kevan_j

What is the VPN you are using? Can you connect to MSN Mess while you are at work? If so, then there may be a restriction imposed by your sys admins on Messenger connections via VPN. Also, the VPN may be set up to not allow 'split tunnelling'. This will not allow you to connect to anything else as long as the VPN is established. It forces all your traffic over the VPN. If split tunneling were allowed, then your MSN messanger traffic should not go over the VPN. There are many issues with VPNs, almost all of which are either security restrictions or routing problems.

tree

bird

This might end up being the longest sentence in history....

chew Yuck!

$102,000 according to articles on Yahoo.

dumb & dumberer !!

dumb & dumber

good & bad

Not quite sure how we got here but.... to follow water... WINGS (HG should follow this one!!)

river

coarse

I have a Memorex Dual Format DVD+/DVD- recorder that I got last year. It was easy to install under Win XP and I haven't had any problems with it. Prices on these units are pretty reasonable too. I got mine from Sam's Club ( a warehouse club in the US) for about $150. I know I have seen some of the Sony unites recently for around that price.

BGP - Border Gateway Protocol Go Geeks!!!

SWMBO - She who must be obeyed. (Related to the 'Dog House post??)

Have any of you Outlook users heard of Archiving???

How about patenting the act of drinking water (and other beverages)..... And while we are at it, I might just patent the idea of trademarking and copyrighting....WOOHOO - gonna be rich!!!

One of the downsides of camphones is emerging in the form of voyeuristic or espionage activities. Reports are that it is extremely easy to smuggle these things into places they shouldn't be, and take surreptitious pics of private 'things'. Some companies have gone to the lengths of banning then in offices because of security concerns.

Wizard

Jikrantz, Thanks for the link. The entry in the EMBED tag worked!! Firefox now displays the transparent background correctly. Kevan

Nat, I'm going to try to explain this in as much detail as I can. Please don't think that I regard you as (in your own words ) "blonde", but for someone who doesn't appear to have done much in this line before, it can be confusing. First, on a system with those kind of specs, it would be best to have the software copy your original CD to your HD before making the copy. If you only have one CD drive (the burner), it is going to do that anyway. This is a temporary image file that the software makes, so that you can remove the original from the drive to put in the blank disk when asked to by the software. Once the copy is made, the software will delete the image from your HD. It will do this transparently to you, so you don't have any input once you start the copy process, except for switching disks. Second, the answer to your last question is 'Not necessarily'. If you put a CD in your drive, and drag and drop the contents to a location on your HD, all you will get is copy of the files on your CD. That is OK, and you might be able to make a new CD based on those files, but the preferred method is to use the copy CD function of the software, which, as described above, creates a temporary image, then burns the new CD from that image. Think of it like this. Let's say you have a sheet of paper with 6 pictures on it that you want a copy of. The 'manual' method (copying files and folders) would be to hand draw each picture on a new sheet. The 'image' method would be to take a picture (image - see the correlation), then have it developed onto a new sheet of paper. An ISO file is like a photo of the original disc. The difference between the first method (copying all the files), and the second (extracting an ISO) is this. When you copy the files, you get copies of each individual file and folder on the CD. The problem with this can be that if there are hidden files on the CD, you might not copy everything. When you extract an ISO, the software reads the information as it is written to the CD, in an exact bit-by-bit copy. You can't see any filenames, or even that there are individual files (unless you get WinISO so you can 'look' inside the ISO). A ISO copy of a CD that is full will be about 650Mb. You can set up most CD copying software to extract an image to the HD (say for instance, if you wanted to illegally copy a CD and post it on the Internet somewhere, or you wanted to store the image so you could burn a CD later), but this is more for manually copying CDs. If you put your original in the drive, and tell the software to copy the CD, it should do it pretty much automatically. The best way to do this is to try it. Don't be scared...Blank CDs are cheap, so if you do burn a 'coaster' (highly technical term for a bad CD burn), you can use it as just that, or hang it from your rear view mirror, or whatever people do with them!! And you can't harm your original CD. If you got it right, the software should make an exact copy of your original, which will act just like the original CD when you try to install from it. Hope this helps,

If you have an original software CD, and you use Copy CD to make a backup, it should work exactly the same as the original. What kind of system do you have? CD drive plus CD Burner?, or just CD burner? How old is the system? Just asking, as there might be some 'gotchas' with copying CDs on older machines.

spaghetti

Nat, WinISo is a program you would have to download and install. It can be found here: http://www.winiso.com/ Also, to answer your other question(s), if you copy an audio CD to your HD, you will probably not create an ISO file, depending on the software you are using. You would have to specify that you wanted to create an 'image' of the disc you are copying. There is so much softwware available to copy CD's now, it would be impossible to tell you exactly how to do it, but look for an option referencing creating an image of a CD. Audio CD's are a different breed to data CD's. If you put an audio CD in your drive, and 'explore' it in Windows, you'll see a bunch of files corresponding to the tracks on the CD. If you copy these to your HD, you will not copy the audio portion of the data. The files are like 'pointers' to the audio data, so that CD players can find and play the music stored on the CD. To copy the audio data, I think you would have to either make an image, or rip to MP3.

I've noticed some 'anomalies' too. Look at my site http://www.hanoveropen.com. The flash based menu on the left side has a transparent background image. Works fine in IE based browsers, but Netscape, Firefox, etc, the backgound behind the buttons is white. Anyone know why, and if it can be fixed?