Oh no! More boring computer problems! Oh no!

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.

A rather fragmented disk (say 10%-12%) that is 3/4 full or more could take 4 hours or more. Does the defragger say what "pass" it is on currently? Expect at least 8 passes.

that seems like kind of a long time, but not a big deal -- just let it run overnight

Defragmenting a hard drive takes a long time - overnight is normal. You can usually do other minor stuff like web surfing during defrag though.

well the odd thing is there is no progress bar or information, it just shows "Defragmenting hard disk..." and a spinning icon.

okay, it I'll leave it on. yeah managing to use web at the same time.

thanks all

I turn my laptop on only find it not acknowledging any keys I type. I plug in the spare keyboard we have and it won't acknowledge that either. wtf do i do?

oh wait it acknowledges capslock and backspace. i haven't spilt anything on it, messed with any settings or anything. GAH.

Is it an HP? I googled and found:

http://h10025.www1.hp.com/ewfrf/wc/document?docname=c01703941&lc=en&dlc=en&cc=us&lang=en&softwareitem=ob-68739-1&os=2100&ts=true&rule=4030&product=3851338
(Basically just turn off the computer, unplug the AC adapter it, take out the battery, hold the power button to the right for 30 seconds, put the battery back in, plug the AC adapter back in, turn it on).

This will make the keyboard type again. To prevent it from happening again, you have to download a driver from hp's drivers and downloads website and download the driver "WinFlash for HP Notebook System BIOS (for Notebooks with AMD Processors) - Microsoft Windows Vista-Based". http://www.hp.com/#Support

it is an acer. will try the non-hp-specific bits though. :)

I've never had the problem.. but I hope that helps!

a search with the acer keyword added has some more complicated directions.. I'd definitely try the above method first:
http://en.kioskea.net/forum/affich-34616-acer-aspir-5100-keybrd-and-mouse-problem

hp advice didn't work.

gonna go with a solid 'left it and hope it feel better later' system, although this doesn't make sense. also a 'i don't feel comfortable removing my hd like that acer site says, so if it doesn't miraciously start working by tomorrow, i'll take it to pc world'

haha, fair enough.

lol i think 'leave it a while and hope it cures itself' may have worked.

I wonder if any of you can help me with this problem? I have a PC with Windows 7 and an external hard drive. A while ago I was trying to move a bunch of mp3's from the computer's hard drive to the external hard drive. Some kind of error happened in the process, and not all of the mp3's were copied to the external hard drive correctly. Now, whenever I try to open the external hard drive, my computer says that some of the files on the external HD are corrupted, and would I want Windows to try and fix the files and the corrupted "sectors"? I tried this fix option, but it took several hours for Windows to do that, and after the process was over it said I should format the external HD in order to completely fix the problem.

Now, I have about 300 gigabytes worth of stuff on the external HD, so I'd have to move all of that somewhere else if I want to format the HD. On top of that, if I open the external HD (the only way of doing that is telling Windows I want to open it without trying to fix the problem, otherwise it won't let me in), I can still move the files around, but it takes a lot longer than normally. I moved the folder that held the mp3's which (I think) caused this problem from the external HD to the trash bin, but it took something like 8 hours before they all were moved there. Now they're sitting in the trash bin, but when I try to empty it, the computer says it will take 8 more hours to completely delete them. So moving the 300 gigabytes of stuff from the external HD to the computer HD could possibly take days!

Do you think there's any way to solve this problem without having to move all the stuff away from the external HD and/or having to format it?

Maybe not the answer you want, but you can either leave it copying them over for a few hours/days, or use this as an opportunity to weed out stuff you don't want and only copy over what you want to keep.

Yeah, the latter option is what I've been thinking of... But I'd still want to know if I can somehow do it bit faster, as I don't keeping the computer running constantly for hours and hours doesn't really fit in my daily schedule. I don't understand how a few files being corrupted can cause the whole external HD to become 1000 times slower than normally?

Because it knows there's 'corruption' around, and it tries to "tread carefully"...

On my Windows 7 pc, since an hour or so I cannot pull up any websites in Firefox, my preferred browser, apart from ILX and my webmail. I restarted my pc, didn't do anything special, but nothing (from Google to eBay, from bbc to tumblr) will show, Firefox showing me that "check your network" error. Apart from ILX and webmail!

Anyone got any idea as to why this is?

here's a google result from a similar query, since you can't google? No experience over here - but I am a lifelong, crazy, Opera browser girl.

I had the same problem with a website i was visiting and finally found what seems like a fix. heres how i did it.

1) go to tools and click options

2) click on the advanced button and then click the network tab

3) then under connections click settings

4) click auto-detect proxy settings for this network.

hope this works for you as it worked for me.

Thanks Lex, but no dice. I also checked if windows firewall was off as it's supposed to be, and it still is.

It's bizarre to me that ILX works but nothing else does, not even Google...

I'm just shooting in the dark but here's another post I found, maybe? It is a very bizarre problem!

The problem is not Windows 7 , the problem is within Firefox 7, and it is because of the network.http.max-connections that were set to 256 , and that is way to much. You need to change it to 48, follow this steps
In the address bar, type about:config
If it shows up, click on I’ll be careful
Filter for network.http.max-connections
Click on network.http.max-connections
Change this from 256 to 48
Restart Firefox

Thanks again for all the help and effort FFM. Shortly after, last night, I lost connection completely. Went through firewall settings, safe mode, back to an earlier restore point etc, all to no avail, but it turned out my DNS settings had changed. I'm completely in the dark about how that happened, but that was the problem. Still can't grasp why ILX did work and the rest didn't, or why Firefox didn't work but Maxthon did. I hate these (Windows) problems that just arise out of nowhere, but am counting my blessings at the moment. Thanks again for helping out!

I'm happy to have tried! How very bizarre...I guess they knew it would be cruel to take away ILX as well as everything else ;)

Like you expect Windows to do things that make sense?

Too right ;)

xp

I know Lee, mad naive

hah so i dug up this thread to ask:
does anyone know why my apple devices tend to self-assign themselves IP addresses when they can't quite connect to the nearby wifi? (my current logic for it being something like 'because they do not want to disappoint me by not having an IP address at all', which I understand involves giving them rather too much of an internal life)

and discovered that this was a problem Alba was having seven years ago! and people didn't really have much of a way of explaining it then.

endlessly recurring boring computer problems, oh no

5-yr-old macbook has randomly shut down completely twice in the past hour. never had this particular problem before. this means it's dying right? and i should replace it? ok, been gearing up to that for a while. but more pertinently is it only going to work in half hour bursts from here on in? because i have urgent work to be doing now and aaaarghhhhhhhhhhh

also advise me re: replacements. this is a 5-yr-old macbook OS X that i bought for about £600 iirc. what's the best basic equivalent model these days? is "around the same price" feasible?

why is my macbook randomly downloading files called things like "l.php" from the internet without me telling it to

when i open them they're empty text files, i don't know where they come from or what they are and they don't seem to be doing any harm?

i hate this computer so much but i have no idea how to buy a new one

http://www.codehesive.com/index.php/archive/facebook-privacy-and-the-mystery-of-l-php/

oh ok but why are the files downloading to my computer?

they're not always called "l.php", can't remember offhand but "comments.php" has happened. they're always php files though

why? why why why why why is it doing this?

textedit is just...not saving?

i closed my macbook lid last night with several document open in textedit. if i change them today, they all save fine, except ONE - it just says it can't be saved, doesn't give an explanation. i tried duplicating it and saving that as a new document - no error message appears but the new document doesn't save at all, anywhere. the same thing happens if i try to create new documents from scratch, as well. WHAT is going on and why? this makes no sense. this is bloody TEXTEDIT, what on earth is there to go wrong? and why must it happen on a monday morning?

Argh. This is driving me fucking bonkers. For two weeks solid now any and all NPR podcasts are taking forever to download through the iTunes store. Like 41 to 57 hours. All other podcasts are download at their typical speeds with absolutely no problems, this is only happening to the three NPR podcasts I subscribe to. I've asked around and no one else seems to be having any problems, so apparently its not like a widespread issue. I've tried unsubscribing and resubscribing to them all, no dice. I've tried downloading them each directly from their individual sites and from feeds, with the same extremely slow download speeds. This is infuriating and I'm just going to have to quit listening to some of my favorite podcasts now. Anyone ever dealt with a similar issue?

this started happening with random things I was downloading; I eventually "fixed" it by repeatedly pausing the download, waiting and resuming the download to check to see if the download speed had picked back up

anyone else got the 'green dot moneypak' virus? got it on the laptop i do most of my writing on in the middle of the night while i was working on a couple of things with deadlines, really fucked me up. have already gone through the motions w/ one site's advice on how to fix it to no avail.

this started happening with random things I was downloading; I eventually "fixed" it by repeatedly pausing the download, waiting and resuming the download to check to see if the download speed had picked back up

Saw someone else mention this, but at least through iTunes I can't even pause these ones for some reason! Its only giving me the 'x' to completely cancel the download.

I don't download podcasts, maybe you can't pause them

can def pause music/apps

All of my other podcasts download over 100 kbps, but these are all at 3-4 kbps on the high end. I just can't figure it out. If all my downloads were this slow, it'd obviously be a speed or connectivity thing, but it's just these three things. And the fact that they're all NPR gives me a common denominator to make me think its on their end, but no one else seems to be having issues with them and they won't respond to feedback.

A little searching shows that people have had problems if they download directly to an external hard drive, which I do, but disconnecting that and downloading directly to my hard drive doesn't help. Also saw a suggestion to turn off the firewall or adjust settings to allow iTunes to connect. Tried that, still no dice. So its apparently not an iTunes thing or an external hard drive thing. This is baffling.

Alight, so tested this on my wife's laptop on three different occasions and same problems there. Is there some weird reason our router would just be having trouble with downloads from one particular source?