On June 8, 2014 Microsoft will publicly admit that Windows XP was a technical fiasco and that the product still contains a nearly infinite number of remaining bugs and security holes -- even after more than twelve years of continuous patching efforts by all of the geniuses who work at Microsoft....

Symptoms: it will occasionally not show up in a Windows Explorer Win 7, modern hardware system. It seems "weak" like it is underpowered, but power supply is adequate. I saw the usual fixes on the net (update driver, play with Registry settings etc, etc) and none work. What did work temporarily...

Can anyone tell me - when you put the plug into a laptop does the connector switch power from battery to mains by means of a mechanical part or does it switch via some clever sensor on the board itself ? I have a socket tht is misbehaving (intermittent problem) - I think that rather than...

We all know that "on average" a hard drive will fail in the first 30 days or then after five years, but what about a fan for your case? When does it become noisy from all the dust accumulated? And is there a 'gold plated' fan that's super expensive and uses some sort of special ball bearings, that...

Hi, the differents sites for detection and the purchasing of memories for notebook say that you can install 2Gb a slot for 4GB maximum (2slot) and instead *some rather 1Gb per slot.. Which one is reliable? Answer: that of Toshiba. But you cannot find my model because maybe now too outdated. Maybe...

I run IE8 and XP. I do most browsing in Firefox but for Windows Updates and a few other things I must use IE. Today IE8 refuses to initialize unless I right-click choose Start Without Addons. At one point I would get a message about some Reminder failing with what looked like a memory address. The...

Does your widescreen monitor require compatibility mode setting "Disable display scaling on high DPI settings"? Using Windows 8 with lots of scripting/macroring, many of my programs including Dragon NaturallySpeaking (DNS) with Advanced Scripting require that compatibility mode setting. Seems kinda...

I'm running a straight forward Win 7 U x64 machine allbeit with now 10 hard drives I have tried to initialize and partition a couple of new drives but it just comes up with errors saying i need to convert to gpt or gpd (sorry can't remember what one) i rebooted with a bootcd for an app called...

Hi. This is my first post on this board. I have a two computers (both Pentium IV's running Windows XP) and an IOGear KVM switch. The KVM switch has PS/2 ports for keyboard and mouse, and I'm finding that most new computers don't have PS/2 ports. I'm hoping to find a reliable way to add PS/2...

I have a M848AL U Rev. 2.1 motherboard with an AMD Athlon XP CPU. I assume my IDE ribbon cables are cable select due to black, End (master) gray (mid connector) and blue (mother B) colors of the connectors. In the documentation of the mother board there is absolutely no mention of Cable select....

I had a scary situation where none of the keys worked, including the Del key so I couldn't enter the Safe Mode. The green lights at the top right of the keyboard all flashed for a second during boot, so everything was connected okay. I ran a quick scan with Malawarebytes, which found nothing. I...

No more trial and error in screw sizes. I bought one of each of these (nuts): 6-32 x .25": Used in PC case cover and I/O plates 6-32 x .15": Used to install hard drives M3 x .25": Used to install floppy drive, CD-ROM drive and motherboard 4-40 x .18": Used in I/O plate connector And one of...

Sometimes the movement of the cursor on the screen in response to my moving the mouse (wireless, USB, Logitech) is erratic or jumpy. Usually the hard drive activity light is on, so it seems like some other task is being given higher priority than the mouse. How can I elevate the priority of the...

For some strange reason, whenever Firefox is open and after visiting ordinary websites (like ESPN), Firefox continuously uploads data. This last time, it was stuck at almost three kilobytes per second. I'm sure it's nothing, but it's troublesome.

The results from three years of use were revealing: Western Digital's drives lasted an average of 2.5 years, while Hitachi's and Seagate's lasted 2 and 1.4 years, respectively. Even so, some of the individual Hitachi models topped the reliability charts. "Hitachi does really well. There is an...

Ok, last night I ended up with a load of malware after downloading a few cpu temperature utilities. Another great waste of time. But this reminded me of a question I have been wondering about -- what methods of infection are used with USB thumbdrives? Am I safe transferring non-executable files...

Dell COA says "Windows 7 Pro OA" and has several numbers on it that might be part numbers. How can I get the correct DVD? People sell them on Ebay but maybe there are different flavors? I hope OA means 64-bit. Thanks.

I have a Windows 7 Pro 64 box with 16 GIG of RAM and 8 core AMD processor and nVidia card. And the machine has lots of disk space. I also have a Motorola DCT 6416 PVR which has both component and HDMI outputs. I'd like to record live HD television or recorded content to my PC. Can it be...

Anyone know how the speed of a stand alone NAS compares to an external drive plugged into a WDTV player?

I have an I5 6gb laptop with 600gb drive and bad LCD. Seems a shame to brick & pitch it. What (if anything) can be salvaged and adapted to a work station? Dell Inspirion N4110. Thanks, John