chocolategoddess

Not sure what section to put this is. Could be anything! I formatted a laptop's HDD the other day in Windows 7, put the drive back in the laptop, and then went to install Win XP. Thing is, it won't boot. I get 'BOOTMGR is missing. Press CTRL+ALT+DEL to restart' no matter what I try. I've tried various CDs/DVDs, XP, 7, BartPE, Ubuntu ... nothing. Googling just tells me to boot from DVD and fix it (useful). Someone suggested that it was defaulting to booting from the HDD each time and to remove it from the boot list altogether, but the BIOS doesn't offer that option. All I can think is that Win7 messed it up somehow and I need to do some trickery to revive it, but I'm not sure what. Ideas? Oh, and I can't try booting from USB. I seem singularly incapable of creating bootable USB pens for some reason.

Hi all, I'm having a weird intermittent (hate those) problem on various PCs. Teachers have been trying to use gallery files with mp3 sound in the Notebook software (latest version, of course), and the sound just doesn't play. Attached mp3s files from another source don't play (but they do in VLC, and WMP). Flash gallery files with sound do play. These PCs are all almost identical, and all have had problems with DVD codecs (ie. they didn't install for some reason), so I have a vague nagging feeling it's something to do with codecs ... any ideas? I've tried installing/uninstalling fddshow and the k-lite codec pack in various combinations to no effect. I did contact Smartboard but just got a really unhelpful 'Features of Smartboard Notebook' leaflet ... uh, thanks?

I've just tried it out and it works perfectly! Thank you so much, I can't believe it was such a simple thing. I always look too deeply into things!

Is it actually 'SERVERNAME'? Or is that a placeholder for the actual personalised name, which is what I can't find?

So I'm learning how to set up and use WSUS. I installed it fine with the help of the useful guide, but now I'm trying to connect clients to it and I'm falling down at the first hurdle. When installing WSUS I didn't take note of the name of the server site, and after googling repeatedly I can't discover how to find it. Does anyone know where you can find this? I've looked all over the WSUS admin console, and in the IIS Manager (it was installed to the default site there) and I can't find anything. It's making me sad, I was really excited about getting this up and running!

Well I don't work with macs at all, and yet I managed it after a 5 minutes training session. We used ... something, a cloning program for macs, I can find out what it was if you want. You just set it to take an image, saved the image somewhere, firewired the target mac to the mac with the image on it, booted the target mac while pressing 't', and then set the program going to image it. It was so easy (and fast) that I sat there drooling for about ten minutes before asking why PCs don't have the 't' function. At which point my boss started being all smug about macs blah blah blah. I'm sure it's much more complex if you're imaging via a network, but if you have macbooks (or ibooks) floating around, it's stupid not to utilise them and cut out the network step.

Someone just posted this on my forum in the discussions about April Fools. Pretty sure it's not a joke as they're a fairly nasty piece of work, so I figured I'd post if here in an attempt to give someone a head's up. They're from a city just north of Philadelphia, USA, according to their IP address. I do hope they get caught.

Someone in my family teaches KS1. She was in Y1 class, and found two kids full-out snogging and touching round the corner. Y1 kids. You can't tell me that kids have been doing that forever. It's a sign of the lack of care of parents and the media to at least attempt to shield youngsters from this sort of activity. They're learning this kind of stuff from their environment, only it's not teaching them right because it pours sympathy on the idiots who get themselves into this position. I think a good healthy dose of shame might work wonders for society. Not to the point where girls are dragged off to convents or mental institutions, but maybe so they get dirty looks in the street. It seems to work to make them fashion-conscious, so maybe it'll work elsewhere. I can't even fathom sex at that age. I was still playing with Barbies, and as tsky says, having snot thrown at me by boys.