h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

There's also some trick to Quicktime, like ctrl-clicking the play button that makes it play backwards. I can't remember exactly what it is, I'll have to look it up.

On a Mac, it's holding the "command" key down while pressing the keyboard's left arrow. On a PC, it's probably "ctrl - left arrow".

Ah, the long forgotten joys of being a tape monkey
I've been asked to find some archive copies of a website I host to pass on to another webserver admin here in the university. Doing restores from tape is tedious but at least I'll give the chap some data to work with.

There was a time that all I wanted in life was to be a tape monkey...

My, how times change.

I just read that as *There was a time when all I wanted in life was a tape monkey*

That's a breed with an extremely long tail, Phil...

Hey, does anyone know how you create those mini-icons that represent a webpage that show up in place of the page or IE icons, in your bookmarks, for example?

Lil
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Favicon

Those mag tape monkeys had it easy, try re-spooling paper punch tape after the reader has chewed it thrown it round the machine room,

New experience today, playing with windows debug utility. All I know for sure is that I found the causes of random reboots (Norton and Video driver) and fixed them via delete and reinstall. No idea if that was the right way to do it but, it appears to have worked (knock on wood).

Yet another reason to eschew Norton. Why do AV programs have to suck so much?

Arrgghh!! Being forced to use IE at home on my new computer is driving me crazy, so I decided to download Opera - but I can't!

Here's what happens: the download starts, goes on for some time, and then the download window says that it has finished downloading - but it hasn't!

I didn't notice this at first, not until I tried to run the exe-file and was told that 'Could not initialize installation. File size expected=3765594, size returned=524288'. I *know* it was supposed to be almost 4 Mb, so I checked the downloaded file, and it was indeed way too small.

So I tried downloading it again, this time keeping an eye on the download window. This time it downloaded 768 Kb before telling me it had finished. Not that the download had been stopped or interrupted, but *finished*! But it hasn't! *pulls at hair*

Could there be a setting somewhere that limits the time an download is allowed to go on? Or what?

Oh - and remember the msmsgs.exe file I mentioned earlier? Not only am I unable to stop it from loading when I start the computer - it also restarts itself after I have shut it down as soon as I start IE!

And, what's worse - it downloads Microsoft updates without checking with me! While offline, I was told that there was now an update available. I don't like my computer downloading *anything* without checking with me first!

Oh - and the update mentions installing a tool that will automatically remove any 'harmful' software detected. What if my idea of 'harmful' software isn't the same as Microsoft's? What exactly is 'harmful' software? By the way, that's not the exact wording - I get all messages and stuff in Swedish despite trying to set the language to English. I still haven't found a way of doing it that won't change my keyboard settings, but I haven't looked very hard yet...

I bought a laptop from my brother. It had no OS installed and has no CD drive because he burned it up. I have now installed DOS 5.0 and am working on windows 3.11.

Titania, to disable the msmsgs, you will need to open up the msn messenger program, click tools go to options, preferences tab and uncheck the "run windows messenger when windows starts" box.

For opera support, I will leave that to someone else.

It's not the MSN messenger, it's the Windows messenger - I've tried unchecking it under Add/Remove Windows Components, but it keeps starting up.

For that: Click start and then run. Type in services.msc, in the window that pops up locate "windows messenger service" double click it click on stop, and then set it to disabled.

Thanks - but there is no windows messenger service running... but I'm sure I've seen the msmsgs file being described as the windows messenger on more than one site...

Oh - I just tried to download a 3 Mb avi-file - and it downloaded in full! So there must be something special about the Opera file...

My bad, it's is actually just Messenger. That's the one you want to disable.

Got it -

Maybe the trouble is with the Opera web server. Did you try downloading Firefox? Or see if there is a mirror site that you can download opera from.

I agree with you on most of your issues. However, even if it is with a little trembling hands, I have opted to let the MS updates (XP SP2) run automatically.

What turned my mind was the feedback from a newsletter I do read, trust and recommend to anybody so inclined: Woody's Watch (comes in an Office flavour and used to come in a Windows one, which is now merged into WindowsSecrets).

They do their fair bit of MS bashing and exposing when the guys (and gals) in Redmond try to cut corners - but eventually their take was that security risks these days are bigger than the risks of letting the auto-security updates run their course.

The "harmful software" thing is a spy-/adware removal program. It's one MS just bought (can't for the life of me think what it was called) - WindowsSecrets has a few recent analysis of the effectiveness of tools against these modern curses... (see http://www.windowssecrets.com/050127/ and a few subsequent ones)

M$ and security software, doesn't matter if they bought is from someone else, it's still oxymoronic and I won't use it.

Oooo... finally managed to download Opera using a different download site - and I'm amazed that Opera is still so much faster than IE, even on my new computer...

Had trouble downloading Trillian though - same as with my first attempts of downloading Opera.

Trouble downloading an 'alternative' browser, and then an 'alternative' messenger - I think I'm turning slightly schizofrenic here...