Archive through February 14, 2003
TV ClubHouse: Archives: 2003 March:
Computer Problem - I need advice/help (ARCHIVES):
Archive through February 14, 2003
Juju2bigdog | Wednesday, February 12, 2003 - 06:20 am     Has anybody here ever purchased through half.com? I don't know anything about it. I am asking for a relative, got this e-mail today:
Quote:has anyone ever bought stuff from eBay's half.com ?? I am gettin' a new Dell, dudes, and I got an offer from Half.com in my e-mail today with a good price on the laptop I am looking at. Got to get more powerful computer...my present laptop is now at least 5 years old......I'll set it up for wireless Internet....and Internet connection via cell phone when RVing........
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Squaredsc | Wednesday, February 12, 2003 - 06:23 am     car, tell keith hello from all of us. juju, i saw it on the ebay site but never bought from them. sorry. |
Car54 | Wednesday, February 12, 2003 - 10:00 am     Square, I am crazed at work today so probably won't call him til this evening, but I hope I get him again. I am not too optimistic about a fix. I have had some instances where 2 different brands of modems will simply not talk to each other well....my experience where I can dial in to a different phone line and get an improvement in performance (not great but better) makes me wonder if that is the case. My old computer was this exact same machine only a year older, and the one thing I know for sure it the modem is a different brand from the old one. |
Draheid | Wednesday, February 12, 2003 - 10:13 am     Car54: There are certainly differences between modems. There are several 'standards' in place today that can cause lower-than-expected connect rates. V90, V92, K-Flex, X2, etc. All claim 56K ability, none able to actually deliver full 56K connections. This is partly due to technical limitations imposed by the FCC. Also, there are some differences in telephone line quality and capabilities when it comes to high-speed dialup connections. I have even experienced 26K connections on my home lines when I can walk across the street and borrow my neighbors line and get 33k or higher connections. Differences in equipment installed on your telephone line have an impact on the connection speed you will be able to get. I was finally able to get a line in my home that allowed 49K connections regularly. However, since I upgraded my newer modem, my dialups are only connecting now at 33K. Thank goodness for my cablemodem! All that being said, I would recommend you find out the 'protocol' that your current modem supports, probably V.92, and make sure the dialup number you are using supports that standard. If you need help figuring that out, let me know and I can try to do some research for you with just a little information. Hope this helps. |
Car54 | Wednesday, February 12, 2003 - 12:00 pm     Draheid, who gave you last night off? I knew you would have some ideas! Ok, here is what I know: The modem is a PCTEL 2304WT MDC modem V.92. At home, my phone line IS slow...I have always routinely connected at 26k, and the pages load slowly but not painfully. At work (the next town over...about 3 miles) I can connect at 56 k, but even at that speed, the pages failed to load and were painfully slow if they did. There is an issue with logging in... when it connects, it takes 2 or 3 tries to authenticate...then once it does connect, after about 60 seconds I get an error message saying they cannot log me into .Net Passport. The Net passport thing has been happening for about 2 months tho...long before this machine...I e-mailed MSN support about the error message and they responded saying they were aware some users had a problem and they were working on it. Even with that message tho, I could just cancel it and go on and browse, receive mail, etc on my old machine. Keith, my Tech 3 believes there is an issue with what he calls my "User Account" on this computer...and he had me log off, log in as the administrator, go to Control Panel, delete myself, and then we had a problem...he said there should be some link asking me to do a new task...set up a new account... My computer did not have that link...I could set up a new user but that did not seem to be what he thought we needed to do. We ended up restoring my old user ID back and ending for the night. He did re-set my MSN password and .NET passport but when I logged in, I still take 2 or 3 tries and get the .Net Passport error. I am very uncomfortable deleting my user ID because I am connected to a Windows NT network and have shared access to things...I don't want to get locked off the server and lose work time. Last night when I went home, I dialled in and connected at 12k...pitiful...I could log in slowly but no pages would load. I discovered this weekend that if I played around with the access numbers I could improve the speed...so I did find one where I could get 26k, and pages did load but very very slow. I know less than nothing about this, but I kept telling them that when I was working with one of the techs, I found a log file in the Modem section of control panel...and there was a message there about the "CD too low." echoing over and over... It seemed to me from reading the log that when I try to load a page it was sending a certain number of bytes but only about half of them were loading...(don't know how to explain it...I can cut and paste the log if you think this is significant.) I think there is more than one issue...one seems to be with me and .Net Passport the other seems to be with me and the sending and receiving of date...the speed, error correction...something. Any ideas would be greatly appreciated...you seem to know a lot about this subject! |
Draheid | Wednesday, February 12, 2003 - 12:18 pm     Car54: In my case, I have 3 lines in my home. One line is dedicated to the computer dialup. Several years ago, I was having trouble because each time I dialed in with the computer, my voice line would go dead and my data connection never exceeded 26,400bps. I discovered that my data & voice line shared a device that put two lines on one cable pair from the central office. I pleaded with the phone company for almost two years describing this problem. They finally connected my data line to a 'dedicated' cable pair from the house back to the central office. Since that time, I've been able to dial in at speeds in the 33K to 51K range. Most connections at 49,600bps. I would caution you to avoid letting them 'sell' you on a more expensive 'data-grade' service since it's not really necessary but may be the only way to get it from them. It varies with different companies. As to your modem, you should check the listing of POP numbers in your area and see which fully support the V92 protocol. A note, when I upgraded my new computers protocol from v90 to v92, my connections actually dropped even though my provider had also upgraded their equipment. I don't use the dialup very often but I'm seriously thinking about downgrading the modem software to get better connections. FWIW. Hope this helps. |
Car54 | Wednesday, February 12, 2003 - 12:19 pm     Oh, I forgot to say...the Dell guy had me run all the diagnostics on the modem and actually connect to a computer in hypertrm...and he is emphatic that there is not an equipment problem. I use Procomm and TinyTerm to dial into our store locations and I have had no issues dialling into many different locations from home or work on the same modem and phone lines. Just with MSN. |
Car54 | Wednesday, February 12, 2003 - 12:32 pm     Draheid...I think the 90 vs 92 issue is a great clue. I will ask Keith about it. At work we are on the verge of getting our own T1 line (we share right now with another business). If we do, it opens up the potential for me to have a VPN connection to our network here and work at a much better speed and quality of connection...our dial up is kind of poky and clunky. If we do this I will know by the weekend, and I think I will just fire MSN and get a cable connection. Right now if I am working, I have to get off the internet and do a direct dial in to work. The new way I will be able to open multiple windows and work on multiple tasks at once. Keeping my fingers crossed. Our phone company stinks pretty bad...I doubt if they would do much of anything to change my setup. Our phone installer is coming in next week, I am going to ask him about it...he has done some work in my town...see what he knows. Thanks so much!! I will be spoiling my adventures again this evening...but can't stay late tonight. |
Draheid | Wednesday, February 12, 2003 - 12:42 pm     Car54 FWIW, when I had dialup and eventually cablemodem/VPN to my old office, I had a machine setup in the office with PC Anywhere for me to 'remote control' when I needed to start processes, etc. I found it much simpler to operate this way then to do everything 'across the wire' so to speak. Even on Dialup, this was effective because all the processing and data was only happening in the building over the internal network so connection speed wasn't really a problem for me. Occasionally, the Cablemodem/VPN came in handy when I needed to retrieve large files from my office. Sorry I wasn't 'involved' last night, I did see your plight but it appeared as though you had MSN & DELL pretty well wrapped up in this so any input from me would probably have confused more then help. Again, good luck. I hope this is helpful. |
Car54 | Wednesday, February 12, 2003 - 01:20 pm     Draheid, that is really useful info. Our network consultants kind of sneer at any mention of dial up... most of what I am doing is on our UNIX server...running updates and queries...but then I want to be able to get on our Network and pull the file over to my machine to work on...right now I have to drive over and hook up my laptop! I am going to mention your thoughts to MSN..they were very helpful last night...we just kind of ran out of time and steam. I am ready to try again this evening after work! Stay tuned |
Car54 | Wednesday, February 12, 2003 - 03:21 pm     Hi I am back. My tech 3 du jour is Travis tonight. Travis is in Portland Oregon where it is not terribly cold, he says...nor is it raining today. He has gone through the normal issues with me and we have come up with nada. Currently he is trying to re-create the problem on an XP machine they have on-site. He was kind enough not to make me hold...he is calling me back. Very nice music on hold again tonight. |
Car54 | Wednesday, February 12, 2003 - 05:11 pm     Well I broke MSN. They cannot duplicate my problem and they don't know what to do. Last time I changed ISP's I broke AOL... I am thinking AT&T next. I am going to work my way slowly through the internet...finding their weak spots. I tell you....it is a gift. Give me software of any kind...I will find the weak spot. Some people are good at music. This is my talent. |
Halfunit | Wednesday, February 12, 2003 - 05:32 pm     Congratulations Car!! Do you use the exclusive features on MSN and AOL, or are you mainly internet surfing? I ask, because you probably have a dozen independent internet providers locally (no frills, of course!). That might be appealing to you, so that if you have a future problem, you can have them come over and look at the problem, lol. |
Squaredsc | Wednesday, February 12, 2003 - 05:51 pm     you go car! |
Car54 | Wednesday, February 12, 2003 - 05:55 pm     Thanks Half...there are a couple...in this area tho they go belly up every day. I am going to try some sort of freebie deal for signing up with someone for a month til this plan at work is for sure..then I will go for the cable modem. I really don't use any of the exclusive things at all...just web access and e-mail. I am just going to bring them all to their knees eventually. I have actually had software vendors at trade shows ask me to leave their booth because I can usually spot the bug in the program during the demo. I am a beta user for our software, and have been in development with our vendor on some custom applications for our business. I make the programmer's lives a living hell...but they love me for it. Browsing around now looking for who has an easy download and 3 free months. |
Grannyg | Wednesday, February 12, 2003 - 06:01 pm     Car, I am so thrilled to know someone that broke MSN. I did the same thing to AOL one time. For the life of them, they couldn't figure what I had done. Gave up and went with Roadrunner!! |
Car54 | Wednesday, February 12, 2003 - 06:30 pm     Granny, I broke AOL last year. Travis's theory is that there is a conflict between my XP Pro and the modem...but I told him..Dell swears the modem is fine...and you ARE Microsoft..go upstairs and find someone to figure it out, hon. I told him MSN and Dell are partners..everything should work perfectly... the only variable is the phone company...Bill and Michael don't own Verizon yet. Travis thought that was pretty funny. |
Gadzooks | Thursday, February 13, 2003 - 08:57 pm     Hi Gang, I have a question about websites. I recently signed up for a free personal website at geocities and I uploaded some pictures into the photo page, but they look so small that you can hardly see anything (like thumbprints). Is there a way to make the picture bigger by clicking on it or something. Just wondering. If anyone knows of any other free website makers, please let me know. Thanks. |
Mosessupposes | Thursday, February 13, 2003 - 09:33 pm     Yeap...there is a way to view them normal size. Just put a check mark in the box under the picture. Click on the title of the picture. It will open in another window in about medium size. Then look across the top of the medium size photo for different viewing options. Click "view full size". The picture will then open full size in another window. There are other options like "slideshow" etc. Another free website provider is Angelfire, but I don't know about their photo viewing options. |
Whit4you | Thursday, February 13, 2003 - 11:43 pm     Howdy guys... anyone here know how to um I don't even know what it's called... perhaps "mix a .mp3" or .wav? What I want to do is crop out certain parts of a song... (just leaving chorus. I know it can be done my x bf made a classic .wav for me once doing this. Let me know if you understand what I mean and if you can help. Thanks |
Jed245 | Friday, February 14, 2003 - 04:28 am     Whit I think what you mean is remove or add tracks to an audio track? If so, then you might want to look for an audio editor. I think your talking about taking out the vocals from a song. Or maybe the bass or rhythm. Maybe all you want is the vocals? Or maybe you want to take the bass line from one song and combine it with another song. The only way I know of that you can do it off hand is with emagic studio which, is for midi tracks also acid 4.0. Midi files are files that play music, but, there is never a real voice. As for doing that with wav and mp3 files umm I can't think of any free audio editing programs out there that would help you out. :o) Jed. |
Whit4you | Friday, February 14, 2003 - 07:01 am     Well what I want to do is cut out some parts of the song. Just keep in the chorus's. If anyone knows how to do that please let me know - thanks |
Draheid | Friday, February 14, 2003 - 07:05 am     Whit: I have a couple of programs that can do that. The program included with Windows, Soundrecorder, isn't really great but can be used if you work at it. The biggest limit with SR is that it only supports .wav files. And I think you would have to cut out the parts one at a time, save them into temporary files, then 'merge' them together using cut-n-paste I believe. (Never needed to try it so I'm not positive this will work.) |
Jed245 | Friday, February 14, 2003 - 11:26 am     Whit Sound recorder doesn't work very well for editing and can be a pain. Try looking on the web for demo or try and buy audio editing software. Audio fx, acid pro, digital orch ,(which is downloadable as a demo at http://www.voyetra.com/site/products/orch/downloads.asp) They also have literature so you can learn to use the software. There are several other options. Maybe you could get a demo of audio fx, then load the track you want and play with the equalizer till you get a few tracks eliminated. Then save it only to reopen the new file and adjust more to get only the chorus. That should work fairly well and be easier to use. :o) Jed. |
Jed245 | Friday, February 14, 2003 - 11:42 am     umm Whit P.S. heh I can give you a walk through on the digital orch demo. If you need that it's really simple to use. :o) |
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