phill

Coop, I currently have about...oh 1200GB a month going to waste at the moment, if theres a need for it, I can see about setting up a sub-domain and ftp account for you.

Its booting into dos somehow and using a: which is normally reserved for the floopy drive. I would pop into the bios and take a look at the boot order, change it so that the harddrive (may show up as hd or sata or ide..or something like that) is the primary boot device.

Sorry bout being a tool there, but it was my special little way of saying there is no difference between the boards. You will find a huge number of boards from different manufactures will have the same base layout because it’s cheaper to let someone else do the engineering (thats right, reference boards). Cheaper boards will look similar to more expensive boards as well, just having fewer components on them. If you look close enough, you will see where SATA 3,4, extra USB and Firewire were suppose to go because most manufactures will mark everything down.

Manufacturer?

Define "errors". If you are talking about bad keys breaking programs or Windows, you are better off reinstalling. Setting keys to some assumed value can...and often does screw things up just as bad. There are exceptions to that, but I would not trust a third party app to fix it for me. Find the broken key, make an educated guess why it’s broken, and then fix it (using research). If it is garbage keys, left over’s from uninstalled program or that sort of thing, removing those is purely cosmetic...for the most part. Reducing the size of the registry will not speed it up; there is no searching involved, the program will know what is needed and where to find it. It is like going to your friends’ house, you know which house is his so you go directly to it, you do not knock on every door on the street till you find the house you want. In the event a program uninstalled poorly, leaving evidence in weird locations (right click menus, add/remove programs, etc) those you should deal with. If you are talking about “threats” then you should be looking for the program that uses the registry key and not the key itself.

thats odd, what type of laptop you got?

your laptop is trying to boot of the network, make sure you selected your cdrom drive and not PXE/Network boot

I was going to give some sort of witty retort to the capture card idea but I am lazy...so here is a link that might interest you http://www.ebgames.com/Catalog/ProductDetails.aspx?product_id=40681

Control Panel >> Network Connections >> Local Area Connectino >> Properties >> Double Click Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) >> Advanced >> DNS Tab >> and make it look like your other computers

Conduction is fairly simple to express as a formula, there isn’t a huge amount of variables involved when it occurs and in a school environment it is usually safe to ignore many of the outside effects on the system (essentially making it a closed system). The formula isn’t hard to find and understanding what it is expressing is fairly easy. Convection is much more erratic, much harder to model since even in a closed system a lot of what is going on still isn’t uniform. When heating a gas or liquid you must consider convection and conduction, and when things move, math becomes messy (still very cool math though). Much easier to use examples like heating a pot of water to show how convection works,

...sweet Jesus my friend, doing that sort of work without some hefty compensation shows some pretty strong devotion to this site and its community.

Volume Shadow Copy (VSC) can be set up to do either Copy-on-Write (as MS call it) for differential backups or it can be set up to do a Clone/Mirror backup to maintain a complete backup of the data on the disk. When you set up a program like NTBackup.exe to do a full backup, it will use VSC to make a clone and then use that clone to make the backup.

It may be the fact I just spent 3 hours in a CCNA class looking at packets.... but I seem to be missing something. The shadow copy service can be implemented by hardware or software to maintain a complete clone of a disk, or to monitor changes and maintain a record of those to be rolled back at a later time. All of which can be stored on the local machine, attached media or across the network and archived to tapes, dvds, etc. Granted shadow copy doesn't monitor the structure of the disk (MBR and related things) like ghost would do, but the data itself is where the money is. You may have to go through the process of partitioning and formating a drive, but you have your files, you have your file structure, and you have your file security, and thats what is important. sorry if I missed what you were aiming for...all I'm thinking right now is f*cking packets.

Scenario 1: Windows has a wonderful thing called shadow copy, most good back-up programs will hook into this or use there own version. It allows you to back up files that are in use (system files included). So scenario 1 is bull shit Scenario 2: Not really how RAID 1 works, you don't write the data to disk 0 then copy that to disk 1. I'm sure there are implementations of RAID 1 that do this...but god why? Your RAID controller is more likely to write data to the drive independently of the other because what you are suggesting could happen. Scenario 3: The fact backups were not done on a regular basis maybe a bit more of a concern then the fact you lost this one. Who would have though that a person working in data recovery would see failed drives....oh oh me? I have the same thoughts about high capacity drives, but for different reasons.

You know, I have heard horror stories about flying, so I don't fly because all the airlines must suck........score one for a waste of money and not knowing what the hell you are talking about... There are a lot of good and bad backup programs out there, so do a little research on them and don't be a f*cking moron. Personally, I use ntbackup.exe because its free (well..you pay for it when you buy windows) its simple, and it does what I want when I want without fault. The life span of a hard drive is either between 5-10 years, or 3-6 months. Hard drive warranties end at around 5 years because manufactures know that if the drive lasts longer then 3-6 months(factory defects show up within this period during regular usage...usually), it will likely fail after 5 years. This could mean it fails 5 years 2 month or after 10 years. Buying a drive every year puts you in between the two high risk areas and because of that is a huge waste of money. I would still suggest Linux to do the drive partitions, its free and fairly simple to understand. If you don't understand it right off the bat, you can ask for help or read the man pages. Also the dd command is an awesome way to do complete back ups of system drives or other important drive/partitions/folders.

I would start by downloading the ubuntu live cd and use that to run it.

I never understood why some teachers (and I have had ones like this) require you to practice bad programming.

Other then going to the ati website and picking up drivers, it is a simple process once you plug it into the right slot.

When I first got the Orange Box I was running a 7600GT and HL2/Portal looked great. The card is cheap now and fits well within your bugdet. I do however suggest you save up some cash and future proof yourself a little by picking up a 8800GT. The card will perform your pants off without costing you them (200-300 price range).

At this point in time, a Intel core 2 duo is the way to go.

It's to bad that not having to pay for OpenOffice isn't enough to make it a decent alternative to Microsoft Office. I use it at home, does what I need, but I still refuse to even consider giving it to an average user. Specifically because the of the interface, the way it looks, functions, how you get to most features, where most features are located in the menus, it all screams programmer. The OpenOffice group needs to bring someone in who know interfaces, so that it can be cleaned up and organized so regular users can understand it properly.

what does the event viewer say is happening when it crashes? and by that I mean what does it say the source of the error is, and does it tell you what may be causing it?

Couple things to look at/for. When the installer box appears, what is its title? just a generic installer? or is it a program name? Also take a look at the following registry keys and either google what you find or come back here and one of the guys here will be able to tell you if the items are safe to delete. HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\RunOnce HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\RunOnce edit: Also, what does the event viewer say is going on, it will usually tell you what is trying to install (if the installer window is kinda generic) among other things

Small correction, current kills not voltage.

It has been a while since I last worked with macs but should there not be a log showing application errors and such.