Please excuse my stupidity here as I've been solely a mac user for a better part of the last decade and it's made me a little soft. My wife has an HP laptop that is acting all sorts of crazy after a few years of use. I want to wipe it clean and just reinstall windows and software that she uses, Office, etc. I can't find any of the original papers for the computer and it never came with a recovery disk. Is there a simple way for me to wipe this thing clean and start over? I'm afraid of having driver problems, etc. The last pc I used was a desktop I built so I knew every component and had no problems wiping it and starting over. I just don't want to ruin her machine. We've copied all good files to an external drive and it's ready to wipe clean. Can I just format the hard drive and insert a windows disk and go from there? Again, sorry for this simple question. Am I over thinking this or is this a more involved process than wipe and reinstall? Thanks.
Generally speaking, if HP didn't give you recovery disks with your machine, they installed an application to allow you to burn one. Barring that, you can pay $15 to $20 for them to send you a new one. As far as Office goes, if you had it preinstalled with the computer and purchased an activation key, it shouldn't be a big deal to re-activate to the software when you restore your computer. Write down all of your activation keys before you have to shell out for another one.
And, if you don't know/can't remember your Office/Windows activation keys, download Magic Jelly Bean. That will scan your system for all Microsoft products and will give you the product keys for Office, Windows, etc.
HP's generally do not need a recovery CD. Every HP I have ever used contains a 2nd partition on your hard disk which contains all of the software you need to re-install the original system. Bring up Windows Explorer, click on My Computer, and you should see a drive C: which is your boot/system drive, and a drive D: which normally contains the recovery/re-install software. On all my HP systems, drive C has a label of "HP" and drive D has a label of FACTORY_IMAGE. I just looked on one of my HP systems to confirm this. However, I've never had to re-install an HP system and not sure what the next step is. Google is your friend. If you can't figure it out, PM me and I'll see what I can figure out.
So I took the plunge and cancelled my satellite. I think I've covered all the bases except one: HBO. Besides torrenting a show after it's aired, does anyone have a site/link to watch HBO streaming content? All the ones I've tried are busted. *I would happily pay for HBO, but right now, in Canada, you can't do that without a cable subscription.
As far as I know, it's not possible to get legal HBO content without first having an underlying service and then subscribing to HBO. It's even spawned the site <a class="postlink" href="http://takemymoneyhbo.com/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;">http://takemymoneyhbo.com/</a> to try and generate public pressure to get HBO sans cable service. HBO GO, the streaming online version of HBO, requires an underlying service subscription. Part of why HBO doesn't just let people subscribe to HBO GO as a standalone is because they aren't the ones actually providing the service, the cable companies are.
Exchange and IOS interop isn't fantastic. The base trouble shooting steps in my experience are always roughly the same regardless of what it is that isn't working between exchange and your IOS device. Make sure you've patched your exchange server and your iphone to current (exchange server is less likely to be relevant, unless you're running an older version), then remove your exchange settings and backup your phone in itunes. Reboot your phone and try re-adding the exchange settings and see if unfucks itself. Don't hold your breath. Factory reset your phone and try again. Enjoy screaming in rage as you wait for that shit to re sync. The only other common issue I've come across with ios and exchange is that if you've got a microsoft firewall between your IOS device and the internet - or god forbid any kind of corporate/enterprise proxy? Don't even bother trying to fix the weird fucking issues. Find a way to do whatever is being fucktarded without going through that firewall. If you have to support a significant number of IOS devices in a Microsoft enterprise IT space - publish your apps through citrix. Don't even try and use the IOS connectivity to your corporate infrastructure. Just used the IOS device to launch published apps and save yourself the pain. The only alternatives are to abandon your Microsoft infrastructure or give up on any kind of security/user environment management. Remember that users need their toys for things that are MUCH much more important than any kind of best practice or IT management common sense.
Thanks, Scootah. As it turns out, it was a PEBKAC error. Apparently he was adding contacts incorrectly. Instead of using his Exchange contact list on his phone, he was adding them to his local contacts... Which, obviously, won't sync between his phone and Exchange/Outlook.
Somebody repped me that they thought from my last post that I'm not a big apple/mac fan - I just want to point out that I actually REALLY like my ipad, and Tiger / Leopard / Snow Leopard were really good opperating systems. If you're a single home user/student. They're even ok if you're a business small enough that you don't have an SOE and trust your employees enough that security and IT controls over your desktop environment aren't worth spending money on. But Apple have basically ignored enterprise needs. There's no good way to manage a farm of 800 seats with all the users running Apple hardware. The sever products for apple are terrible, the directory service integration products are ugly, hard to manage and usually borderline useless. Security is either non existent or completely impractical for a business. The update processes are utterly broken if you have any kind of network security worth talking about. The only way to have sensible business operations with your users running Mac's is to just publish apps out from a controlled environment, drop all your users onto a restricted network that can only reach the internet and your application gateway. There are a few products for publishing your apps from Microsoft/VMWare - but the most practical/the ones that work best in my experience are the citrix suite. The cost of supporting bring your own device policies to support IOS users or OSX users in a secure and professional corporate IT environment is prohibitive. There are some kind of sensible ways to do it - but they all rely on a 5+ year IT purchasing strategy and forecast benefits that are almost entirely based on futurist predictions that are only loosely supported by available data before they make sense. And almost nobody is willing to spend enough to implement it properly, and half arsing it is a cluster fuck waiting to happen. But people who don't know anything about technology REALLY want to use their Ipad to play games while they drop a deuce, I mean for taking notes in meetings ... so the vast majority of arguments end with "This is idiotic, but we can just turn off all the best practice risk management and network security that we spent years and mid sized fortunes getting in place, so that the CFO can update angry birds and Spotify over the corporate network, but before you instruct us to do it, please understand that every single person in the IT department agrees that it's a terrible idea, and that the risk massively outweighs the benefit as this will almost certainly lead to extremely expensive incidents as a result", "Shut up and fix it nerd boy. I'll sign off on the risk". I wish I was exaggerating. But to clarify, I don't hate the products. I hate the people who use them.
My ipod is causing my computer to freeze every time it's plugged in. I've restored the ipod, reinstalled Itunes (ugh), and attempted to use 3rd party software to restore the thing with no luck. Google reported a potential problem with update KB973879 for Windows Vista that sounds precisely like my problem, but I'm running 7 and this update is no longer used/I don't have it. Any suggestions?
I'm looking for free cloud hosting for .zip files of pictures that photography clients can download. My webhost limits me to a file size of 20mb, and the files I want to send my clients are routinely >100mb. Prefer something without a million popups. Thanks!
Google Drive. <a class="postlink" href="http://drive.google.com" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;">http://drive.google.com</a> Done.
I need to clean up my C: drive and have found a large chunk of data (9 gigs) that I can't really account for. It's in the Users\Trakiel\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Windows directory, but when I'm in that subfolder I hit a dead end. According to its properties it contains 238,334 files in 95 folders, but when I actually go into that folder I only see 9 folders, none of which contain the huge chunk of data I'm looking to delete. I have my settings to show hidden files and folders. I need to find out what that data is and if I can delete it. Any ideas?
My Sherwood BDP-5004 Blu-Ray player is seriously fried, and doesn't want to play anything. My first thought is to restore the firmware, and I'm looking for the original 2009 firmware; there was a later update that deletes region-free capabilities, so of course I don't want that. But, my searches thus far have been fruitless. Anyone know where I can download an ISO file to burn? It looks like the company website has it, but only for dealers with a login. Thanks!
Go into your Tools > Folder Options and make sure that you've selected to view hidden folders AND uncheck the box that says "hide protected operating system files." That should display the offending folders. Of course, it's annoying to see all the protected OS files (they show up everywhere) so re-check it when you're done. Alternately, I recommend CCleaner as an effective, free way to scan and clean files out of your drive, and it also categorizes them. I had an almost identical situation just a week or so ago - my girlfriend's laptop had nearly 15gb of space eaten up for which I couldn't identify the source. Rather than pick through folders looking, I ran CCleaner and found I had some large chunk of orphaned internet explorer cached files. Not sure where they came from, but they wouldn't go away when I cleared the cache. Purged with CCleaner and all is well.
Also, try using WinDirStat to determine which folders on your machine are taking up the most space. It's a free program and is very helpful for disk cleanup and figuring out which folders are causing the problem.
Question for you guys - is there a way to tell if a folder has been recently opened? A friend was by my house today, and I strongly suspect he was on my computer into some files...any way to see a log on when certain folders have been activated? Actually, even better would be to see the entire activity log for a certain period. I went into the events log, and it showed activity for about five minutes this afternoon, but there wasn't enough detail to say for certain if a person had logged on.
There's really nothing you can see. You can check your "recent places" if you're using Windows 7 - open up a Windows Explorer screen (windows key+E), and under "Favorites" there's something called "Recent Places." That's going to include everywhere you've gone, though, so if you've also viewed the folders in question, it won't help. If you think the person might have opened files, you can check your applications for recent documents (e.g. in Microsoft Word, if you click the File button, you'll see a section of recent files). Other than that, though, there's not much you can do without having some kind of monitoring application installed prior to the activity. The Event Log is for notable events, typically errors or problem messages - it doesn't track normal activity.
A few tech-related questions; -My laptop runs slowly, lags, and overheats for online games, even simple ones. One thing I notice is the rather high CPU usage and CPU memory usage. Right after start-up, with no browser window open, and almost all start-up programs shut off, there is still about 1.0 GB of memory used, which is 30% of the total. That number rises to about 60% and 1.8 GB with some windows in Chrome open. Is this unusual? -Any simple changes I can make to increase performance and memory usage? -For a fairly weak and old processor (Pentium(R) Dual-Core CPU, T4200 @2.00 GHz), is my 64-bit OS a bad idea? If so, how does one switch it to 32-bit? -Would upgrading from Vista Home Basic to Windows 7 make sense? And if so, is there a deal better than Amazon's $87 price tag? Thanks a bunch in advance.