GoRedwings19's Computer Help Hotline

Last night while attempting to finish some final details on my son's science fair project we discovered that most of the MS Word documents from the past three weeks including ones saved two days ago seem to have disappeared. We performed a virus scan, search of the hard drive and can find no Word documents that have been saved in the past three weeks, whether saved to a folder or saved without designating a folder. Google queries for solutions haven't helped and this seems to be a random problem with no general solution. Has anyone here experienced this problem or is this just more example of my bad audio equipment luck migrating to my home computer?

Any Windows Servers experts in here? I need to migrate from Windows 10 to Server and have questions.

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…

so i am trying to build my computer but I cant get the one thing to fit in the other thing like people are telling me. I got the one thing to sit nicely in the other thing after I stuck the one thing on it and jiggled it a bit. but I cant get this thing to fit in the other thing for the life of me. PLEASE HELP MIKEY!!! What do I do? I tired your 900 number but I got some scary sounding woman who was talking about other noncomputer things.

Well, the title is a bit misleading, as what I'm actually aiming to do is to print a filled-out pdf file with data saved in an FDF file. Here's the thing: at work, there is a blank form in pdf format that has fillable textboxes. What's been done until now is that a group of people painstakingly copy-paste client info into each field. And I was asked to do that today.... ...blech! Always seeking to automate whenever possible, I found that the info is copied from an Excel file, so I started looking for a way to get that info from Excel unto the pdf form. (we all have Acrobat Reader, not the full version) I came across the FDF format, which is a file that sto…

My son wants a gaming mouse and doesn't want to spend a ton. He uses a PC laptop and is willing to do wired over wireless if the features or pricing are better. I know nothing about this subject, so please enlighten us with your gaming wisdom.

Another Deathstar incident? Know we're quite storage-intensive around here, maybe advance warning will save someone's data. Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 drives said to be failing at an alarming rate - Engadget

I went ahead and got a XFX GeForce 9800 GX2 Black Edition last week, but I discovered that I needed 1x 8-pin PCI-E connector and 1x 6-pin PCI-E connector to power this card. I'm not sure what type of PSU would be good. I have a 620W not-so-good PSU right now, and it's a single rail old design one (I have no idea what I'm talking about, I showed it to someone and they told me this rail thing.) Any recommendation for what PSU to get? I'm running 4 HDDs, but that is no problem because most of the newer PSUs have more than enough connectors. Does this look like a good PSU to purchase? Antec - Signature 850 or the 650W version... Antec - Signature 650 Pleas…

So I checked Windows Update out of curiosity yesterday (actually looking for an Edge browser update) and noticed that the 2004 update has been around since May and Microsoft has been delaying the rollout. Then I looked for 2004 update problems and got a long list... what do you guys think about the latest major update? I'm inclined to delay this for as long as possible on my personal computer. Microsoft's track record with major updates has been truly terrible in the last few years, going from bricked computers to lost data. I'm afraid to estimate how many millions of dollars of productivity and data have been lost from these problems in enterprise and home computing…

I decided a while ago that I wanted to get a small pc to use with my headphone rig and also as an HTPC for watching the occasional movie on. My recent acquisition of a new dac, the Auralic Vega and it's ability to do hi-rez pcm and dsd over usb made this more of a priority. Now normally I'd just go ahead and build something like this myself as I've built well over 100 desktops/servers over the years. After considering that I didn't want to spend my time dealing the tight spaces of really small cases I decided to buy something fully assembled. Naturally I did keep a close eye on parts cost vs cost of the assembled system, if the difference was high enough I'd just bu…

Does anyone have a suggestion for good software (free or otherwise) for cloning a more than half empty 1T windows drive to a smaller (512GM) drive, including the boot stuff, recovery partition, etc?

The desktop concept looked neat. I thought the pic of the AKG701 on the desktop looked nice too. The Windows 8 Concept Desktop - Desktops - Lifehacker What would you guys like to see in the Windows 8 desktop? I do like the feature in Windows 7 where I highlight a program in the taskbar and all the other windows disappear and the one that is highlighted is in the forefront.

So I've got enough free space on my MacBook that I'd like to have a go at running Windows on it, just for kicks. So is there any reason not to use boot camp? i.e. is there a better way? With the single largest caveat being that I don't want to have to wipe the drive and reinstall both OS's.

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…

I have a 13.3" MB404LL/A (early 2008) MacBook. It's got a 2.4GHz C2D, 2GB of RAM and a 250GB drive. I'm ordering a 4GB upgrade for it today from MemoryX. I like that company because they guarantee what they sell will work with the machines they list. I notice that they have a 500GB drive listed on the page for my machine. I asked a friend of mine who is an alpha geek on the subject, and he said he suspected that I could "probably" get a 1TB drive to work with my laptop. Where would I begin to look to find that out and more imporantly what HDD models work well? So far googling has given me mountains of irrelevant and useless info. I have in the past considered …

So the buzz is getting pretty buzzy. Anyone using?

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've been cleaning the spare around my computer, and in the process I put about six wallwarts in a box. One of them goes to my BlacX. I've got a couple that fit the power socket on the unit. Unfortunately, Thermaltake saw fit to not mark the BlacX's voltage requirement on the back of it. It just says "DC IN." Mine is the SATA model with USB and E-SATA out. Any head-casers have a BlacX and PSU handy? Can you tell me the voltage and tip polarity?

The wife needs a new laptop and it needs to be able rot run AutoCAD seamlessly. Since I’m an Apple person, I’m not so aware of the high end Windows workstations. I’m assuming some gaming computers might work well but them may not be optimized for what she does. Also, she probably wants something businesslike (she does game). Any engineer types that could recommend something? Was looking at Dell Precision and Lenovo Thinkpad. Should have a good keyboard, etc.

So I'm not going to bore you with all the details, but I'm looking at getting a new laptop, and the 1920x1080-on-a-15-inch-screen-or-smaller technology has been around long enough that my choices have expanded beyond 2 or 3 companies since last time. Where would I go to get advice? I.E. I'm looking at MSI, Toshiba, and HP Envy, and I don't know if these are better or worse (than, for example, my current Sony) in terms of ruggedness, value-for-the-dollar, intelligently chosen chipset combinations, etc. I would, of course, prefer better. As much as I like Sony, I know it's not famously the top brand, I'm just partial to it from experience.

Anyone have any solutions for the eye fatigue that results from staring at an LCD all day? In the ad from buy.com today, one of the items was a $50 pair of glasses designed for exactly that, that I'm actually seriously considering. Also, there's an overlay that one can put over one's screen. Anyone use any of these things? Are there other options ("go blind" does not count -- I'd rather not) that you prefer?

so last night I got through transferring all my music to my new drobo. this morning I wake up and it is in standby mode, unrecognized by Windows 7. I couldn't get it to mount by unplugging the USB cable, trying different USB ports, different USB cable. so I shut down my computer and power cycle the drobo. it comes back on fine, all green lights lit up, etc, but windows still won't recognize it. I get bad USB device errors when I plug it in. I'm currently scouring the Internet for solutions, and have tried lots of typical solutions, though I haven't power cycled the drobo again for fear of corruption (which might be what is already going on anyway). the screwed up th…

I recently procured some audio files with an .APE extension and am having trouble finding a free program that will let me do it. Is there one out there?

I'm running pretty low on space on my laptop due to all the music I've been ripping to FLAC lately, so I'm left with two options: (1) get a new laptop, or (2) get a nice big external HD. (The internal HD is already at maximum possible with my 4-year old laptop - couldn't find any ATA-66 drives that were more than 100GB that were also 7200rpm.) For cost reasons I'd obviously prefer to get an external HD but that leaves me with a question. Is it feasible to run a USB external HD and a USB DAC at the same time? Should be technically possible I'd think but I was wondering if anyone has actually tried it and if there might any big latency issues that would make it less than…

Somebody gave me a computer a while ago and I just noticed that in the hardware manager it shows there being two processors. also in the Task Manager it shows two processor windows. Could I be dreaming? Here are some pics of what I'm talking about.