GavinO

I would run a search by date/time based on when you may have uploaded the images.

Ah, if you're going through your system vendor/maintaining warranty, that does sort of limit options ... Configuration of the new drive is pretty easy; under Windows 2K/XP, there's even a nice admin tool to partition and format the drive.

It sounds like you need to set the boot flag of the original partition, and set NTLDR to boot from it. The first part can be done with any partitioning tool (ie, fdisk). The second task might be doable from msconfig on the new partition, but you might need to do a repair install on the old partition (never really messed with it before).

I would poke around in the Add Remove Software dialog, under the Windows Components tab.

I would install the 100GB as an additional drive in the system, leaving the existing 40GB for the operating system and software, and move your data files over to the new drive. I think there's also a way to remap Documents and Settings to be on the new drive rather than the system drive (amazing how much stuff collects there). If you have other plans for the 40GB (ie, you plan on making the new drive the system drive), best solution is to do a reinstall. You could probably move an image of the old drive to the new one, and it would probably boot, but my experience with trying to move a Windows installation to new hardware is that it is far less a headache in the long run to bite the bullet and do the reinstall (you'll probably wind up doing it eventually). My other thought was to the size of the drive; 100GB is a relatively small drive these days. While those 500GB Deskstars may be a bit extravagant, a 250-300GB drive might be a better investment long-term. $/GB seems to be pretty flat up through that range. With the larger (ie newer) drives, you also benefit from things like bigger buffers.

Re: keyboard hotkey\extra key problem You need to set up software to pick up the special keys and map them to system calls. The keyboard should have come with some sort of driver disk, or there might be something on the MS website.

It sounds like the actual data portion is corrupted, but the file table is intact. You need a low-level recovery utility that can try to reconstruct the data portion. No guarantees, but it might work.

Those are generally called autocomplete boxes or something similar. Visual Studio calls it Intellisense.

You want to go to the control panel and click on 'Add New Hardware'. The system should be able to detect the sound card, and may still have the driver kicking around (if it doesn't, it should be on the original installation media for the card or the machine).

If the card is newish, it may still be under warranty. If it is, you can easily send it back for a fan replacement. If it's not under warranty, there are a number of places that sell aftermarket VGA coolers. If the machine has been running stable with the fan broken, however (no crashing/artifacting), you may be able to just disconnect the fan. There should be a pair of wires leading from the fan to a connector on the card. Disconnecting the fan almost certainly voids the warranty, though, and may cause instability in the future or shorten the life of the card. Here are some potential replacement fans: http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.asp?Submit=list&SubCategory=62&bop=and&srchInDesc=vga Note that sometimes it's really hard to get the old fan off; I'd try to remove it before placing an order. Some cards have the heatsink glued to the processor with thermal epoxy in addition to the standard pins.

To remove the internal connectors, you just need to press down on the little clip on the top side and pull. Sometimes you really need to push the clip in there to get it free. The cable going 'to the innards' is connected to the output of the CD drive; there's no real need to reconnect either cable on the new machine, since few drives have play buttons anymore, and few modems support output from the sound card. To install the card in the new machine, you need to know the manufacturer and model number of the card, or have a disk with drivers you know are compatible with the card and the OS on the destination machine. You'll also need to disable the onboard sound card via the BIOS menus or a jumper.

Try to describe the problems, one at a time. Include possibly relevant changes made to the machine, and exactly what you do to produce the symptoms.

Are you formatting the drives as FAT32 or NTFS? FAT32 won't support the full size of those drives. Also, is LBA enabled?

This is a very interesting problem. Are you certain that connecting the speakers reproducibly causes the MBR error? How is the DSL router attached? Is this an ethernet router, or a DSL modem connected via USB?

You want to open up the control panel, and select Add/Remove Programs. This will give you a list of all of the programs installed that Windows knows about. On Windows 2000 and later, you will also get in indication of how much disk the program's install is consuming, and how often you use the program (this number is not always accurate, as it counts starts rather than runtimes).