Recent Posts

1851

General Software Discussion / Re: Advice Needed: Fixing Pentium 4 PC with Conficker virus

« Last post by kyrathaba on September 16, 2011, 08:01 PM »

Now let me show my ignorance (and hopefully learn something):

Say that I wind up formatting his desktop's HDD.  Virus gone: *POOF*.  But will I then be able to access the CD-ROM, or will I be missing the drivers necessary to do that because I just formatted them out of existence?

I know that there's something the PC Repair Guys use, called a Preinstallation Environment, and I have BartPE on USB (but my dad's desktop won't boot from a USB).

To rephrase...

Say it turns out that his CD_ROM drive isn't failed in any hardware sense, but was simply being messed-up by the Conficker bug.  Nevertheless, will I be able to access the CD drive if I reformat the HDD?

1852

General Software Discussion / Re: Advice Needed: Fixing Pentium 4 PC with Conficker virus

« Last post by kyrathaba on September 16, 2011, 07:53 PM »

Dear old dad is a hunt-and-peck typist, and an avid but unsophisticated computer user   Love his heart, nine out of ten times when he tells me his PC has "started acting up...", it turns out he's done something he shouldn't have done.  Used to be, I could just use the built-in recovery partition to restore his system, but I've noticed that more and more laptops and notebooks are no longer coming with a recovery partition pre-installed.  Instead, they want you to create your own on a DVD (or set of DVDs).  And some manufacturers (HP comes to mind) will only allow you to create this Recovery Disc once (why, I ask).

After finally getting his aging Dell Latitude C800 WinXP machine up and running again, mother and I got him a new Dell Presario with Win 7 Home Premium and 2 GB Ram.  He's still raving about how fast it is, LOL...

1853

General Software Discussion / Re: Advice Needed: Fixing Pentium 4 PC with Conficker virus

« Last post by kyrathaba on September 16, 2011, 07:36 PM »

Thanks 40hz.  If it turns out to be a bad CD drive, I'll take you up on that! 

1854

General Software Discussion / Re: Advice Needed: Fixing Pentium 4 PC with Conficker virus

« Last post by kyrathaba on September 16, 2011, 07:05 PM »

Alright.  I've downloaded the 32-bit version, and I'll try manually providing the updated virus-defs via USB key.

Say that, for whatever reason, I wind up needing to refomat the drive and reinstall XP, but that I cannot use his CD-ROM drive.  Is it possible to install Windows on a drive that is located in an external drive case, then relocate the HDD back to the original computer?

1855

General Software Discussion / Advice Needed: Fixing Pentium 4 PC with Conficker virus

« Last post by kyrathaba on September 16, 2011, 05:43 PM »

My dad's Windows XP Home Pentium-4 machine has the Conficker virus, or some variant of it.  The reason I know this is that he passed the virus on to his external hard-drive (in USB enclosure), a USB thumb-drive, and his Windows XP Home laptop. 

Long story short: we've disinfected the external HD and thumb-drive, as well as the Windows laptop.  However, the Pentium-4 desktop PC seems royally screwed.  The DVD drive seems not to be working now, so even when I put a Kaspersky 10 Rescue DC in the drive and reboot, specifying CD-ROM as first boot device, we have no luck...

Managed to download and install Microsoft Security Essentials (he was running NO anti-virus initially, hence the virus), but we're unable to complete downloading of virus-definitions (presumably the virus is interfering).  Safe mode, no luck.  And his BIOS is too old to be able to allow booting from a USB.

Summary: I cannot get at the problem in any of the usual ways.  I'm wondering if I removed the hard drive and put it in an external HD enclosure, hooked that to a PC running MSE, if we could disinfect the drive, then reinstall it in his Pentium-4 desktop PC and go from there.

Recommendations?

1856

Living Room / Re: What's Your Internet Speed/Reliability SATISFACTION?

« Last post by kyrathaba on September 16, 2011, 06:42 AM »

Yes, it's pretty pitiful.

1857

N.A.N.Y. 2012 / Re: NANY 2012 Pledge & Early Beta: Kyrathaba's Source Code Line Counter

« Last post by kyrathaba on September 15, 2011, 05:29 PM »

Glad the program worked well for you!  Always good to hear positive feedback! 

1858

N.A.N.Y. 2012 / Re: NANY 2012 Pledge & Early Beta: Kyrathaba's Source Code Line Counter

« Last post by kyrathaba on September 15, 2011, 05:28 PM »

LOL!  1,905, counting blank lines, comments, and auto-generated code:

1859

Living Room / Re: Board Game Review Site Roundup

« Last post by kyrathaba on September 14, 2011, 09:09 PM »

Nice find!  I'm enjoying it! 

1860

General Software Discussion / Re: Linux distros that work with Dell Laptops' 1397 mini-wifi card & Broadcom router

« Last post by kyrathaba on September 12, 2011, 08:49 PM »

Here's a screenshot of my LucidPuppy desktop on my laptop, thus far:

1861

General Software Discussion / Re: Linux distros that work with Dell Laptops' 1397 mini-wifi card & Broadcom router

« Last post by kyrathaba on September 12, 2011, 08:14 PM »

Note: at first, I was having to re-enter my wireless WEP passphrase each time I logged in, but after downloading updates, and copying my drivers to the USB, it picks it up automatically everytime I run LucidPuppy.  Firefox and Chrome seem faster too: not only more responsive, but they seem to download some large test-files a bit faster (2-5 seconds faster on 500 Mb test files).

1862

Living Room / Re: PCWorld recommends DonationCoder.com and says: "Give a Little, Get a Lot"

« Last post by kyrathaba on September 12, 2011, 04:14 PM »

Nice exposure in a well-read venue. 

1863

General Software Discussion / Linux distros that work with Dell Laptops' 1397 mini-wifi card & Broadcom router

« Last post by kyrathaba on September 12, 2011, 06:54 AM »

For anyone who owns a Dell laptop and wants to run a Linux distro:

Many Dell laptops come equipped with the Dell WLAN 1397 mini-wifi card.  I've had a Dell Inspiron 1545 for several years, and have tried several Linux distros.  The only two I have found that detected my Broadcom router's wireless easily, without any hassle on my part, are xPUD and LucidPuppy.  LucidPuppy was a breeze, and looks very nice.  Very attractive icons and overall theme.

If anyone is interested, I recommended installing LucidPuppy to USB, along with a variety of recovery, antivirus, and other ISOs, via SARDU.

The only thing you may need to do to enable wireless router connection on your Dell laptop is copy any subfolders in C:\Drivers to the root of the /puppy/ folder on your USB pen-drive.

Great stuff!! 

1864

General Software Discussion / Re: Splashtop: Linux for Windows users

« Last post by kyrathaba on September 10, 2011, 10:06 PM »

Got an Inspiron? Try Mint.

+1 

1865

General Software Discussion / Re: Splashtop: Linux for Windows users

« Last post by kyrathaba on September 10, 2011, 10:03 PM »

it boots completely in 10-15 seconds

Correction: it takes about 30-31 seconds to reach the xPUD desktop, and another 6-7 seconds to complete connection to the internet.  But the additional time is primarily due to two factors: (1) having to F12 into boot device selection, then pick my USB drive, and time to read a 1.3 Mb backup file from USB (reading in my wireless password and other settings).

I imagine if you had this on SSD, it'd boot in well under the 10 seconds some people are reporting off their mechanical hard drives.

1866

General Software Discussion / Re: Splashtop: Linux for Windows users

« Last post by kyrathaba on September 10, 2011, 09:42 PM »

Then you can try xPUD, (works fine on my Aspire One), which I mentioned here, (along with SplashTop and InstantOn a few posts down).

Just wanted to let anyone using an Inspiron Notebook, or perhaps various other Dell laptops, know that xPUD is the only linux flavor I've EVER gotten to connect via wireless to the 'net (apparently, the Broadcom WLAN cards that ship in many Dell laps are notoriously unsupported in Linux distros).  I now have it configured on a USB drive, such that if I interrupt from the normal boot-preference order, and specify that USB stick, it boots completely in 10-15 seconds, and connects to the internet, giving me access to Facebook, Firefox, instant messaging, etc.

I had to copy the backup data file, xpud-data.gz to the /opts/ directory to get xPUD to automatically connect to the internet.

1867

General Software Discussion / Re: DOS Batch Functions Tutorial

« Last post by kyrathaba on September 10, 2011, 11:54 AM »

+1.

I think that, in general, WS would be preferable, although there might be so esoteric situations where a small batch file might be preferable.

1868

N.A.N.Y. 2012 / Re: NANY 2012 Pledge Teaser: Web Link Captor, aka LL Robot

« Last post by kyrathaba on September 10, 2011, 08:15 AM »

Can you give us some more tantalizing hints, mouser? 

1869

N.A.N.Y. 2012 / Re: NANY 2012 Pledge & Early Beta: Ethervane Echo

« Last post by kyrathaba on September 10, 2011, 08:14 AM »

tranglos, great support.  I appreciate your quick responsiveness to feature requests and bug reports! 

1870

N.A.N.Y. 2012 / Re: NANY 2012 Early Beta: Portable Extension Warlock

« Last post by kyrathaba on September 10, 2011, 08:09 AM »

Great program, hamradio!!

1871

N.A.N.Y. 2012 / Re: NANY 2012 Ground Rules, Submission Template & Goals

« Last post by kyrathaba on September 10, 2011, 08:05 AM »

87 days remaining to get your NANY submissions in, folks! 

1872

Living Room / Re: Migrating Win7 installation to SSD

« Last post by kyrathaba on September 07, 2011, 06:42 AM »

Yeah, I just skimmed the article,
but I didnt see any mention of the 100MB System partition.

Do you have that in your current setup kyrathaba?

No, I just have a single partition on my hard drive.

1873

Living Room / Re: screen pics to DonationCoder forum (trying zScreen)

« Last post by kyrathaba on September 06, 2011, 09:13 PM »

It might be nicer if we implemented a feature that would ask the forum to automatically grab the image from the remote site and save it as a file attachment on the dc server, but that currently does not exist.

That seems like it would be a very valuable feature to implement, as it would ensure the integrity of multimedia posts in perpetuity.

1874

Living Room / Migrating Win7 installation to SSD

« Last post by kyrathaba on September 06, 2011, 09:07 PM »

Will this work as described?  If the consensus is "Yes", then I'll describe what I'd like to do, and see the community's reaction and advice.

1875

N.A.N.Y. 2012 / Re: NANY 2012 Pledge & Early Beta: Got Space?

« Last post by kyrathaba on September 06, 2011, 09:00 PM »

Hey, don't worry about implementing that feature request.  I'll just use what we've discussed to permit an INI file in Program Files subdir.