Computer issues

[Spivonious]

Well, I just did what was suggested and the proxy box was not checked. Someone also suggested checking the IP address and that it should start with 192.168 and well it doesn't. It starts with 169.254? What do I do now?

That means it's not getting an IP address from the router. Doublecheck that the network connection is configured to automatically get an IP address. If it is, try power cycling the router and see if that helps (unplug it, wait 10 seconds, plug it back in). If it's still not getting an IP address, are you sure the network cable is plugged in? There's not much else it could be.

Grim, rjohnstone, I've got a BS in Comp Sci too. We just need hippietim to show up and I think we'll have all of the devs/IT guys on the JCF. I've been in the field for about 5 years now, all software dev with VB6 (really not as bad as everyone says) and .NET. WPF rocks my world.

Grim - having the browser installed on a different drive letter makes absolutely no difference in terms of security. Open up cmd and type "del %windir%/*.*" from the D: drive. It will run with no problems. UAC doesn't prevent hacking, but it forces the user to confirm any system-level changes. The worst malware can do without showing a UAC prompt is screw up the user profile. I will say that I haven't seen any nasty malware on my customer's machines (the kind that intercepts calls to regedit, or prevents booting) since XP.

Trem - time to leave XP. There are zero reasons to stick with it. Windows Vista fixed some major problems, and Windows 7 continued the work. The interface is a big change (primarily the focus on search, and the new taskbar in Win7) but once you use it for a week or two, you won't want to go back. SuperFetch makes opening frequently used apps lightning fast (assuming you have enough physical RAM to make good use of it; I've found that 4GB is minimum to see an improvement).

I've been running IE9 Beta 1 on my PC for the past couple weeks and I love it. I dropped Firefox when IE7 came out because it no longer added anything for me. My dad still runs Firefox because of Adblock; I just add the ad sites to IE's restricted sites list. And the F12 developer tools are fantastic.

[Sharkfin]

The network adapter has to already be set to automatically get an IP address, hence the 196.254xx.xx. If a network adapter isn't able to receive an IP address that's the type of address it would pick up. It's a fail over; APIPA.

http://compnetworking.about.com/cs/protocolsdhcp/g/bldef_apipa.htm

[Grim]

Grim, rjohnstone, I've got a BS in Comp Sci too. We just need hippietim to show up and I think we'll have all of the devs/IT guys on the JCF. I've been in the field for about 5 years now, all software dev with VB6 (really not as bad as everyone says) and .NET. WPF rocks my world.

Grim - having the browser installed on a different drive letter makes absolutely no difference in terms of security. Open up cmd and type "del %windir%/*.*" from the D: drive. It will run with no problems. UAC doesn't prevent hacking, but it forces the user to confirm any system-level changes. The worst malware can do without showing a UAC prompt is screw up the user profile. I will say that I haven't seen any nasty malware on my customer's machines (the kind that intercepts calls to regedit, or prevents booting) since XP.
.

I'm not saying prevention, but rather removal.

UAC Doesn't prevent hacking, I concur.

I have seen some nasty Windows 7 rogues, but that is about it (And these use social engineering to get themselves installed), now that you mention. Most of the infected PCs people bring into the shop are XP SP2.

Not much malware prevents booting though... That would make the malware quite pointless. There was a ThinkPoint rogue that intercepted boots and instead of showing the login screen on XP it showed the ThinkPoint screen and locked your computer. Run Task Manager, kill the process, start explorer.exe from task manager and run malwarebytes.