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Ok, here we go: Mobo P5KPL-AM IN/GB - Asus P5KPL-AM iG31, S775, PCI-E (x16), DDR2 1066(OC)/667/800, SATA 3Gb/s, uATX, VGA - Scan.co.uk £33.68 CPU BX80571E5200 - Intel Pentium Dual-Core, E5200, S 775, Wolfdale, 2.5 Ghz, 2MB Cache, 12.5x Core Ratio, 65W, Retail - Scan.co.uk £46.12 PSU Compucase Green Earth 350W 80plus Certified PSU - 20+4pin 2x SATA 1x PCI-E - Ebuyer £26.89 Mem 2GB DDR2, PC2-6400 (800MHz), 240 Pins, Non-ECC, Unbuffered, CAS 6 Retail - Scan.co.uk £20.46 HDD 320 GB Samsung HD322HJ Spinpoint F1, SATA 3Gb/s, 7200rpm, 16MB Cache, 8.9 ms, NCQ - Scan.co.uk £33.89 Case TMB11NOPSU - Asus TM-B11 Black Mini Tower No PSU - Scan.co.uk £21.88 DVD LG GH22NS50 22x DVD±R, 16xDVD±DL, DVD+RW x8/-RWx6 ,12xRAM SATA, Black, OEM - Scan.co.uk £16.66 Fan Xilence Red Wing 80mm Quiet Fan - 3&4pin connection - Ebuyer £2.94 <EDIT: changed link, was out of stock> Screen Samsung SM943SN 19" TFT Monitor 1360x768 15000:1 (dynamic) 250cd/m2 5ms VGA Black - Ebuyer £83.99 Windows 66I-03525 - Microsoft Windows Vista Home Premium SP1 64-bit English 1pk OEM + Windows 7 Offer Form - Scan.co.uk £90.36 GPU EAH4350 SILENT/DI/512MD2 - 512MB Asus HD 4350 Silent, PCI-E 2.0(x16), 800MHz GDDR2, GPU 600MHz, 80 Cores, D-Sub/ DVI-I/ HDMI - Scan.co.uk £27.26 Paste Arctic Cooling MX-2 High Performance Thermal Compound (it's what arctic use on their Coolers) - Scan.co.uk £4.36 TOTAL: £408.49 The reason I've chosen the more delicate components from scan.co.uk is that you can take out their scansure insurance: Computer hardware and software at amazing prices, available online - Scan.co.uk This will protect against frying your motherboard during installation, for instance, and is designed to help PC builders. I'm not certain how much it is though; i think it will vary depending on your order. I would also reccomend that you get a CPU cooler such as: Arctic Cooling AC-FRZ-7P Freezer 7 Pro Socket 775 Processor Cooler - Ebuyer but this will add £14 to the total cost, so it is up to you. The stock cooler will do for general use.

I tried, I tried, and I tried to get this spec under your budget but I just can't bring myself to list a £5 'casecom' PSU for the fear of such stuff blowing up... Mobo ASROCK G31M-S G31 Socket 775 VGA Out 6 Channel Audio MATX Motherboard - Ebuyer £30.59 CPU Intel Pentium Dual Core E5200 2.5GHz Socket 775 800FSB 2MB Cache Retail Boxed Processor - Ebuyer £46.17 PSU Compucase Green Earth 350W 80plus Certified PSU - 20+4pin 2x SATA 1x PCI-E - Ebuyer £26.89 Mem Crucial 4GB Kit (2x2GB) DDR2 800MHz/PC2-6400 Memory Non-ECC Unbuffered CL6 Lifetime Warranty - Ebuyer £35.99 HDD Seagate ST3500418AS 500GB Hard Drive SATAII 7200rpm 16MB Cache - OEM - Ebuyer £37.93 Case Asus TA-K12 Black Mid Tower Case - No PSU - Ebuyer £21.99 DVD Sony AD-7240S 24x DVDRW DL & RAM Internal SATA Black Bare Drive - OEM - Ebuyer £16.99 Fan Xilence Red Wing 80mm Quiet Fan - 3&4pin connection - Ebuyer £2.94 Screen EXDISPLAY Samsung SM943SN 19" TFT Monitor 1360x768 15000:1 (dynamic) 250cd/m2 5ms VGA Black - Ebuyer £81.98 Windows Microsoft Windows Vista Home Premium - Licence and media - 1 PC - OEM - DVD - 64-bit - English - Ebuyer £74.32 TOTAL: £375.79 I know it's allot more expensive than what you asked for, but this will be a solid machine, and the components are vastly superior to the cheap stuff Medion had listed. This has double the RAM, and from a decent manufacturer. The Hard drive is also double the size, again from a good manufacturer. The monitor is far better than the one listed. The only thing it doesn't have is a graphics card, but the Mobo has onboard, so you could upgrade that later. The case and PSU will be infinitely better than theirs. The reason the Medion machine was listed so cheap is because they will literally bang in the cheapest PSU, cheapest Mobo, cheapest Case, and only list things like the CPU to catch your eye. If it's too much I could try to shave off some £££'s, just say and I'll have a go.

Burning a windows restore point to a CD will NOT back up your data. Only your windows settings. When Wolfey said 'Backup disks' he just ment that you should copy your important data to somewhere other than your computer, so that in the event that the hard disk fails, you will still have access to it. Do you have an external hard drive? That would be ideal. Just copy all of the data you want to save in the event of a crash to a folder called 'backup' or similar on the external drive. Of course you could also burn this data to CD's or DVD's, but that wouldn't be as realiable as storing it on an external hard drive.

Thanks Bob, I've replied. Don't think a rule break as trivial as this matters much now. I'll keep posting until the place closes , so if my last suggestions didn't work Legally Blind Egghead then just say and I'll try to think of something else before tomorrow.

No problem at all, On reading your reply I realise that I have overlooked Windows XP's handling of file extensions. If you open up my computer, then click on Tools at the top, then go to Folder Options, and then go to the View tab, you should be able to find the option 'Hide extensions for known file types'. Make sure this is unchecked, and then click apply, and then OK. Try to re-name the file now. You should be able to see the extension at the end this time.

Ok, that definitely helps. It sounds like it hasn't been fully re-set, and still has your old settings. Unless you held down the re-set button for at least 30 seconds then it won't have re-set itself. The problem is at the modem. You could try using a different telephone cable to plug it into the wall, but I think whatever problem Comcast fixed for you on their end has come back. Give them a call, and tell them the symptoms (link light off) and that this has happened before. It sounds to me like the rest of your equipment is fine.

If you have an Ethernet (cat 5) cable around then you could connect one of the four LAN ports on the router to one of your computers and try to connect again. An SSID is a Service Set ID, basically the name of your wireless network. You will be able to change it from the web interface. This is the name that will show up when you browse available wireless networks from one of your computers. The button on the left of the router is the re-set button. It sets all of the routers settings back to factory defaults. In this case though it shouldn't matter, as the factory defaults should still be able to get you online if you use a separate modem. Try browsing for available wireless networks and see if you can find the Linksys. It will probobly be the one with the strongest signal. It should have defaulted to no authentication, so don't worry about your WEP key for now. Choose the network type 'open' or 'no authentication' for it. You said this happened before, and comcast fixed it on their end? If your link light is off then there is no signal on your telephone line for internet access. You might have to phone them again to check that the problem hasn't re-surfaced.

Hi Bowman, Are all of the lights on the modem active, including the link light? Does the internet work if you plug straight into the router using an Ethernet cable? Your router will have a web interface from which you can configure it. Open a web browser on a computer connected to it, and enter into the address bar: 192.168.1.1 Then hit enter. It will ask for a user name and password; if you have re-set it then you should leave the username filed blank, and enter 'admin' as the password. From there you should be able to check the wireless settings. You may have been using a custom SSID for the network, which has now been re-set to defaults. This would mean that computers looking for the wireless network won't find it, as the name has changed. If you know what the old name was, then change it back and try again. Do you know if you used WEP or WPA authentication before?

My suggestions: Antec Basiq Power 350W ATX 12V PSU - Ebuyer £25.73 Sapphire HD 3650 512MB DDR2 DVI HDCP HDTV out AGP Graphics Card - Ebuyer £44.52 Total: £70.25 I know this is £10 more than you would like to spend, but the card will provide far more punch, and is 4 years newer than the one you listed. I wouldn't touch a no-brand PSU, or once made by 'e-z cool' or whatever with a barge-pole. A thing as important as a PSU needs to be of acceptable quality, and Antec are a good brand who won't do you wrong there.

After you have successfully completed the visual Capatcha it should ask you if you want to save the file. It should be a file called WLMContacts.csv You say it is an XLS (.xls) file? If this is the case then when you try to import it, it won't show up in OE's file browser, because OE will only accept files with the CSV (.csv) extension. If you get an XLS file from windows Live mail, then try changing the extension to .csv and then importing it. And you're not thick headed :)

Great news okstgrad! Looks like we got there in the end :D I think something happened to your install of Trend-micro, and re-installing it has reset or replaced whatever went wrong. Randy makes an excellent point; you should only run one firewall at once. I would advise that you turn off the windows firewall by going to Control Panel - Windows Firewall and setting it to off. Since Trend-Micro is a complete security package, you won't need any other firewalls or virus scanners. As for spyware, stick to an up-to-date version of firefox with NoScript for added security; NoScript - JavaScript/Java/Flash blocker for a safer Firefox experience! - get it! - InformAction And that will eliminate 99% of ad/spyware on the web from getting at you. For the rest, Super antispyware and Malware bytes are probably the best combination at clearing it out.

I have seen S-video ports burn out before. They can be fragile, a Radeon X1650 of mine had this happen to it. If you have tried with other cables and are at the stage of replacing your whole motherboard to troubleshoot it, then this might be what's happened to it. Unfortunately I don't think that updating your bios will fix anything, as the bios should only govern any onboard graphics chips, not a separate, discrete graphics card like a 9800. What inputs does your TV have at the back of it? There may be an alternative way to connect the computer up without the S-video.

Ok, if you don't have an I386 folder then we can try something else. Download the hp driver and save it to your desktop. You will need either Winrar or 7zip for the next step, if you have neither then I would recommend 7zip as it is free: Download 7-Zip from SourceForge.net Make an empty folder on your desktop called 'driver'. Open either winrar or 7zip, then drag the hp .exe file on your desktop into the window. Select extract, and choose the driver folder you made. You should end up with lots of files inside there. Now, plug in your printer and when it gives you the option, select "install from a list or specific location" this time and click next. Uncheck "search removable media" and check "include this location in search". Click the browse button and go to the 'driver' directory on your desktop. Click next and it will attempt to find the driver itself. I've seen this work where packaged installs failed, so hopefully it installs your printer correctly again.

We recently had a very similar problem to this one: http://extremetechsupport.com/forum/networking/7621-network-bridge-cuts-out-my-internet-connection.html Please try the suggestions there, and let us know how you get on.

'pop.msn.com' should not be there; the address you need is 'pop3.live.com' Please check your account settings, and make sure you have 'pop3.live.com' as the address for incoming mail, and 'smtp.live.com' for outgoing mail.

That's strange; it should be in add/remove programs. Ok, open the run box by holding down the windows key and pressing 'R', then type msconfig and hit enter. Go to the 'startup' tab and search for anything that looks like it could be yahoo messenger, then uncheck it.

Hi Gazza, Have you tried forcing detection using catalyst control centre? I believe it is under the 'Display options section', with a check box that reads 'Force TV detect' The BIOS shouldn't be a problem here, it will be your graphics settings in windows.

If you don't want yahoo messenger at all, you could just uninstall it by going to Control Panel, then clicking on Add/remove programs, and finding it in the list there. Select it, then choose uninstall. If you want to keep it, then look through its preferences for anything like 'start messenger when windows starts' or 'load at startup' or similar, and uncheck/disable it.

OK, there is a way to try to run the system file checker without your recovery CD. Go to each of your hard drive's partitions, and look for a folder called 'I386' It might be directly on the root of the drive, like C:\I386 or D:\I386, or it might be inside the windows directory like C:\Windows\I386 If you have this folder, then we may be able to run sfc.exe without the need for your CD.

After some digging on google, it looks like this feature has recently been added to Microsoft's email service, windows live mail. MSN mail and hotmail have both been combined into windows Live mail, so they are basically all the same email service now. This means that you can login to windows live mail using your MSN account. Here is a link to the Microsoft page describing how you would add your MSN account to outlook express in detail: https://windowslivehelp.com/solutions/settings/archive/2009/02/18/how-to-add-your-e-mail-account-to-microsoft-outlook-express.aspx Let us know how you get on.

Hi pen, welcome to the forum. When you open a command window you are in the default 'Documents and settings' directory belonging to the current user, in your case 'Administrator'. The command to change the directory you are in is 'cd' So, to get to the MSDN files you need, you would type: cd C:\SQL2KSP4\MSDE\ And then setup /upgradesp

Hi Gazelle, Welcome to the forum :)

No worries :) Sometimes these things try to defy explanation, but I'll give it a go anyway; I think what may have happened is this: The system files and settings that deal with establishing network connections have been replaced or modified by your Trend-micro software. Manny firewalls and security applications do this. When you ran the winsock fix it worked for a moment, probably because but undid some of these changes, but then the program put them back in place and you were back at square one, hence why it stopped working almost instantly. You say that if the whole application is disabled, then you can connect. This is a good enough indication that Trend-mico is probably the source of the problem. I'm not sure why the error given by IE changed, but if firefox can't connect either then the problem remains the same. The best thing to do would be to remove it completely so we can eliminate it from the list of possible causes, and then try to connect to a website. You can easily re-install it afterwards if you want.

Hi tismehi, Firstly try uninstalling all of the HP printer software and drivers from your laptop, including the every mention of it inside the windows device manager. After you've done that and re-started, try running the windows installer cleanup utility to completely remove all of the old installation information. Download it from Microsoft here: http://download.microsoft.com/download/e/9/d/e9d80355-7ab4-45b8-80e8-983a48d5e1bd/msicuu2.exe Run it, then look for any mention of your printer's drivers or software, and remove them. Then go here: Select software and drivers* And download these two from the items selected: » HP Deskjet and Photosmart Basic Print Driver 01-2007 61.063.247.20 - 34.93M » Critical Update to Enhance Reliability of Network and USB Connectivity and Improve System Responsiveness While Printing 04-2009 2.0 - 25.29M Install the driver first, then the update, without connecting the printer. If it asks you to connect the printer during the install then do so, but otherwise wait until it's finished before you plug back in.

I am not asking you to give up Trend-micro permanently, just for the time it would take to test your connection without it. The only consistent thing so far is the firewall component of Trend-micro: You may have been using it for years previously, but you have been using older versions of it for years. A new update could have caused this, or some recent windows update could have conflicted with it, etc. Completely removing it will tell you if it is the problem, but I'm not going to force you to do anything, just suggest what I think would help.