Oh no! More boring computer problems! Oh no!

thanks libcrypt!

So uh any streaming experts on here?

Trying to stream video (from mlb.com, as it happens) through IE in WinXP; the site uses Windows Media Player. My problem is probably not unusual: buffering pauses, apparent (near-)dropouts etc. Monitoring the Network tab of the Task Manager...

http://i23.photobucket.com/albums/b356/olem/strrream.jpg

I notice two things. (1) A fetching sawtooth pattern, yielding almost ok video, but with intermittent buffering. (2) Periods with way low transmission rate, when obv it's like a poor slideshow with sound.

Now, the problem could be several places:

(A) At my end; ie my internet connection and/or domestic wireless network transmission. My take: Pretty unlikely; trying other Internet activity, eg to refresh another page in the browser, yields instant results. (Note e.g. the non-sawtooth segment just to the right of "Byte per intervall" -- that's me bringing up ILX.)

(B) With ISP. My take: As above, for same reason.

(C) With the service provider, ie mlb.com in this case. My take: Not entirely unlikely per se, but I've experienced similar things from several other sources, usually (but not exclusively) using WMP. (Flash players, for instance, seem to do this close to never.)

(D) With WMP. These patterns suggest to me that it is the streaming application itself that is causing this, trying to hog no more bandwidth than necessary for OK streaming, and missing slightly (except for the near-dropout periods, when it misses mightily), making stuff close to unwatchable. Am I just paranoid, or could some "bandwidth management algorithm" for "optimizing my streaming experience" be responsible for this?

Hewp!

I would go with option C as most likely, the cause being more people trying to stream video than the server can reasonably handle.

hellos. two problems, in order of urgency... if anyone can help, i will be so hugely grateful. advice definitely needed.

1) my shitty cheap 2+ years old acer laptop is running interminably slow. if i have itunes running, it sucks up huge amounts of the CPU, and i basically struggle to run word and firefox at the same time. a quick perusal of the internet suggests the registry might be the problem, and the askanerd website suggested a program that will, for $28, scan and repair any registry issues caused by installing tonnes of programs/mp3s over the last few years. is this snake oil? will it kill my laptop?

2) my expensive lovely laptop is currently mothballed, as it won't connect to the broadband internet at my new flat anymore. at my old house, it had no problems. moving to this new flat, and a different BT homehub than it was used to, it would regularly disconnect, and not be able to reconnect. phoning BT and getting their helpers to remotely rejig some of the settings on the laptop/hub would help, temporarily, but often, a week later, the same issue would come up again, necessitating another hour long call to BT. Until, a month ago, it did it again, and abfter 90 minutes the BT guy said it was my laptop at fault, not their software/homehub. but it *recognises the homehub, it just refuses to make the connection somehow. i could send it back to the PC World it came from for a check-up, but i am not sure what to say the problem is...

anyway, too very dull and probably complicated/stupidly-easy problems, but any advice would be great, esp. to the first one, as i am desperate enough to buy software off the internet to solve this problem.

and goddamn i wish i had enough money to get a new laptop

and finally, on my shitty laptop, itunes regularly sucks down 80-90% of my cpu, is this normal???

Sounds like snake oil.

I'd back-up my data and reinstall Windows, or revert to an older version of iTunes if it's the new one causing the problems.

Or download Ccleaner for free to clear your registry - http://www.ccleaner.com/

Or maybe uninstall iTunes and use http://lifehacker.com/5200534/install-itunes-without-the-extra-bloat

much obliged james, will explore those options now...

As for the good laptop, try cleaning out the remembered networks for the wireless adapter. Open the wireless network device through the network control panel then I think it is in the advanced tab. At the bottom is a list of stored networks. Clear that out and try connecting again.

dump the bt home hub

thanks for the advice ed, though iy didn't seem to help. and i think you're right, DG, though it isn't an option at the moment.

the left and right arrow keys on my mac have inexplicably stopped working. i didn't spill anything on them. up and down are fine. ideas anyone?

is it a laptop?

yes

Do you have a USB keyboard you could try?

hmm, no! and a day on and the keys still don't work

slight whirring noise in my MacBook.

not loud, not clicking. but consistent, annoying when the room is quiet. goes away only sometimes.

fan? backing everything up now but i'm concerned.

still whirring... :/

ok granted it's very subtle. like if there's a little room noise u would be hard pressed to hear it. but i just had a hard drive crash in may and can't really take another one. will prolly go to GeniusBar.

my macbook whirrs constantly, more so when hot

how old is yours, surm? mine is a 2007 model iirc

Casuistry (no longer with us on ILX) had a Mac that whirred very loudly. I think he said it was the power source, but not sure.

My laptop (2005 Dell Inspiron) will not stay off. I power it off and a few hours later it comes on again. Weird!

Whirring is usually fan for power supply and thus intended and harmless, though I've had it go crazy on at least three computers (which were all Dell desktop PCs and not laptop Macs, though). The last one went enough haywire to stall startup of the machine whilst revving up to what seemed like jet-engine sound levels, and I had to restart the box repeatedly until the BIOS or whatever kicked in before the fan did (53 times on the highest count, no kidding).

While whirring may be annoying, I guess the thing to pay notice to regarding the health of the machine is if there's any change to how it behaves over time.

Outlook Express seems to be freezing and I can't get to task manager when it's running to get a look at it - I end up resetting each time.
So I thought it was probably time to do an online virus scan. However, every single website I try after searching Google - Panda, House Call, AVG, Kaspersky etc - none of their sites will load ("Cannot find server" in both Firefox and IE) - as if my net connection was down - but all other sites work fine.

I'm getting the scans through other sites and running a Spybot S&D, but wondered if this was likely to be deliberate, caused by a virus? I haven't come across this before.

Maybe try http://www.microsoft.com/Security_Essentials/ if the others are blocked

Don't think Outlook Express is being developed anymore. Maybe try using Windows Live Mail instead - http://download.live.com/wlmail

> none of their sites will load ("Cannot find server" in both Firefox and IE)

check your hosts file - malware sometimes rewrites it to stop people accessing anti-virus sites

(or try downloading them on a working pc)

Yeah sorry, my post was a bit garbled - I'd never heard of a virus preventing you accessing anti-virus sites. Ummm... how do I check the hosts file/ get around this? I don't have another pc I can use.

your hosts file would normally be in C:\WINDOWS\system32\drivers\etc. Just edit it in notepad

might be a red herring but given that all the antivirus sites were having trouble (and i assume others (ILE at least 8) were working ok) then it's worth a look

mine's at C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc\hosts (vista) and contains only entries for localhost:

127.0.0.1 localhost
::1 localhost

(see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hosts_file . it's actually a holdover from old BSD networking code that the windows tcpip stack is all built on)

this http://www.microsoft.com/windows/ie/community/columns/ietopten.mspx says you might need to show hidden files in order to see it.

xpost...

Just had a look and it seems ok - there's the stuff saying "This is a sample hosts file" then the only entry is
127.0.0.1 localhost

which as far as I can tell is ok? Not too clued up on this sort of thing.

I managed to get AVG software but it won't let me update the anti-virus database (again just tells me to check my internet connection), presumably because the avg.com (or w/ever) site is blocked along with all the others :(

but other sites are fine? what about microsoft.com? if that one's ok then try downloading their antivirus stuff (as someone else suggested upthread)

(http://news.softpedia.com/news/DNS-Poisoning-Malware-Gets-Upgrade-106953.shtml mentions dns poisoning malware, which hijacks the dns that translates the names to ip addresses. the way around this is to add entries to hosts file, which should be used in preference. but all this is little more than speculation...)

this: http://free.avg.com/gb-en/download-update lets you manually download avg's virus definitions for an update. that's http://77.67.44.202/gb-en/download-update ...

"someone else above" was james: Oh no! More boring computer problems! Oh no!

I can't get onto Microsoft.com, nor either of those two AVG URLs (the second one just changes to the first when trying to access it), I only managed to get the AVG I do have from www.v3.co.uk/vnunet/downloads/2129071/avg-antivirus-free-edition

but trying to get Trend Micro from the same site didn't work - presumably it just points to the Trend Micro site which is blocked. There must be a list of 'blocked' site somewhere but I don't know where else to look...

The AVG scan is still running but hasn't found anything of note yet. Spybot didn't find anything. Normally I'd do a combination of a few different scans.

BTW thanks v much for your help so far!

Arghh. So I ran the AVG scan and it found a couple of things, cleaned them, and all seemed fine as I was able to access the anti-virus websites that I couldn't before. However logging on today, I can't open my iogear wireless dongle thing that I have plugged into my USB port. When I try, it appears on the taskbar for a second then closes. So, I can't get online (posting from a friend's pc). Any idea what could be causing it?
The icon for it is normally on the quick launch bar by the clock, but has disappeared from here along with the windows network connections icon.

short of reinstalling drivers, i have nothing.

can you use a wired connection? plug it straight into the router?

www.ubuntu.com? 8)

Doh... I tried taking the wireless adapter out and putting it in the other usb slot.. seems to work fine now! I think I thought it was connected with the virus stuff I had.

OK, so this is probably the most boring of boring computer questions but I am stumped.

I am trying to install this little barcode generating tool onto Tomcat on 10.6 OSX server:

http://www.idautomation.com/tomcat/

After a great deal of fiddling I keep coming back with the same error

http://i45.tinypic.com/5a5e0x.jpg

which suggest it can't find the awt which I thought was a fundamental part of Java.

Any ideas?

looks like a missing library within tomcat. that said, java.awt.Canvas is pretty fundamental - is used for any drawing of anything. it's more of a java App thing than a webapp thing though (but necessary for drawing the barcode prior to saving / serving it as an image, i guess).

it's just a case of copying the right jar into your classpath. just don't ask me what the right jar is...

i can find an awt.dll and an libawt.so but not a jar. am guessing it's a native library for speed...

the .so is here on our linux systems:
/usr/java/jdk1.5.0_16/jre/lib/amd64/libawt.so

thanks, I will try that

Possibly not the best of these threads to revive, but enh.

We have 2 ipod touches (one runnning OS v2.something and one os v 3.0), and an iphone on v 3.0

I reset the WEP key on my router the other day because my Touch wouldnt connect to our wireless network at home, though it'd happily connect to free wifi at Mcdonalds or wherever. I'd read some forums say after an OS update it can make them barf and to change yr WEP/WPA key.

So I did. And now, none of the 3 ipods can see the wif- and the other 2 could before. We've ensured all 3 have the new WEP key. I've reset the modem twice (hard reset). I've done "reset network settings) and rebooted my Touch several times.

The weirdest thing is every time we try it, it breifly knocks all the functional laptops off the network. Its as if they're doing something shitty to the DHCP by grabbing a used IP. Maybe? Maybe its nothing to do with that.

Short of reformatting my ipod which I *dont* want to have to do, I'm at a loss. Anyone had issues with this? Any other suggestions?

Just bought an Airport Express and after 3 hours trying to get it to work, I'm regretting the $100 I spent on it. I've spent 3 hours trying to get my Macbook to find it, no dice. The Airport Express light just keeps flashing amber and when I try to run the Airport Utility on my Macbook the only option it gives me is to rescan for the Airport, which won't work. Any ideas? Beyond frustrated. So much for Apple products being easy to use and intuitive.

Okay, finally got it working. Apparently I needed to reset our ages old router, update the firmware, and switch to WPA security versus WEP.

I want to install Apache HTTP Server on my laptop which is 64-bit. Apparently official Apache releases don't support Win64 yet, so is there any harm in going with 32-bit?

had to go fix a friends computer the other night. seems their Windows xp theme had been switched to an all black colour scheme - which included black text. and so they couldn't see anything.

i managed to fix it by guess-clicking into the screen properties and changing the theme.

but has anyone ever come across this? i couldn't find the theme again in the list.

odd.

UGH. So today my computer decided to crash and give me a BSOD every 20 minutes to an hour. I ran a malware search and it found a few things, which i fixed. I then ran some antivirus scans using a live cd and it turned up nothing. I turned off all the weird dumb programs that had been set to boot up with Windows, and my computer is still acting up. About every other time I start it now it wants to run a chkdsk and when its not, its giving me the blue circle of wait with my cursor arrow in short little blips after it loads up. It keeps blipping like something is taking a lot of memory to do something but there is nothing running. What is going on?! I am mystified.

For what its worth I am running a cracked version of Win7 Ultimate on a dualcore AMD athalon Compaq that can certainly handle quite a load. I have 3 gigs of ram. There's a lot of windows updates and security patches I haven't installed because occasionally they sneak a new Genuine software checker in there that screws everything up so what I'm running is like the June 2010 retail version without any updates.

Anyone have any ideas? Is there a better way I can check for sneaky malware and viruses? I am usually really good with troubleshooting my computer problems on my own but this won't go away no matter what I do. Thanks in advance!