Oh no! More boring computer problems! Oh no!

(do yours or Mark's computer have networking? If all else fails, you can connect two computers together using a "null modem" cable and make a copy of your files that way. A null modem cable plugs into the serial port of each computer and should only get a few quid; but check what connectors your computers have before you get one, because serial port connectors can be either 9-pin or 25-pin.)

I've got most of the important stuff (eg latest thesis draft) backed up via emailed copies, although at this point I know there are misc. documents still on there that I refer to maybe once a month and haven't backed up, also lots of photos, and I should really transfer everything if possible. Fingers crossed it will turn on again long enough to transfer everything. It will pain me to lose photoshop though. (The CD for it is somewhere in storage in the US.)

Follow the guide from microsoft and get your files over ASAP and then stop creating new files on your laptop.

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;304040

The hardisk will die at some point in the future, so you will need to buy and fit/have fitted a replacement hdd, if I was doing this I would buy a new disk now and using adapters on a standard PC ghost (make an exact copy, using Norton Ghost) your old drive onto the new one while it was still working this would be seamless, you may find a computer shop willing to do this for you. If not you'll need to resinstall Windows and all your applications onto your new HDD.

Pash, pour water on it.

The point is that most people don't have a single internet connection in their house. So they need something that can give ethernet, which everything speaks.

(Ed is right here. Quibbling about different varieties of ?DSL is neither here nor there, because your average off-the-shelf DSL modem supports all of them. The hard part is finding out what settings your ISP hasn't told you)

I hate iPhoto, sorry but it sucks. anyway, I have got myself into a right pickle. i was trying to show my dad flickr and see if i could upload some of his photos onto it. anyway hes got 3000 or so photos in his iPhoto Library, and iPhoto was being difficult, and seemed to have crashed, so I used Force Quit. the one that says "you may lose any unsaved data".

so the next day i get a phone call and it turns out that all his photos hvae "disappeared". when i next am home, i look high and low for the missing photos but cant find em. not in the trash, not in any hidden folders or something. all thats left is photos left in other folders outside fo the iPhoto Library folder.

so what does this mean? iPhoto ate my photos? where coudl they have gone? what happens to data when it just is "lost"? is there any hope of using data recovery software to get it back? it seems hard to get such software for the mac, and i wasnt sure whether it would work. is there anything i can do?

im not sure how much more detail i can give, especailly as i am not using that computer at the moment.

thanks in advance for saving me from my dads wrath!

also: windows has a neat little feature where you can restore the machine back to a certain date. like the day before all the photos disappeared. im not sure if mac has something similiar.

find / -name '*.jpg' | less

it should list every .jpg file on the entire system. You'll have a lot of trawling to do to find any of the ones that you're looking for, but if they're still on your computer they'll be somewhere in the list.

If the worst possible thing has happened and iPhoto either won't open your library or there are photos missing, they are probably still in the library, stored by year, month and day. Navigate through the various folders and copy them back out. When you copy a photo out of the database, use option-drag to make a new copy so that the original is left behind. All of the metadata is history at this point, but you at least have your photos. If the photos are actually not there, then there has been some serious disk issue that you should address immediately."

http://girr.org/mac_stuff/photos.html

Restore points don't get your data back they just roll back the system software to a point before you installed that dodgy driver or piece of spyware. You have to set them manually as well, it's not a backup.

As for Ambrose's problem, not sure what to suggest as far as recovering the photos which should be in the iPhoto Library. As for the slowdown, it's a known problem, especially on older systems, due to on the fly thumbnail creation.

Some tips on speeding up iPhoto.

http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20030204061957714
http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20050212014121749&query=iphoto+speed

This implies you might need a specific BRAND or something of DSL (or dialup or cable) modem with yr ISP which just isnt right. Not for dialup or DSL anyway. The exception being ADSL vs DSL2 - DSL2 does need a DSL modem capable of it and older ones wont be.

Current set-up:
AMD Athlon Processor 1.14 ghz.
256mb of RAM.
Radeon 7200 graphics card 64mb

What should I upgrade in order for GTA: SA to work well on my pc? Which should I made priority? I've seen 256mb graphics cards ranging from £55 to £150 on Amazon, am I an idiot or are these similar products?

The min spec for GTA:SA is 1GHz Intel Pentium III or AMD Athlon or equivalent, RAM: 256 MB RAM, Video Memory: 64 MB VRAM and the recommended spec is Intel Pentium 4 or AMD Athlon XP or equivalent, RAM: 384 MB RAM, Video Memory: 128 MB VRAM.

Also, how easy is it to upgrade these three elements? Would I be best taking it to a proper pc shop to get sorted or can it be done at home with ease?

If you have to upgrade the motherboard too, you're essentially looking at stripping down and rebuilding the entire machine. It's usually less work to buy a new computer and put your old hard disk in it.

Take a look at these guides

http://arstechnica.com/guides/buyer/system-guide-200506.ars/2

The budget box but with 1GB of RAM is a nice machine, keep in mind that budget means budget gaming here, the video card isn't the best around but it will run GTA:SA very nicely at 1024x768, but as the system is PCI-E you can slot in what video card you want later on or even a better one now depending on how much you want to spend.

based on this incredibly handy list:

http://episteme.arstechnica.com/groupee/forums/a/tpc/f/67909965/m/844003222631

BEar in mind the videocards at the top of that list are able to run Battlefield 2 at very high resolutions and quality settings.

You could keep your current HDD and optical drives, you might want a new case/power supply though modern systems tend to use a bit more juice than older ones and run a bit warmer so a few case fans are needed.

Really how powerful a videocard you need is based on what resolution you need which depends on the monitor you use.

Bear in mind minimum specs are the minimum to just get the game running they never really give any guide to a spec for a smooth gaming experience, the recomended specs are where you should be looking.

Don't buy from a local computer shop, unless you are supplying the parts list and they offer a reasonable quote for the work/parts.

Seriously 3200+ and 6600GT with no monitor for 1500USD is too much

also, does anyone use mkisofs much? am having trouble with options - it's turning '=' signs in filenames (yes, i know...) to '_'s and generally being a pain. am using cygwin mkisofs, source is win2k, destination is linux. don't need subdirectories but filenames are at least 26 characters long and need to be preserved.

(mkisofs -J -l -R -iso-level 3 resulted in a disk full of files i could list but not access)

(google gives lots of links to manpages full of all possible options but there's too much of a wood / trees thing going on there)

To annoy.

I don't use mkisofs much, but I've just skimmed the manpage: have you tried the option -relaxed-filenames

Yeah they don't care about the bandwidth really it's the principle or something.

am writing a script to cobble together 650M of files from a directory (there are hundreds, roughly 4M each but not constant), md5sum them, mkisofs them and write them to cd because the alternative is using windows gui 'tools'. next problem, adding filesizes together...

$sum=$(( $a + $b ))

Computers are supposed to be deteministic dammit!

prompt> sh a
+ 0 + 10 ╪

um. worked fine in real bash, gave the above rubbish in cygwin bash. am using size=`eval $size + $s` instead. the thing i thought i'd have trouble with was extracting the filesize but stat -c "%s" filename to the rescue.

Is there any way to change the attribution line in replies in Mail? So that instead of saying "On 10 Aug 2005, at 11:20 pm, John Doe wrote:" it says something a little more lively? My googling has turned up nothing, but googling for "Mail" is a most unrewarding exercise.

I used to be able to do this in Eudora with a little plug-in. I kinda miss Eudora, but I've made the change and I'm going to stick with it for a while longer.

when I turn it on all that comes up on the screen is a folder with a little exclamation mark beside it, similar to the low battery sign

I have had a little look around on google and people are registering the same complaint but no-one has provided satisfactory solution

in the past whenever my ipod has failed in its many novel ways it has normally rectified itself by just being left alone

perhaps that'll work this time but in the meanwhile, any suggestions?