Oh no! More boring computer problems! Oh no!

The problem now is that iTunes doesn't know what happened to the mp3s. If I try to play something, it says "The song could not be used because the original file could not be found. Would you like to locate it?" If I click yes, I can show it that's on the new hard drive. And then it'll play.

But is there a way to avoid doing this for every individual song on my computer?

I got the idea that perhaps something had overheated, so I turned the computer off for forty minutes, and restarted it again. Since then, everything's worked fine, although I haven't been doing any kind of serious work with my computer.

Dell is sending me a new hard drive (I'm under warranty) ... so it'll be a pain in the ass to reinstall everything, but whatever. Now, assuming that the overheating is the problem, will it be solved with a new hard drive? What's stopping the next hard drive from overheating too? I removed the hard drive and examined it -- nothing appeared scratched or damaged at all. Is the real problem something else?

Your opinions would be appreciated!

Mechanical parts (such as fans or motors) -- those are the sorts of things which break down at a moment's notice.

When you replace it try to clean out any dust from vents, etc. (Or from anywhere.)

like:

http://www.sente.ch/software/GPGMail/English.lproj/GPGMail.html

yes, so much nicer than the routine beatings fathers usually hand out

my housemate has told me about this after her mum read bout it in the paper, but she doesnt know anythiong about computers

is it a scam? how could it work?

Soon after I fitted the card and got everything working so that I was on the internet the computer turned itself off - no warnings, just 'clunk' and it was off. Up on restarting it, it got stuck in a loop of getting to the point where the blue XP 'welcome' screen appears and then restarting again and again and again from the same point. after a while it started up fine and said it had recorvered from a serious error. Everything worked noramlly until I shut it down. when I started it up again, it got stuck in the same loop.

This happened a few times until last night when it restarted, got through all the dos stuff and now keeps hanging prior to the Windows XP screen (with the orange blobs scrolling left to right to make it look like it is loading).

I'm guessing this is pretty serious but is there anything I can do to sort this out other than taking it in to be repaired?

Have you tried booting into saafe mode?

How do I allow established FTP connections the ports needed for passive FTP access without allowing everyone access to those ports?

Or am I going about this the wrong way?

I haven't tried the safe mode option. Assuming I can get it to start in safe mode, what should I be doing to make it better?

CD Burners. I have an internal burner and an external burner. Neither is working.. But it seems to be Windows Xp that's the problem (surprise surprise.)

Here're the symptoms:
-Internal writer - when looking in Explorer (file browser) at the supposedly blank media in the drive, it shows a folder from a CD I burned about 4 months ago.

-When I put a CDR in the external burner, Explorer shows the contents of the last CD that was in the drive.

So I can't write a Cd because Windows (via Nero or Burn at Once) thinks the CD in the drive is not blank. But I keep putting new CDRs in, and they all seem to have the contents of the last successful read. (If I put a different audio CD in the drive, then Explorer shows its contents for every blank CDR I put in.)

I have tried rebooting, reinstalling the drives, restore points, ....

Any other ideas why it's doing this and/or how to fix it?

Copy that path into the location bar of Internet Explorer (which is just another way of dealing with windows explorer), truncate the file name so it's just the path: f:\unsorted\albumname\ There are all the files. go up a directory: can't find the directory albumname.

WHAT THE FUCK????

try searching for "windows xp files hidden not showing up" and you get the standard bullshit about viewing hidden system files which isn't what I'm trying to do.

I'm worried this might be a drive problem. It also doesn't seem to be consistent. For instance, it happened to some stuff I downloaded two days ago, but not yesterday, but it happened today. No rhyme or reason.

Is it formatted NTFS or FAT32?

I'm at my mom's house and her computer runs S L O W. It's windows 98, and she has never run the defragging program as far as I can tell, nor done a system cleanup. So I decided to defragment it, left it defragmenting overnight, and it is still only partway done. It will work on it for a short while, then a message comes up that says "new drive information: restarting" or something similar, and it has to go through the whole reading-the-driver thing again, working through already-defragged areas, then each time only defragging a few more lines before starting the process over. I've got it paused right now.

Things I have done to try to make it go faster and not restart:
stopped norton utilities from running in the background
shut off the screen saver
shut off the monitor's (and anything else's) idle auto-shut-off
deleted cookies and any spyware I found (i.e. ran the disk cleanup thing)
I even unplugged the phone cord (we are on dialup) even though I know that should do nothing.

Anyway, I'm an idiot about these things, and if anything else is running in the background, and updating the files every few minutes to cause this restarting, I don't know how to find it. And I don't want the total defragging to take, like, DAYS at this rate. So, help please?

If you have tons of directories/files, go to the directory you're losing the files/directories in, choose the "view" option from the menu bar on top of the window, go to "arrange icons by..." and then choose "name". I'm willing to bet if the directory is there, it's just not in the right alphabetical location, or is maybe off to the side of the window or something. It seems like a stupid answer to the question, but I've been burned by this multiple times.

As for the Win98 defragging issue, beanz OTM: the Win98 defragger fucking sucks, because if anything is running in the background at all, it messes with the defrag. Give up before you tear your hair out.

If you're connecting it to your system with an IDE cable straight to the motherboard, you may be running into an issue with the system not seeing all of the files, if you've gone over about 137 gigabytes...sometimes the controller on the motherboard isn't set up for drives over that size. After that amount of data, performance might get flaky. (If the drive is pre-formatted before you put it into the system, Windows will probably report 200GB but may not know what to do with the last 63 or so gigs, reliably, when it's writing to the drive.)

If it's a serial ATA drive or an external drive, this doesn't apply.

I have a SMART failure thing detection thing on my hard disc, after the BIOS screen, before windows begins to start up.

I was backing-up everything to reformat the drive and reinstall windows, anyway. I did so, hoping the detection thing would just go away but it has not.

is a failure inevitable? is there no way to fix/stop it? should I just replace the disc straight away? the only reason I have not already got a new disc is that it is a laptop and a new 80Gb drive will be almost £100.

thanks.

http://www.lavalys.com/products.php?lang=en

That will give you SMART information, is your laptop still in warranty?

but 1st off make sure any irreplacable docs are backed up ASAP.

05 / Reallocated Sector Count / 50 / 1 / 1 / 1022 / Pre-Failure: Imminent loss of data is being predicted

any idea what this means?

I have everything backed-up to an external disc and, also, to DVDs.

it is just under a year into its two year warranty.

problem is...I have a ton of work, at the moment and up until june, and cannot risk sudden problems or waiting for "repairs". I wish I could just buy a new disc and they would compensate me.

thank you.

Depending on your warranty type they will probably want the whole laptop back, and if you replace the disk yourself you could invalidate your current warranty in someway (breaking a sticker or something)

Give them a call and ask them what the warranty procedure involves for a knackered HDD.