I recently purchased a computer from eBay. The machine has MSI P4M890 motherboard, Intel Core 2 Duo 1.86 GHz processor, 2 GB RAM, 250 GB hard drive, and NVIDIA 7100 GS graphics card. The computer worked perfectly for the first week, but then the rear USB and PS/2 ports stopped working. Externally powered devices still work on these ports (such as printers and the ADSL modem) but self-powered devices do not work (such as keyboards, mice, and flash drives). This means I must use the front USB ports for the mouse and keyboard, significantly reducing the number of available USB ports on the computer. The computer has an AMI BIOS and, in case this provides a clue, the computer beeps twice during booting. I attempted to reseat the RAM, but this did not resolve the problem. The computer is running Windows XP. (more…)

I regularly scan my Windows XP computer using antispyware and anti-adware utilities such as Spybot Search & Destroy and Ad-Aware. However, these programs only run on Windows. I also own a Mac computer, and wanted to know if there is any such software which will scan and detect cookies, spyware, and adware on the Mac platform? (more…)

Firefox will save downloaded items to the Windows desktop by default. However, if you have an alternative location, such as a Downloads folder, where you would like to save downloaded items this can be set as the default download location. In Firefox, go to the “Tools” menu > “Options”. In the window that appears, click “Main”. Under the “Downloads” heading, enable “Save files to” and click the “Browse” button. Set the save location to your preferred save folder and click OK and then OK to save and close the Options. All downloaded items will now be saved to this newly defined location. (more…)

Attempting to install the latest video card drivers for my computer produced the message ?WinZip encountered a problem. C: drive is not a valid drive?. There was a lot of data on the C drive at this time, so I am unsure whether this makes any difference. On a different topic, is there any way to get Thunderbird to display the email address of a sender, in addition to their name? (more…)

When my laptop goes into standby mode the wireless keyboard and mouse do not work when the computer is restored. This does not happen if I restore the computer from the first standby mode (i.e. tapping the track pad to “wake” the computer), but the problem does occur when I need to press the Power button to wake the computer from a deeper standby. If I reinsert the wireless mouse and keyboard dongle into the computer following the restoration from standby I can get the mouse to work, but the keyboard still does not work. How can I fix this problem, so that both the keyboard and mouse work following restoration from standby mode? (more…)