GoRedwings19's Computer Help Hotline

I have a good client/friend that has cancer. He is having major surgery in about 2 weeks. I've been telling him to get a drive for me to transfer a bunch of music for him to use on his ipod and at home. I have an external in my office which I reformatted by accident. I have a 1 tb drive at home that is Mac OS formatted. I would like to be able to transfer about 400 gb of music from this drive to his new 1 tb Seagate Freeagent (not Mac OS). He uses a pc. Is there anyway for me to do this?

So I'm trying to put in a clean copy of XP Media Center on my Mom's Acer laptop (her current installation is kinda jacked) and I can't figure out quite how to do it. I'm very familiar with putting together a PC and installing OS from scratch but my biggest challenge here is finding a XP Media Center disc without actually buying one. I still have the product key, it's on the sticker under the laptop. So the million dollar question is: how/where do I get/buy a Windows XP installation disc without the product key (which I already have)?

Here are a couple reviews of a 24" EIZO, which you can get for around $2400 (about 3x the price of Apple's 23" and 4-5x the price of popular Dells/etc) http://www.mydigitallife.info/2007/09/16/eizo-coloredge-cg241w-high-end-monitor/ http://www.macuser.co.uk/macuser/reviews/129056/eizo-coloredge-cg241w.html excerpt: pricey though

My Macbook Pro (2.4Ghz, 2GB, factory refurb, bought May 2008 ) won't wake up out of sleep mode. The Superdrive will spin up (picture CD is still in the drive) but I can't get it to reboot. I've tried the PRAM keystroke and reseting the power management and nothing works. I've scheduled a Genius bar session at my local store on Thursday night but I was wondering if anyone on here has run into this before Right now is when it sucks to only have a computer as a source

I'm looking to hook up an HTPC for streaming from the NAS and watching youtube/streams. It must be able to decode 1080p and DTS/Dolby. Ideally, it would run something like XBMC or another linux based system to speed up boot time. Budget is $200. Maybe an Acer Revo? Apple TV 1?

My laptop of three years might not be of use any more The charger pin is either loose or faulty since I have to wiggle the charger wire a lot in order for it to get a secure connection. It's got to the point where I have to fiddle with it for as much as a half an hour before it sticks, only for it to loosen up with the slightest movement. And since it was an OEM (Compal) I'm not exactly sure how to get it repaired...if any one has any ideas I'd appreciate it. So I'm considering a new laptop. I paid $1300 for this one back in the day and I'm fed up paying so much for what's pretty much a two to three year disposable device (previous Dell lasted same amount of time).…

I've maxed out my 2.4GHz laptop with 4 gigs of memory. OWC has a kit that will take it up to 6 gb. Would this be a waste of time and money or would it be a welcome addition? The laptop is rated up to 4gb, but they have tested the 6gb and said it works.

we have a dsl line with at&t at home and a wrt300n linksys wireless router. the password to get admin access to the router settings is pretty strong. up until now i had been using wpa2 personal encryption and the password was ok. not terribly strong. about a week ago both my moms emails accounts were compromised and i reset the router settings and changed the ssid and all router associated passwords. last night both my gmail accounts were hacked and random emails were sent to some of my contacts. i tried find the last few used ip's from gmail but they all were from a few hours ago and only showed my office or home ip addresses. is it possible to remotely (not with…

Not sure if this is the right place for this topic. Now that I have the Oppo as my source I want to know if there is a fast and painless way to convert my ALAC files (close to 800GB) to FLAC. Any help will be appreciated. I believe it can handle .wav as well so that may be the easier route as I think I can do that through iTunes.

Ok, I'm real late to this one. But why is bittorrent useful to me? And is it easy to use?

Yes, I'm one of those annoying people who basically never learned how to do anything myself, and now have a problem I don't know how to troubleshoot so need someone to help me out yet again. Last night around 11PM, my wireless connection suddenly disappeared, but my computer asked me if I wanted to connect to another network, so I connected to a neighbor's unsecured whatever. Today, I get home from work and try to find out what's going on, the modem and the airport express have all the right lights lit up, but I don't know what my network was called, have no idea what my password was if I even knew at all, and now don't know how to start to figure it out. Any ideas? I…

I need a new laptop PC some time between now and fall quarter (september 23rd). Is there a time of year when laptops can be found at a discount or do their prices remain pretty constant?

Ok, I have a 10 year old nephew with a laptop. This was purchased by his IBC mother (my sister) at a pawn shop for cheap, and, of course, without the original XP media. Need I say more? But, I'm stuck getting XP back on it. The machine is not up for Vista, nor Win7 (pity, because I have a spare Vista upgrade), and Linux (Ubutu, etc) just is not an option for the spawn of IBC. So, how do I get a reasonable version of XP?

Codeweavers says cheap gas = free software tomorrow - The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) Press Releases - CODEWEAVERS' SOFTWARE FREE FOR DOWNLOAD THANKS TO GEORGE W. BUSH AND FALLING GAS PRICES Giveaway Triggered in CodeWeaver's Great American Lame Duck Presidential Challenge; "We take full responsibility for global economic collapse," s

Well there are more and more rumblings all around about not using University equipment (computers) for non-University functions (music listening). So I plan to head off the whole issue by setting up another computer (personally purchased) to serve the music to my work rig (output to Apogee Mini-DAC). The question for you is should I buy a Mac Mini or a Dell Studio Hybrid? and more importantly, why? The unit needs to be small, OS is irrelevant, I'll use itunes on the Mini or J. River Media Center on the Studio, the library will be on an external drive (most likely directly connected), I have my library in both FLAC and ALAC, it will be for playback only, it doesn't h…

Well it seems microsoft has done it again to me. For years off and on I have had problems whenever microsoft has done an update and it would screw up everything. This time in early February there was some type of update that FUBARed my whole computer. First I suspected it was the NORD vpn update but I deactivated it and there was no difference. The problems are- I cannot access any apps. The startup icon and search bar do not work, When I hit startup button+R, I can see the HDs with some documents but no apps, MS Office, Windows Accessories etc do not appear on the HD tree, When attempting to pull up saved docs I get error messages which makes me thi…

So Microsofts fears may come true... Official Google Blog: Introducing the Google Chrome OS

Hi All, I teach high school science, and our department has a bit of money to spend. Our school is very dependent on technology for PowerPoint and other software for curriculum, so any problems with our desktops or LCD projectors is a BIG hassle. I suggested that we invest in a laptop and projector to use exclusively as a roving backup for teachers in our department. I am only looking for absolute reliability since every new laptop can run Powerpoint and any other education software one can dream of for lecture purposes. In my very short search thus far, something like this would be about right: http://www.overstock.com/Electronics/Lenovo-ThinkPad-Edge-E520-11…

I need a new, ergonomic mouse. Stacy bought me a Logitech Nano V450 last night and I like everything about it except it's too small and not ergonomic. Can somebody please suggest a mouse with similar characteristics to the Nano (laser and wireless included) in a full size, ergonomic package? Thanks in advance for your suggestions.

Just saw a thread about this on Audiocircles so I thought I would post the link here: Something wicked this way comes…the Dell Inspiron Zino HD AMD at Home

Basically all in the title... finally cancelled my HP Instant Ink service (what a scam) and would like a normal printer please.

I need to purchase a slim SATA ODD for a slim HTPC case. I'll need DVD, CD, and Blu-Ray read support (best accuracy is what I'm looking for). Write support is not as important but CDR, DVDR would be needed at least. I'm really looking for the best slim ODD to finish ripping my CD, DVD, Blu-Ray collection to storage.

Is it possible to use Mobile Me to sync my calendar if I don't own a Mac, or Microsoft Outlook? I was kind of hoping I could just have everything I key into my iPhone calendar go to the magical me.com cloud in the sky, but it looks like if I try to sync my iPhone without first having synced with Outlook or iCal, it will just zap everything on my iPhone Calendar. Is this the case?

Here's my situation. I am using my iMac as my transport, feeding either my DAC1 or (more frequently) my HR Balanced Desktop w/DAC. I use iTunes to manage my collection. Most of my collection is 256 AAC due to the fact that I used to do a lot of portable listening and I like to have my whole collection on my iPod. But recent meets have finally hammered into my head that it all starts with the source. So, I think I need to start reripping lossless. But here's the rub, I also want to keep the lossy rips for my iPod. So here are my questions: 1) Is there a way to split up the iTunes db such that I could easily flip between my lossy and lossless collections, or do I need to…

Hello Head-case. I would like to build my own website to put on my Resume and show off my fotos and skeematics better than Flickr, and a stack of loose papers on the edge of my desk. I'm not really sure where to start. What I'm looking for: I want the website to be pretty simple No horizontal scrolling, simple/easy to read fonts with high contrasts, basically paper on the internet. A few pages for photography (street, sports) A page for DIY stuff MAYBE a blog I have a domain name in mind, that is not owned yet, so that is good. I know I need to buy it and 1and1.com looks like a good place to do this, but I'm not really sure where to go from there. …