I am a novice with Vista. Have just bought a new lap top and tried to burn a DVD but instead of shrinking it then asking for a blank dvd to burn to it just saves to the hard drive. I have dvd shrink which works fine but it doesnt seem to connect with the burner. I have downloaded a trial version of Nero 9 in case this helped but still burns to hard drive.
View 6 RepliesI've just finished my friend's new pc today and I will be using the HDD from his old pc in the new one. Now I was wondering whether I can just install the old one in the new pc, or whether I should format it to delete everything. There's windows XP on it.. So, can I just take it out of the old one and plug it into the new or not
View 9 Replies View RelatedDo you have to have XP fully installed on your computer before to install upgrade Vista? Can you in install Vista on a blank Hard Drive and then when Vista asks for XP just put your XP CD in and then continue with Vista. That way you don't have to over lay Vista with XP which is just more garbage on your computer.
View 8 Replies View RelatedThe Hard Drive LED light on my Sony Vaio keeps blinking EVERY SECOND. When it's really quiet I can hear it too, it's constantly writing. Constantly. I did my research - read all the threads on the net and so far I have disabled:
Windows index
Windows defender
Windows search
Superfetch
System Restore
Readyboost
Defragmenter
I have uninstalled google desktop.
The system is totally virus and spyware free, and the anti-virus is not scanning (schedule scan disabled). All Vista updates are installed. Nothing has helped. I've run out of things to disable. I'm running Vista Business SP1, Dual Core 2.2 Ghz, 3 Gb RAM.
I have a ASUS laptop running Vista Home Premium, 64 bit OS. I have several programs that I use but no loner have the insall disks for. Should I have to reformat in the future I would hate to lose them. Here's what I'm thinking: Buy a extrenal hard drive. Seagate, 1Tbit, usb, cost $90.00. Copy my hard drive to it. If I need to reformat. Reinstall Vista from my recover disk that came with the computer. Then copy files from external drive. Bingo. All my old programs would be there and working. Question is: Can this be done?
What file/folders do I need to copy to the external drive?
This has been going on for quite a while but its getting to severe points. What's happening is basically explorer.exe jumps straight to 95-99% when vista boots and remains like that without budging, resulting in extreme slow computer performance. Attempting to close the explorer then restarting will temporary bring it back to aroung 50% but it will soon jump up again, restarting doesnt work.
Here's the stuff Ive tried to do:
1- Got rid of the index.dat files in the TIF, apparently they slow performance.
2- Turned off search indexing
3- Tried to defragment the memory, but it doesnt do anything!
The weird thing is that it jumps to 99 without having anything running which implies that there is a background process thats eating up the CPU!
Gotta love it. Just tried to download Halo2 on my system and everything went Haywire. When I tried to run it, I got a message that I needed to have Vista to run the program. When I tried to uninstall it it said I needed to have Vista to run the program. Silly me THOUGHT I was running Vista the whole time..... SO I go from the DVD and get to the Live site to register where it tells me my key is no good. Time to call Microsoft............
SO the dude gets on and I give him control and he starts slashing and burning his way through the program to get it uninstalled. Gets down to the registry and slashes and burns his way through that. Ok, he says, put the disk in and I'll show you how to install a program, (arrogant SOB). Put the disk in and immediately we get an error message that there are now files missing. "Some important files needed to run this game are missing from the installation directory" is the direct quote from the message error. I somehow doubt he was able to delete files from the DVD so I'm thinking Attila slashed and burned his way maybe a bit to far into my registry lol. Long and short of it is that it's beyond his level and someone will get back to me on Monday. IE, it's Saturday morning right now in India and none of the engineers will be back til Monday. So here's MY thought.............
I just created a restore point so iff my "thought" turns out to be a bad one I hit system restore and I'm back to where I am at this very moment. So.........Can I not just hit system restore and go back to where I was BEFORE I installed the Halo? If I do, will that take care of the new admin account he added to my computer? Will it replace all the stuff he may have erased from my registry that he SHOULDN'T have erased? I'm a little fuzzy on system restore because it says it leaves the documents and stuff alone, but what about programs and extra added Admin accounts? Anyone? Anyone? Anyone? Bueller? LOL Methinks thata no one is here this fine Friday night and I'm gonna get impatient and slash and burn my way through a system restore. Oh, Mr. Brainiac also decided that maybe I had too much memory so he adjusted what windows can see. Will that go back to it's normal value if I do a sys restore as well?
The other day, I tried to burn a dvd for my brothers. The drive worked a month ago and now it doesn't. I don't know what happened - I didn't install any new programs or anything like that. The drive in question is an LG GSA-H55L (lightscribe). When I put in a blank cdr, autorun takes over and asks me what I want to do with the media, but when I try the same thing with a DVD, nothing happens. I have searched online for a fix, but nothing happens. I updated the firmware to 1.05 (latest FW). I first noticed the problem when using windows dvd maker (wanted menus and chapters for some home movies taken from my canon hg10) uninstalled all my burner software and reinstalled. rolled back the computer to previous state
View 9 Replies View RelatedIs it possible to copy my entire hard drive onto an external hard drive. Vista Premium, all the data, etc. and what would be a good software to accomplish this?
View 5 Replies View RelatedI have an external hard drive, I reformated it so I could use Vista's backup.Now it seems that when my brother inlaw tries to put some music files(Itunes) that the hard disc is unavailable to his computer. At this stage it seems that Vista has conned me into destroying a perfectly good WD harddrive!I have created a second partion on the hard drive and I am reformatting that, as I write this, but the only formatting option seems to be this NTFS, and that is what I had already formatted the ExtHD to so I think this formatting will be to no avail!From what I can figure I need to format into FAT but I tried a quick format an ex-fat option was there, but the problem was the same. I am becoming more frustrated with Vista, seems I just keep running into things that should be simple and aren't!
View 4 Replies View RelatedI got a Dell Inspiron 1501 with a partion drive I tried to assess the second partion drive but every time it will load it will bring up a blank screen and with the mouse curser what should I do?
View 6 Replies View Relatedwhen booting up from a vista cd I accidentally had my usb external hard drive plugged in and the drive has been emptied and replaced by windows there are sintimental photos etc on the drive can anyone help me to restore them
View 9 Replies View RelatedDoes 'Local Disc' D mean it is a drive inside my machine or could it be my external hard drive?
View 9 Replies View RelatedI was wonder if anyone know a solution for the following problem. I have a ethernet hard drive and I've never had a problem until using vista and windows server 2008. both operating systems are unable to browse the drive, instead it completely crashes explorer.exe. Windows server 2003 & XP have never had trouble.
View 6 Replies View Relatedi bought a kit for an old hard drive. i got it to work once ealier today, and now it doesn't work. when i plug it into the usb, it will not successfully install. the kit is a rocketfish hd 35, the hard drive is seagate u8 model st313021a. the "remove hardware" icon appears in the tray, but no designated lettered drive appears on the computer.
the hard drive was part of an older tower that i couldn't get to boot. it's strange because just today i accessed the hard drive and located old pictures, music and other files that i hadn't seen in a few years. had i known this would have happened i would have started saving right away. i thought i had it working.
I've upgraded my machine at some point in the last year, where I added a new 500GB drive and moved my C: partition across to it. The previous 250GB drive was left in for additional storage. Just recently (while upgrading my BIOS) I realised that my system was still booting from the 250GB drive even though Windows was on the other disk. There is a fair possibility in the not too distant future that I'll replace the 250GB disk with a larger disk, in which case I won't be able to boot. Is there a safe and reliable way to change it so that the system boots from the 500GB disk?
View 9 Replies View RelatedI was starting my computer today (that has Vista), and during the start up process, a black screen came up stating that there was an error opening up my external hard drive and it was checking for errors. After it finally booted up, I went to open the hard drive files, and it was totally BLANK! I then restarted the computer, and still the hard drive is EMPTY! I had ALL my important files in there!
The ONLY thing that looks promising is that when I go to Start then to Computer, it shows the hard drive there, and it still shows that 43GB are free of 111GB of storage (same info shows by right clicking on it and going to Properties). Why would it show this if nothing is on the hard drive anymore? Is there ANYWAY to recover these files again you think???? I NEED those files!!!! Remember that the hard drive STILL PHYSICALLY WORKS. It's just that I cannot access the files on my pc at the time for some reason.......
I just bought and installed a external hard drive. I am fairly knowlegable about computers but this is my first Ex. Hard drive and know very little about there use. So what I want to know is how to save my Family Tree Makers files to it. And once I do that how do I know for sure it is opening from my new drive and not my computer C: drive? I saved it to a DVD one time but when the time came when I needed it all that was there was a short cut but no files.
View 5 Replies View RelatedI have Windows XP and Vista. I always go through "safely remove hardware" before pulling off USB drive on XP. However, I have been trying to do the same on Vista, it seems that I cannot do the same as XP. For instance, I plug in my USB on Vista and it appears as H drive on Vista, when I am ready to do "safely remove hardware", I don't see the device drive H is on the "Safely remove hardware" window, so I cannot stop the H drive. I am concerned about the Vista hardware.
View 5 Replies View Relatedi have an older maxtor 250gb ide hard drive and i am trying to put it in my computer so i can reformat it and install vista ultimate, the thing is when i go to disk manager i can see the drve, feel the drive, but it wont let me initialize it or anything, it comes up as "the request could not be performed because of an I/O devise error, the disk was originally in my modded xbox and i could acces it with xp.
View 9 Replies View RelatedI have a new pc with only 256MB of RAM- how hard is it to add memory? Also, how do I find out how many GB the hard drive is?
View 4 Replies View RelatedI purchased a new hard drive and named it NEW-BACKUP. I did a exact disk copy from my old BACKUP drive. My wife uses the old drive now. I have renamed my new drive to BACKUP. I am doing complete system backup's pretty frequently. To verify that the backups are happening, I typed in the command "wbadmin get versions" and got a list of the backups. The disk name showed up as "NEW-BACKUP". "NEW-BACKUP" is the destination drive for the backup and renamed as "BACKUP.
View 4 Replies View RelatedI just inserted a SD/MMC Card in my laptop, and it changed my external hard drive letter from F to G?, how can I change it back to F again?, as I had everything setup on the FRIVE, now nothing recognises it?
View 3 Replies View Relatedim unable to burn music from my laptop, i have vista basic and until now ive had no problems. I insert a blank cd and it auto loads, then it asks to format before continueing, i click yes, it formats then right at the end it says unable to finish formatting and opens the cd. I then try to burn onto it and the cd stays blank.
View 5 Replies View RelatedI just installed a new hd WD500g sata to my box. Vista "sees" the new hd in device manager, but doesnt see it in "my computer. It is freshly installed and straight out of the bubble wrap,I was thinking gee, maybe it needs formatted...but i dont see that option anywhere...maybe im missing something.... i donno...first time i've run into this....usually the drives are "seen" right away.....
View 2 Replies View RelatedWhat is the best way to add a partition to a hard drive in safe mode or in normal mode.
Thanks in advance.
I recently bought a western digital 1TB hard drive which I had to reformat before I could use. Everything works good now, except for onething. Sometimes the computer doesn't want to restart while the new drive is plugged in. If I remove it from the USB port prior to restarting, it will restart just fine.
It shuts down and turns on without an issue. This only happens when I
restart the system with it plugged in.
So while it's not a big issue,it is an annoyance.
i just bought a new laptop and the 140 gig hd came partitioned into (2) 70 gig drives. Is it possible to enlarge the C drive and shrink the D drive at the same time?
View 9 Replies View RelatedMy current C drive has a corrupt system on it (Vista) It needs to be formated and the system reinstalled. I am considering installing a larger capacity drive as the primary (C) drive , install the system on that and use the current drive as extra storage space while keeping some of the data that is currently on it thus not reformatting it. My question is, when the computer boots will it automatically boot to the new C drive or, as the system will now be on both drives, will it confuse itself?
Also. as my system disk is from from the mfr of the computer, I believe it does not have any of the Vista service packs on it. Once formated with this disk should I then get SP1 and SP2 and install them? In that order I presume or will SP2 alone suffice? Where can I get SP1 and 2?
I am contemplating getting a new Hard Drive (bigger, of course by a large margin!) and with the problems I have had with activation in the past, despite being a bloody genuine copy (calm down, Philip, calm down) - how can I go about activating on a new hard drive without experiencing the same c**p I have in the past (last one just needed to type in serial and it was activated, but the 2nd time I had to go via Indian call centre and was on FORTY FIVE MINUTES FFS !!!!....calm down, lad...calm....) So....is there a way to avoid chatting with Sanjay in Bangalore ?
View 9 Replies View Relatedlast week i was recoding some video's using Nero's Recode program (sidenote worked great) but now my 100 gig laptop on has 2 gigs of space left from the original 60 gigs free space. where did it go?? the video files have been deleted, i've used the disc clean-up program to remove the temp files and used the registry to enable Pagefiles removeal from another post of this forum. that clean up some on the space i now have 20gigs free space but i still am missing 40 more gigs that i have before i starting the recodeing.
in my disk de-fragmenter is shows me that i have a huge "yellow" portion of paging files still left and by just guessing it should be that extra 40 gigs just by seeing the size of the "yellow" bar.
how do i get rid of these "paging files" and how do i reclaim my lost space?