Computer Help

Ok, my laptop (a thinkpad R50e) has a hard drive thats beginning to fail, so, while its still useable i want to get an image of the recovery partition and store it on my PC until i get a new harddrive. i don't want to spend a lot of money for programs like norton ghost because i would only use it once or twice before its outdated and then useless. i have found 1 program that can get an image of it but it uses its own format (.arc) that is useless because i can't burn to DVD with that. So, eh, how would i go about getting an image of this?

I want to partition my hard drive into two sections: one for Linux and one for Windows XP Home. I only have the Restore (reformat) DVD for Windows. I must restart the computer with the DVD-rom in the disc-drive to load Windows onto the hard drive. However, I'm not given an option to partition the hard drive. I was wondering how I could do the following: 1. Erase Windows from my system. 2. Partition the hard drive for Linux and Windows. 3. Trick the Windows reformat CD into loading Windows onto its own partition. 4. Put Linux on a different parition. 5. Create a dual-boot. I suppose I could create a start-up CD. Afterwards, I could erase Windows and split t…

I recently got an old pc and I'm trying to get it to work. Well, I air-dusted the inside and pressed the "on" button, such is the extent of my pc skills Anyway, when I push the "on" button it starts making a horrible noise (upon further study this noise comes from the fan on the CPU, I think) and it starts, but then only flashes the first screen that comes up when you start it and then shuts down. So, having the computer skills I have, I figured I could hit it in the right place and it would work (don't worry didn't break anything ). After some experimentation I found that it would work if I hit it on the side just right. What's more, if I hold it diagonally…

My mom had a lap top from a couple years ago, and she let me have it. I installed XP on it, but it's really slow. It's a Latitude CPi A366XT, has a Intel Pentium II processor at 363 MHz, 128 MB of ram, and 4.52 GB hard drive. First, I need to know how to protect it. I have the free version of AVG, spy-bot search and destroy, and AdAware SE. Are these enough to protect it? And second, I need to know if there is any way to make it go a little faster, it's so slow! Can it take XP? Will other non-free virus/spy-ware protections that would slow the computer less? What should I do? Thanks for your help, I'm not as good with computers as I would like to…

A friend of mine recently gave me a laptop of his to look at. He said it was running terribly slow, so I did the usual and scaned for all manners of spyware and viruses. NOTHING (very weird) but he says he only uses Firefox and rarely searches the dark questionable depths of the Internet. Fair enough. He had Norton Systemworks 2005 installed, with CheckIt diagnostics. I figured it was a useless program, but tried it anyway. Apparently it clocks his CPU speed at 950 MHz? That's pretty damn slow for a 64 bit processor. I was wondering if this had anything to do with the fact CheckIt is a bad program or if it's possible some safety feature to conserve energy is causi…

Part of my job this summer is to write a program that imports data into matlab, does a bunch of manipulations and makes some graphs and stuff and then exports it all into a Word document. I'm trying to make this as independent of the user as possible (I don't want the user to have to copy and paste everything into word themselves.) Does anyone know how I could go about exporting data from Matlab into Word? For example, I'd like a table like the following: x | (x1) | (x2) | (x3) | ___________________ y | (y1) | (y2) | (y3) | This is really simplified, but anyway...I want the user to type in a bunch of inputs, Matlab runs some programing and opens up …

I was Stupid enough to DL realplayer a few months ago, found it didn`t have all the codecs as I already had in WinMedia Player and so I deleted it (uninstall and then the add Remove thingy). BUT, it`s renamed a good 1000+ MP3 and movie clip files in a way mediaPlayer can`t use, even the Icon next to them has changed. In effect my systems been altered in a way they had no frakin Right to do! How do I change them all back?

I'm looking for a desktop manager(or virtual desktop thingy not sure what they are called) where i can have different desktops. the virtual desktps i have come across so far merely have different wallpapers for each desktop and minimize/maximize windows according to what "desktop" they were opened in. how ever if you change the icons on one desktop then the icons change in all of them. Is there a desktop manager for XP where it'll allow you to have different icons on each desktop. basically i want to set it so i have a "technical" desktop(all the AV and maintenance and diagnostic stuff) a "work" desktop(MSword and so forth, but no games) and a "fun" desktop(the ma…

I have a video in quick time format which I need to edit by cutting bits out. Do any of you know a program I can use to do this?

[edit]Don't bother reading this, just skip down to my post #4, after The Tree's When I open specific .doc files with MS Word 2000 it will crash before the document has loaded. It only happens with some files, and always the same ones. Here's what I've tried so far to get a specific file (which used to work just fine) to open: 1) Redownload the file incase of corruption - doesn't help 1) Uninstal/reinstal Office 2000 - still crashes when I try to open it 2) Instal Office 2003 - Word 2003 crashed too 3) Open with WordPad does work 4) Export as .rtf from WordPad - Word opens it and I see the first page but then immediately crashes 5) In Word import the file …

To make a long story short: i was VERY dumb and gots me that web specials thingy. I tried almost everything and all free software that's out, but no use, it's nested everywhere. So, i decided to format my drive. So, how do i backup everything without copying webspecials?

I got home today, was booted in arch64, and expected the desktop to appear when I moved the mouse. But nothing worked -- the black powersaving thing never went away, pressing buttons, ctrl+alt+F1/7, etc, so I held the power button and started it back up. Nothing booted. No grub. The bootit partition manager (floppy) wont even start the partitioning program. And fdisk, well... root@0[knoppix]# fdisk /dev/hda Unable to read /dev/hda So is it broken? Should I get a new hard drive or is this fixable?

Necc stands for no ecc?

I got this installation file from an email, it did not appear to be a malicious program according to my anti-virus program, therefore, I just install it. After installation, I couldn't find the installed files any where on my computer. Can you people help me diagonize this installation file? http://rapidshare.de/files/19895786/bad_soft.rar.html Warning: This file may contain a virus or spyware! (-Cap'n) (above is the installation file I put in a rar archive) and tell me where did the installed files go? thanks alot

Hi. How to execute a set of commands automatically after finishes initialization (Win98 ; Win XP)? Getting into Windows explorer, I manually delete 'temporary internet files' and all 'cookies' from within their folders periodically, which is supposed to happen when the option to do it when closing the browser is selected under Internet 'tools' But it does not happen as expected, and besides cookies being kept in the cookies folder, they also hide in several 'internet temporary folders' along with more crap pumped by peddlers and spies of all sorts. To the colorguard of computers idiots (me), is not easy to implement such 'Startup?' set of actions. Can so…

Last night, my house mate gave me an unwanted graphics card as his pc wasn't the right spec to run it properly. I stuck it in my pc, installed it et.c only to realize that I'd forgotten to uninstall the old graphics card...very stupid indeed. Obviously this caused a conflict, they are both Nvidia so are likely to share similar files. I managed to get the pc into safe mode, but when I tried uninstalling the drivers...they appeared to be merged on the add/remove programs (there was only one Nvidia program) it came up with an error, and wouldn't uninstall. NVUDISP.EXE error - restart your pc et.c So I think through frustration (I really need my pc at the moment)…

Dunno if this is old news to you guys and girls, but I just found this: http://www.google.com/microsoft.html It is Google but restricts your search results to "Microsoft-related sites". Useful for MS troubleshooting and stuff. As I just found it earlier I can't really say how good it is, but it looks like it might be useful.

For some reason, my network connection's folder is blank. My LAN connection is fine, but the wireless (on my laptop) isn't. I ran through a bunch of trouble shooting techniques http://support.microsoft.com/kb/825826/ ,but none of them worked. I'm running Windows XP Home sp2... Also, I can't get out of Windows classic mode, even through my Window's themes say's in the "XP theme." I wonder if those two problems are related. Thanks.

Basically, that's my problem. My anti-virus systems don't detect any problems, I've gone over everything with Spybot, and I'm still getting these random popups that are telling me I'm infected and should buy their system. And admittedly I'm a complete idiot when it comes to computers, so I don't know which end is up.

I've had Knoppix LiveCD for a very long time now and it works just as it is supposed to. I put the CD into the drive and boot from it. However yesterday I decided to get Damn Small Linux (DSL) and Julex (which is a stripped down version of Knoppix) - both are LiveCD. So I put of them onto a CD (seperate CDs) and tried to boot from them, it wont't work. It tries to read the CD and then gives up and boots Windows. The same happens for both DSL and Julex (which are installed on seperate CDs). I tried burning Julex onto a 3rd CD but got the same results. Any idea why I can't boot off those CDs? I got Julex via BitTorrent and from the official site (remember that I…

This one has got me scratching my head. I run XP pro home, and everything was working fine. I didn't even shut my computer off for the day, and when I got home at night, the Internet had magically stopped working. I tried repairing my LAN connection, but that didn't help. I made sure my computer was communicating with the router (it was). I ran some anti-virus/ad-block software in safe mode and still nothing. This one is confusing me because I didn't do anything to make it stop working, and I can't do anything to make it start again. Thanks for the help.

Does anyone know what this error means (for Tracker Status): Connection Error (Connectexception: Connection refused: connect) There's a bit about it on the Internet, quite a few results on google anyway, but none of the results seem to really give a real solution or explanation of what the problem really is. The download is working, but only at about 20kb/s which is rubbish.

Hey, everyone. In MSN chat, if someone sends me a pic and I choose to download/accept it in the chat box and it says "you've successfully downloaded to my_documents/myname/pictures" does the other person see all of that? Thanks for any input.

A presentation is to be prepared in .mpg format. It should contain animated picture, text, short movies etc. First I tried MovieMaker but text is impossible to insert. Powerpoint is ideal for that purpose but the .ppt cannot be exported in .mpg format. Is there any way out ? Is there any program which could fulfill these purposes?

Every so often, at least once a day, my mouse starts acting strangely: - Sometimes the cursor will stop responding all together, but the keyboard works. When I ctrl-alt-delete and enter "stand-by" mode, then immediately return to what I was doing, the mouse works fine. - Sometimes the mouse will act like its possessed, and when I touch the mouse the cursor will randomly appear on the screen and click things. If I click the mouse without moving it, then it will shift to the right a few pixels. I have to press ctrl-alt-delete to get the cursor working normally again. (The possessed mouse has been known to close out programs or documents I'm working on.) - Someti…