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Very trivial question - when I start up my laptop (Windows XP), RealPlayer automatically opens. I cannot for the life of me find any option in the preferences to stop it doing this. Any thoughts?

― Archel, Monday, 5 March 2007 18:55 (nineteen years ago)

I haven't used RealPlayer in a long long time, I installed Real Alternative instead.

You can look here http://www.chipconnection.com/tips.html there are two sections that may help. Removing realplayer from the tray or the next one "Prevent programs from automatically loading when you start Windows" should do it for you.

― svend, Monday, 5 March 2007 19:17 (nineteen years ago)

was there a mac os x update recently that might have totally fucked my php.ini? because something did, and it wasn't me.

― akm, Monday, 5 March 2007 21:04 (nineteen years ago)

shouldn't it copy the old one to like php.init.something? IIRC it did that for apache?

― JW, Monday, 5 March 2007 21:12 (nineteen years ago)

i don't know, it was using php.ini.default and my regular php.ini file seems to have disappeared, and all the permissions for these things (like pear.php) were changed as well.

― akm, Monday, 5 March 2007 21:16 (nineteen years ago)

ok so my computer problems (with a 3.75 year old dell laptop) were so bad my computer completely and utterly died. i will be getting a new computer in about two weeks. what kind should i get? (basically what i require is that it be fairly light and transportable, have a glossy screen, at least 80 gigs of memory, at least 2 hours of battery life, and be able to run both itunes and windows media player. and, um, the internet and a word processor.)

― Maria, Monday, 5 March 2007 21:29 (nineteen years ago)

ok, here's an easy one: how do i configure a program to automatically load upon startup in tiger?

― ^@^, Tuesday, 6 March 2007 11:58 (nineteen years ago)

right click on dock icon, "launch at login" (or something like that)

― tissp, Tuesday, 6 March 2007 12:06 (nineteen years ago)

System Preferences --> Accounts --> (select account you want to configure) --> Login Items

― Tracer Hand, Tuesday, 6 March 2007 12:08 (nineteen years ago)

ooh tissp's is better

― Tracer Hand, Tuesday, 6 March 2007 12:09 (nineteen years ago)

thanks dudes.

― ^@^, Tuesday, 6 March 2007 12:12 (nineteen years ago)

Hi hi,

I want to buy an external hard drive to 1) act as a backup/archive of music, pics etc and 2) enable me to transfer large amounts of files between two PCs. Can anyone advise me as to what would be a good value solution at present? I don't have a phenomenal amount of stuff, maybe 40Gb at present, but I'd like it to last a while.

Thanks!

― Mark C, Wednesday, 7 March 2007 15:15 (nineteen years ago)

320G for £80 at a dixons near you. (seagate toaster looking thing, usb2, runs very cool)

oh, have gone up in dixons, but here's one:

http://www.microdirect.co.uk/ProductInfo.aspx?ProductID=14982&&source=Dealtime

― koogs, Wednesday, 7 March 2007 15:51 (nineteen years ago)

Mr. Jaq got a 500Gb MyBook for less than $200 last weekend. He hasn't done much with it yet.

― Jaq, Wednesday, 7 March 2007 15:52 (nineteen years ago)

Only prob with a MyBook (or at least the one I had) is constant spin up/down for no reason. P!ssed me off in the end; got a 1.6TB NAS. How portable do you need it to be? You may want to try looking at some of the caddied laptop drives out there.

Try here...

― peteR, Wednesday, 7 March 2007 16:38 (nineteen years ago)

I don't need it to be terribly portable - simplicity, reliability and price are the three keys.

― Mark C, Wednesday, 7 March 2007 16:41 (nineteen years ago)

A MyBook would still be the cheapest out there, just about. All of them are simple (i.e. plug and pray). Reliability: have had two MyBooks, and only got rid because of annoying spin up/down thing mentioned above. I've had no such problem with my Maxtor external, which is the only one I've kept as an addition to the NAS. Most of your options are pretty much of a muchness, to be honest.

― peteR, Wednesday, 7 March 2007 16:59 (nineteen years ago)

Hm, I need a music drive....

― JW, Wednesday, 7 March 2007 17:14 (nineteen years ago)

As in? For storage on your pc? As an ipod kind of a thing? Personal recs=NAS (Buffalo terastation) for storing flac files (flac=lossless=good). Alternative to that would be the external drives mentioned above. iAudio X5 as a portable ipoddy thing, as long as you RockBox it quicksmart. You can then convert your flac to ogg, and away you go.

― peteR, Wednesday, 7 March 2007 17:21 (nineteen years ago)

why would you need to rockbox a X5?

― koogs, Wednesday, 7 March 2007 17:22 (nineteen years ago)

Something that can do NAS and usb. Firewire would be nice

― JW, Wednesday, 7 March 2007 17:24 (nineteen years ago)

I though that the firmware was awful. Like, why play ogg that isn't gapless? Plus the icon based gui didn't do it for me. Personal taste, though, I suppose.

― peteR, Wednesday, 7 March 2007 17:25 (nineteen years ago)

JW, this was what I got. Raid 5 ends up at 1.2 TB. I thought that would probably keep me in available space for a while. Not sure about usb/firewire with that, though.

― peteR, Wednesday, 7 March 2007 17:28 (nineteen years ago)

I though that the firmware was awful. Like, why play ogg that isn't gapless? Plus the icon based gui didn't do it for me. Personal taste, though, I suppose.

well, yeah - my m5 does natively 95% of the stuff people rockbox their ipods for anyway (ogg, flac, usb...) so i didn't see a lot of point. (the m5 doesn't have icons, just a list). mine's suffereing from limited battery - after 15 months i get about an hour out of a full charge so i'm looking to buy another, possibly a different make (keep the m5 as a 20G external drive full of mp3s)

the new D2 looks nice though.

― koogs, Wednesday, 7 March 2007 17:57 (nineteen years ago)

Ooh, I didn't see this thread before buying a Western Digital Essential MyBook (250GB) from Amazon for about £60. (Maplin are doing them for a tenner more but have ceased their cheap Seagate deals for the time being).

I'm wondering if I can use it as a backup device from both a Win XP laptop and a Win ME desktop? Would that involve partitioning? I bought it primarily cos we're rapidly running out of space on the laptop and I want to archive a lot of stuff off, but it would be handy to use it on both machines. Is there a file format issue between XP and ME (FAT32/NTFS)? And backup utilities - I think there's one bundled with XP but I'd need something for the ME machine. How do they work - first = full backup, subsequent = incrementals?

― Michael Jones, Thursday, 8 March 2007 13:52 (nineteen years ago)

I have no spin-up/down problems on my MyBook. That sounds like an OS issue rather than a hard drive issue. My OS is Mac OS X 10.4.8. The MyBook is connected over Firewire.

― caek, Thursday, 8 March 2007 13:57 (nineteen years ago)

If Steady Mike has a MyBook, then I shall get a MyBook. Thanks for your help everyone - my ignorance as to what spin-up/down means need never be put straight.

― Mark C, Thursday, 8 March 2007 14:17 (nineteen years ago)

Jeez, don't go thinking I know what I'm doing! My thought process on this went: are Seagate drives at Maplin still cheap? No, but they're pushing WD drives now. Can I get a WD drive cheaper anywhere else? Yes. Are the reviews generally positive? Yes. Where's my credit card?

I guess I'd have to stick with FAT32 on the MyBook if I wanted to hook it up to the Win ME machine - is this right? It was delivered by someone who thought he was doing us a favour (as there was no one in) by shoving the package through the wire mesh above the locked gate that links the garden passage with the car port, which means it fell about eight feet onto concrete. It may not even work.

― Michael Jones, Thursday, 8 March 2007 14:24 (nineteen years ago)

spin down is where the disk stops spinning (because it's not being used and is trying to save energy, which is probably a good thing). the problem comes the next time you want to access it it has to spin up again before it can access the files and this feels lumpy. listen carefully and you can hear it stop and wind up again.

(also, my cd burner would produce coasters if the hdd on the same ide cable span down during burning. took me a while to figure that one out and a simple hdparm command to fix.)

fat32 is fine mike, my seagate is the same and i use it with win98, linux, xp, win2k...

― koogs, Thursday, 8 March 2007 15:00 (nineteen years ago)

as for mp3player battery, it ran out this morning halfway to work which is about 50 minutes in total with a 12 hour dormant period in the middle. charged it up when i got here and set it playing and it was ok for 3.5 hours, which is enough. but curious. lots of forum posts about using ds-lite batteries as replacements so i might try that. or buy one like mike's.

― koogs, Thursday, 8 March 2007 15:04 (nineteen years ago)

Everyone who buys a WD MyBook seems to reformat the bugger to NTFS immediately, but I guess they haven't got flaky 6-y-o PCs with terrible operating systems languishing upstairs. I'll stay fat.

My Samsung thing only recharges in a USB socket, y'know, Koogs.

― Michael Jones, Thursday, 8 March 2007 15:15 (nineteen years ago)

Oh no! I'll have to reformat the thing? I have two XP PCs, one with home and one with pro I think. I don't want it to be complicated :(

― Mark C, Thursday, 8 March 2007 15:19 (nineteen years ago)

Well, no, you don't have to. I haven't even taken it out of its static-proof wrapper (with the lovely silica gel sachet - num), so I don't really know, but I think it's FAT32 out of the box. XP & NT support NTFS and FAT32 but the former is probably what yr internal HDD is and NTFS is better cos the N stands for New and New is always better, roight?

― Michael Jones, Thursday, 8 March 2007 15:23 (nineteen years ago)

mark, you don't need to reformat, it'll do as it is. you might lose some functionality like per-user permissions and stuff that ntfs adds but i doubt that'll bother you. - http://www.anandtech.com/guides/viewfaq.html?i=63 for details (which doesn't mention the 4G file size limit)

usb socket = ok, mike, i have usb sockets.

― koogs, Thursday, 8 March 2007 15:34 (nineteen years ago)

I guess I should partition this thing too, eh? One chunk for desktop backup, one for laptop backup. Which means I could then convert/reformat one of the partitions to NTFS (I can imagine the 4GB file limit being a problem one day). I presume I can create unequal partitions? 200/50 split would be good.

― Michael Jones, Thursday, 8 March 2007 15:42 (nineteen years ago)

I got the 500GB MyBook "Premium" (i.e. USB2 + FW400) on Amazon a month or so back for £110. If you're doing video editing it's worth springing for the "Professional", i.e. USB 2 + FW800. Conversely, if you're on Windows and not doing video editing you don't even need the Premium version.

Found mine on Amazon.co.uk, as recommended by my new favorite price comparison site, DoorOne: http://doorone.co.uk/xPF-Western-Digital-Western-Digital-500GB-My-Book-Premium-1C-External-Hard-Drive-USB2-0-Firewire-Retail-kit.

― caek, Thursday, 8 March 2007 15:55 (nineteen years ago)

I have two 500G MyBooks if anyone wants to buy them off me.

― peteR, Thursday, 8 March 2007 16:39 (nineteen years ago)

my solution to a 3 hr journey home and an mp3 player with a battery life of about an hour = dig the minidisc out of the attic 8)

(actually, i used it friday to record gig and the week before for mp3ing vinyl, has been in pretty constant use for 10 years and still gets 6 hours or so on a single charge)

― koogs, Friday, 9 March 2007 11:15 (nineteen years ago)

koogs, I have remembered over the weekend why I was so adamant about rockboxing the X5. I knew there was a proper reason, and it is that there is a file limit of 9999, which on a 60G player (like mine) is not a right lot. OK, so if you like prog rock it's never going to be a problem, as three songs will fill up the entirely of the player, but for anyone else...

― peteR, Monday, 12 March 2007 08:24 (nineteen years ago)

Has anyone managed to get flickrfs working with MacFUSE

― Ed, Monday, 12 March 2007 20:56 (nineteen years ago)

Ok, here's a question about formatting/partitioning this WD 250GB MyBook what I have bought (and which I've now established does actually work, despite the best efforts of Amazon's delivery courier to break it)...

It comes with a single 232GB FAT32 partition, but converting it to NTFS is a doddle. However, I want to use it as:
(a) a backup device for WinXP laptop (80GB HDD)
(b) a backup device for WinME desktop (40GB HDD)
(c) a place to store video, images and audio that overspill from the laptop

Now, it isn't possible to create a FAT32 partition larger than 32GB from a WinXP machine. You can create a FAT32 partition larger than this from a WinME machine. So, what should I do? Partition it in FAT32 from the desktop (say, 40/80/112 roughly) and then convert (or reformat) the 80/112 partitions as NTFS on the laptop. Is this feasible?

Presumably that will leave me with a HDD that has three partitions, only one of which is visible from the WinME machine.

I'm still pondering my backup strategy - normal/differential, I guess. But I'd prefer my video/audio/images to be freely available in their own partition rather than tied up in a .bck file. Does that make sense?

― Michael Jones, Monday, 12 March 2007 23:24 (nineteen years ago)

That's too many words for me to concentrate on, Mike, but do you need a FAT32 partition at all? If your new machine can see your ME machine (which it ought to be able to), then you could get data from it, rather than trying to put data from the ME machine to the NTFS partition.

― Keith, Monday, 12 March 2007 23:31 (nineteen years ago)

Well, my thinking was: I need to partition this MyBook to (at least) keep the laptop and desktop data physically separate (or maybe I don't)? I can't create big enough FAT32 partitions from the XP laptop to store all my data from either machine. I can create NTFS partitions that are as big as the moon but that's no good for the ME desktop (it won't see them). So the only solution seems to be creating greater-than-32GB FAT32 partitions from the ME desktop and then converting one or more of them to NTFS from the XP laptop.

This supposes:
(a) the need to have separate partitions for the two computers
(b) the desirability of using NTFS for backing up XP laptop data

Maybe I don't need to do anything - I just have three big folders on the pre-formatted FAT32 232GB disc: Laptop backups, Desktop backups, Other data. Easy, I guess - but the most efficient use of the HDD?

― Michael Jones, Monday, 12 March 2007 23:45 (nineteen years ago)

(I'm going to unplug the MyBook HDD and pop in back in its shiny pouch overnight. Ner-night, everybody).

― Michael Jones, Monday, 12 March 2007 23:51 (nineteen years ago)

every time i partition a disk (multiple linux distros) i end up with one partition that's 99% full and another that's barely used. which is a pain. so these days i don't tend to bother with partitioning beyond one for / and one for /home (C:\ and D:\ for windows people). large partitions are painful when fscking but that's what journalled file systems are for.

i wouldn't use ntfs - frankly i don't trust bill gates with my data.

haven't bothered with a generational approach to my backups (it's mostly mp3s that i can always re-rip and anything that needs versioning is kept in cvs / svn anyway), i just run rsync when i remember.

― koogs, Tuesday, 13 March 2007 10:18 (nineteen years ago)

The thing that bothers me about having one huge FAT32 partition is that FAT drives are kinda notorious for getting fragmented very easily and becoming a pain in the backside to use. But, then again, I'm not really going to be using the MyBook like that - it'll be a place for laptop/desktop backups (maybe a full one once a month for the former with weekly differentials, a full one for the latter full stop (it's barely used thesedays)) and a huge cache of audio/video/images which I'll just be adding to. The backups will be wiped and replaced every once in a while, so no great danger of fragmentation.

― Michael Jones, Tuesday, 13 March 2007 10:27 (nineteen years ago)

If you are feeling L33t have a go with MacFUSE posted above which gives you a way of doing read/write on NTFS from OS X.

― Ed, Tuesday, 13 March 2007 10:45 (nineteen years ago)

Awesome = Services menu!!

apple+shift+Y = new sticky of selected txt

― Catsupppppppppppppp dude ‫茄蕃‪, Wednesday, 14 March 2007 21:55 (nineteen years ago)

Youtube problem.

This whole week, I haven't been able to get past the black "Loading video" screen, which had been a problem ever since I upgraded to Peerguardian 2 several months ago. But I've since perm-allowed most of the IPs for YT, and when I go to YT now, I'm not seeing any IPs getting blocked.

I've tried disabling PG2, then turning off my firewall (ZA), I've checked to make sure that Quicktime isn't my default program to handle streaming videos (I tried to check in WMP but I couldn't find anything about streaming; I don't have Realplayer installed either).

The YT help page mentioned an out-of-date Flash player, but I don't think that's my problem since I'm able to see the "Loading video" screen.

I've tried both FF2 and IE7, and YT doesn't work for either.

WinXP SP2 yadda yadda.

― Leee, Wednesday, 14 March 2007 22:15 (nineteen years ago)

every time I connect my ipod to my windows xp box I'm unable to eject it normally because it says the files are "in use by another application". everything Ive looked up says this is due to Norton AntiVirus but I have auto-protection turned off and it still happens. the only way I can ever eject it is either via explorer force eject, or just taking it off the usb dongle anyway and forcing it to restart. anyone else experience this?

― akm, Wednesday, 14 March 2007 22:50 (nineteen years ago)

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