Darrel

Actually those HP machines arent bad at all for the price. Quiet, cool, quite fast, with well-matched components.They would suit just about any average user who isnt a hard-core gamer or HD video renderer. Most people only use a small fraction of any computer's real capacity.

That said, if I was looking to get a high-end machine then I would make a short-list of compatible parts and buy them in HK whilst on a visa run. I find Pattaya prices to be very high for parts, higher even than in the UK with 20% VAT. The choice is very limited also. Dont buy the case or power supply in HK though. Everything else (mobo, proc, video card, RAM, hard drive, DVD/BD, Windows DVD, cables) will easily fit in your carry-on luggage and as long as you throw away the packing and protect the parts with some bubble wrap you wont be bothered by customs or damage.

when I plug into the audio jack asks me what i plugged in speakers or microphone.

What happens if you want to use both?

for around 800 Baht a month there is no download limit

Are you certain? I have yet to come across a wireless data provider that doesnt cap or throttle usage somehow or another. The most common way being to say "unlimited" in the ads and then throttling the speed down to something just barely usable if you download more than a certain amount (which may be anything from a few hundred megabytes to a few gigabytes). Other common restrictions are streaming, torrents/P2P, usenet and VOIP.

buy an iphone charger

You dont need an iPhone charger. It's just another example of Apple trying to extract more money from you for nothing, something they are extremely good at.

All you need is a bog-standard USB charger such as you would buy for any MP3 player or smartphone, and a suitable USB=iPhone/iPod lead which you probably have anyway.

The multiple charger that I bought recently for under 200B came with all the necessary interchangeable leads/plugs, including the Apple one. I saw similar ones in 7/11 the other day.

No need to go to all that trouble.

All decent (or do I mean indecent? ) modern browsers have a "private" or 'anonymous" mode which you can find in the main toolbar. This automatically avoids leaving traces in your browsing history and cache, and also avoids cookies. Your ISP will still know where you go (unless you take further precautions), as would anyone prepared to examine the drive in depth (again, unless you take further precautions), but anyone glancing at your PC will not.

Read the Firefox description of this mode, and Internet Explorer is very similar.

The Orange San Francisco (AKA ZTE Blade) costs just GBP89 / 4500Baht without contract from Argos in the UK and does just about everything all those other phones do. It is excellent value for money, and especially suitable for use anywhere where it might get lost/broken/stolen. Unlock is free online. It works 100% with my Thai SIM. Many ROMs are being developed for it and mine currently runs 2.2

The only thing that it doesnt have is an ARM7 processor, which means that Flash wont install on it, which means that you cant access BBC iPlayer directly. Apart from that it is great (and there are work-arounds for BBC iPlayer).

I am allergic to the notion of paying any supplement for anything (which rules out all Apple products and Blackberries) and so the Blade suits me perfectly.

turned off existing Avira, Sandboxi, and (Comodo firewall for installation) and installed.

It is a bad idea to have more than one AV/Firewall installed at any one time. If you want to use another one then you should first uninstall the current one and reboot. Turning them off is not enough. The only exception is the Windows Firewall which should just be deactivated when not required.

Yes, there is a sort of double-jack now that does both mic and headphones in one plug.

Personally I use a Microsoft LifeChat USB mic/headset which is excellent and far better quality than any jack device I have come across. I think I paid about GBP20 for it, maybe less. Great for listening to music also.

Do you even need a letter? Isn't the passboook enough?

Unless you can actually drive yourself to the border (or unless you really enjoy slow trips in non-aircon buses, waiting for connections, and tedious discussions with taxi drivers and other touts/officials) it seems to be far better value and much faster to go with one of the many visa run tour companies.

If you know anyone coming from the UK then just get them to bring you a GBP89 (that's about 4500Baht) ZTE Blade (AKA Orange San Francisco), available without contract from Argos and even direct from Orange for GBP10 more. Can be unlocked for free online.

Incredible value for money and matches phones costing up to 3 times more.

I would guess that the cake flour is self-raising and all-purpose is not. Why not make one muffin and see?

You would also need strong flour for bread-making. Proper bread-making anyway.

I find that the water pistol is very humane, totally harmless and very effective. When we had cats in Europe and were bothered by strays hanging round (and coming in through the pop-hole), it only needed a few squirts to teach them to stay well away.

In this instance it may be a bit late to talk to your neighbour about it though.

Songkran in Pattaya is a total PITA. It has no redeeming features at all.

The only solution I know of is to stay indoors for a week or leave the region/country for a week. Not sure which I will do this year.

Ah. Thanks. I even have Tesco shares so a little of the 109B will come back to me!

No sign of cheap plain T-shirts in Central Festival, though they did have some "plain with small logo" ones for the bargain price of 1290B. Needless to say I didnt buy any and instead will be looking at the 50B ones in the weekend market that was mentioned.

1290B for a T-shirt. What a joke.

Do you know what's on the OP's hard disk? I don't, nor will I pretend to know either. Chances are there may not be anything 'malicious' lurking at all. But then again, I don't know this for certain. Wiping the drive is just another option for the OP to consider, irrelevant as it may seem.

Could it be something in the BIOS causing problems? Perhaps, but there's no definitive proof of this. I'm not going to suggest a BIOS reflash (which is a risk in itself) when one may not be necessary. Given that the OP is relatively inexperienced, I'd leave this task to a DELL technician. Should something go horribly wrong, the responsibility will rest with the technician, not the OP.

You are correct in that we certainly dont know what's on his drives and his machine, not least because he is rather imprecise about what is going on. So really we should just be saying "sorry, cant help, go get a tech to sort it for you". Which so far has been unsuccessful.

That said, binning the USB key, disconnecting the network, formatting the drive from another OS, flashing the BIOS using a Dell tool and then reinstalling Windows from the DVD without messing about changing settings that he doesnt understand would normally get the PC working again no matter what his problem is. Though I suspect that he would soon have altered enough admin settings to stop it working properly again.

I have flashed hundreds of devices of all types and whilst there is a minute risk of bricking one this has never actually happened to me. As long as you follow the instructions it should not pose a problem. Of course, if Dell are around to do it for free and to carry the can, so much the better.

(Tthough I suspect that if the Dell tech flashed the BIOS and bricked it he would just say 'Sorry, it's broken. A new one will cost you xxx.")

<br /> So do I have to install a BIOS program of some kind before I reinstall Windows? <br />

<br /><br />The BIOS is built into your computer and has nothing to do with your operating system, except in as much as it allows your operating system to talk to the bits and pieces that make up your computer. If you dont know what a BIOS is or how it works then you shouldnt be messing about with it. Leave  it alone and leave it on the default Dell settings.<br />That said, on the Dell support site you will find a program that allows you to reflash the BIOS with the most recent version and this is safe enough to do<b> if you follow the instructions to the letter</b>. As I mentioned it is just about possible (but very unlikely) that something has infected your BIOS. Reflashing it would sort that out, in the unlikely event that it is the case.<br /><br />

<br />Clearly there wouldn't be much point in Bitlocker-encrypting a drive that you'd shrug off with a grin - I was pretty desperate, and I'm a fierce researcher. If there was a way to save that Bitlocker drive, it wasn't online. <br />

<br /><br />You misunderstand. I didnt say that you can recover the data: if you have lost the key/password then that is gone. However you can recover and re-use the drive simply by formatting it. Unless of course the drive is broken or reports many bad sectors in which case you can bin it. So the most you can lose is your personal data which should, of course, be backed up several times anyway.<br /><br /><b>If</b> you have your original installation disks and activation keys (for Windows etc) and <b>if </b>you have backups of your personal data then you are never more than a couple of hours away from <b>a full recovery with nothing lost</b>.

I meant delete partitions and wipe data (aka Zero-fill or writing zero's to the hard disk). This will effectively destroy ALL data on the drive. Think of it as a document shredder; I'm sure you're familiar with those in the workplace.

While some BIOSes do support "low-level formatting", modern drives no longer require LLF, therefore, avoid using the BIOS for this purpose. Zero-fill is the modern day equivalent to LLF. Use diagnostic tools provided by your hard disk manufacturer (e.g., Seagate SeaTools) or partition software such as Acronis Disk Director to wipe data.

This is fine for erasing personal data but it is not really relevant in this instance.

Deleting and recreating a partition will effectively remove any data on the partition. There is no need to overwrite as long as the FAT is empty, especially as this is not the problem here. Whatever the OP may have (and actually I'm not convinced he has anything at all) it will be living in the boot sector and the best way to erase this is to do so from a non-Windows OS as this will make it unreadable to Windows. When Windows is reinstalled it will recreate the boot sector correctly. The hard drive tools you mention (and Ubuntu and MacOS and the BIOS etc) will do the same thing, but overwriting is not needed.

There is a very small possibility that something has affected his BIOS or other firmware and the solution to that is to reflash the BIOS using a Dell flashing tool and check the firmware of any other cards having one. This is really rare though so it seems unlikely.

(Personally I suspect that the other poster was correct and that the OP is in fact a troll, as it's hard to imagine any real person having the problems that he has. But the replies may be useful for other people and so no harm done there.)

A very bright DELL technician and I spent all night working .....

I'm sure the Dell tech was a very nice guy but let me try and clarify. I do this for a living. I've been doing it every day for well over 15 years and I get very well paid for doing it (European rates, not Thai), so someone must be satisfied with me. When I work on a computer it doesnt take me all night and when I've finished it functions properly.

I gave you the benefit of my advice for free. Listen or ignore it, it's up to you.

Good idea. I'll have a look tomorrow. So many T-shirt shops around I didnt think of anywhere like that.

I've spent the last 3 days traipsing around markets and shops looking for something that I would have thought would be easy to find: plain single-colour cotton T-shirts in farang size (probably a small XXL).

Have I found any? No.

Loads of T-shirts with stupid messages, pictures, designer labels, multiple colours, frills, bells, whistles. But no normal plain cotton T-shirts.

I'm after light grey or maybe dark green or dark blue. Not white or black or poly-cotton. Fairtrade organic unbleached cotton would be nice, but that's probably asking too much. I bought several of these last summer back in farangland for about 3Euros each (120B) but didnt think I would need to bring a suitcase-full here (coals to Newcastle).

Has anyone seen any of these mythical beasts recently? If so, where?

Also, it is strange that my 25-digit Windows key doesn't show up, instead that weird Product ID code instead?

No, it isnt. Only the PID shows in Windows. The key that you used to generate the PID is never shown (unless you specifically go and look for it).

You apparently know very little about Windows and how it works and so I am surprised that you are fiddling about with things that you clearly dont understand like the registry. Bitlocker for example: if you use it goes to huge lengths to warn you to save the unlock key in a safe place for emergency use. Did you do so? Apparently not.

Autorun.inf shows as a generic threat because it is precisely that: a generic threat AKA a potentially harmful file. Given that is it only a text file it is easy enough to check the contents and see if it is normal or not. You dont need to check the MD5.

And the list of anti-malware software that you have installed/used is quite remarkable: much of it is only suitable for use by experts anyway, and I dont think that you qualify. In fact that list is 10 times more software than I have used to clean any number of infected PCs in the last 10 years, something I do for a living.

Your original hard drive didnt need replacing either, even if you didnt know the Bitlocker key. I dont know why anyone would have told you to do that.

Your solution is to remove any network connection or USB storage device from your PC, format the hard drive from the BIOS or via an Ubuntu Live CD, reinstall Windows using the official disk (your disk looks official enough) being sure to reformat the partitions during the process, install the correct drivers from the Dell site, allow Windows Update to do the necessary updates, install MSE.

Then format (or better still throw away) your USB key. Dont connect any other PC to the network unless you are certain that it is not infected with anything.

And finally stop messing about with things that you dont understand. As a uninformed end-user you should not be fooling about in the advanced setup of Windows at all. If you leave Windows 7 alone you will probably never have any trouble.

I tried wireless N several times and it couldnt handle 1080P at all well

Wireless N has no problem with 1080p which is around 3.0MB/s-4.0MB/s stream. A properly configured Wireless N network within range can easily obtain 10MB/s.

YMMV. It didn't work well enough to tempt me to abandon the much cheaper and 100% reliable ethernet solution. There is also the issue of potentially getting one's brain fried.

The o/p should upgrade to latest version, and for that matter all security updates.

Yes indeed. And that applies no matter which browser anyone chooses to use. Browsers and operating systems MUST be kept up to date.

Personally I regularly use Firefox 3.6 and IE8 (soon to be replaced by IE9 and Firefox 4, as mentioned) as they do different things in different ways. Also some plug-ins will only work on one browser.

I also have Safari and Chrome installed as I need them to develop websites.