Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Computing/2008 October 2

= October 2 =

monitor driver issues after reformat
I just reformatted and reinstalled win xp home on my dell. The screen resolution has defaulted to 640x480. I went into 'Display Properties > Settings' to change it, but the slider wouldn't budge which makes me think the driver for my monitor isn't installed (which makes zero sense). I continued on to 'advanced > monitor' where I saw that the monitor was set to "default monitor." the dialog box would not allow me to push the 'properties' button to specify a monitor/driver. I dug out a dell resource cd titled 'drivers and utilities' but found no clear solutions there. Any ideas? --Shaggorama (talk) 04:55, 2 October 2008 (UTC)


 * It's not your monitor, but your graphics card driver. What graphics card do you have? If it's a Dell why didn't you just use its recovery software? --antilivedT 06:04, 2 October 2008 (UTC)


 * Why should he use the recovery cd by dell? Dell did not manufacture the graphics card, did it? I would say all the OP has to do is figure out what graphics card it is and download the appropriate drivers for it. Am I missing something? Kushal (talk) 15:18, 5 October 2008 (UTC)ß


 * i managed to have the issue resolved by dell tech support. Apparently there was a whole slew of drivers I assumed had been installed but were on a separate disk. noob --> Shaggorama (talk) 07:14, 2 October 2008 (UTC)


 * This issue isn't unique to Dell.... in fact, in my experience Dell is the easiest to get drivers for unknown hardware once you've reinstalled the OS. Most of their computers come with a "Service Tag" - using that at their support site will give you links to all the driver downloads for your model. ---J.S (T/C/WRE) 01:57, 6 October 2008 (UTC)


 * Unfortunately, that can sometimes involve hundreds of megs of driver download just for various graphics card or chipset drivers. It's painful, especially when working in a small computer shop. Washii (talk) 17:50, 7 October 2008 (UTC)

Windows ME
I like to use windows ME. My usual computer crashed so I went to my backup computer which is older. I had put in a new hard drive and installed windows ME. But when I turn the compuer on it says "loading os". I have waited for over an hour and it does not load. The system does meet the requirements. What must I do? I would really appreciate any help. Thank you. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 173.16.170.143 (talk) 12:20, 2 October 2008 (UTC)


 * Did you install windows ME on the crashed computer or on your backup computer? 31306D696E6E69636B6D (talk) 13:24, 2 October 2008 (UTC)
 * My vote is to install Windows XP instead of ME. Useight (talk) 16:19, 2 October 2008 (UTC)
 * The support for Windows ME ended on 11 July 2006, so I second Useight on that. Alternatively try a free OS based on Linux or BSD if the backup computer doesn't meet the system requirements of Windows XP. -- Reep (talk) 23:59, 2 October 2008 (UTC)


 * Windows ME is a horrible operating system compared to XP - ME's flakey as all hell and XP is actually pretty stable. If you can get a copy of XP to install - that's probably your best option (unless, of course you're ready for Linux...which I'd certainly recommend to keep an older machine running on the cheap). SteveBaker (talk) 02:47, 3 October 2008 (UTC)

Wow. "Hey this guy can't run windows ME on his PC because it doesn't meet system requirements. Lets recommend something with higher system requirements!" To the question asker, since you are used to 9x systems and your PC isn't powerful enough to run Windows ME I'd suggest hunting down a copy of Windows 98 SE (the SE part is important). While in some ways it is worse than ME (driver installation for instance) it is better in others, and also doesn't need as powerful a system. 88.211.96.3 (talk) 12:07, 3 October 2008 (UTC)

Calm down, 88. Please read what the OP said. They said: "The system does meet the requirements." They did not say: "can't run windows ME on his PC because it doesn't meet system requirements" —Preceding unsigned comment added by Kushal one (talk • contribs)


 * I'd also recommend Windows 98 SE over ME. And if your system can handle it, try Windows 2000. Win 2k is vastly superior to both 98 and ME. Even if you manage to get ME to install, it will probably give you other problems. There is also a grass-roots support effort for 98, including an unofficial service pack.--Tree &#39;uns 5 (talk) 05:50, 5 October 2008 (UTC)


 * Yes, Win2k is about as good as Windows gets. But I'm not sure that you have any option other than (a) leaving it without any service packs, security patches, etc., or (b) installing the damned things one after another. The last time I did the latter, it seemed to take half a day: in order to to Z, you first had to do Y; in order to do Y, you first had to do X; all the way back to A or so it seemed. If you do install any version of Win2k, be sure not to use MSIE or Outlook Express; no hardship, as the latest Mozilla alternatives should run just fine. -- Hoary (talk) 06:07, 5 October 2008 (UTC)


 * If it is not much hardship, I would suggest to go ahead and use Ubuntu. By the way, what are the specifications of the hardware? Could you tell us here? Are you thinking about upgrading any components? Kushal (talk) 10:43, 6 October 2008 (UTC)

Excel VBA question
Just a quick question I hope someone can help me with. On a TI-83 calculator under mode there's an option to have imaginary numbers display in a+bi mode. Is there any kind of command to do that in VBA? Thanks in advance for your help. Deltacom1515 (talk) 16:57, 2 October 2008 (UTC)
 * I'm not sure which version of Excel you have, but this microsoft.com page may be hinting towards what you need. Laenir (talk) 18:28, 2 October 2008 (UTC)

Dual booting linux and windows
I'm trying to install Linux (Fedora) for the first time. I found instructions on partitioning my hard drive here and have downloaded Fedora and burned it to a disk (after verifying the sha1 checksum). What I want to know is, will installing Fedora now erase all the files I have on my Windows partition? Will they be completely seperate? And will I be able to select between Windows and Fedora when I turn on my computer? I want to still be able to access Windows so that my parents can use this computer. Thanks! 86.164.163.72 (talk) 17:26, 2 October 2008 (UTC)


 * > What I want to know is, will installing Fedora now erase all the files I have on my Windows partition?
 * No. You have to have it shrink the Windows partition and use the other space for Fedora.
 * > Will they be completely separate?
 * Yes. But you will be able to access your Windows partition from within Linux.
 * > Will I be able to select between Windows and Fedora when I turn on my computer?
 * Yes.
 * Also, you might want to get some more updated instructions. The current Fedora is Fedora 9 (soon to be Fedora 10 next month). That page is about Fedora Core 1, from 2003. So some things might be different. --71.106.183.17 (talk) 18:39, 2 October 2008 (UTC)
 * yeah im using the fedora 9 installation guide on their site for most of the info, i just used that link to find out how to partition my hard drive :) thanks for the info, i am much less nervous about installing now! —Preceding unsigned comment added by 86.164.163.72 (talk) 20:57, 2 October 2008 (UTC)


 * Just to clarify, now a days, you don't need to partition your drive before installing a Linux distribution, because distributions now have partitioning applications that can create, remove and resize existing partitions (including partitions with FAT and NTFS) during installation. Just make sure you read the options the installer gives you before you click "Next", there's probably an option to wipe the whole drive and install linux on the whole drive, so don't choose that one ;) -- Reep (talk) 23:50, 2 October 2008 (UTC)


 * Make sure you backup all your Windows data before you begin, just in case. - Akamad (talk) 22:10, 2 October 2008 (UTC)

If it's done 100% correctly - you can have all of your Windows files kept intact (although with considerably less free disk space!) and Linux happily installed off on it's own chunk of the drive. Once that's done, Windows is blissfully unaware that Linux is there - and Linux will be blissfully unaware that Windows is there (unless you choose to mount the windows partition under Linux so you can copy files back and forth. However, it's alarmingly easy to misread a dialog or misunderstand what it's asking - and then you can VERY easily trash your Windows partition...AND the 'hidden backup' partition that most laptops have to allow you to reinstall Windows in the event of a disaster!!  So whatever you do:


 * 1) Make a "windows recovery CD" before you even take that Linux CD out of the wrapper!  Make two - the first one might not work!
 * 2) Back up all of the files that matter to you - you don't want to risk losing a single thing.
 * 3) Read carefully what the Linux installer is saying to you - take your time.  If there is something you don't understand - come back here to the RD and ask our resident Linux geeks before you carry on.

For the super-nervous - you can install some of the smaller Linux distro's on a flash drive - or an external USB hard drive. In the past (when I was still dual-booting - I'm 100% linux these days) I bought a second hard drive to install Linux on - and actually unplugged the Windows drive to be 100% sure I wasn't going to screw it up. But the advantage of installing on a flash drive is that you can unplug it from your PC and all trace of it is definitely gone. If you set up your BIOS to try to boot from USB first - and from the hard drive second - then you plug in the "Linux widget" and hit the reset button to get into Linux - pull it out and hit the button again to get back into Windows. This is good if you have warranty or service contract on your computer - or if it belongs to your company or something.

As for booting - your distro installer will probably install "GRUB" - it sits on the hard drive where the Windows boot-up code usually lives. You can choose at that point how you want the system to start up. You can have it come up with a little text-mode menu ("Hit 1 for Linux, 2 for Windows" kind of thing) and you can have it boot into one or other operating system "by default" if nobody hits a key within some number of seconds that you can also set. So have it boot into Windows if nobody hit a key within (say) 5 seconds - and your parents won't have to do anything special to get Windows to boot up. You can install other programs and different versions of operating systems - that install on that same menu. I have a built-in RAM-check program and two different Linux versions installed on my boot menu for example. With care you can even get it to boot between Windows XP and Windows Vista and Linux and BSD-Unix...it's a great little tool.

But once you've done the whole installation thing a few times, you'll know what's going on - it'll get a lot easier.

SteveBaker (talk) 02:34, 3 October 2008 (UTC)


 * Unless Microsoft has changed its spots, which I doubt, the problem will come if/when you want to reinstall or upgrade Windows, a process that (the last time I heard) trashes any other OS that's elsewhere on the same hard drive. But there are (were) workarounds.


 * Parents can use GNU/Linux too. I know some parents who do just that. -- Hoary (talk) 06:01, 5 October 2008 (UTC)

Is there a street atlas with municipal borders on the web?
Google maps and expedia don't have municipal borders. Thanks! Nero y (talk) 17:30, 2 October 2008 (UTC)


 * Have you tried tiger? It has a lot of stuff the other maps don't have (as it is not designed to be a user-friendly direction finder). --  k a i n a w &trade; 17:31, 2 October 2008 (UTC)
 * Well, its quality is not very good, and the map is pretty little. But anyway, how can I see there the municipal borders? Nero y (talk) 18:24, 2 October 2008 (UTC)


 * On the right, there are a lot of checkboxes to have it draw city, county, state... borders. If you are looking for a specific type of municipal border (ie: the border between Barry Harbor and Barry Heights in North Kansas City), then ask for specifically what you want.  As you've asked, showing city and town borders is showing municipal borders.  And, yes, it isn't great for scrolling around and looking at the map like Google Maps is. --  k a i n a w &trade; 22:47, 2 October 2008 (UTC)


 * IIRC Google Earth has these minor borders - not exactly "on the web" I know, but it uses data streamed from the web. Astronaut (talk) 17:52, 2 October 2008 (UTC)
 * I'm not familiar with that. Can I use it thru the browser? Nero y (talk) 18:24, 2 October 2008 (UTC)
 * No, but it's easy to download. See Google Earth for more information. Anonymous101 (talk) 20:33, 2 October 2008 (UTC)
 * Well, I downloaded it, but can't find the municipal borders... I guess that if they had it - they would have put them in Google maps as well... AM I wrong? Nero y (talk) 08:55, 3 October 2008 (UTC)
 * I was at the office and working from memory. Now I'm at home, I see Google Earth can display (see the Borders and labels" layer): "International Borders" in yellow, "1st Level Admin Borders (States/Privinces)" in blue and "2nd Level Admin Regions (Counties)" in green.  Astronaut (talk) 18:49, 4 October 2008 (UTC)

Norton 360
If i bought the original version of Norton 360 and put it on my computer, then updated it, would i autmoatically then have the version 2.0?Jwking (talk) 22:12, 2 October 2008 (UTC)


 * I would think twice about getting a Norton product unless it is required. Unless things have changed in the last two years, uninstalling the Norton product will be a PITA! Kushal (talk) 22:31, 2 October 2008 (UTC)
 * That's what the Norton Removal Tool (made by Symantec) is for (should be first result on Google with those three words in order). It also has the nice side-effect of removing the horrid lockdown that will be left behind from a normal uninstall on XP SP2 and above. Just don't uninstall first, or it won't be as effective. Use the tool to uninstall. Washii (talk) 03:18, 3 October 2008 (UTC)
 * If the removal tool walks the walk as it does talk the talk, I apologize and withdraw my opposition to it. Thanks for pointing it out. Kushal (talk) 15:12, 5 October 2008 (UTC)
 * Go ahead and still be opposed to it. The tool expires every two weeks or so, which sucks, since we keep a copy on a fileserver in the computer shop I work in. Washii (talk) 17:53, 7 October 2008 (UTC)
 * Some googling reveals that users of the original version got free upgrades to version 2, so I'm pretty sure you would get a free upgrade. Symantec makes most of their money from subscriptions anyway. --wj32 t/c 02:51, 3 October 2008 (UTC)