Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Computing/2007 March 16

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1 March 16

[edit] March 16

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I WOULD LIKE TO KNOW HOW CAN I PURCHASE A DVD / CD REPILICATION/ DUPLICATION EQUIPTMENT FEEL FREE CONTACT ON THESE OUTLETS AN COMPUTERS THAT CAN DO THESE OPERATIONS

Any properly equipped PC can do this, so just get one together and presto. This is for small-scale needs of course. Keep in mind, though, such activity might not really be legal. --Ouro (blah blah) 08:02, 16 March 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Word 2007 docs

In MS Word 2007, how do I remove the recent documents list? 68.193.147.179 01:27, 16 March 2007 (UTC)

In Tools > Options > somewhere, I think File or History, will have the option to decrease the number of recent documents. Decrease it to 0 and then set it back. I'm afraid I don't have Word 2007 but all previous recent versions have had similar steps. x42bn6 Talk 01:50, 16 March 2007 (UTC)

In Word 2007, the option for how many recent documents is shown is under Office button -> Word Options -> Advanced -> Display -> Show this number of Recent Documents --Spoon! 07:36, 16 March 2007 (UTC)

[edit] PSP/Xbox like multiplayer games on PC

(I'm not sure whether this question should be better asked in "Entertainment". Feel free to move it there.)

Are there any games that can be played by more than one person at the same time on ONE PC?

Maybe something that would need a pair of control devices?

I'm looking for something like multiplayer car race games or shooting/fighting games. Thanks Lukas 02:28, 16 March 2007 (UTC)

I know Star Wars Pod Racer is like that, and Wacky Wheels. The Queen of Hearts are nice 2-D doujin fighting games, the Melty Blood games. Ragnarok Battle Offline can be played with 3 people, and it's a side scroller based on Ragnarok Online. As for more recent ones, I have no idea. I've been out of the gaming loop for the most part. --Wirbelwindヴィルヴェルヴィント (talk) 04:12, 16 March 2007 (UTC)

You don't know Jack, LEGO Star Wars, Heroes of Might and Magic and basically any turn-based game. Aetherfukz 14:51, 21 March 2007 (UTC)

Worms (computer game) One of the classics --D3matt 23:37, 22 March 2007 (UTC)

[edit] This is about my computer,

it is not working most of the time. In a week and a half my new one should be arriving, how do I not get deleted for in activity? coffeelover63

What? If you're talking about Wikipedia, your account cannot be deleted. -Wo o ty Woot? contribs 04:08, 16 March 2007 (UTC)

Well, someone with "developer" privilege here at Wikipedia could delete your account if they had a mind to, but it won't happen. You will have to log-in again, though, both because your login cookie will expire and it won't be present on your new computer anyway. You do remember your password, right ;-) ?

Atlant 16:13, 16 March 2007 (UTC)

But of course you could get blocked (or even banned like me) if you upset the wrong people (Admins) 8-)) —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 88.110.212.53 (talk) 21:35, 16 March 2007 (UTC).

I read in news media (sorry forget citation), where if you are inactive for like 6 months, your user pages get deleted, your contributions remain User:AlMac|^(talk) 20:06, 17 March 2007 (UTC)

[edit] How do I get the exit code of a background job in bash?

I have something like,

 FINISHED=
 trap 'FINISHED=true' SIGCHLD
 do_something &
 while [ "$FINISHED" != "true" ]; do
   sleep 1
 done
 # Print the exit code of "do_something" here.

Is this possible? --Silvaran 06:03, 16 March 2007 (UTC)

Use the wait builtin command. —EncMstr 06:13, 16 March 2007 (UTC)

Ahh, thanks very much. I thought about that, but when I did a simple test (Ran /bin/false in the bg, then did wait %1), I let bash report its exit status to the console (like [1]+ Exit 1 /bin/false) so wait simply said "no such job". But if bash hasn't already told you about its exit status, and it exited quite awhile ago (and you're just sitting at the prompt), it still works. Thanks again. --Silvaran 15:04, 16 March 2007 (UTC)

You might be interested to know that the $! variable is the PID of the most recent job started in the background. You can do something like this:

 do_job1 &
 job1_pid=$!

 do_job2 &
 job2_pid=$!

 do_job3 &
 job3_pid=$!

 wait $job2_pid
 job2_rc=$?

 wait $job1_pid
 job1_rc=$?

 if wait $job3_pid; then
     echo "job 3 succeeded :)"
 fi
# ... etc.

[edit] Key-combo that changes the keyboard language

I am using a keyboard with the letters åøæ, but due to a random key-combo that I pressed and can't find to reset, these now appear as various other symbols like ' and \. What is the combination to get out of this mess? :) 213.161.190.228 09:27, 16 March 2007 (UTC)

Alt-shift? Ctrl-shift? Note these only work on the left side of the keyboard. 203.109.167.159 09:58, 16 March 2007 (UTC)

I used to activate this combination by accident, and found it best to disable it (Control Panel -> Keyboard, something like that). --Ouro (blah blah) 10:31, 16 March 2007 (UTC)

As User:203.109.167.159 said though, LCtrl+LShift and LAlt+LShift are the most common IME settings for switching between languages in a Windows system. --Wirbelwindヴィルヴェルヴィント (talk) 19:53, 16 March 2007 (UTC)

[edit] latest configuration for PCs

Please give the latest detailed configuration for PCs

Did you look at our article on Personal computers? There's a whole section on the configuration of modern PCs — Matt Eason ^{(Talk • Contribs)} 11:30, 16 March 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Temporary files

How do I completely delete all temp internet files if I am on a shared network and am not a administrator?? (posted by 72.16.204.201) (Ouro (blah blah) 17:05, 16 March 2007 (UTC))

Not sure, but if you're accessing the internet through your company it will probably go through a proxy or router, which will log all your activity anyway. There's no escape! --h2g2bob 06:31, 17 March 2007 (UTC)

[edit] xp home edition to professional upgrade

i've just tried to upgrade (using the upgrade cds) my computer from xp home edition sp2 to xp professional edition sp2. however after doing some stuff when i put the cd it rebooted itself and gets to a stage where it says "ajlkqgjo.sys can not be found press any key to continue" however my keyboard at this point has been disabled. the keyboard works becuase i can get into the bios, i've tried telling it to boot from cd before hard drive but that then requires a keyboard input for it load up after i exit the bios, which i cnat input as the keyboard doesnt work. the keyboard seems to be disabled just after the bios finishs loading. i've tried to use the 6 recovery disks thing but that also needs a keyboard input which i cant do. i've tried googling and searching windows website for this missing file but neither cna find it. any1 have any idea how i can recover my pc to either home or professional? --137.205.164.142 16:05, 16 March 2007 (UTC)

I've no idea about the DLL, but I might be able to help with the keyboard problem. Is your keyboard USB? Windows likes to require you to click things with the mouse or press things with the keyboard before detecting the hardware. If you use a PS/2 keyboard it seems to work. --HughCharlesParker (talk - contribs) 16:58, 16 March 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Vista and the Hosts File

Sometimes it's enough to drive you mad. I copied and pasted my Windows XP hosts file (the file, not the content) to my Windows Vista installation, but nothing is affected by it. I've run notepad as Administrator, replaced the proper header, and granted myself complete access to the file using the elevated command line, but it still doesn't work. Any advice? Logical2u_{Review me!} 16:40, 16 March 2007 (UTC)

Worth a note to say I've flushed the DNS cache as well. Logical2u_{Review me!} 16:46, 16 March 2007 (UTC)

Got it, Windows Vista hosts files require the full notation for the IP address (IE: Four segments, IE: 0.0.0.0, not just 0) in order to function. Logical2u_{Review me!} 18:11, 16 March 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Displaying a bytearray as an image in a browser

Hi all,

I have a java applet that can return an image as a PNG ByteArray. Using JavaScript, I can get that ByteArray. How can I then display that image? Is there some ByteArray rendering I should know about?

Thanks! Mary, 16:54, 16 March 2007 (UTC)

This snippet from [1] might be useful (not tried it myself)

   // Write the image out as a byte array in PNG format
   var stream = new java.io.ByteArrayOutputStream();
   Packages.javax.imageio.ImageIO.write(image, "png", stream);
   var imageData = stream.toByteArray();
   // Convert the data to a URL-encoded string
   var rawString = new java.lang.String(imageData, "iso8859-1");
   var encodedString = java.net.URLEncoder.encode(rawString, "iso8859-1");
   encodedString = encodedString.replaceAll("\\+", "%20");
   // And return it all as a data: URL
   return "data:image/png," + encodedString;

— Matt Eason ^{(Talk • Contribs)} 17:01, 16 March 2007 (UTC)

Ok, thanks for that. It doesn't quite work, because the "data:image/png" doesn't work on IE browsers, and all the Java stuff requires an appplet, but it's a good lead. Thanks! Mary, 20:23, 16 March 2007 (UTC)

[edit] GPU & CPU

Any difference in the type of instructions processed and computing tasks between the two?(something like why cant we put a Core 2 duo/AMD in place of Ati/Nvidia)??59.92.243.50

See Graphics processing unit#Computational functions, as well as the first paragraph of that article. Basically, GPUs are streamlined to handle large amounts of memory and heavy arithmetic used for video. They don't have all of the functions of a CPU. However, you can technically make a CPU do the job (such as software rendering), but CPUs are not as efficient in doing these functions. --Wirbelwindヴィルヴェルヴィント (talk) 19:51, 16 March 2007 (UTC)

In terms of performance, a top-end GPU is perhaps a hundred times more powerful than a top-end CPU for 3D graphics, but less than 1% as powerful for general-purpose computing. --Carnildo 19:52, 16 March 2007 (UTC)

Any idea why cant the AMD/ATI team come up with a combined processor????59.92.245.87

Many general-purpose CPUs have included SIMD and MIMD elements for a while. Part of the problem with placing a CPU and GPU on the same die is that you will probably reduce your yield while also reducing your target market (or maybe not depending on how you play your cards). I can only think of a few benefits of doing so off-hand. -- mattb @ 2007-03-18T04:09Z

AMD is indeed planning to do just that, under the codename AMD Fusion. -- Consumed Crustacean (talk) 06:39, 17 March 2007 (UTC)

Then suppose we were to include entire GPU,CPU,MEMORY into one superchip and eliminate the BUS altogether, then would not we be having a supercomputer??59.92.244.31

Not really. Again, yield problems. DRAM and high volume CMOS processes are usually optimized in slightly different ways. -- mattb @ 2007-03-19T15:39Z

[edit] Twin boot scenario on slow computer

Is it possible to have both Win 98 SE and XP opearing sytems on a slow (200MHz) computer? What are the possible problems, and how should I go about installing?--SlipperyHippo 19:42, 16 March 2007 (UTC)

I think XP requires something around a 233 MHz, and even then, will be somewhat slow. I don't know how I remembered the exact value, but see Windows XP#System requirements. --Wirbelwindヴィルヴェルヴィント (talk) 19:45, 16 March 2007 (UTC)

Im prepared for it to be a bit slow. In fact I did try to install XP PRo, but it didnt 'take' and I had to remove it again reverting to 98 SE :(.--SlipperyHippo 22:11, 16 March 2007 (UTC)

XP on a 200 MHz PC? Friend... not the way to go. It won't be a bit too slow, it will be tortoise-wounded-in-the-leg slow. --Ouro (blah blah) 16:25, 17 March 2007 (UTC)

So LINUX would be much better?--SlipperyHippo 16:41, 17 March 2007 (UTC)

Yes. Johnnykimble 16:59, 17 March 2007 (UTC)

I've managed to get XP running pretty swiftly on around 550 MHz, but the idea of it on 200MHz seems like it would be really pushing it. --24.147.86.187 17:02, 17 March 2007 (UTC)

Does it not also depend upon the chipset and the actual processor (Intel MMX) and the speed of the drives etc?--SlipperyHippo 17:40, 17 March 2007 (UTC)

It pretty much depends on the speed of everything combined, that's why PC specs take up ten lines and are filled with numbers. It's fairly obvious that a faster hard drive will let the various components and apps load quicker, a faster graphics card will better take care of drawing things, scrolling and what not, more memory means the system will not rely on the swap file (that much - or at all, I have mine deactivated). BUT if a quick and big drive (I'd imagine 40 G upwards) is combined with a good graphics card and a generous amount of memory, it will still not do the trick if the CPU slows them all down in general. --Ouro (blah blah) 18:04, 17 March 2007 (UTC)

Windows XP likes a lot of RAM. The definition of 'a lot of RAM' has changed quite a bit since Windows XP was released, but really, you should continue to see huge leaps in performance if you upgrade from 128mb to 256mb, or to 512mb if the cpu doesn't become the bottleneck by that stage. If you've accumulated a lot of SDRAM modules over time, and haven't dumped them, your slow machine is the perfect place for them (3 of them anyway)... Johnnykimble 18:56, 17 March 2007 (UTC)

Good point. My old computer only has about 64MB RAM and I dont really want to have to search for more compatible RAM modules if i can avoid it. --SlipperyHippo 23:17, 17 March 2007 (UTC)

64 meg is not enough for windows XP, but your old computer may not use SDRAM, does it use FPO or EDO]? Be careful what memory you get. GB 09:14, 18 March 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Windows Home Server

Persuant to my earlier question on servers, I think the thing i saw advertised was in fact the Windows Home Server software that would run on HP (and psooibly other) hardware. Would using this system be better than an external HDD attached to my current computer? --SlipperyHippo 20:40, 16 March 2007 (UTC)

Aha! Found the HP HW it can run on [2]. What are the pros and cons?--SlipperyHippo 20:42, 16 March 2007 (UTC)

Or just use an old computer, slap some harddrives on it, install Linux and save quite a bit of money. --antilived^{T | C | G} 21:15, 16 March 2007 (UTC)

Yes that was suggested earlier, and I m still considering that option. But could Linux read the existing FAT32 and NT partitions on the existing drives? —The preceding unsigned comment was added by SlipperyHippo (talk • contribs) 21:32, 16 March 2007 (UTC).

Definitely FAT32, and NTFS has experimental support. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Splintercellguy (talk • contribs) 22:19, 16 March 2007 (UTC)

NTFS support is stable now, see [3] --antilived^{T | C | G} 22:21, 16 March 2007 (UTC)

Thanks guys. I think I'll give Linux a try.--SlipperyHippo 22:34, 16 March 2007 (UTC)

[edit] LG by Verizon Wireless

What is the lastest model of LG by Verizon Wireless? -68.193.147.179 22:17, 16 March 2007 (UTC)

Ask Verizon by finding their contact info at their website. − Twas Now ( talk • contribs • e-mail ) 10:30, 17 March 2007 (UTC)