Comandante

well, here comes one more reason to start digging. drinks on me "Deposits formed in Martian gullies during the past seven years suggest that liquid water exists on Mars today. Researchers have observed two downhill tracks of light-colored material that were not present in images taken by the Mars Global Surveyor spacecraft before 1999." from: http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?chanID=sa003&articleID=596EADAB-E7F2-99DF-3F373E177D108C1D

ok, i left it on for 30mins and the blue screen came again, looks like hardware issue (no specific error message, just wants me to scan hard disk for bad sectors). thanks for support i'm taking it to technicians, they should fix it. (I feel like somethings wrong with power supply, im sick of this notebook, ill get another one) regards

well, this is what happened. this morning i wake up and press the power button but the lcd still doesnt turn on. i take the laptop and turn it aside so the keypad stands vertically on the desk and i press power button again when look, the lcd turns on! I slowly put it back in normal position again and proceed onto loading windows in normal mode. Once it loaded it reported a hell of a lot of corrupted files mainly with avast antivirus. It also installed default drivers for graphics since I uninstalled the old one. So what I did is uninstall avast, copy all the important files this time (since this time the blue screen didnt come up so I had time to do what I had to do). Once I did all that I shut it down and restarted. I let the scan disk go ahead and it did just fine. In stage 3/3 it said it found some errors and large space of disk that was free but not assigned or something like that. So it reboots itself once again and proceeds normally into windows, like nothing happened yesterday. Now, I don't want to move it from this position on the desk but would like to know if there are any hardware diagnostic tools that I can check if there is anything wrong with the hardware.

a day before i installed ventrilo voip application. right now i the pc sounds quite when i turn it on and the lcd doesnt turn on at all, as if some of the hardware died. ill check the power supply tomorrow.

I was just browsing the net as usual and left my laptop on its own for a while, I came back few mins later and there is a blue screen that said the error was detected and system was halted to prevent damage, something like that. Not that this hasn't happened to me before, it happened a few times during the year but after next reboot it worked just fine. This time though I switched power off and on and tried to boot it again, it asked to check the drive and I let it. It came to stage 2 (winxp pro) and the blue screen came again. It stated this: DRIVER_IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL . Next thing I tried was to boot in safe mode, the first time I tried it came up to agp440.sys and it just stopped there for a loooong time. I shut it down. Then I tried last known good configuration and that worked. XP booted up and I quickly managed to copy some of the most essential files to the other pc. This lasted for about 10mins and the blue screen came up again, didn't say anything just started dumping something onto the disk. Last known good configuration worked once more. After reading some posts on the net where some suggested the graphics driver was outdated or something, I uninstalled the ati control center and was going to update to the new 5.13 version but I couldn't boot up no more. I tried turning the laptop on 2 more times but not even the startup screen came up (the very first logo screen), the monitor was just blank and the computer shut down. I suspect that the graphics chip may have died and if so how much, if you know, would it cost to replace it? If you could give me any suggestions that would be great. Thanks.

thanks Dak, I do not want to hear about AVG anymore, it has caused me enough problems, my computer came back to life today and I have abandoned my plans of formatting! I will get whatever you have to offer for antivirus, if that be Avast I'll have it. Very nice ultimate boot cd thing, never heard of it but whoever made it was a hell of a good idea. We'll burn it on as soon as possible and I'll report back.

ok, i did some tests, and i have good and bad news. the bad news is that i got negatives for all 3 of your questions/tests: as for 1), its only a dvd rom, it can't burn for 2) no, it can't read audio cd's and 3) no, it does not work in safe mode also, i did not have valid bootable disk as my winxp pro is a copy (apparently copied xppro can't boot up, im not so sure but it didnt work on friends' desktop pc soo.. i guess it won't work on my laptop, i did try it of course but it didnt work so i can't really give any diagnosis on that, it'd be unreliable) and i dont think anyone of my friends around here, at the moment, dont have it. but when i put it in (the copied one), i noticed that it did wait a couple of minutes, the boot screen, but then just proceeded on with normal startup. ok, the good news i went to that forum where the guy installed AVG but i didnt find the registry entry they suggested. i then uninstalled AVG and when rebooted i found out that a couple of old problems had gone, including the fact that my touch pad now works! didn't realise it was AVG causing the problem, thought it was hardware fault, but looking at it right now it looks almost certainly that the problem was in AVG. the touchpad keys now work so i'm portable again! so... what do we do now? im happy that at least i've got one problem down, i actually asked about this problem with the touchpad on one of the forums, can't quite remember which, but nobody was able to help me and i decided to take my laptop to technicians, but didnt do it since then, didnt have time, and now i dont have to so, its good. ps. yeah, the trick was nice! im just wondering why didnt i do that! very good. having said that i will keep on looking through google, in the meantime ill also jump back here to see whats the next proposal

wow! that last thing you said 5614 triggered me. i do actually have free antivirus , the same one they're talking about it, so i think there may have been a problem... i hope!. as for the trials i still didnt have proper time but will do tomorrow, or later today. i did try 1 thing tho, i tried data dvd and it worked just fine. (previously i only tried movies), so... ill try the boot thing tomorrow and then check that forum thing, which looks like the best hit so far. thx.

very interesting, i didn't know there was another crystal in there, actually i dont think there is because when i open it, the cds and dvds are placed so that the reading surface is positioned down (as usual), exactly above the laser, and there apppears to be only one (it's easily accessible because when the disk tray is open the laser is at the bottom of it, if you know what i mean). I don't think there is another one inside but I will have a look. I'll do as you say, I'll wait some time, maybe I figure it out somehow too. That's a good point with bootable disk, I will try that tomorrow, now I got to go somewhere. Thanks so far

yes, i have tried 10 different CDs which I double checked on another CDrom and they worked, while on my damned dvdrom they didnt. i did notice one thing tho, at one point, with one particular cd, the dvd rom sounded like it almost got it, but then miserably failed again. could you at least tell me if i should seek further assistance in fixing this or should i spend some money and get another one? (if i could at least try it on another laptop ...)

tcdplay wasn't found. when i insert data cd, the dvdrom sounds , initially, as though it's going to read it and then suddenly stops and starts again, and so on for 3-4 times and stops for good. then when i go to my computer and click on dvd rom drive i get the error message: "Windows cannot read from the disk. The disk might be corrupted, or it could be using a format that is not compatible with Windows." (Exclamation mark icon - Disk not formatted title) :S ps. can't find an audio cd , ill try tomorrow

TCDPlay isn't there at all. You think I should try it, won't cause any harm? ps. by the way, that site says "Found on a Toshiba laptop" but my laptop isn't toshiba, it's dell, will this make a difference even though the dvd rom is toshiba?

this is Toshiba (manufactured for Dell), black, DVD-ROM that reads (used to!) both DVDs and CDs. It can't burn. I tried couple of things, including fine cleaning the laser, but nothing helped. It only reads DVD movies that I have got here in arsenal. Perhaps I should try some data DVDs and see what happens? Might be a good idea, I just need to find a data DVD!

Yes, everything has worked fine a month ago and I don't remember installing any new hardware or software. I tried original DVDs and they work. I tried original CDs and they don't. I also tried playing CDs which I burned some time ago and they don't work either. I don't know what the heck is the problem. In the system settings and device manager everything looks clean and good. No errors reported by win (xp pro). I was having a similar problem before on my desktop pc, but the problem was that the dvd rom couldn't read dvd's but only cd's, where the problem was the laser or something with it rather, so I thought this would be something similar of a problem but it looks like it's not. I have not had much time to check it out but I will tomorrow. If you have any 'list' of suggestions I'd be thankful. Registry keys sound like a reasonable solution so I will first look into that, after I give google a few shots of course. I really need to get this dvd rom working again.

the dvd drive in my laptop doesn't want to read CDs anymore, it only reads DVDs. does anyone know what could be the problem here?

I say that if there were stars that far away there would probably be other stars in between, for example you wouldn't have an empty space of trillions of ly apart, there would PROBABLY be some stars in between; and IF there were then the number of stars we see over years would increase because the light emitted would start to reach us... Does this happen? Anyone kept track of exact number of visible stars ?

hmmm, still haven't done it... cant even afford 1hr of time to do it.. i think i'll use schools' lab to try it out,if they let me... hopefully.

oh oh, sorry, it seems the rules of the other forums are not to ask for assistance at two places at once, so I'll have to stop here. i posted my problem on the other forums where there is much more security specialists, well this is science forums anyway, so, I can let you know how the problem progressed but generally won't mind if administrator removes this thread...

i'm aware of what svchost.exe is, the problem is that there are more of those and each is doing something different... this one(~14,000k one) aparently shut off some (maybe all) drivers and aparently it also shut down network connection, which didnt even solve the problem partialy, so i still dont know what's causing my LAN to continuously transmit and receive packets. (im going to get network protocol analyzer in a moment)

I've got an interesting problem here which I can't seem to be able to solve myself. I have my laptop (xp) connected to my main desktop pc (xp) which uses cable internet connection which is also shared. Now I also enabled both display icons in the taskbar (when LAN is connected and Internet Gateway). The Internet Gateway icon works ok, shows activity only when I use internet, however, the LAN icon keeps reporting activity non-stop; sending and receiving packets all the time! I am having a suspicion as if it is also using Internet as well and therefore wasting my bandwidth into something I'm not aware of. I tried ending processes from the task bar and I noticed the activity stops when I shut down the svchost.exe (~14,000k one). BUT, along with the activity I also lose the skin of my windows for a moment and shortly after it comes back again, AND ALSO, all my drivers stop working without this svchost.exe application. I didn't find much info on this problem, does anyone have any ideas?

I'm looking for a VoIP program that lets you use it over the LAN as well, and won't require internet connection, is there one that you know of?

you speak confidently my friend, beware

i doubt the signal will ever reach, did they calculate how powerful the signal has to be in order to be detectable when it reaches there? when we're up to this, i was just curious; did we ever try to transmit any messages towards alpha centauri? i think that would be a good idea 'cause its much closer than M13!

Hi, I need someone who has a good knowledge in bacteria engineering or whatever it's called to tell me if what I've thought of is possible or not. All I know about bacteria is that it can reproduce rapidly and that it can be modified to reproduce other things... That idea brought me on thinking that it could be possible to create a "pen that never runs out". This pen would work so that its ink is constantly reproduced in form of bacteria(or by bacteria, whatever). There should also be a small device inside the pen which would keep the number of bacteria constant, that is, prevent overflow, and another device which would be used as a food source for bacteria (if it requires one). (then it wouldnt be forever lasting pen tho but at least, i hope, for some 50 years..) There are other things I took in consideration but don't want to write a 3-page essay so I'll just ask this for the time being; Would it be possible to use bacteria in such way?