Rich-M

Thanks for that Gimbo. I have sent him now 3 unanswered email but only in a few days and I think my worst fears are showing up. If he does finally contact me and is interested in moving forward, I will post back and ask you to do just that but I am getting the feeling he is in over his head and looking to bail himself out.

Yeah that makes sense to Dougie.

Great idea same thing we always suggest for usbs that go in and out a lot, use a hub and break that instead.

Thanks Cindy it is what I thought. And Bob you hit the nail right on the head because what I forgot to say is most of the speed tests I ran showed the upload speed faster than the download speed with the excpetion of the one time I crossed 26 MBPS.

I must admit I am not a "crazed music downloader" and in fact never do such things but I know that Security Mods will not work with systems until all P2P downloaders are removed and none of us can guaranty safety when such things are in play. The other day I had a client who is a DJ by trade (but not evidently highly experienced at it as his living standards left me somewhat uncomfortable) and I had to leave a Torrent Downloader in because he said it is the only way he can download music for what he does. I cleaned the system and it was running fine as it had examples of almost every form of Malware and Adware known to man and it was running fine when I left. Within an hour he calls me it is again slow as molasses and every single internet move takes forever. I did install Emsisoft AntiMalware as well as Wot and Ad Blockers etc.....his internet is Comcast but running a fairly new wireless Netgear "N" adapter and the speeds I saw were all over the place from as low as 1 Mbps to as high as 26 and there was no rhyme nor reason for that I saw. The router was about 4 rooms away on a straight line and I did try raising the adapter using usb extender cords up in the air no more then 15' as I know the usb limitation which helped at times but the overall affect wasn't the best. Could the Torrent downloader be causing all this? What ways can he download music more safely and he has sites he pays for he goes to to download from so I don't think it is being free that is the whole cause and effect here or should he just download from them without the downloader? I am not quite sure where to go here and I might add, this is possible "buyers remorse" as he tries to wiggle out for the costs to me also. I left with another project an old hard drive to remove Pictures from and there are a ton and intended to install the drive as an extra on his desktop to hold files as his desktop is only a 40 gb drive even though the system has 4 gb ram and a decent Intel Core 2 Duo Cpu. I had to remove about 7 gb from the drive to relieve it before I did anything as it was "red lining" and couldn't have a swap file the way it was but I don't think he managed to crap that up that much again in an hour. he might be trying to get me to cave on labor for copying out files and formatting drive is what I am suggesting though I know he will want them as he has no copies and there are a ton! Thanks in advance!

Had to ask!

Did you ever try changing the power cord?

Ah we'll just use it this week as same scenario being tauted again. I keep asking myself, "I put up with this why?"

Comcast really is the "pits" for customer service.

It's not that important I was just yanking your chain anyway.

So the little boxes are gone at the top and I don't see the command bar is all. Other than that it looks the same to me. The one that came with XP looked just like the one you posted.

Yeah might as well err on the side of caution. The one I broke was my own that I took in trade and it was cheaper to toss it then replace the motherboard, all that Dell could suggest.

Probably not Mike but I have done plenty of Gateway laptops and never seen one not come off. Are you certain you have all the screws out? Could there be one more under the front of the drive we cannot see in the photo. You can try placing a flat screw driver between the drive and the sata port and gently inching it forward. I had a Dell Vostro one time where the whole drive connection was corroded somehow and broke off while I was trying to remove the drive and that unfortunately totaled the laptop.

Gee IE might finally catch up to Chrome and Firefox, but do they really think they will stand still? I tried using IE recently as I was having issues with both Chrome and FF and honestly I felt like I was computing on Windows 95 whenever I used it.

Well now 4 days into the new server and I do note a major improvement I was not expecting. My Dell All-in-One which is right next to the server has begun to act a lot better. I sued to get a freeze-up almost every night on Outlook that would cause me to shut down and restart and just realized that has yet to happen since the change. The Outlook store is on the server. After about running for a few hours I would also get freez-ups from several other programs such as QuickBooks 2014 where again the store is on the server and I only remember seeing that on my Win 7 desktop a few times so not nearly as often and not at all now. I did open that "furnace up and clean it out every 2 months and never found many filth when I did, but I would notice the heat going down right after and it did seem quieter.

I agree Kick but remember Puppy Linux is designed to be that way mainly used mostly by Live-cd and it sounds like your use is the same as mine as I use it mostly for Live-Cd to easily save out customer files from a bad hard drive or to test the system to see if the hard drive is indeed the bad component. Therefore it is not as completer as a full Linux Distro such as Pc Linux though it is surprisingly good for its small size.

Well yes its true you won't mismatch Dougie but most boards today have dual channel ram and you are missing the opportunity for a bit of speed there my friend. I used to have issue after issue with memory until I realized there is no reason to buy a "pig'n a poke" so to speak and catch22 just phrased it better than I have: "Meaning, if you added a second stick of memory that might be a different brand you may introduce several unstable variables. One is that one stick is DDR3 2700 and the other DDR3 400, and possibly different default voltages-timings-cas latency. Most mobos of that era will try to dial in the lowest stick's speed." Ram is matched by cas latency, density and Ecc factor and not all memory lists all those ratings. Speed is really the least important factor having to do with compatibility. I let everyone else do the work for me. When I pick a motherboard I go to the mfgr site and find the list of compatible tested ram and if I cannot buy one of those, I change the board, it is very simple. Since I started doing that I have never had an issue with memory. Often times I note that new boards have very little ram tested for them and when I see that I also move on. There are enough other problems that we have in building. Why take such a simple thing and make it complex? I must admit I also have noted HP particularly shipping out desktops with mismatched ram quite often a while back, and was astonished with their resources they would stoop to such a stupid thing.