Oh no! More boring computer problems! Oh no!

have stupid issues w/ synching ipod & itunes and also w/ browser (firefox) search redirect virus which idk if are related -- previously had run tdsskiller which had fixed the redirect virus & then did an uninstall > reinstall of itunes w/ using a prev version of itunes, saving that version folder of program files/ipod, installing newest itunes vers and swapping in the "old" program files/ipod folder

it worked great for 2-3 wks and somehow is all back..now when i try to go thru those steps the "new" program files/ipod wont let it self be deleted --(there is an error saying the directory is not empty and there is a blank file in there that i cant open & if you try to right click delete just nothing even happens) even after all of itunes is uninstalled...i can move it and swap in the "old" one but idk shit is still not working i guess i need to research it more wtf i was so happy i had managed to fix this b4!

> i am trying to go to sonicrouter.com but the browser keeps taking me to my fucking belkin router page. what am i doing wrong?

dunno. sounds like a dns problem, somewhere - the name is associated with a bad ip address (bit suspicious that it also has 'router' in the name)

ip address for sonicrouter.com is 75.98.165.2 - try that instead of the name

Boring question here. At work we get a lot of documents from people for the newspaper. MS Word docx, sadly.

I've created macro's (on PC's) and a list (for MAC's) for my staff to rid documents from errors like double spaces, two spaces after a full stop, a space before comma's etc. Find "<double spaces>" and replace with "<single space>", for instance.

But, is there also a way for one to 'find' full stops in a document that isn't followed by a space? eg. "John was sad.He was lonely." There needs to be a space after the full stop, but Word - as far as I know - doesn't work with asterisks and search strings. But oh how I would like to automate putting a space after a full stop if there isn't one.

Is this possible? Any help or suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

add a space after every full stop. do this before you reduce all double spaces to single spaces.

Thanks, yes, that's the way I do it now, but it's tricky because it also puts a space after some full stops were it's not wanted (after full stops like eg. 'St.-Jean', '10.15 am' etc). I suppose it's the best way to do it now, but it's still annoying that I can't use a syntax that is more specific.

moving the goalposts 8)

are you using regexp? the regexp for the above would be to replace the pattern
"\.([^a-zA-Z])" (ie a literal dot followed by an alphabetic character) with
". $1"

(not sure of syntax, not a word user)

simple regexp example:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2799741/find-and-replace-a-section-of-a-string-with-wildcard-
type-search-using-regex-whi

arg, that appears to be c# not word macros

find \.([a-zA-Z]) or \.([A-Z]) if you only want to replace stops followed by capitals -i.e. what koogs said except for the ^ which is the negating character

replace . \1

oh and you have to tick the 'use wildcards' option under the 'More >>' part of the dialog box.

Wow you guys, thanks! That's great! Looking forward to diving into this and being able to use this!

Will it work on a mac though? Office for Mac doesn't allow macro's for some odd reason.

xp Ledge 'n Koogs, thanks! :-)

dunno about macs...

btw I went to a restaurant called Le Bateau Ivre restaurant in Madagascar. It was overpriced and full of old white men with young malagasy partners. There was a bad lounge band, and I was pretty much regretting our choice of eaterie, until the band busted out their cover of The Scorpions' Wind of Change.

Whoah... best LBI quote ever haha <3

What did you have?

errrr lamb. Allegedly slow cooked but it wasn't particularly tender. Not the best food I had in the country by any means.

Was it this one?

Next to La Récréa, the 'Drunken Boat' assures its own popularity with a 25m swimming pool (open from 09:00) and boisterous live music in the evenings, plus a seafood-oriented menu. It's a great place for kids, but the pool gets packed at weekends.

If so, boisterous live music otm

not exactly a problem but as this thread is active i'll hop on in - i'm getting kind of tired of constant transfers between my bulky external drive and my annoyingly small laptop hard drive, so i was thinking of getting the smallest external drive possible and just taping it to the top of my laptop and plugging in the usb from there. assuming i can do this without blocking up ventilation and such, are there any potential problems here?

That's the one! Evenings are cold so we didn't get to use the pool - not really sure how a pool and restaurant fit together tbh. Doing lengths inbetween starter and main?

xp - ok enough random african restaurant derail.

ha, sorry, the african restaurant derail was a lot more interesting than my question.

:)

Merdeyeux, I don't think it will lead to any problems, apart from stability for the ext. drive you are taping to the top of the laptop? (top of the laptop as in the other side of the screen?).

thanks LBI - that's right, top of the screen. I don't imagine I'll be throwing it around too much (and I'll warily disconnect it when I'm travelling etc.), so I'll give it a go.

My laptop DVD writer's saying there's some power callibration error or something if I try and burn a DVD. Seems fine if burning CDs though. Is this something that can be fixed easily or is it time to get a new laptop?

What do you do if your external hard drive is suddenly not being recognized by your computer? Most everything on there I've got elsewhere, except for one thing: 20+ GB of Beatles covers that took me years to compile. If you have to do data retrieval, how expensive is that?

Have you tried hooking it up to a different computer than your own? If a different computer picks it up it could be a problem with the usb port.

Thanks--I'll see if the one downstairs will recognize it.

Mac or PC?

Same problem downstairs. The computer's a PC; the external hard drive is TrekStor.

okay, do you have storage to be able to transfer to 20 GB? Probably one drive is better

when you plug it in does it start to do something then click and stop?

or is it just not responsive?

if it's the latter you might wanna buy a new enclosure for the drive and that could fix the problem

Could the connecting cord be borked? Ours is. We wiggled it until it recognized the drive and quickly transferred everything, being sure not to move the cord at all.

Basically the light keeps flashing, and you can hear a clicking sound, like it's trying to get itself going but can't. My brother-in-law actually refrigerated it overnight, something that's worked for him in the past, but nothing. 4,000 Beatles covers gone.

Some actual good news on the malfunctioning-technology front: I took the drive into Best Buy, and they were able to transfer everything over to a new external HD. $170--$100 for the work, plus the cost of the drive. (They waived the diagnostic fee.) So I can go back to pointlessly collecting Beatles covers I'll never listen to. What I've taken away from this is to make sure I have back-up to the back-up, so I'm going to also load the irreplaceable stuff onto the computer downstairs.

Installing Windows Vista, and it's running CHKDSK twice in a row??? Seems to be going faster the 2d time, maybe?

The OS is installed and computer works, but now it doesn't recognize my wireless USB adapter so I STILL can't get online normally. ;_;

HOW MANY TIMES IS IT GOING TO RUN CHKDSK. GOD.

u probably need an updated driver?

http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/windows-vista/Update-a-driver-for-hardware-that-isnt-working-properly

http://www.devicedoctor.com

Maybe I didn't do all the set-up steps. Trying again.

It worked! It's working! I don't have the password handy for our network so I can't connect yet but I will soon!!

o shit wait until your extended family learns what a computer genius you are

Fuck I hate computers.

HELLOOOOOOOO

LOL mookie otm :)

My family, like everyone else in the world that I know, now only uses macs. Their issues with viruses and spyware have gone from "insurmountable" to "zero" since they switched.

It's insane that virus protection even needs to be a thing anymore. Microsoft should have used the NT/XP leap to redesign the whole thing to work like a proper OS, but no. I presume MS was getting kickbacks from Symantec etc.

how long does the average disk defragging take? I'm running it on my laptop, okay for the first time so that might make a difference, but it's been running now for 4 hours...

how long has it been and how full is yr disk?

well defrag is a rather lenghty process, maybe some sectors of your disk have been corrupted and that slows down things

yeah should have told you that.

it's only a 140 gb hard drive. it's about 74gb full.

so far it's been 3 hours.