cipher such as Triple Data Encryption Standard (Triple DES) is used, and is intended as a workaround for a known block cipher chaining vulnerability. The Internet extensions for the Wininet.dll file does not interpret this zero-length packet correctly. WORKAROUND To successfully connect to a secure Web site, disable the system policy that requires FIPS-compliant algorithms. To do this, follow these steps: 1. Click Start, and then click Control Panel. 2. Click Performance and Maintenance. 3. Click Administrative Tools. 4. Double-click Local Security Policy. 5. Expand Local Policies. There also seems to be a hotfix: http://support.microsoft.com/contactus/?ws=support And finally they suggest turning off the popup blocker Turn off the pop-up blocker Internet Explorer SP2 includes the ability to block pop-up windows. This new feature may block some Web pages. To turn off the Pop-Up Blocker, follow these steps: 1. Click Start, right-click Internet Explorer, click Internet Properties. 2. Click the Privacy tab. 3. In the Pop-Up Blocker section, click to clear the Block pop-ups check box. 4. Click Apply. 5. Click OK. 6. Click Security Options. 7. In the Policy list, double-click System cryptography: Use FIPS compliant algorithms for encryption, hashing, and signing. 8. Click Disabled, and then click OK. 9. Restart your computer.

Fabulous, it makes you wonder why Microsoft doesn't warehouse some of its older software. Anyway, I am delighted you are up and going after I sent you on a false path,