My computer is experiencing some problems when I try to add a SATA hard disk drive. The motherboard (Gigabyte GA-K8N Ultra-9) has the usual two IDE connectors, both of which have the primary and secondary channels occupied with two hard disks, an optical drive, and a Zip drive. The motherboard also has eight SATA connectors, four of which are used by the on-board nVidia chipset. On the assumption that sooner or later one of the IDE channels will fail, I tried to connect a SATA hard drive, as a reserve, to one of the appropriate SATA connectors on the board. The BIOS correctly identified the new drive, but the system would not proceed to boot, displaying the following error message: “Windows could not start because of the following ARC firmware boot configuration problem: Did not properly generate ARC name for HAL and system paths. Please check the Windows documentation about ARC configuration options and your hardware reference manuals for additional information”. I cannot find either of these terms in the Windows Help files or in the manual that came with the system board. The system BIOS has never been updated, nor has the chipset. The computer is running Windows XP SP2. Can you help in getting the system to recognise the SATA hard drive? (more…)

Recently I found a folder on my computer which contains different sounds. These were interesting, but when I had finished I did not put the Windows sounds back to their original settings. While this does not seem like a difficult process I cannot find the folder which contains these original sounds. Can you help, as the sound coming from my speakers is now dreadful. The computer is running Windows Vista Home Premium. (more…)

It is not a good idea to use the same password for different online services and websites, as if there is a security breach at one of those services or websites and your password is found then potentially the unauthorised person who has obtained your password could use that to login to other services and websites. On the other hand, it is a major pain to remember several different passwords for all the different services. This is why a password management tool is a very powerful utility. 1Password (agilewebsolutions.com/products/1Password) is an excellent password management application for the Apple Mac platform which allows you to just not store passwords, but also software licences, secure notes, credit card and bank details, etc. Additionally, there is also a free iPhone application allowing you to synchronise passwords between the computer and iPhone, so you can take all your passwords with you. Your secure data is protected with high-level encryption, but just make sure you use a difficult to guess master password to access 1Password. The 1Password application is not free, but well worth the investment of US$39.95.

I have an HP Photosmart 2610 printer which is connected via USB to my main desktop computer, and the printer is also shared over the network (through a wireless G router) so that my laptop computer can access the printer. Occasionally the following error message will appear which prevents both the desktop and laptop computers from printing to the Photosmart 2610: “The print spooler was unable to connect to your printer. This can be caused by your printer being turned off, the cable being unplugged, or being connected to a VPN, which will block your access to your local network. Your document will print when the printer becomes available”. Sometimes this situation lasts a couple of days before the printer works again. At other times, print jobs sent from my laptop to the (shared) printer work correctly, while at the same time jobs from the desktop computer sent to the (locally connected) printer encounter the VPN error. There seems to be no rhyme or reason for this occurring, and it can be quite annoying. Both computers are running Windows XP. (more…)