Losing the Net, Divx Encoders, Validating Office and Internet Speed

Hi there Everyone

Thanks for making it a great show this week! Today we had Charlie behind the desk in place of Fiona - well done to Charlie for pressing all the right buttons Wink

This week we had Peter from Julatten first up, saying that he has been offline for 2 weeks now. Basically his ISP is blaming their upstream provider (in this case, Telstra). Now I feel your pain, but the moral of the story here is that you cannot call Telstra and expect them to take any action at all. In this case you have an agreement with your ISP - not Telstra. Your ISP can contact Telstra, but not you. Strange heh? Anyway - keep on the case to your ISP. Call em daily, hourly if need be and get them to take it up with the behemoth. Good luck Peter, we look forward to having you with us back on line soon!

Pam from Cairns called in with a great question about DivX encoding a DVD for her computer. There are lots of tips & tricks to encoding DVD's - whole forums are filled with questions and answers on the subject! In this case, Pam's sound was not matching the video stream. I will assume for this discussion that you are backing up DVD's that you already legally own. There are HEAPS of things that could be causing the problem - here are a few resources:

Hubert from Kewarra rang with a question about getting an error message when installing MSN messenger. I suspect that he has posted a question with the exact error message in our forum - see the error discussion page here.

Mike from Yorkies Knob called in with a question about non-genuine Office warnings - a great topic, which has it's own discussion thread now! (complete with pictures - thanks Mike:)

Steven from Cairns called in with a question about Internet Speeds. Now you can try a speedtest at http://www.speedtest.net - this is a slick interface, and not a bad test for a first try. Just keep in mind that many factors affect your download speed. One of the most common problems is having your, or other computers on your home network downing downloads without your knowing while you are surfing the Internet.

Last up - Barry from Cooktown rang with a top geek question about dual booting windows. Barry is trying to get a dual-boot system working with Windows XP and Windows Vista. Basically this is not normally for the faint-hearted. I would suggest trying an established "how-to guide" - try this guide at APC magazine for a start

Thanks again too everyone who listened in - and a big thanks to those people who called in too !

Cheers,
:)RG