Computer Tips -Tech Info

Month: December 2008

  • Free Nationwide Wireless?

    According to the Wall Street Journal, the FCC in it’s December meeting will be looking at the possibility of requiring the winner of the upcoming spectrum auction to use a portion of it’s spectrum to provide free internet access. They would require filtering although the idea is that adults could get unfiltered access with verification. Large wireless networks (as you can imagine) are against the idea, but I wonder if it REALLY is the threat to them that they think.

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  • Gateway gt4022 Won’t Boot | Won’t Post | Dead Motherboard

    The title says most all, the system would start to act as though it was powering up. The LED would come on for a second and the fans would start. The fans stayed on, but the LED went right back off and the system didn’t seem to POST, or show anything on the onboard video. This is a Gateway gt4022 with a 64 bit AMD processor and I think was Media Center edition of Windows XP. Anyway, I pulled the memory and CPU hoping to hear some sort of BIOS beep code, but no such luck. I pulled everything at one point with the exception of the power to the main board. It still gave the same symptoms. I tried another power supply just in case, same…. So, as I started to read online it seems that the motherboard in these Gateway gt4022’s may be a problem….

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  • Ron Ads NetupBanner Popups and Invalid Image file c:\windows\system32\nolomipu.dll

    Here are some notes from a recent spyware cleanup. The system came in and there were complaints that “Ron Ads by NetupBanner” kept coming up all the time as well as popups claiming that the dll c:\windows\system32\nolomipu.dll is not a valid windows image – mismn.exe bad image.

    I ran malwarebytes antimalware and that cleaned out a LOT…

    I installed the new version of AVG (8.0) – AVG 7.5 had been on the system (fairly up to date (within 2 days)) Webroot Spysweeper was installed, but the subscription was expired. Internet Explorer is the primary browser.

    then I started looking at the invalid image errors – here are the notes:

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  • Linux Market Share Growing Faster than Apple! | Linux adoption rate beats iPhone

    I had to find a twist like that headline above reading this article. Net Applications does a monthly survey across sites that receive 160 million visitors to gauge the “market share” of operating systems and web browsers. According to the November numbers, Microsoft Windows has no fallen below 90% market share, Mac is up to 8.87% and linux is around 0.83%. The growth rate for Mac is 7.43%, Linux growth rate is at 15.49% The iPhone is “only” growing at 12.12%

    Of course, looking at numbers from one month to the next you can see variations caused by a number of factors that may or may not accurately reflect the situation. Are people surfing more from work this month for some reason? Maybe there is a weather related reason that causes more web traffic than last month/less/etc…. Still the trends are that Windows is shrinking and NON windows use is growing…

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  • Converting Audio to PCM Wave format

    To make sure you’ve go the idea that mplayer is really a swiss army knife for media files that can do most anything. I wanted to get a post JUST on this idea. Any media format that mplayer recognizes it can dump the audio to the most common and readable audio format out there, the PCM Wav file.

    Here’s how it goes:

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