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Sunday, August 29, 2004

Show #70

 toc | toc 

Today’s news items

RFID is coming soon to a store near you. Read all about it at RFIDBuzz.com. Are there RFID tags in the $20 bill? This site says there are. I’m skeptical, but I do like all those pictures of burnt $20 bills.

Noon-1p

Sharon in Carlsbad - AOL problems

She uses a high speed Internet service, but keeps AOL for her email. Problem is, AOL kicks her off all the time. This seems to be a common problem. Try AOL Communicator.

Arnold in Malibu - Macintosh viruses on the rise?

Not that I’ve noticed.
Instances of Mac virus rumors are on the rise.

Trevor Evans says: These rumors or fears of mac viruses, combined with news of a new mac trojan virus a few months back that was only proposed but never let into the wild, could be attributed possibly to anti-virus companies trying to make a buck, as stated in an old Wired article. As Leo said McAfee Virex through .Mac is good enough (there are other benefits being with .Mac as well to check out)

John in Victorville - can I hack my DISH PVR?

(Added by CRoberts) TiVo, the DISH Receiver and Replay PVR can all be modified. The most common hack is adding a bigger hard drive. One company that Leo usually recomends is weaKnees but it seems that they don’t handle DISH PVR’s.

Sharon in Garden Grove - upgraded to Mozilla but Java is missing

Point your browser to www.java.com and press the Yellow Get It Now button.

←The button looks like this.

Firefox- Click tools>options>general tab> paste in the url for your home page then click “use current page”

1–2p

Michelle in Long Beach - AT&T won’t let her use Firefox

Michelle has low cost Internet service from AT&T. In order to subsidize the service AT&T flashes ads at her. It requires IE to do that - and you have to use their dialer. I don’t know of any way around this.

JohnDgeek says: You might want to switch to a different service. Something like Netzero or PeoplePC. It’s still low cost internet connection but without the restrictions.

Dave in Costa Mesa is running a gaming server from his home

Dave is running a gaming server from his home and wants to export his activity logs that produces html output to his web site
You need a Domain Host, then you need to upload the files to the server of your web site.

Mike in Palm Springs is having PC problems

Mike is having performance problems with the family PCs, and he needs tips on computer maintenance, he doesn’t have any Windows recovery disks
First backup everything and make a recovery CD. Then you can reinstall Windows.

Listeners’ suggestions for Boot Disks

Boot Disk List:

• My Boot Disk
• Ultimate Boot CD
• Hiren’s BootCD 6.0
• BootDisk.com
• AllBootDisks.com (Attributed to Trevor Evans)

Denise from San Clemente is the victim of a browser hijack and she needs help with removal

Browser hijackers are evil and they can be hard to remove. In this case, you need to get a specific removal tool to completely eliminate these issues. See the Tips section for more on this problem.

Trevor Evans says: Once the browser hijacker objects or BHOs are identified using the Tips on Removing Spyware you can go to spywareinfo.com when the site is working again (me thinks spyware programmers have something to do with this….) for more information on how to remove it.

Also look at the BHO List, which used to be on spywareinfo.com, it leads to a program called BHO List by guy called Merijn Bellekom of Hijack This! fame, and has a searchable database of BHOs (funny aside BHOs can also mean Browser Helper Objects - these BHOs are not very helpful are they)

2–3p

Perry from Lompoc has a new Dell 8400

Perry has a new Dell 8400 and it keeps doing physical memory dumps
This used to be called a core dump and is used to diagnose what caused a problem. A driver in need of an update is most likely cause of this annoyance. Another possibility is the driver is not compatible with XP. To turn off the memory dump logging application, open the System Properties from the Control Panel and click the Advanced Tab. Select the Settings Tab from Startup and Recovery and under System Failure, Select the ‘none’ option of Write debugging information. Click Ok, and you will no more logging of system failure will occur.

Terrance from Los Angeles Getting DOS errors

Terrance is using Windows 95 and after formatting his hard drives he is getting an ‘unable to format in DOS mode’ error message
Make your partition size smaller, less than 2 GB because your using Fat 32.
Terrance also replaced his power supply becuase it was noisy, but the replacement is not powering his computer and he noticed a red light on the motherboard, is that a bad sign?
You’ll have to look at the manual for the motherboard, surf the web for a source. The red light could just be a light that tells you it’s getting power.

Debra in Santa Clarita goes wireless

Debra recently bought a wireless router and at times it seems to be changing speeds without a loss of signal strength.

There is an issue with Windows dropping wireless connections.
Check the show notes from yesterday for more on this issue.

Annie from Studio City has PC problems

Annie has PC problems connecting to the internet, should she switch to Apple?

There are many factors to consider, but if you’re tired of dealing with PC issues like spyware and viruses, the Mac platform is relatively free of such issues. Switching to another OS is a personal issue so try it out and see if you like it.

Trevor Evans says: May I suggest that those considering the switch check out the book Switching to the Mac: The Missing Manual that I have used to prepare for my switch.

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