GoRedwings19's Computer Help Hotline

So this guy on eBay has a disc that I want, and since he's in Germany, and there are other things in Germany that I want, I want to be able to browse what he has, but he sucks and doesn't put them in categories or anything. Does anyone have any advice on how to go through his catalog without looking up every single thing he has somewhere else? It's this guy, tucu9. I got SACD's, and there's even one I want (After Forever, though no Epica), but beyond that I'm stumped. I like his electro/ebm/industrial selection (which includes the disc I want), but am insufficently familiar with compilations to know which are good ones and which are not so good (I am avidly not in…

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…

My regular PC, which I built and have re-built along the last 10 years, is ageing and giving signs of a soon-to-happen crash. Not sure if it's the SCSI Adaptec board, one of the SCSI discs, one of the USB ports in the mobo, even the AGP card... whatever, it freezes, refuses to reboot and I'm afraid that while I've managed to get it booting, it won't in a few days. With this computer I have a 21" CRT Philips monitor which besides being a behemoth filling most of my desk, works great and offers excellent image quality. I'd feel kind of guilty getting rid of it, so any solution which allows to keep it has some bonus points. Options I'm considering keeping budget under …

So I get home from the gym last Friday to find a brown box on my doorstep. It was odd, as a Mexican hadn't stolen it yet, but I digress. I wasn't expecting anything, but I opened it up and lo and behold, a box of awesomeness. I even got the new stickers! Anyways... I really like a lot about this thing. The size is just about perfect, the build quality is very good. For a daily carry machine, I love it, but there is a bit lacking, as of now. I have a lot more playing to do, but for now, I post a pic for Jeff's sake. No review yet, as I've been rather busy as of late, but I wanted to throw this out there saying that "one of us has one." If you want to know …

My music library is accessed via my iMac and iTunes. AFAIK, iTunes does not support high resolution audio files. Is there any way I can get hi rez files to pump out of the optical out of my iMac?

My wife is coordinating the hospital's integration of a new research physician and department. The researcher requires movable storage medium for physically moving large research data from one system to another and up until now the only storage vehicle approved by the hospital has been the Kangaroo thumb drives which employ 256 bit AES encryption. The physician's tech coordinator says that the WD Passport's 256 bit Smart Ware encryption is more than adequate. The technology department at the hospital is currently overwhelmed right now in dealing with some new regulations and not making a decision as to the adequacy of the WD Smart Ware encryption (aka they don't have t…

Need to connect a Sony GT1/Google TV to my Macbook, mostly for video. Anyone have a recommendation of which uPnP server to use? http://www.yazsoft.com/products/playback/ http://www.nullriver.com/products/medialink http://www.twonky.com/products/twonkyserver/default.aspx

So I decided to upgrade my home file server from a Windows 2003 Server platform to something else. All the server does is serve files to Mac clients and run the Squeezebox Server. DNS and DHCP is performed by my router. No Email or Web serving. The reason I'm upgrading is because the Squeezebox server is running kinda flaky lately and file server speeds are kinda slow for a small Gigabit network. The hardware is semi heavy duty. It's a HP xw8200 workstation with dual 3.2 GHz Xeon CPU's, 6 GB Ram and 1.5 TB of internal disk. I also have a LacIe 4TB estata/FW/USB that's configured as a 3 TB RAID 5 external drive via esata. I recently installed a Linux SUSE 11.3 64-bi…

So, I bought my Lenovo from JB w/out an operating system (but with an XP key) last year. Because I was tight on money, I threw a Windows 7 Ultimate release candidate on it. Well, I'm getting daily warnings that it's about to expire (in about a week), so it's time to get this squared away. I have a Vista Ultimate seat on my old HTPC sitting unused since switching over to the PS3 for my media. However, I've never run anything but W7 on this machine, and am a little concerned about how it will handle Vista Ultimate. But I could certainly install it in a pinch. In the meantime, my girlfriend's back in school (and her laptop crapped out too, so we're both using mine)…

Has anyone used these things successfully? If you have any thoughts or experiences, post them up. Planning to get one for my wife's new camera.

A new job has me searching for a Mac solution for playing around with music gear. They want to submit some budget numbers tomorrow. Argh! Not really enough time to research shit. I'm torn between a faster Mac laptop than I have and a DIY Linux music server, and just popping for a Mac Pro desktop. I currently have an iTouch, iPad, and entry level MacBook, and a fairly new and fast Dell Windows 7 desktop. My needs are: I've got to be able to play with and evaluate virtually any digital media device. I won't be looking at bad-ass listening room servers (ie Sooloos) or professional audio editing stuff, but may be playing with most anything other hardware and sof…

Here's one for the IT guys: I share a printer between 4 computers on a network and I want to monitor how many copies are printed from each of them. It seemed to me like a rather simple and common thing to do, but I've spent the last hour googling for a free solution to the problem and apparently it doesn't exist. There are many enterprise solutions, but I won't pay 100$ to do such a simple task on my home network. Have I overlooked something?

I need to make a Windows Live account, but the site is claiming that all 3 of my email addresses are already assigned to accounts. When I try the password reset feature, it loops back to the login page. The Windows Live login pages leads to an XBox Live support page help page (are these services the same thing?) The XBox contact page has a 1-800 number, but all of its voice prompts are for XBox related services. I realize this is Microsoft I'm dealing with here, but does anyone know a contact # where I can reach MS and get a Windows Live account set up?

I'm wondering if there is any good software that can implement a "jukebox" style web interface to browse all albums. Basically create a website on a local computer that is easily updated with album art and artist information by simply inputting information into a field. The user can then just go to their local website and browse their entire collection say for example by album art. Or clicking on an artist which would then take you to a page of album art for just that artist. It wouldn't have to playback anything just serve as GUI showing the user what music they have access to. I'm using foobar2000 and iTunes, but both of them have become too cumbersome when de…

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?

Well my good fortune with anything electrical has continued unabated with my office computer choosing to sleep with the fishes on Wednesday morning. I am pretty sure it was the motherboard that died and not the hard drives (fingers crossed). There are a couple of important files I had not gotten to backing up yet on the old computer which I need access to at some point in the next few weeks. I pulled both the hard drives out of the dead computer and was preparing to download all the files today using my Thermaltake sata docking station when I discovered to my horror that the HDs are not sata but most probably ide HDs and the Thermaltake model I have only supports sata.…

ordered some well reviewed g skill 8gb dual channel ram for my thinkpad. computer however is less responsive (slower start up times, slower times while opening programs, lag while typing etc) than it was with the 2gb stick that was in there earlier. the timings that the bios is running are 7-7-7-20 but the timings on the ram are 9-9-9-24. would bios forcing tighter timings on the ram be causing this issue? i cant think of anything else that would cause the system to slow down as opposed to get smoother with more ram. suggestions are welcome. figured i would ask here before i send this back and get ram that matches timings in bios. Forgot to mention that I ram Memte…

I would like to rip my parents' CD collection and "share" mine with them. They already have a multi-room setup, so I wouldn't need to put wireless speakers, etc. all over. Unfortunately, it's a B&O setup and you know how friendly they are with non-B&O gear. Regardless, I figured out a way that I can hang a network audio player off the B&O system and make it work. But here's the thing, I want to get my parents something like a Sonos or Duet (or anything else people can recommend) and set it up such that they don't have to use the computer. Can this be achieved via NAS, so that the Sonos or Duet or similar would just talk to the NAS and we could elimina…

trying to get google voice set up so i can make phone calls from my computer. using windows 7 64 bit. the thinkpad has built in mics which sucks so i am trying to use a zalman mic that i have been using for the past 7 years without issue. i can use the mic in ventrilo (skype like program gamers use) and it works just fine so hardware is fine. current set up is as follows. usb - gamma 2 - crack - 650s (for hearing) zalman mic - thinkpad combo jack (same jack for headphones and mic) built in mics are muted. built in volume control is muted. when i go into volume control settings i only see the settings for the built in mic. when i go into google voice settin…

Hey all. I'm having weird difficulties establishing a secure connection to certain Web sites. Some work fine (gmail, online banking, amazon, itunes etc.) but some (paypal, me.com, random ecommerce sites) will not load on my iMac in any browser -- have tried Safari, Firefox and Chrome. The pages will start to render and then hang forever with no further network activity. This only occurs when connected to our home wireless setup -- cellular data connections via iPhone or iPad are OK. I've checked the router settings and nothing is being blocked there. No difference with OS X firewall off, or with Little Snitch disabled. Even switched ISPs to see if it was something at that…

Google Chrome 4 lands (Windows) extensions on world+dog ? The Register Now with extensions! Including AdBlock https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/gighmmpiobklfepjocnamgkkbiglidom And FlashBlock https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/cdngiadmnkhgemkimkhiilgffbjijcie

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…

Hi everyone- Simple question before I cram this drive in my Drobo: can I put a drive in there that already has stuff on it, or should I only insert blank drives? I tried and tried to google this info up but no dice. Just want to make sure before I proceed. By my calculation there should be plenty of space left for protection after I insert the drive.

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.

My mom is ready to pull the trigger on a new desktop computer for her business. A few machines have already been recommended to her by a computer support guy that she has worked with for many years. I wish I could offer her more help, but I am pretty clueless with respect to any of the new computers being offered these days beside Apple and she isn't interesting in getting an Apple for her business. I think she would like to keep the price in line with what has been recommended, so the $500 to $1000 range. Typically, she uses such a new machine for about six to seven years. My two primary concerns are, first and foremost, reliability and then good to great value for h…