Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Computing/2007 November 20

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November 20

word virus

I have word 2000 and lately, my documents will not send in email because Gmail has decided that it has a virus. So does every program out there. The only thing that I can figure out is that in other computers, they ask about disabling macros. I did not install a macro, nor do any show up in the macro list. What is going on? --Omnipotence407 (talk) 01:04, 20 November 2007 (UTC)

What's going on? You have a virus!! It is writing itself into your Word files as a macro so that it can try to infect other computers. This is seriously bad stuff! Have you tried running a full virus scan first? Get AVG Free if you don't have one that is up to date. --24.147.86.187 (talk) 01:36, 20 November 2007 (UTC)

Ooh, thanks. Any other suggestions for free Anti-Virus. Last time I tried installing AVG, this computer crashed. So, Id kinda rather not use AVG. I'm running a Trend Micro scan now, is that sufficient?--Omnipotence407 (talk) 01:51, 20 November 2007 (UTC)

If it detects it then it's sufficient. Avast is also free if you don't like AVG --ffroth 02:04, 20 November 2007 (UTC)

It found it. It actually found two things; 3 instances of W97M_GENERIC in what looked like the word program files, and 16 instances of W97M_MARKER.A in the actual word documents. It says that the second one sends a log to its author via FTP once a month. Seems to me that some computer savvy person with the necessary authority could track that back. Why hasn't this been done? Thanks for all the help. --Omnipotence407 (talk) 04:23, 20 November 2007 (UTC)

It's author is probably using another computer that's also been taken over as its ftp destination...or perhaps the destination account is simply outside of the juristiction of anyone who cares. Many countries have too many other problems to be bothered with arresting people who are perpetrating "Internet crimes" that don't affect them and they may not even understand. SteveBaker (talk) 12:33, 20 November 2007 (UTC)

PostgreSQL: Denormalized input

I recently normalized my PostgreSQL/pgforms database of Magic: The Gathering cards to deal with split cards. The result is that each physical card now requires a row on two separate tables, and it would be a pain to have to switch back and forth between two forms when entering one physical card. But pgforms can't handle more than one table in a form, and I'm told that using a denormalized view with rules at the back-end would be nearly impossible, even with the rules already pseudocoded. Is there a standard solution to database situations where unnormalized storage would cause problems and normalized input would be awkward? NeonMerlin 01:42, 20 November 2007 (UTC)

P.S. Anyone reading the pseudocode should know that the PK of cards is "Name","Set", the PK of spells is "Card","Set","Spell", and the FK of spells onto cards and left outer join of the denormalized view is cards."Name" = spells."Card" AND cards."Set" = spells."Set". NeonMerlin 02:35, 20 November 2007 (UTC)

excel problems

I have excel 97 on another computer. Recently, it has decided that when I double click on a .xls, it tries every group of letters before trying the whole filepath. So, for example, if I was to try opening C:\Documents and Settings\Owner\Test Spreadsheet 2007.xls ... First an error message pops up saying that it cant find C:\Documents.xls, then one for and.xls then one for Settings\Owner\Test.xls, then Spreadsheet.xls, then 2007.xls. After clicking OK on all those error messages, it opens the file. Why is it doing this and how can I fix it? --Omnipotence407 (talk) 01:45, 20 November 2007 (UTC)

Never use spaces in your filenames- it breaks old programs and command-line syntax. Use underscores instead --ffroth 02:03, 20 November 2007 (UTC)

It has never done this before. Besides, the "Documents and Settings" is where "My Documents" is, and those are XP defaults.--Omnipotence407 (talk) 02:11, 20 November 2007 (UTC)

Try switching to OpenOffice.org Calc. It's free, more secure against macro viruses and compared against such an old version of Excel should be fully compatible (except for the features OOo will have and Excel 97 won't). Or, you could switch to a Linux distro such as Kubuntu (which doesn't force or default any folder names to include non-alphanumeric characters) and run Excel through Wine. Either Excel 97 or Windows XP probably has to go sooner or later, but it doesn't have to cost any money. NeonMerlin 02:40, 20 November 2007 (UTC)

Oy, except that Calc kinda sucks at the moment, like much of OOo. Slow, ugly, unintuitive, not-quite-fully-documented; reproducing all of the worst features of Excel... but even worse! --24.147.86.187 (talk) 02:51, 20 November 2007 (UTC)

What department of Microsoft are you working for? Even if it's not unqualifiedly better than Excel 2007, Calc should dominate Excel 97 in any fair comparison. NeonMerlin 02:56, 20 November 2007 (UTC)

Believe you me, I hate Excel too. I think Calc's biggest problem, aside from having its interface standards set by computer geeks, is that they are trying to replicate something that is barely usable in the first place. Excel (like all of Microsoft Office) is a shitty program and making a free version of a shitty program is not an improvement, especially if it is a very slow version of said shitty program. But I digress. My hope is that once OOo gets into a more stable phase a bunch of designers will descend upon its code and make a fork for people who actually want to not have to battle with their office tools to get them to work. But if I am going to have to battle with my software, I want to at least battle at a good pace, so the slowness issue (and the fact that everything produced with OOo looks about 200% more ugly than the already ugly things that come out of Office) means a lot to me. --24.147.86.187 (talk) 02:58, 20 November 2007 (UTC)

The interface standards are not set by geeks: one of OOo's strengths is that it's good at responding to bug reports and feature requests from non-programmers. As for it looking ugly, the only significant difference in appearance from Excel is the icon theme, and that can be changed (Tools > Options > OpenOffice.org > View > Icon size and style). Many other aspects of the GUI can also be customized that can't in Excel. NeonMerlin 03:09, 20 November 2007 (UTC)

Sorry, but the interface is super ugly and super clunky looking. Alas, the ugliness does not end there. Try to make good looking graph with Calc. I dare you. One that doesn't look like it was cobbled together by programmers with no idea of how graphs should look, one that takes Excel's already ugly approach to making graphs and makes it even uglier. It can't be done, as far as I can tell. Everything looks like crap; it would be totally unusable in anything but a setting where apperances did not matter (which is unfortunately the case amongst programmers). Not to mention they seem to have spent more time allowing you to make 3D graphs (which are methodologically problematic, as anyone concerned with visual representation of data knows) than they have on simple things like simple XY plots (you can't plot circles at all unless you are using ugly drop-in bitmapped "custom" plot images). This is the sort of thing that consulting with people who actually care about visual representation of data (or at least had read a book or two by Edward Tufte) would have stopped from the get-go. But the culture of OOo is to create a "replacement" for MS Office; recreating a flawed product will not end up with a good product, and everyone knows how awful MS Office is. (And I won't get into things like OOo Base, which is totally unusable for even basic things as far as I can tell, as a database programmer.) Anyway, I wish the OOo people all the luck but at the moment it's not a great program and I wouldn't wish it on anyone who has to use programs like that on a daily basis (like myself). As far as I'm concerned its a neat tech demo (based on a flawed idea). --24.147.86.187 (talk) 14:59, 20 November 2007 (UTC)

Wow, didnt mean to start this argument, but I have to agree with 24. I tried using Impress for a presentation for school, and it just kept crashing, and took about 5 minutes to save any progress. I flipped back to powerpoint, and whipped off the presentation that had been taking days, in a matter of an hour or two. Ive generally found OOo to be pretty slow, and not a viable alternative to Any Version of Microsoft Office, including 97. Only thing that OOo seems to have on Microsoft in my use is the pricetag. --Omnipotence407 (talk) 04:28, 20 November 2007 (UTC)

The odds are that somehow the file association had gotten whiggy and it is trying to execute it without the quotes it needs around the filename. If I recall you have to fish around in the registry to fix it. This post sounds like what I am talking about—it's the quotes around the %1 that are probably missing (for some reason). --24.147.86.187 (talk) 02:51, 20 November 2007 (UTC)

Ok, I'm gonna try the registry fix tomorrow after the computer is scanned for the same virus my other computer had. I'll let you know if it works. --Omnipotence407 (talk) 04:28, 20 November 2007 (UTC)

The regedit worked great. Thanks--Omnipotence407 (talk) 02:01, 22 November 2007 (UTC)

MediaWiki, JavaScript and PHP

(This is not a Wikipedia question)

If I have my own MediaWiki system, can I add JavaScript or PHP to specific pages in the Wiki to make them interactive? For example, if I have a JavaScript snippet to create a little interactive widget to convert fahrenheit to centigrade - can I set up the system to allow me to put that into a regular Wiki page? How about PHP code to do stuff on the server-side?

I could obviously do this outside the Wiki on some other web page - but I want the ability to edit it in a browser and to use the Wiki to do version control. Since this is for a private Wiki, I'm not concerned with vandalism or anything.

TIA SteveBaker (talk) 03:18, 20 November 2007 (UTC)

Well for Javascript you can edit the skin's js file and do something similar to all the javascript tools on here like WP:POPUPS. --antilived^{T | C | G} 04:05, 20 November 2007 (UTC)

Yeah - I knew about that - but it's not what I need. Editing your monobook.js allows one user to stick in some JavaScript that affects all pages he visits. I want the opposite - something I can stick into one page that affects all users who visit it. Think specificially about something like having a little type-in box in the article on Temperature that would let you type in a temperature in Fahrenheit, click a 'Convert' button and see the result appear in Centigrade. This is really easy to do in HTML - but MediaWiki kills the usual comment tags for JS. I'm kinda hoping there is a configuration option to change that behavior. SteveBaker (talk) 05:21, 20 November 2007 (UTC)

I don't have an answer to your question since I don't know MediaWiki all that well (although I doubt it'd be hard to implement a <script>-tag in mediawiki that does what you want), but I do want to point out that you should be VERY careful about this, since this would be a major security issue. Your whole wiki would become one big XSS vulnerability. So you'd have to, at the very least, figure out some way to do it so only admins can edit such pages or add such code (which, since it's a private wiki, you may already have done). If you do implement this in some way, keep that in mind. 161.52.15.110 (talk) 11:42, 20 November 2007 (UTC)

As I explained, this is a private Wiki, it's set up so that only registered users can edit or move pages, WikiSysop is the only account that can create users - there will only be a handful of users and they are all trusted people. The <nowiki><script></nowiki> trick doesn't work - the script tag ends up surrounded by &lt;...&gt; instead of <...> so the browser doesn't see it. This is obviously an essential protection for a regular Wiki - but I need to circumvent it somehow. SteveBaker (talk) 12:25, 20 November 2007 (UTC)

If I understand correctly, what you want to do is make it so that MediaWiki doesn't automatically escape out Javascript or PHP code, yes? If there isn't a setting for such a thing, I bet you could find the function that does the escaping and disable it? (Sorry, I don't know MediaWiki at all so I can't give any specifics.) If I were going to guess where such a setting would be, it would be around the same place where you can presumably enable or disable HTML tags. --24.147.86.187 (talk) 15:03, 20 November 2007 (UTC)

Yep - that's probably what it's going to come down to. I guess I'm just going to have to dive in and start reading PHP code. Urgh! SteveBaker (talk) 01:52, 21 November 2007 (UTC)

My guess is that if you run a search over all of the PHP code for "strip_tags" you'll find the function(s) that remove the PHP and HTML, etc. --24.147.86.187 (talk) 21:34, 20 November 2007 (UTC)

Nope - I just tried that - there is not one occurrence of 'strip_tags' anyplace in the PHP code. SteveBaker (talk) 01:52, 21 November 2007 (UTC)

Which, now that I think of it, makes sense: it isn't stripping it, it's converting it to entities. Which might be done with "htmlentities" but even more likely is being done with a custom regex of some sort and might be hard to find for that reason. --24.147.86.187 (talk) 17:08, 21 November 2007 (UTC)

Why not just do the same approach as WP, except it's integrated into the skin? Once you have the JS in then you can simply reference to it using plain HTML code. But, I think this belongs to somewhere like Village Pump/Technical where people are more experienced with MediaWiki. --antilived^{T | C | G} 22:08, 20 November 2007 (UTC)

The trouble with asking at the Village Pump and such is that those are about Wikipedia itself - and this is nothing to do with Wikipedia (other than that we're using the same base software). SteveBaker (talk) 01:52, 21 November 2007 (UTC)

My bet is on doing things the way the user scripts had been doing already, only with it built into the skin instead of optional. You can circumvent the code sanitisation by simply putting a <div> with an id, and use the DOM to create the elements inside it. --antilived^{T | C | G} 03:37, 21 November 2007 (UTC)

Well, I have it kinda/sorta working. I got into the file 'wiki/includes/Sanitizer.php and found tables of allowed HTML tags. Adding things like SCRIPT, FORM and INPUT into those lists allowed me to make a page containing JavaScript that actually loaded and ran - although Wiki keeps trying to format the text inside those tage which resulted in a bunch of <p> tags getting inside my JavaScript code - so I had to put all of my JavaScript code onto one long line! Also, I havn't yet figured out how to let the sttribute fields of those tags go through - but the PHP code appears to be in that same source file. So it looks like I can fix those few problems and make this work - and when I do, it'll be pretty nifty. It's a shame it's such a security risk (which it truly is) - it would be v.cool to have client-side scripting inside Wikipedia. I wonder if we could limit what JavaScript could do by defining our own Wiki-markup scripting language that would be safe and generate real JavaScript from that? SteveBaker (talk) 07:53, 22 November 2007 (UTC)

Or Try: $wgRawHtml=true 68.4.20.250 (talk) 00:08, 17 February 2008 (UTC)

"Bunu kimse Yapmaz" vanishing email

A friend tells me he received an email through Outlook Express that mysteriously disappeared from his computer. Fortunately he had copied the above text from the subject line to do a Google search before it disappeared. Otherwise he would have had no record. An Outlook Express internal "find" revealed nothing, no record whatsoever.

A week earlier, after purchasing a computer peripheral from Ecoolstore on eBay from China, he also received an email stating that processing of their PayPal payment had been "completed." When the item did not arrive from Hong Kong within the allocated 14 business day limit he requested a refund but the seller responded that his PayPal payment had not been "completed" so when he went to look for the email it had also mysteriously vanished.

What is going on? Can email that has been received and displayed simply self destruct like the mission assignment tapes from Mission Impossible, or did my friend delete them by mistake without knowing what he had done?

Also is it possible for computer peripherals from China to have spyware installed inside then on a read only memory and if so how can this be determined?

Thanks in advance for any response. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 71.100.5.134 (talk) 18:56, 20 November 2007 (UTC)

It is probably too soon to tell anything with the little information that we have.

If the user has a desktop search program, I would urge to use it.

If a secondary computer is available, please try taking out the hard disk to that computer and using it as a secondary drive there.

I doubt that the email vanished into thin air because even if the email contained a strange request like that, there is no reason why Windows Outlook Express would conform to it.

Any ideas, Wikipedians?

To the OP: Before doing anything, make sure you understand the disclaimers above. If the issue in the email was critical, I would turn off the computer and have it sent to a reputable data recovery company. It would expensive and the I would probably finish eating my nails (and probably my toenails as well) as they recover the data, but if the situation warranted that, I would do it. --Kushal^t 19:06, 20 November 2007 (UTC)

• Desktop search is faster than Outlook Express or Windows XP searches but does not appear to be configurable to do a search on text or any sequence of characters within a file whereas "Bunu kimse Yapmaz" appeared in the subject text of the email and in the body of the email rather than as the email's name.
• The peripheral device mentioned was not a hard drive.
• The issue with the email is that it contradicts the claim that the PayPal payment was not "completed." There is no need for a data recovery program but only the ability to scan the hard drive at the byte or bit level. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 71.100.5.134 (talk) 19:58, 20 November 2007 (UTC)

Thank you for the correction, 71.100.5.134. I used data recovery in the sense that even if the worst case scenario of the data being deleted from the file allocation table, it might still exist on the hard disk and therefore recoverable. --Kushal^t 20:37, 20 November 2007 (UTC)

To me data recovery implies at worst a hard drive found in the ashes of a house fire and at best a motor or other circuit that has burned out making a cleanroom necessary to disassemble the hard drive and remount the platers in a new case with new electronics to hopefully make the data accessible again. If the data on the hard drive can still be read independent of format then all that is needed should be scanner software that can read sequential bits and bytes looking for keywords. I have data recovery software but it is not keyword friendly. Instead of allowing a bit or byte pattern keyword it merely restores all data it can leaving the user to do his own keyword search by conventional means after all possible data has been restored. I do not expect that such a thing will work in this case.

Also I assume that it is possible for anti-spam or antiviral anti-malware software to allow the text of an email to be displayed but then delete it when it recognizes it contains a pattern it does not like. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 71.100.5.134 (talk) 21:20, 20 November 2007 (UTC)

The last bit of our post is interesting and very relevant. However, the most sensible anti-spam/anti-malware program will probably keep the message in an archive somewhere so that the software can be trained on whether to treat similar messages as junk in the future.

To the OP: Do you have any anti-spam/anti-malware program that you think will take such actions? --Kushal^t 00:53, 21 November 2007 (UTC)

Advertising new store online.

I have a family member who just opened up a new store, of the brick-and-mortar type, and I have offered to help with online sales. A friend set up the basic skeleton of a sales web site, but it needs a lot of work. Mainly it needs some type of sales software (keep track of shopping cart, process transactions, generate receipts, etc). When I look for this type of software I either find what looks like a scam to me, or over-priced options that want to do everything for me. Any suggestions here?

I also need to advertise so the web site can get some traffic, the most important step would be that when someone google searches the name of the store they get the web site. I've looked at the Pagerank page, and I'm a little confused about how to go about this. It seems like the best way to improve the site's visibility in searches is to go to other sites (like blogs and forums) and post links back to my site (especially contextual links). However, this sounds under-handed to me. For instance I could insert a link to the site here in this question, and since google loves Wikipedia this would increase my rank. But the purpose of this question isn't to insert a link back to my site, it is to ask if there is a legitimate way to accomplish the same task? I also plan on eventually using google's ad service to place context-sensitive text-based ads elsewhere, will this increase my search ranking in-and-of itself? Thanks for your help. 128.223.131.21 (talk) 20:35, 20 November 2007 (UTC)

As far as I know, link farms on Wikipedia no longer give you a boost on Google as Wikipedia has tags to ask Google not to crawl external links and Google accepts the meta tags. --Kushal^t 20:41, 20 November 2007 (UTC)

Google doesn't love Wikipedia, in the way you think. All external links from Wikipedia have the nofollow tag set on them, which means Google doesn't follow them and doesn't give them any value. That doesn't stop dumb people from trying it anyway, and we're really pretty good at removing that stuff and blocking the spammer (for that is what people who do stuff like that are). And if they're persistent, and do something stupid like make a whole article about their business, when it gets deleted here it leaves a track (like a deletion discussion) that Google does like. So when you search Google for that business, you find the deletion discussion, and that's something that says "scammer" to your customer. guerrilla marketing is one thing, but dumb stuff like that undoes thousands of dollars of positive press and advertising. -- Finlay McWalter | Talk 20:42, 20 November 2007 (UTC)

And similarly a lot of the "cunning" search engine optimization tricks you've heard of, including stuffing blogs with backlinks, turn out to trigger Google's (and Yahoo's, and MSN's) sophisticated "we're being scammed" detectors, which blacklist your site and again prove to be vastly counterproductive. -- Finlay McWalter | Talk 20:55, 20 November 2007 (UTC)

Regarding software, our Shopping cart software article doesn't have a comparision (which is disappointing) but does link to some external lists. Google for "open source shopping cart" and you'll find some you can use for free (and can see the source for, making it much less likely to be a scam). But the big pain is accepting credit cards - for a small online retailer that tends to be rather pricey. For that you need to find a trustworthy "merchant services" provider - there are many providers, but I can't say which is trustworthy. Going with an established brand is probably the path of least risk, but will add a cost (PayPal UK's merchant services account charges 3.4% + £0.20 GBP per transaction, which seems like a lot to me). -- Finlay McWalter | Talk 20:50, 20 November 2007 (UTC)

Besides PayPal, you will also find that Google and Amazon offer cash-register services for online credit card payments. When you look at the percentage taken, compare it to the percentage that a small merchant would pay for any other credit card transaction. Also consider the cost of website programming, bookkeeping, returns, fraud prevention etc and it might not be the deciding factor on whether to do online sales. EdJohnston (talk) 21:09, 20 November 2007 (UTC)

In terms of advertising your site, it's true that the more people with 'good' websites who link to your site, the better your pagerank will be. Using Wikipedia for this doesn't work (as has previously been explained) because we wish not to become overwhelmed with people posting junk links just to improve their page rank - and the Google 'spider' that searches and indexes Wikipedia knows not to include external links. Spamming other sites may work better though - but it's not a morally good thing to do - and I greatly respect your integrity in that matter. The point of the pagerank algorithm (which has totally transformed the web by the way) is that sites that are actually good, interesting, liked will pretty soon get noticed and the pagerank will accurately reflect their worth. The problem is that until you get noticed, you don't get noticed!

What I think helps is to make sure that there are REASONS for people to link to you. Regrettably, however good your business might be, you'll end up in peoples 'Favorites' lists - but they are hardly likely to link to you from their web sites/forums/whatever. Perhaps people will do it simply because of the uniqueness of the business - but that might be problematic if the business isn't all that unique. In that case, I think you should strive to put things onto the page that (whilst not strictly related to the business) drive traffic your way. This means that you need CONTENT. Content is king. So - do you have employees who are talented in some way? Do you have an amateur cartoonist? Run a weekly comic. Someone with a talent for crazy/funny animal photos? Get in on the lolcats craze. Can you put industry-relevent content on there? Well researched and organised raw data will get linked to. Perhaps if you are a food store then you could publish nutritional data for the foods you sell? Make sure every page on your site links back to the main page.

Anything to make someone trip over your web site while searching for something that's not necessarily related to your business. Make them want to link to your web site. If you have reasonable amounts of disk space and bandwidth, you could offer free web space to a club or other organisation vaguely (possibly very vaguely) related to your business. If you give appropriate credit and pay attention to the GFDL, you can mirror Wikipedia articles that relate to your business. Disk space is cheap (if it isn't, find another web hosting service!) - it costs you little to offer tons of stuff.

Ironically, it's not so important that the people who visit these 'peripheral' locations actually buy stuff from you (although it obviously won't hurt) - what you want is those pagerank-pushing links.

Taking a shot at viral marketting (of the web site - not the business) can't hurt. You may wish your business to have an air of respectability - but you're trying to drive links to your site - not to your business. Can you put on some weird sporting event with staff? Maybe challenge your biggest competitor! A custard pie flinging contest is always good for a laugh - get everyone involved - get everyone messy as all hell - post a short version of it to YouTube with something at the bottom of the video that says "Come to xyzcorp.com to see the full version of this movie". Make sure everyone knows where to go to look for the video - ask everyone to send out links to everyone they know. If you magnanimously agree to host the video on your site, you'll end up with your competitors employees emailing links to your site for you!

But you have to get actually creative - not 'fake' creative, the Internet can spot 'fake creative' a mile off. Be weird - be funny - be unique. The links WILL come if you do it right.

SteveBaker (talk) 01:43, 21 November 2007 (UTC)

Republic Commando Soundtrack

Hi all,

the german and english articles state stuff about the soundtrack being available for public at LucasArts, but LA seems to have removed the whole product site :( Does anyone have a DL link for the soundtrack or at least the credit song by Ash?

88.64.74.49 (talk) 21:42, 20 November 2007 (UTC)

Origin of h.264 name?

I know h.264 was "descended" from h.264~h.261. But where did the "h" and "26x" part come from? Do they have any special meaning? --24.249.108.133 (talk) 22:35, 20 November 2007 (UTC)

Assuming you're talking about the video codec. The 'H.xxx' standards come from the ITU-T standards group. They use a letter.number format for all of their standards names - where the letter tells you which kind of standard it is - and the number tells you exactly which standard within the group. They seem to have allocated letters of the alphabet in order - so, for example: 'T.xxx' standards are for faxes, 'G.xxx' are optical networking standards and 'H.xxx' is for multimedia standards. The '264' part basically seems to mean that it's the 264th standard that they've defined in the area of Multimedia. Pretty boring really! SteveBaker (talk) 00:52, 21 November 2007 (UTC)

Thanks for the info. I hoped there was a more interesting backstory -- like the birthdate of the lead programmer's pet iguana or something! :) Hard to believe there have been 263 previous ITU approved video codecs. --72.202.150.92 (talk) 20:58, 23 November 2007 (UTC)

Not just video codecs; it's all multimedia standards combined --ffroth 21:30, 23 November 2007 (UTC)

Windows 95 platform with the 'newest new'

I have a lot of old games that only run well on Win 95 (Railroad Tycoon II among them). This is a weird request, but what is the most modern old stuff you can put on a Win 95 platform, and expect it to run old games like a star? By that I guess I'm thinking about what was brand new in '00 or so. Do the new SM3.0 compatible graphic cards have problems running old games like these, or is it purely the OS? Because heck, I guess I can just dual-boot any new computer with Win95/XP. So I guess there's potential here for the request to be not so weird, but somehow I doubt Win95 would work with some Gfx8800... Still, I'd love to know it from the techies. Thanks a lot in advance. =) 81.93.102.185 (talk) 22:36, 20 November 2007 (UTC)

You could install Win95 or Win98 inside a virtual machine (like QEMU, which is free). This would ignore your actual hardware and will appear to Windows to be old(ish) hardware which it can cope with. This is fairly slow to do, but for Windows 95 on a modern computer, it might work ok. Probably worth a look at, anyway. --h2g2bob (talk) 23:34, 20 November 2007 (UTC)

MS Virtual PC 2007 is also free, and probably a bit easier to use. Speed shouldn't be a problem for the sort of games you're talking about. -- DatRoot 23:46, 20 November 2007 (UTC)

Win95 might have some trouble with large hard drives (large being more than 8GB) or Serial ATA drives. Video cards shouldn't be a problems: as long as you don't need 3D acceleration, the standard VESA drivers should let you use the card -- I've had no trouble running Windows 3.1 on a machine with a GeForce 6600GT. You might also run into a problem with too much memory: Win98 (and presumably Win95) have problems on systems with 768MB or more. If the hard drive is supported, it might be slow: without motherboard-specific drivers, you don't get access to the faster transfer modes. Sound cards are an open question: there's no standard, but you might be able to get an AC97 driver and card that work with Win95. You'll need a PS/2 keyboard and mouse: Win95 does not support USB. If you need a modem, look for a Hayes-compatible hardware modem -- those all use the same drivers. Ethernet cards could also be a problem: look for a card that offers Win95 drivers. --Carnildo (talk) 23:02, 21 November 2007 (UTC)

Excel

If I have a list as the following in Excel and I want to sort them from A-Z by last name but keeping there phone # and address with their name. How do I do that in Excel?

Last Name, Phone Number, Address

use the mouse to highlight the rectangle containing all the data. Then click data, then sort,

then tell it you want to sort by the column with lastname in it. Graeme Bartlett (talk) 01:33, 21 November 2007 (UTC)

Excel Question

In Excel, how do I create a list for one cell? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 68.193.147.179 (talk) 23:15, 20 November 2007 (UTC)

YOu can type the first item, then alt-enter, then the second item, then alt-enter and so on. is that what you want? Graeme Bartlett (talk) 01:35, 21 November 2007 (UTC)

Did you mean a drop-down list in one cell (otherwise known as a 'Combo Box')? If so, I think you have to show the Control Toolbox (go to View > Toolbars > Control Toolbox then you can click on the drop down list icon and click where you want to put it. You should be able to customise it by right clicking and going to Properties but I've never actually done it in Excel, only Access and Word.GaryReggae (talk) 20:19, 21 November 2007 (UTC)

You'd have to do a lot more work to make it behave properly; don't use controls in Excel files unless you know what you are doing (and even then, they're not usually what you want). --24.147.86.187 (talk) 01:18, 22 November 2007 (UTC)

Unidentified Malicious Software.. "Thumb.exe"?!!

I'm suffering some kind of files on my hdd called "thumb.exe". it copies itself to every drive on the hdd, even to removable drives once i connect them, creating an "autorun.ini" file which makes every drive opens in a separate window, slowing down my pc. it also makes my floppy drive runs every now and then, as if it's looking for a floppy disk inside. anti-viruses are unable to deal with these files because they don't recognize them as viruses inspite of their virus-like activities!!! i used some anti-spyware but it was unfruitful too. when i try to remove them manually, they just come back once i restart my pc, or turn it on after a shutdown. although there is no suspicious programs in the Start-up Menu or in "Windows Services".. my last trick was to remove it manually then format C: drive and reinstall my Windows XP SP2 again. but all in vain, it was in my reception there. what do you think about this, people?. sorry for being gabby!! Thanks in advance Supersonic8 (talk) 23:45, 20 November 2007 (UTC)

Are you sure it's "thumb.exe" and not "thumbs.db"? thumbs.db is automatically made by windows and contains thumbnails of pictures in the folder --ffroth 08:11, 21 November 2007 (UTC)

Yes, I'm sure it's "Thumb.exe" not "Thumb.db". I know exactly what "thumb.db" is for. and this is why it took me sometime to discover these files. Thank you Froth. Supersonic8 (talk) 00:14, 22 November 2007 (UTC)

Download Free antivirus software like Avast! or AVG and do a complete scan of your system. Alternatively boot into Linux using a LiveCD, and run ClamWin from there on the harddrive. --antilived^{T | C | G} 21:38, 22 November 2007 (UTC)

If you have a single file, it would be better to upload it to VirusTotal and it will be tested against pretty much all the anti-virus engines. --Mdwyer (talk) 17:38, 23 November 2007 (UTC)