ClareJonsson

Does it only happen in a browser, or does it happen randomly while using your PC. i.e. does the fault show when you are using a word processor or other games? It doesn't look like a connection problem, connection problems usually show in other ways, it could be a memory fault, as laptops share the main system RAM with the GPU.

I'm guessing this only happens in Runescape, the most likely resolution would be one or both of the following: Make sure your graphics drivers are up to date. Download and install the latest version of Java.

We repair a LOT of laptops, and overheating is a big problem as all components are crammed into a small space. Now the thing is they can easily collect dust internally and eventually clog the heat sink vents. it my look clear externally but internally might have a carpet of fluff. This blocks airflow and then the system never gets the cooling required. You have 2 options: 1. if there is an access flap at the bottom revealing the fan and the vent, open it and make sure there is no fluff clogging the airflow. 2. Take it to a good laptop repair specialist. NEVER ever try to dismantle a laptop yourself if you are not a qualified technician. you are only asking for a bigger repair bill. @Solartide: We have found Toshiba to be the most reliable, we see less Toshibas than any other brands, also they are the easiest to service. From a techniciansl point of view I would buy a Toshiba as I know it's a safe bet. A bit like Panasonic rule the TV market from a repair specialists point of view, they go wrong less, and if they do go wrong servicing is easier, contributing to a smaller service bill.

Thanks for that info, but I reckon it's going to be quite a while before fibre arrives here in Mid Wales. But I'm glad BT have made a start at upgrading the UK :)

I have just heard that BT are starting to roll out fibre optic broadband in the UK, I would be really interested in how much of an improvement it really is. So this thread is aimed at anyone who is in the UK and has moved over to fibre broadband, could you post here your experience of the service compared to standard broadband.

Right, I forgot they were grayed out in Window's XP's disk manager. Actually XP doesn't support Shrinking or extending partitions on the fly and the options aren't even there.

Windows vista onwards has disk resizing on the fly built in to the drive manager. Windows XP doesn't. We use Power Quest's Partition Magic to resize XP partitions.

This all depends on your web host, but you could try a free content management system such as Joomla. This will allow you, or anyone you give permission to edit the pages etc...

Most of the time a WYSIWYG editor wouldn't work for me as the pages are generated via PHP on the fly. But I do agree sometimes it is nice to have a WYSIWYG view for quick references. I too use Dreamweaver (CS3 Version 9), but I use it mainly as it is scripting aware, has numbered lines which makes it easier for debugging, and because I don't need to have a separate FTP client to upload the pages as Dreamweaver has sites and updates pages as soon as you save them, for me this is a must. In the end though, it's whatever you're comfortable with, and I think when you're starting out WYSIWYG is kinda helpful, but I think it teaches you bad habits.

If you really want to get into web design and extend your knowledge more than just a simple site. I would seriously concider learning a bit of HTML and CSS, there's lots of on-line tutorials such as W3schools. WYSIWYG editors are never very good in my opinion, they never give you an accurate representation of what the page will finally look like when rendered in a browser. Also if you have a knowledge of HTML and CSS, you can quickly rectify problems and even use a simple text editor to write the pages in.

I recently bought an iPhone, the plan I have is £45 a month, 16 hours talk time, unlimited texts and unlimited Internet. It's the best thing I ever did! I can seriously reccommend an iPhone 3GS. In fact I am typing this on my phone :)

I'm not sure if anyone is interested but I have written my first gadget for Windows 7 / Vista, in Vista it sits in the Sidebar and in Win 7 on the Desktop. So what does it do? Have you ever wanted to a simple, quick way of looking up a phone number on your PC? Well here's N-Seek, a little gadget that's fast and quickly shows phone numbers from a simple search box. If you would like to take a look at it you can download it from here. Any bug reports would be greatly received. TTFN, Clare.

That shouldn't be a problem. Distances under 25m really don't matter over cat5 cables (which I am going to assume is what you are using). That's right, UTP running at 100Mb full duplex is perfectly fine for streaming video, but for those of you who are using wireless and are thinking of moving over to a cabled solution, here's some very important advice. NEVER buy your cable from a high street retailer such as Currys, they will charge you an arm and a leg for a UTP network cable. Take a look on eBay and you should be able to pick up a 20M cable for about £5 including postage. Do a search on eBay for "20M UTP Cable". The last time I was in Currys they were selling a 3M UTP cable for £15, I almost died laughing. But that's not the worst, they had a standard 3M PC Mains cable, and they were selling that for £19.99! I wouldn't pay more than £3 for one one of them. Another bit of advice, if you need to split your UTP cables to connect more computers, never buy a hub, buy a switch instead. Here's the differences between the two: HUB: A hub simply broadcasts all data it receives on any port to all other ports. It doesn't care where the data goes and isn't bothered about broadcasting data on a port that has incoming traffic. To do this a hub runs at half duplex which means it can only transmit data in one direction at a time. A hub saturates all your network with all data being sent from any machine connected to it and is prone to packet collision and errors. Just for info: A packet is what we call a chunk of network data. SWITCH: A switch has some intelligence built in, it will determine what machines are connected to what port and redirect the data to that port, therefore it will only send the data to where it needs to go. Switches run at full duplex and generally have much more efficient error correction. Also switches can mix network media, so if your systems are running at different speeds it will be happy at talking to them all. So to sum up, Hubs are slow, more prone to packet collisions/errors and they saturate your network with unnecessary data slowing everything down even more. Switches are fast, they manage the network traffic efficiently and are much more robust when it comes to error correction and different equipment speeds and duplexes. The only downside to switches is that they are more expensive than hubs, but well worth the extra pennies. im connected through wi-fi I feel silly now after typing all that :ohnoes:

To be honest I don't think it matters what anti/malware/spyware solution you use there's always a risk of infection, and that is because new virsuses/trojans/spyware are being written every day and unless your software has been updated to include it's definition it will get onto your system. I use MSE and so far (Fingers crossed) have been infection free, also the reason I moved to MSE was because it was the only one that removed a rather nasty infection I had last year that not even Avast stopped or could remove. Also in my oppinion the best people to protect an operating system are the people who wrote it in the first place, and MSE does a really good job of it too!

That shouldn't be a problem. Distances under 25m really don't matter over cat5 cables (which I am going to assume is what you are using). That's right, UTP running at 100Mb full duplex is perfectly fine for streaming video, but for those of you who are using wireless and are thinking of moving over to a cabled solution, here's some very important advice. NEVER buy your cable from a high street retailer such as Currys, they will charge you an arm and a leg for a UTP network cable. Take a look on eBay and you should be able to pick up a 20M cable for about £5 including postage. Do a search on eBay for "20M UTP Cable". The last time I was in Currys they were selling a 3M UTP cable for £15, I almost died laughing. But that's not the worst, they had a standard 3M PC Mains cable, and they were selling that for £19.99! I wouldn't pay more than £3 for one one of them. Another bit of advice, if you need to split your UTP cables to connect more computers, never buy a hub, buy a switch instead. Here's the differences between the two: HUB: A hub simply broadcasts all data it receives on any port to all other ports. It doesn't care where the data goes and isn't bothered about broadcasting data on a port that has incoming traffic. To do this a hub runs at half duplex which means it can only transmit data in one direction at a time. A hub saturates all your network with all data being sent from any machine connected to it and is prone to packet collision and errors. Just for info: A packet is what we call a chunk of network data. SWITCH: A switch has some intelligence built in, it will determine what machines are connected to what port and redirect the data to that port, therefore it will only send the data to where it needs to go. Switches run at full duplex and generally have much more efficient error correction. Also switches can mix network media, so if your systems are running at different speeds it will be happy at talking to them all. So to sum up, Hubs are slow, more prone to packet collisions/errors and they saturate your network with unnecessary data slowing everything down even more. Switches are fast, they manage the network traffic efficiently and are much more robust when it comes to error correction and different equipment speeds and duplexes. The only downside to switches is that they are more expensive than hubs, but well worth the extra pennies.

Okay you may have two problems here, and I need for you to clarify something: Firstly un-plug the external monitor and then turn the laptop on. Do you get any image on the laptop screen, look closely and If you get a very slight faint image (you may have to look VERY closely) then it is likely that a module in the screen itself called an inverter has died, this provides the back light to the screen. You should take it to a laptop repair specialist and get them to replace it, inverters are usually not very expensive. Now because you are getting garbled images on the screen AND file corruption when loading windows, then it is pointing towards an intermittent memory problem. The laptops GPU shares a bit of the main system RAM, and if one of the sticks of memory is failing then this will effect both the GPU and windows files such as the registry when it gets loaded into memory. So you should mention this to the people you get to repair it.

I currently have two ways of watching movies that I have on my PC on the Television: 1. I have a 10 metre HDMI cable connected to my PC, this means I can use Windows 7 Media Canter on my TV and even play games on a huge Plasma screen. 2. I have another PC hidden in a cupboard with a huge hard drive running PS3 Media Server which my Playstation 3 can access and play all the content from the server. So why have I got both of these options when I have a high spec PC connected to the TV? Well even though the PC can output full Hi Def 1080P, there's still some issues with de-interlacing, most people aren't bothered about this but it really annoys both me and my boyfriend. The PS3 however has superb output and streaming media to it from PS3 Media Server running on PC is awesome, especially since it transcodes on the fly so I can play just about any type of video file on my PS3. Of course, a dedicated media box streaming wirelessly from the PC should be just like the PS3 option.

HDDs don't always just die, I have quite often see a hard drive slow down to a snails pace but still to actually work. In fact I had exactly that on a laptop last week. I reckon it may have been an intermittent problem with reading the tracking surface or the on-board cache. I have also seen drives die slowly due to the firmware being intermittently read incorrectly until finally they died. we had a batch of Seagate drives that exhibited this problem and we had hundreds of PCs with that model in them. It must have cost Seagate a fortune to replace them all. Seagate even release a small utility that attempted to re-flash the firmware which may allow you to recover the data on a one off basis. Gosh I hated that.

I'm a technician in a University and we used to build our own PCs, but in the end we found it to be more economical to buy pre-built from a manufacturer. From our point of view this was because the time it took us to reliably source all the parts and build and test every PC. In the end we were spending more time and money sourcing and trying to maintain identical hardware across the board than the extra mark-up a PC manufacturer was charging. And they had to test the machines before they were sent to us so we had very little parts failure. The manufacturer also guaranteed us all the hardware we required was all tested together, you would not believe sometimes how two or more supposedly compatible devices just wouldn't gel with each other. But for a single person I think it may be a little cheaper to source the parts independently and build your own, but you also run the risk of parts failure, especially if you have never done this before. If you decide to go down this route make sure you have adequate static precautions and you at least tidy up the internal cables with cable ties. Also, please think hard on the subject of cooling. Don't just throw it all together, take your time and you might find the whole experience a rewarding one. Good luck in whatever you decide, Clare.

This is NOT a legitimate Windows error, it is unlikely your hard drive is at risk of failure, unless the error is generated before your PC boots into windows, and then you would be told something like S.M.A.R.T. status bad backup and replace. But this would not appear in windows itself, it would appear very shortly after powering the PC on. I would personally run a good anti-malware/spyware solution on your system, something like Avast, AVG, Windows Defender or Microsoft Security Essentials and do a deep scan.

iTunes has an option to do this, in preferences under Advanced tab, the option is "Keep iTunes media folder organized". When you import media into iTunes it copies it into folders.

Echoing some posts already, my biggest annoyances are the following: It's apparently a bit on the heavy side :(. No Multitasking. I will really have to use one before I know how much of an experience breaker this is. If it quickly halts one app to use another then un-halts it when getting back to the app then maybe not such a big deal for me. The touch screen is a capacitance screen, that means you can't use pen style touch devices, this device is no good for artists which would have been an ideal use for the iPad. Plus the fact that the only way to use it is with your fingers means that you're gonna get fingerprints all over the viewing area, no way of avoiding that. Lack of good connectivity to popular external devices. No card slot, so you're stuck with whatever internal memory that came with the device. You would have thought a micro SD slot would be the minimum. No built in Camera, that means you need an optional extra. You would think every portable device of this calibre would have one these days, even my little EeePC has one! I know these are only little things, but I get the feeling that Apple will release an updated iPad in the future with some of these features added, it makes good business sense to release a lower spec machine first then an updated model later on as this encourages users to upgrade and spend again! Additional: I wonder how long it will be before someone hacks the iPad and throws Linuix on it :rolleyes: ?

On the subject of upgrading PS3 hard drives, how do you guys back up the current data? I guess the only way to do this is to use an external USB HDD but my big issue is that you must format the USB drive FAT32, but FAT32 has a partition limit of about 32GB, which is obviously not big enough to backup the entire drive..... Will the PS3 backup across multiple FAT32 partitions on one drive?

Vista uses Superfetch to load parts of your commonly used programs into RAM at boot time, but if you have less than 3GB of memory I have found this has an impact on system performance. Use THIS GUIDE to disable superfetch.

I totally 2nd Microsoft Security Essentials. If your OS isn't Windows 7, then turn off the indexing service. if you have less than 2GB of RAM, then Disable Superfetch. You might want to take a look at RecketDock, it's a very good toolbar/Launcher and it's free!