Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Computing/2009 August 29

= August 29 =

BSODs referencing nvidia display driver with new 260GTX
I've just reformatted my PC and put all my games back on, the games seem to run fine generally, but I'm getting a weird STOP error which I haven't had before. It references nv4_disp, and I've took a look in WinDebug but apparently the x86 SP3 kernel symbols I have on my PC are wrong, so all I can really find out is 'something went wrong with the display driver'. I'm running a brand new 260GTX (stock) on the 190.62 forceware drivers. Overheating is not the issue, the temperatures are fine, and it crashes at various temperatures (but only in games). I've uploaded two minidumps generated from the crash, hopefully they should be able to help in diagnosing what exactly is causing this (but as I say, for some reason WinDbg won't work for me). Thanks a lot in advance. :) — neuro  (talk)  01:40, 29 August 2009 (UTC)
 * Google suggests this might be an error with the newest drivers themselves. Going to roll back to an earlier version (186.18) and see what happens. — neuro  (talk)  01:48, 29 August 2009 (UTC)
 * Seems to be working with 186.18. Marking as resolved for now, will do more rigorous testing tomorrow. — neuro  (talk)  03:08, 29 August 2009 (UTC)
 * Did you just answer your own question?!-- The Ninth Bright Shiner 17:46, 29 August 2009 (UTC)
 * Slow night on the RD. THe employees have to keep themselves busy somehow. --Tagishsimon (talk) 17:53, 29 August 2009 (UTC)
 * Seems stable on 186.18. Going to stick with those until a new forceware driver comes up. :) — neuro  (talk)  18:54, 29 August 2009 (UTC)

Firefox addons
What's the name of the Firefox extension that overrides the version check and allows you to use old addons on new Firefox? I used to have it but I can't remember the name. Thanks! —Preceding unsigned comment added by 82.43.88.99 (talk) 16:42, 29 August 2009 (UTC)
 * "MR Tech Toolkit" or "Nightly Tester Tools", among others, I think. -- Codicorumus &laquo; msg 17:30, 29 August 2009 (UTC)
 * Nightly Tester Tools is the one! Thanks! —Preceding unsigned comment added by 82.43.88.99 (talk) 17:50, 29 August 2009 (UTC)
 * Or use the about:config route e.g. . Rjwilmsi  20:21, 29 August 2009 (UTC)

Self-destructing data storage
Does wikipedia have an article on that or something related? --91.145.72.220 (talk) 16:59, 29 August 2009 (UTC)


 * Not much: Self-destruct and there's in Deniable encryption a pointer to Vanish - a research prototype implementation of self-destructing data storage. I think that's your lot. --Tagishsimon (talk) 17:04, 29 August 2009 (UTC)

yahoo mail problems
Is yahoo mail in the middle of some humungous problem with their system? For the past 3 weeks or so, whenever I use yahoo mail it completely nukes my browser. Sometimes only the mail page will be messed up - freezing, not responding to clicks, etc - but at least 50% of the time, as soon as i sign into yahoo mail it freezes all my other tabs and windows for at least 15 seconds, and maybe once every couple days it's so bad that i have to use the task manager to close all the windows. This happens on firefox and IE. I recently even got a brand new laptop, and the first time i logged into my yahoo mail, the exact same thing happened. So, I don't think it's me. Is yahoo having some kind of enormous software problem? Gohome00 (talk) 19:39, 29 August 2009 (UTC)


 * I had a similar problem with AOL web-mail. In that case, they had all sorts of ads and crap that played automatically, including movie clips, that were just too much for my modest computer. StuRat (talk) 20:26, 29 August 2009 (UTC)
 * This doesn't seem to be the case, yahoo doesn't use much in the way of complex ads or video... Gohome00 (talk) 22:15, 29 August 2009 (UTC)


 * I used to have a huge performance problem with Yahoo mail. However, that was back when I had an old computer (1997 vintage), Windows 95, and dial-up internet access.  Performance did vary, but eventually the growth of Flash in banner ads crippled my browser, sometimes leaving me waiting 10 minutes or more to read a mail while it painfully displayed each frame of a particularly large flash banner ad.  I temporarily fixed the problem by uninstalling all Flash plugins, disabling everything I could think of in the browser settings (but which would still let me use Yahoo mail -so I had to leave cookies and Java on).  My much newer PC has no such problems.  Astronaut (talk) 23:00, 29 August 2009 (UTC)


 * There are lots of things that could be holding you up, depending on your computer, your browser, and your connection. For example, my connection for some reason is really bad at loading the dozens of little scripts (used for loading ads, recording stats, etc.) that many pages now use, and so pages seem to take forever to load when really it is just trying in vain to load all of these little additional scripts. There are also some browsers (IE in particular) that are extremely bad at string manipulation in Javascript and so if they rewrite their code to include too much of that, it can grind things down. The specifics of your case would take some more complicated analysis to diagnose, to figure out what the limiting factor is. ---98.217.14.211 (talk) 23:48, 29 August 2009 (UTC)


 * Yahoo! Mail has two modes: New Yahoo! Mail and Yahoo! Mail Classic. Try switching to the other mode if you have problems with one of them. --Spoon! (talk) 01:12, 30 August 2009 (UTC)

Can't find supposedly newly-produced files
The website of the National Register of Historic Places (a US federal government program) allows users to download its entire database by going to this webpage. After reading the readme, I decided to run Detail.exe from that page, which is supposed to convert the program's dbf files into a more easily readable format for my HP Vista computer. However, after the program had downloaded and finished running, I couldn't find anything that it had done — it's not in My Documents, Recent Documents, My Pictures [my default location for downloads], or even the Downloaded Installations that I get by going from [my username] to AppData to Local to Downloaded Installations. I know that it ran, because when I told it to run again, it asked me if I wanted to overwrite an already created file. Any idea how I can find where these files went? I can't tell it to look for a specific format, because the Dos prompt that asks me if I want to overwrite says nothing about any non-dbf files, and the readme describes the result of running the program as only "a format most databases are able to recognize". Any ideas where I can go to look for this information? Nyttend (talk) 19:59, 29 August 2009 (UTC)


 * Never mind; I discovered that saving the .exe and running it after saving put the extracted files into the same folder as the downloaded .exe. Nyttend (talk) 20:04, 29 August 2009 (UTC)

Certificate authority classes
What is the difference between, say, "CAcert Class 1 CA" and "CAcert Class 3 CA"? All CAs I've seen have classes. --grawity 20:34, 29 August 2009 (UTC)


 * The class applies to the certificate rather than the authority, I think - Public key certificate — Matt Eason (Talk &#149; Contribs) 21:42, 29 August 2009 (UTC)