Hmmm

I didn't know there was a bunch of guitar shops in Chinatown. The 'bunch' I know are on Thanon Atsadang near the Grand Palace. At least a dozen small shops I would say.

Don't log into your google account unless you really have to (ie to use gmail etc), then log out. Never use google search while logged into google. Don't use social media accounts to log into other sites. Don't link accounts. Use Firefox and set "Do not track me". Install NoScript plugin and do not unblock anything with "google" in its address. Install Adblock Plus plugin.

Anything I've missed ?

IME there is a tendency in Thailand when a technical business cannot diagnose the source of a problem, they will often say that the whole motherboard / car engine management computer / operating system / hard drive / <insert-name-of-a-big-single-part> needs replacing.

I have seen this go badly wrong on a number of occasions, ie the problem not solved and major cost incurred.

I wonder if this is a "face" thing. ie the technician or the company does not want to admit to the customer that they can't diagnose the specific problem, so they propose a blanket, over-the-top, expensive solution. Of course the bigger the proposed replacement part the chances of that fixing the problem are often pretty good, even if it was totally unnecessary. Unfortunately it sometimes makes no difference to the real problem, and you are still billed for that big part, and the company refuses responsibility.

If such a "solution" is ever proposed, you must get a gaurantee that if it doesn't solve the problem, you won't get charged for the part and the system will be returned to you in its original state.

The best approach is to google/trawl the international forums for your laptop, for other people with a similar problem. While the posters here at TV are knowledgeable, there is more specific expertise elsewhere. Then order the part yourself and if necessary, learn how to install it. It's usually not that difficult.

Having said all that, it is faintly possible that your laptop does really need a new motherboard. But if so you are better off buying a new laptop.

> While I'm fine in using the com. as a tool, my knowledge of what can & can't be done in the event of component failure is very poor.

If you want the best chance of recovering the situation you're going to have to do some homework.

Trust your disk to the wrong computer shop or one that doesn't understand what you want (data recovery from just the D partition), and you can kiss your data goodbye. You could end up with your disk newly formatted with a nice new copy of Thai Windows on it .. and nothing else.

However, given your above statement, I suspect some of the other suggested solutions may be beyond you. They're also not what I would do first in your situation, IMHO. You don't need any special software to attempt the most obvious disk access approach. I would also not be trying to re-install the OS unless you're confident that you can follow the right steps to preserve the D partition while doing that.

The first technique I have used many times in similar situations is dependent on having access to another, working Windows computer. You need a USB adaptor that will plug directly into your disk, similar to this:

http://www.amazon.com/USB-SATA-5-25-Cable-Adapter/dp/B000YJBL78

You can get them at Pantip or similar big computer malls for a couple of hundred baht. Take your disk along to make sure you get one with the right connectors.

It's basically the same electronics as an external USB drive has, without the box. If you can't find one, ask for a full external USB drive enclosure for the disk instead, which will cost a little more.

Plug your disk into the connector. Plug in the power to the disk. Then plug the USB into the working computer. If the disk is readable, it will pop as as one or two external drive partitions. If your D partition is OK, copy off your data.

If not, your last chance may be a data recovery service. Someone else can advise on where they are in Thailand. The skills and equipment required are not something your average computer shop has. Can be expensive.

A number of overseas content providers have techniques to identify known proxy services, and block content when they think that is how you are connecting. I have not been able to connect to the Australian providers you mention with any of the free services I have tried. The symptoms I have seen with those providers are identical to yours. Looks like some Australian providers are particuarly determined to thwart attempts at avoiding their geo-blocking.

Maybe someone else can report successful experiences with Australian connections.

What add-ons do you have installed in IE and Firefox ?

Disable/uninstall those you don't want/don't understand. That would include Halo.

Re-installing browsers is not the way to solve these problems.

And do be careful what you click on to install.

The Huawei IDEOS (U8150) is one of the first 'cheap' smartphones. It runs Android 2.2 and has had good reviews in the markets where it has been released, where it generally sells for under US$200 unlocked. If I could sum up the reviews, they would be 'mostly as good as phones twice as expensive'. So as long as you don't expect the equivalent of a phone that costs 3 times as much (ie with a faster processor and more memory), most people are very happy.

I am also thinking of bringing mine to BKK. There may be slight variants being sold in different markets, but mine supports the following networks. Someone with better knowledge of what frequencies the phone companies are running in Thailand these days can advise on whether the following range would be restrictive (eg the lack of 3G 1800GHz).

3G Network: HSDPA 900 / 2100

2G Network: GSM 850 / 900 / 1800 / 1900

No 3G 1800Ghz

The screen is indeed small. But you can install the Gingerbread keyboard which is better than the stock 2.2 one, and use a small stylus if necessary.

Huawei are releasing several more powerful devices soon.

MyPhoneExplorer

I've had a couple of external drives do that. In most cases it's been something with the box's interface, not the drive itself.

Open up your box to see if the drive has an accessible IDE or SATA connection. If so, buy one of those USB-to-IDE/SATA connectors for about 200 baht ....

http://www.google.com/products/catalog?hl=...sult#ps-sellers

Disconnect your drive from inside the external box and connect the connector cable to it. The USB-IDE/SATA should come with a power cable too. Plug in the power and your drive should power up. Plug the USB connector into a USB port and the drive should be recognized .... if it's still OK.

Run some diagnostics to make sure the drive is OK. If it's not, and you can't read anything from it, THEN data recovery may be able to help you. If the drive is OK, buy a new external enclosure for a few hundred baht.

The BA lounge in BKK is actually a Qantas lounge. Qantas uses the same designer for all their lounges around the world. I have not yet been in the QF/BA F/C and B/C lounges. Anybody here who can tell me if they are any good? What about the food? Drink selection?

QF/BA BC lounge at BKK is passable. Seems smaller than at Don Muang, which makes it very crowded when the main BA and QF long hauls (LHR-BKK-SYD and back) are both in at the same time, as they are twice each day.

Slightly shorter walk to the usual departure gates than at DM, albeit with two security checkpoints to negotiate.

Food similar to QF lounges elsewhere - salads, sandwiches, cakes, ie better than the usual tea and biscuits in BA Terraces Lounges at LHR.

A dozen or more PCs available, although often all taken. Nice looking showers, although again hard to get one.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_censorship_in_Thailand

Quote:

' Software applications for circumventing web-blocking are readily available. ... The Minister of Information Communications and Technology has said in an interview in the Bangkok Post that he has not blocked these methods because "using proxies to access illegal sites are illegal, whereas using proxies to access legal sites is legal." '

Since the nature of these tools is that no one monitoring your connection can tell what sites you are accessing - legal or illegal - one might conclude that this law might not be very successful.

Pantip would be the obvious suggestion, but I've done these jobs on my Dell by finding the parts on ebay and doing the install myself. You find the service manual online if it's not obvious what to do. It's usually not hard.

I would get an external USB drive like a Lacie of sufficient size to backup just the irreplaceable stuff (ie not the OS or the apps). Then, use a program like Retrospect that does incremental, compressed, backup. There may be freeware that does the same thing.

You can schedule backup overnight if your PC is left on, or just run it before you turn off. The incremental backup will only backup files that have changed since the last backup.

A typical default 'grooming' policy should give you multiple full backup copies - one per day for the last week, one per week for the last month, one per month for the last year, etc. All within a space smaller than the disks / partitions that are being backed up together in the one place.

To my mind, the best and much less complex and problem-prone solutions to these issues are a Tor-enabled browser such as Torpark (now Zerobank Browser) for secure browsing, and TrueCrypt for disk encryption . All free.

Well, I use Office 2000. No bugs at all.

I'm buggered if I know why people rush out & buy the latest MacroHard software . Personally, I will wait until the MacroHard software has been "out there" for 1 year before I even think about buying it.

Normally this is very good advice. Windows 98, NT, XP, and Office 2003 all had at least one SP out before I migrated to them.

Migrate when you need to, not when MS tells you to.

Unfotunately Excel 2007 is the first to offer greater than 256 columns, which I really need for my work.

This is a minor bug that will be fixed quickly with an update.

However Excel 2007 still has serious problems for power users, whereby charting of large amounts of data is so slow as to be unusable. The same tasks complete immediately under Excel 2003.

The one 'hotfix' issued so far had little effect.

This problem with the new charting engine was widely reported during the extensive beta program, but Microsoft obviously chose to ignore the problem and release Excel 2007 without fixing it. Shameful.

Also worth checking on the ISP's website that you're dialling the right number. :-) They change from time to time.

Having had problems with multi-boot setups, I've usually found that the BOOT.INI file on your boot drive is pointing to the wrong drive/partition to boot the OS (which is where NTLDR is).

If you have no way to read that file now (since the OS won't boot), then you'll have to move the drive to a working PC (eg plug in as a USB external drive) or boot the current PC from floppy / USB etc. Or maybe you can read it from Linux ?

If that's the problem, you'll need to find out how to construct BOOT.INI lines like this correctly for your setup ...

multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINNT="Microsoft Windows 2000 Professional" /fastdetect

Google will find the help you need.

A Y adapter but with 3 outlets instead of 2 would be the go. Do they make these?

What you have now (2 Y cables) is the electrical equivalent of a "3-way Y". So if you have problems now, you would have the same problems with such a cable.

Your problems sound like they're due to the multiple output connections loading each other, which is why I suggested an active (mini-amplifier) solution.

I assume you may wish to use more than one output at once, otherwise a simple A/V switch from Big C would work (although most of these have RCA connectors, so you'd need adaptor cables for those).

Your post suggests that a purely passive approach is not working for you.

Goggle for "audio splitter" -download

(-download gets rid of most of the audio software file splitters)

Something like this ....

http://www.onlinesupplystore.com/product.a...=2&id=26632

If there's a cheap chinese gizmo that does the same thing, you might find it at pantip. I wouldn't fancy trying to explain what you want to a non-English speaker though.

This deal has already come and gone in some countries. It's questionable whether it's a 'bargain'.

Students, and others, would be best advised to avoid Excel 2007 in the Office 2007 package. It is totally unusable for any serious spreadsheet work, especially involving charts. Most of the problems seem to lie in the new charting engine. Google for "Excel 2007" and "slow" to see that everyone is having these problems.

Excel 2007 is the single worst 'upgrade' I have seen in my years of computer work. Tasks that completed very quickly under Excel 2003 take up to tens of minutes under Excel 2007, if they complete at all.

There has been one hotfix that eased some problems, but did not make the product usable for most power users. It looks like we'll be waiting until Excel 2009. :-(

Also, the new ribbon interface for all of Office 2007 takes several weeks to get used to. Expect a big hit to productivity until you find where all the old menu options have been moved to.

No need to carry a whole OS on your USB stick. Just need an encrypted password repository on the stick, like this free (for < 10 passwords) one ...

http://www.roboform.com/pass2go.html

If you need secure surfing, add free (but slow) portable/secure version of firefox, previously known as torpark, now xero bank browser ...

http://xerobank.com/xB_browser.html

Can you confirm that tor is legal under the new law?

"Software applications for circumventing web-blocking are readily available. ... The Minister of Information Communications and Technology has said in an interview in the Bangkok Post that he has not blocked these methods because "using proxies to access illegal sites are illegal, whereas using proxies to access legal sites is legal."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_censorship_in_Thailand

So if the quote is accurate, use of the tools itself is not illegal. But since, by definition, remote monitoring cannot tell what sites are being accessed using these tools, one might conclude that this law may not achieve its aim.

Furthermore, since Google's cache can easily be used to access blocked sites (if you don't know how, I can't tell you ... or this post may be deleted), use of Google would be illegal if the law did indeed ban mere use of the available tools.

No need to carry a whole OS on your USB stick. Just need an encrypted password repository on the stick, like this free (for < 10 passwords) one ...

http://www.roboform.com/pass2go.html

If you need secure surfing, add free (but slow) portable/secure version of firefox, previously known as torpark, now xero bank browser ...

http://xerobank.com/xB_browser.html

Now if only I could figure out how to get the file name listed in the xls automatically linked to the original file (while in xls sheet click on file name and the photo opens).

Use the Excel HYPERLINK function ...

=HYPERLINK("C:\photos\photo1.jpg", "Click to open")

If you have a file name in cell A1, then you could put this in B1 ...

=HYPERLINK(A1, "Click to open")

Excel is now overly security conscious, so you will probably get a message asking you to confirm that you REALLY want to open the JPG. There 'may' be a way of disabling this.

I have bought Dell laptop parts on ebay and done similar repairs / upgrades myself. The service manual is usually readily available online.

I have also seen laptop repair shops at Pantip (towards the back on the upper floors) with piles of Dell parts in their display cabinets.