First the safety rules

The inside of a computer is a bad place full of electricity and sharp edges.

On the electricity side always when working on you computer make sure that it’s still plugged in to the power socket and the power is turned off, this is to ensure that any static

From you is discharged through the earth. The inside of most computer cases are unfinished metal and has very sharp edges so be careful.

The first signs of a battery failing are:-

1) your clock starts running slowly

2) when you boot (start) your computer it has a problem finding your hardware (no hard drive, no cd rom)

To change the battery you need the following tools

1) a X-point screwdriver

2) an anti-static strap(optional)

3) a new battery (seems logical)

Then unplug all the cables from the back of the computer as you remove them make a note where they came from. (So when you finished you can put them back)

Move the computer somewhere where you can work on it with ease

Remove the cover by locating the screws around the outer edge (back) of the computer

Some computer cases only require you to remove 2 screws on one side then a panel can be removed allowing you access to the computers insides, others you must remove 6 screws and remove the whole case by sliding it to the rear and lifting it off.

Now make sure that you read the safety instructions about static.

Look inside you will see a round silver thing that looks about the size of a 10p piece (quarter). This is the battery itself, carefully lift the retaining clip and slide the battery out. That’s it removed now go to your local computer retailer, electrical retailer (Tandy/Radio shack) taking the old battery with you and get a new battery.

Back to your computer insert the new battery by lifting the clip and sliding the battery in.

Reinstall your case and plug all the cables back (you did remember to label them didn’t you)

Now for the fun part.

You will now need to go into you bios….

Right the bios is the god of your computer.

To access it, when your computer first starts you will see a black screen with white text.

If you look carefully you will see a line that says something like "press del for setup" or some other key (F2 or ESC or tab) this will take you to god's house where you can make lots of changes to the way your machine works.

It is also the place where you can make your nice computer in to a rather expensive door stop so be careful and don’t go playing with anything.

You will now be presented with a blue screen with a lot of options on it,

The one we want is load optimised/default settings.

Press the F10 key and type y the computer should now reboot.

If every thing went well then your computer will now be up and running.

Shizers way: Keep computer running. Lay it on it's side and remove side cover to expose MoBo. Take any thin object, "small screwdriver, knife point, wood shiskabob skewer. Pull back the battery retaining clip. Toss the old battery in the junk recepticle, unless you belong to greenpeace and want to save the earth. Install the new battery. No need to reset bios becasue the compter supplies voltage to the cmos while it is running. Reset or resync clock with internet. Done!

When you first turn on you computer (BEFORE DIALING INTO YOUR ISP),

open a MS-DOS Prompt window (start/programs MS-DOS Prompt).

Then type netstat -arn and press the Enter key.

Your screen should display the following (without the dotted lines

which I added for clarification).

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------

Active Routes:

Network Address Netmask Gateway Address Interface Metric

127.0.0.0 255.0.0.0 127.0.0.1 127.0.0.1 1

255.255.255.255 255.255.255.255 255.255.255.255 0.0.0.0 1

Route Table

Active Connections

Proto Local Address Foreign Address State

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

If you see anything else, there might be a problem (more on that later).

Now dial into your ISP, once you are connected;

go back to the MS-DOS Prompt and run the same command as before

netstat -arn, this time it will look similar to the following (without

dotted lines).

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Active Routes:

Network Address Netmask Gateway Address Interface Metric

0.0.0.0 0.0.0.0 216.1.104.70 216.1.104.70 1

127.0.0.0 255.0.0.0 127.0.0.1 127.0.0.1 1

216.1.104.0 255.255.255.0 216.1.104.70 216.1.104.70 1

216.1.104.70 255.255.255.255 127.0.0.1 127.0.0.1 1

216.1.104.255 255.255.255.255 216.1.104.70 216.1.104.70 1

224.0.0.0 224.0.0.0 216.1.104.70 216.1.104.70 1

255.255.255.255 255.255.255.255 216.1.104.70 216.1.104.70 1

Route Table

Active Connections

Proto Local Address Foreign Address State

TCP 0.0.0.0:0 0.0.0.0:0 LISTENING

TCP 216.1.104.70:137 0.0.0.0:0 LISTENING

TCP 216.1.104.70:138 0.0.0.0:0 LISTENING

TCP 216.1.104.70:139 0.0.0.0:0 LISTENING

UDP 216.1.104.70:137 *:*

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

What you are seeing in the first section (Active Routes) under the heading of

Network Address are some additional lines. The only ones that should be there

are ones belonging to your ISP (more on that later). In the second section

(Route Table) under Local Address you are seeing the IP address that your ISP

assigned you (in this example 216.1.104.70).

The numbers are divided into four dot notations, the first three should be

the same for both sets, while in this case the .70 is the unique number

assigned for THIS session. Next time you dial in that number will more than

likely be different.

To make sure that the first three notation are as they should be, we will run

one more command from the MS-DOS window.

From the MS-DOS Prompt type tracert /www.yourispwebsite.com or .net

or whatever it ends in. Following is an example of the output you should see.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Tracing route to /www.motion.net [207.239.117.112]over a maximum of 30 hops:

1 128 ms 2084 ms 102 ms chat-port.motion.net [216.1.104.4]

2 115 ms 188 ms 117 ms chat-core.motion.net [216.1.104.1]

3 108 ms 116 ms 119 ms www.motion.net [207.239.117.112]

Trace complete.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

You will see that on lines with the 1 and 2 the first three notations of the

address match with what we saw above, which is a good thing. If it does not,

then some further investigation is needed.

If everything matches like above, you can almost breath easier. Another thing

which should you should check is programs launched during startup. To find

these, Click start/programs/startup, look at what shows up. You should be

able to recognize everything there, if not, once again more investigation is

needed.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Now just because everything reported out like we expected (and demonstrated

above) we still are not out of the woods. How is this so, you ask? Do you use

Netmeeting? Do you get on IRC (Internet Relay Chat)? Or any other program

that makes use of the Internet. Have you every recieved an email with an

attachment that ended in .exe? The list goes on and on, basically anything

that you run could have become infected with a trojan. What this means, is

the program appears to do what you expect, but also does just a little more.

This little more could be blasting ebay.com or one of the other sites that

CNNlive was talking about.

What can you do? Well some anti-virus software will detect some trojans.

Another (tedious) thing is to start each of these "extra" Internet programs

one at a time and go through the last two steps above, looking at the routes

and connection the program uses. However, the tricky part will be figuring

out where to tracert to in order to find out if the addresses you see in

step 2 are "safe" or not. I should forewarn you, that running tracert after

tracert, after tracert might be considered "improper" by your ISP. The steps

outlined above may not work exactly as I have stated depending upon your ISP,

but with a true ISP it should work. Finally, this advise comes with NO

warranty and by following my "hints' you implicitly release me from ANY and

ALL liability which you may incur.

Other options

Display protocol statistics and current TCP/IP network connections.

Netstat [-a] [-e] [-n] [-s] [-p proto] [-r] [intervals]

-a.. Display all connections and listening ports.

-e.. Display Ethernet statistics. This may be combined with the -s option.

-n.. Diplays address and port numbers in the numerical form.

-p proto..Shows connections for the protocol specified by proto; proto may be

TCP or UDP. If used with the -s option to display per-protocol statistics,

proto may be TCP, UDP, of IP.

-r.. Display the routing table.

-s.. Display per-protocol statistics. By default, statistics are shown for TCP

UDP and IP; the -p option may be used to specify a subset of the default

interval..Redisplay selected statistics, pausing intervals seconds between each

display. If omitted. netstat will print the current configuration information

First off, I've been doing this for a long time now. I still listen to a lot of the bands I've found by doing this. It's really simple, but it works like a charm. I ALWAYS find cool new stuff -- sometimes even bands that have been around 10 years that I never heard of.

The things you need:

- (Optional) A file sharing program (I use limewire)

- A browser. :]

1.) Pick one of your favorite bands.

2.) Go to amazon.com or cdnow.com (same thing)

3.) Look up that band's name

4.) Scroll down until you see "Customers who bought this title also bought:"

5.) Browse through the artists you've never heard of in that list.

6.) Check out one of their albums, preferably the one with highest rating (in stars)

7.) Either listen to the samples on amazon or download a song by them with your filesharing app.

If you like what you hear, repeat steps 3-7 using the new band's name.

You'll find TONS of new music you never thought existed.

It's a really simple way to find stuff, and I'm sure lots of you probably already do this. But for those who don't -- you'll thank me later. It works wonders. :)

XP lets you rename files in bulk by simply selecting multiple files within Windows Explorer and pressing the F2 key. When you use this feature, the OS applies the name you enter to the first file and applies the same name with a number in parentheses to the other files you selected (the file extensions remain unchanged).

For example, if you select the following files,

* notes.doc

* figures.xls

* disney.jpg

* holiday.gif

and rename the first file (notes.doc) to SoD.doc, XP renames the remaining files as follows:

XP PRO has a lot of fun utilities. One of the most useful ones I have found to date is the ability to remotely reboot a PC. There are 2 ways of doing this. You will need to have admin access to the PC to preform these actions. That being said, here is the first way to do it:

Right click my computer, choose manage.

Highlight the Computer Management (Local) then click on Action, choose connect to another computer.

In the window that opens fill in the machine name of the PC you want to connect to and click ok.

Once connected right click on Computer Management (Remote machine name) and choose properties.

Go to the "Advanced" tab and click the Settings button under Start up and recovery.

Click on the Shutdown button.

Under action choose what you want to do (you can log off current user, shut down, restart, or power down. you can also choose if you want to force all applications to close, close hung apps, or wait for all apps to close by themselves).

The second way... Remember dos... that good old thing. Open up a command prompt and enter in the following:

%windir%\System32\shutdown.exe -r -m \\Machinename. The command prompt has more switches and options. I highly suggest using shutdown.exe /? to see all the posibilities.

You can add an Internet URL address bar to your Windows XP taskbar. Doing so will let you type in URLs and launch Web pages without first launching a browser. It will also let you launch some native Windows XP applications in much the same way as you would via the Run menu (so you could type in calc to launch the calculator or mspaint to launch Microsoft Paint. Here's how you add the address bar:

1. Right-click on the taskbar, select Toolbars, and then click Address.

2. The word Address will appear on your taskbar.

3. Double click it to access it.

4. If that doesn't work, your taskbar is locked. You can unlock it by right-clicking on the taskbar again and uncheck Lock the Taskbar.

NOTE: You may also need to grab the vertical dotted lines beside the word Address and drag it to the left to make the Address window appear.

First of all you need to know where your Linux OS is installed to. that is what drive it is currently living on. Bear in mind that Linux formats the drive as HFS rather than Fat/Fat32 or NTFS. ( These are the file systems used by various Operating Systems).

So HFS Partitions are not seen by windows, so its hidden.

To remove the partitions of Linux in WindowsXP go to your 'Control panel' > Admistrative Tools > Computer Managment

Open 'Disk Management' and you will see your Linux drives recognised as 'Unknown Partition' plus the status of the drive. Bearing in mind you know what partition and disk you installed to it will be easier to recognise as the drive/partition where you had installed it to.

Once you have identifed the drives, 'right-Click' on the drive/partiton and select 'Delete Logical Drive'

Once you have followed this through, you will now have free space.

This next part is very important. Once you have formatted the drive, re format it as your required file system type. either Fat32 or NTFS. Now the important part is coming up !

Fixing your Master Boot Record to make Windows Bootable again.

Have a Windows Boot disk with all the basic DOS Commands loaded on to the disk. A standard Windows 98/Me Boot Disk will work too.

Type in the DOS command :

e.g, from your C:\

fdisk /mbr

Or use your Windows XP run the recovery console, pick which xp install you would like to boot in to (usually you will pick #1)

then type: fixmbr. Answer Y to the dialoge.

Your master boot record will now be restored and Windows XP will be bootable once again. Your System will be restored with your original boot loader that you got with Windows XP.