I'm back from the cold..

[E-Liam]

Hi all,

Apologies for not being around for a few days. My poor old PIII 500 finally gave up the ghost. Four hard drive crashes.. and the last was unrecoverable.. (so far, I don't give up that easily. Questions will follow)

I went and spent a bit of money on a new one. Happy Christmas Liam.

AMD 2600+
512DDR
80gB HD
5.1 surround sound

..and lots of other sparkly new things.. I know I've always said that I'd never put XP on a machine (our dear departed was W98) but I have to say, it doesn't behave at all like the other machines I've used. Perhaps it's because this one is out of the box shiny. Generally, when I go and play on other XP machines, it's cos they're knackered.. and I don't have the pleasure of 10 minutes mucking around with display attributes.

But seeing as this is a help forum, and I'm a complete novice with the finer points of XP, any handy hints concerning getting the best out of it, settings wise, or anything else for that matter. Switching off the arrows on the shortcuts for instance. I know I could get that from the net, but someone else may find this useful.

It's SP2 as standard, (I got the disc, the COA the lot.. not just a recovery disk, which surprised me) and the first thing I did (this is me after all) was to get AVG installed. ZA will be on in a little while. I'm on the XP firewall at the moment, but I'll change that and switch it off.

I'm just about to get all the spy stuff loaded.. I read a great little summary on that a while ago.. , and then Office '97..

Okay, I'll admit it.. this is daft, I've been using PCs for a decade or more, I did computer studies at school, programmed in basic.. not exactly a newbie.. and I'm grinning like a grinning thing that's very happy indeed.

Oh well, install time.

Catch you all later. I'll have a look round later as well.. see if anyone's posted some logs for a look at.

Cheers

Liam

[zoink]

Here is a site that has more than you could shake a stick at!!!!

http://www.tunexp.com/tips/

[goates]

Don't worry about turning off the Windows Firewall. ZoneAlarm will do that for you during installation.

Which version of XP did you get, Home or Professional? One thing to watch out for is if you play around with limited user accounts. While great for restricting what people can do (and any viruses/malware//trojans they download), it doesn't work well with many games. I have XP Professional, so I was able to grant my brothers permissions to the specific games while still limiting their access to the system folders. Under XP Home you will need to give the user an administrator account if they need one of the problem programs. If all users could run as limited accounts, I bet we wouldn't have quite so much trouble with malware like CoolWebSearch.

Check out Microsoft's Powertoys for XP. I find the Alt-Tab Switching replacement and TweakUI quite handy.

goates

[E-Liam]

Hi Zoink,

I just had a quick look at that link.. I'll need to get a second stick.

Hi Goates,

XP Home. I'm sole user, so I'll probably leave it on the admin account for now.. at least until I've installed everything I'll need, and I'll also check out the links as well later.

Thanks for the help chaps.. plenty to play with there.

Cheers

Liam

[Binoculars]

Good to have you back Liam. If you could have a look at my WebRebates thread and offer your expert suggestion on the HijackThis log before I do anything more I'd appreciate it.

Cheers, Binos

[Naples Air Center, Inc.]

Liam,

Which mobo did you choose?

Welcome back to Cyberspace,

Richard

[E-Liam]

Hi Richard,

ASRock K7S41. I didn't choose it as such. It was already installed.

I did look at the Dell site to start with, but although the advertised machines start off at arouind £370 ($500 ish), once you start specifying anything, the price rockets. You can't for instance not have a monitor. I've already got a bullet proof HP 17" CRT, that will go on for ever, (famous last words?? ) so that would have been an un-necessary expense.

I got mine from the local PC shop in Bracknell, Millenium Computers. It comes with a year's back to base warranty, and they're a 30 second walk from work. Base Unit, and standard PS2 keyboard and mouse. I've already sold the keyboard on at retail price, to someone who managed to jam his Ctrl button, but I'll keep the mouse as a spare.. my other spare doesn't have a scroll wheel.

I installed all my spyware progs, but forgot to update Adaware. In three days, I managed 200 critical finds.. that'll teach me.

Off out for a beer now, catch you all later.

Cheers

Liam

[Naples Air Center, Inc.]

Liam,

I hope you enjoyed your beer and that the new comp serves you well as you help others here.

Richard

[E-Liam]

Hi Richard,

Have to admit it.. the beer was luverly..

Cheers

Liam