Sampson

Most cable modems have both USB connections and ethernet connections. If she has an ethernet card in her machine, she can hook up the modem to the ethernet connection. This requires an ethernet wire to go from the modem to the computer. Ethernet is the preferred connection to cable modems precisely because USB ports are flakey.

The one most common solution put forward is to power down your computer, unplug it from the wall. Wait at least an hour before plugging it back in. If it is a laptop; remove the battery.

The problem is that you can't just take a hard drive from one machine and put it into another under XP since the hardware is included into XP install. It will fail every time. The instructions were to make the hard disk a slave of one that was bootable.

Before you go changing the bios for your machine, you should see if your new video card will work. Put your old card in; boot up. When you get to the desktop, go to the Control Panel, then Add/Remove software and remove the graphic card drivers. Sometimes, XP will want to immediately install new drivers or ask you to reboot. Don't install any drivers, just shut the system down. Take the old card out; put the new card in. Boot up. If you get to windows desktop, pull out the CD that came with your new card. Use it to install your drivers. If you want to upgrade your video drivers, go to the website of the company that made the card. If your machine rejects the new card by not letting you get back to the windows desktop, put the old card back in, boot up, but don't install any video drivers. Let it stay as it is. Then, go to the Gigabyte site and find the latest BIOS for your motherboard. Do not download any video drivers. You are looking for the BIOS update. Generally, Gigabyte has a "live" install for new Bios's. It is a little utility to will allow you to access their site and find the BIOS for your motherboard. If you can't find that, then find your motherboard and step through finding the latest BIOS. Follow the instructions they give you. Have more trouble, come back to sort it out.

funkyfem, the video you are using is probably onboard, meaning that it is part of your motherboard's chipset. DosFreak is giving you the advice that you will need to disable your onboard video and install a completely new card in order to run the game. Since, it seems, you are unfamiliar with this process, you may need to take it to a computer dealer that you trust and have them install the card. What you may want to do, at this point, is find out what the name and number of your motherboard (speed of your processor and how much memory you are running) is and post it here. Let some of the people on the board then make suggestions as to what video card would be compatible with your motherboard. Then, you can look up these suggestions on the web to see what the costs are. At least then when you take it in, you will have a better idea what you want and roughly what it costs.

Maybe, if you would give the name of your video card, we could help. My intuition is that you have onboard video. Right click on My Computer, choose Properties from the drop down menu. Click on the Hardware tab then click on the Device Manager Button. When the window comes up, click on the + next to Display Adapters. This will give you the name of the card and you can explore further to find the version of the drivers you are using.

The message you are getting can come from a variety of things not the least that your hard drive has become corrupt. You get this message even if your windows login is messed up. It can also come from a windowsupdate that has in some way affected how the hard drive is read. You will need not a recovery CD but a bootable CD for the operating system you are using. Boot from it and follow the prompts to attempt your recovery.

Can be any of three things - or really none of them. Always hard to say about these Stop errors: 1) While the memory modules are sound, it looks like the timing is different. One module is faster at read/write than the other. 99% or the time, it will use the slower timing for both, but under some programs, this is enough to cause a read/write malfunction. 2) Video card - you are using an FX 5200 128 - it is not renowned for its game play. You might consider a more game oriented nVidia card or get the FX 5200 in the 256 flavor. 3) Video drivers - for any given system, the nVidia driver works better or worse depending on the drivers chosen. The latest is not always the greatest. Because the drivers write to memory, where they rewrite to sometimes comes into conflict with some programs seeking the same memory addresses. Or, it can happen that the driver causes a program to move to an alternate address and the program progressively increases its memory usage until it exhausts the memory pool.

From what I read of your problem, you do not say that the system collapses or freezes only that you as the user gets logged off. If that is true, it is just as likely that you have a security problem and not a hardware problem. On the other hand, if the machine is freezing when you are logged off, danleff's suggestions should be followed. Bring up your Task Manager (Ctrl-Shift-ESC). Look at the processes running. If there is something you can't identify, Google it. To help identify security problems in your user accounts 1 Go to Control Panel>Performance and Maintenance>Administrative Tools>Local Security Policy. 2 In the left pane of the Local Security Settings window, expand Local Policies then click Audit Policy. 3 Double-click each setting in the right pane to configure auditing properties. Once you have enabled auditing, it is recommended that you use Event Viewer to check the Security and other logs regularly, especially if you suspect that your system may have been compromised. To check the Security log: 1. Go to Control Panel>Performance and Maintenance>Administrative Tools>Event Viewer. 2. In the left pane, select the Security icon to review the logs.

If it has a memory leak, this is possible. Try using something like PopTray to alert you to your incoming email and use Thunderbird to retrieve it rather than leaving it running in the background. Just a suggestion.

Time Warner provides a Firewall and Anti-virus, anti-spam, and snti-spyware through CA Associates for free. The combination is not a bad deal, and one can tune the anti-spam component to be pretty good at filtering out spam.

Your motherboard is the main factor in determining whether you can support a PCIe video card. PCI slots are not the same thing as PCIe slots. Indirectly, since IGP works with or substitutes for AGP, my guess is that you don't have a PCIe slot on that machine.

Since it is a Dell, a call to their support would not be out of the question. As to where all the space is gone, without looking at the contents of the hard drive, here are the usual culprits. However, none of these should have swallowed up that much space: 1) Dell has some hidden directories on the hard drive for their diagnostics. 2) If you are running IE, it can use a massive amount of the hard drive to store its cache. 3) Depending on the number of emails you store on that machine, deleting them and compacting the folder will yeild back space. 4) There are a variety of temp files and bak files that XP creates when running or installing software, find and delete them. 5) Run your anti-virus and anti-spamware programs to see if you have any number of trojans or bots that could be hogging your hard drive. 6) Run chkdsk.

For Norton's" 1. Open up the Norton Internet Security program. You can either do this by selecting the program from the Start menu in the bottom-left corner of the screen, or by clicking on the program icon that appears in your browser toolbar. 2. In the window that opens, click on the "Norton AntiSpam" button located in the left-hand panel. 3. Select "Pop-up Blocking" from the resulting menu. Several new options should appear along the right-hand side of the window. What browser are you using? I am presuming that it is IE6 since it seems to have the most trouble with popups. IE7 is a little sturdier as are most of the Mozilla based browsers.

No, XP has to have XP drivers to run the printer despite the fact that the printer is attached to an ME computer. I did find this set of drivers for that printer, but like the page says, use at your own risk: http://www.totallydrivers.com/drivers/download-driver.asp?driver=51

HP has some peculiar drivers. You might want to go to their site and see if you can find the most recent drivers. Sometimes, you have to install the driver as a network driver designating the computer it is attached to as the "server", sometimes you have to give it the IP address, and sometimes you have to install the HP drivers on the networked computers directly.

If you are just interested in general, go here: http://computer.howstuffworks.com/ If you want to see something in particular, depending on what strikes the fancy of this particular reviewer, go here: http://www.lostcircuits.com/

According to Microsoft, this indicates a problem with your keyboard: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/q263318/

In addition to peterh's suggestions, also look at Spyware Terminator, which is free: http://www.majorgeeks.com/Spyware_Terminator_d5242.html

Generally, you do not have to do all that much. click on Start-ControlPanel-Printers and Faxes from your Sony Viao. When the icon of the printer comes up, right click on it and click on the word Shared from the drop down menu and go from there. Once done, the laptop should be able to see it over the network. Sometimes, you have to reboot. Now, different printers work differently. More often than not, under XP when you select to print from the laptop, the proper drivers are downloaded to the laptop the first time and you are good to go. Some printers however need to have the drivers to be installed on the computer from the CD you got with the printer or from drivers you download from the Cannon site, and you must tell them where to find the printer.

Actually, you really do not have much choice in relation to XP. SP2 is the only supported version. SP1 and 1a just lost their support. Actually SP2 is mostly an enormous number of security patches. I like W2K but I also use XP. Certain functions you will have to get used to since some things were changed. But, you can run XP in the "classical" mode and it will look and pretty much feel like W2K.

I am not sure what you are saying. Do you mean that you downloaded a new cursor and installed it and after that explorer.exe won't run? At this point, it is probable that something was written into the registry that is not allowing other programs to be initialized. Personally, I would get out my XP cd and boot from it and have XP attempt to repair your installation or just go ahead and re-install XP altogether.

The only way you will know is 1) scan your machine with an online virus checking program: http://housecall.trendmicro.com/ or you could use: http://www.kaspersky.com/scanforvirus.html or 2) get the concrete name of the virus and google it to find out how to remove it physically or 3) run hijackthis http://www.spywareinfo.com/~merijn/programs.php#hijackthis and find where in your startup or in your processes it could be hiding.

I've never seen that message before. However, I have seen the message "overclock failure" on some boards when either the HD won't boot or the fan over the CPU heatsink is not running. Is the thing making any peculiar noises; or worse, is it making no noise at all?

Why wait for Vista? "Techweb hacks have been working their way through the licence and found a few things that have not been mentioned in the official releases. The first is that once you have installed Vista on a machine you can only move it once. If you have an upgrade of your motherboard or anything else that will cause the operating system to think that it is a new computer you have to buy a new copy of Vista. While the expensive versions of Vista, Vista Ultimate and Vista Business, can be installed within a Virtual Machine environment, Vole forbids you from doing so with the cheaper Vista Home Basic and Vista Home Premium." From WinXPcentral: "The level at which I am testing is isolated to the lab and only on machines that have the "Vista Compatible" label on them which begs the question: did the OEM's really perform any sort of testing on these machines or did they simply slap a sticker on them so people would buy them now ? I can't speak with any authority about that, but I have to wonder if that's not the case. As of RC2, not one my "Vista Compatible" systems fully work. Whether it be video, sound, chipset, RAID, etc... all of them need driver support at some level from the OEM's. So far, all I hear from the OEM's is" "Ummm... yea... we'll get to it... maybe." I think I would have felt better buying a desktop or a laptop with Vista already installed on it but equipment fails and needs to be replaced. So, we thought buying new equipment with the Vista Compatible sticker on it would be smart thing to do. Now I'm not so sure we wouldn't be better off repairing the broken machines and waiting for machines that have Vista already installed on them. It might save some time and headaches with future roll outs. Hmmm... decisions... decisions... Please understand, I get the fact that a 50 MILLION, 2-3+ GB OS will have its problems but again, when you hit a point in the development cycle where you start to tout it as a "Release Candidate" one assumes it's good enough to send to manufacturing. Well, RC2 is not and I'm not the only one saying that. CNET has a video "First Look: Windows Vista RC2" where the Senior Editor of CNET says what I have been saying: "Vista needs at least one more RC before it heads off to manufacturing". I was reading the latest Redmond Magazine this morning and something caught my eye. Microsoft has been touting how more companies than ever before will roll Vista sooner rather than later. Hmmm... well, according to a recent Merrill Lynch survey, that number has dropped almost in half. The survey concluded that only 8% of CTO's surveyed plan on deploying Vista in 2007. That's down from January's 14%. So what caused this drop? I can tell you in one word: "caution". Every tech I have spoken with loves what Vista promises (I do to) but the application incompatibility, driver issues, and the weirdness in-between the RC releases has put brakes on any sort of rapid deployment. Until IT Departments get either a fully cooked RC release or the "gold" release AND driver support, I think MS might have a hard time getting companies to deploy it on any scale. That said, I think true Microsoft shops will probably be the first to deploy on a small scale. They will test, deploy, make adjustments, patch, and then deploy on a larger scale ONLY after they are satisfied Vista is stable but most importantly, works with their internal applications. Personally, I eagerly await their blogs. The good news is MS will get Vista right at some point. I remember typing something similar to this when XP came out and slowly but surely XP became a very stable (although not the securest OS) operating system. But, that brings up one more point people have been sorta scratching there heads about? Is XP worth dumping for Vista? For now, I've joined the "scratching my head" crowd. I'm just not sure yet."