Computer question

[estevie]

hey guys!

I upgraded to aol7, now when i reboot or start up computer, aol starts automatically. I woke up this morning and my internet had been on all night. I looked around to try and figure out how to change it, but i can't find anything...HELP!!!!

 

[OUTSIDER]

If there was nothing wrong with the old version then just trash this one and go back to the old one, or unplug your modem before you go to bed as I do, apart from stopping it from connecting while your asleep it also stop's your modem from getting burnt out if there's a lightening strike on your phone line while your asleep, and before you say that can't happen I have a friend who works in a PC shop and he does a roaring trade in modems everytime theres a thunder storm.

Either way I hate AOL.

 

[Harbinger]

*insert weeping smiley face here*

AOL is very bad. It is Evil. I don't know much about ver.7.0, but I can only assume it is an order of magnitude worse than 6.0, and 100 times worse than 5 (I think that's how AOL comes up with those numbers. Like the Richter scale.) When I changed ISPs a year ago, I finally had to wipe my hard drive and re-install my OS from the ground up just to get rid it. I can hardly imagine what unspeakable perversions their twisted software engineers have come up with since then. *shudders* I am so, so sorry.

 

[estevie]

Well just fucking great! I usually have no problems with aol. Damnit, if this has messed up my puter, im gonna have to kill someone! Thanks for the info guys!

 

[OUTSIDER]

The reason I hate AOL is that a while back I tried to install their instant messenger, I took ages filling in all the data they asked for and when I hit install it just laughed and fucked off....not once but on four seperate occaions.

Also AOL are running a scam here in the UK where you can have I think a month or two of free internet access...great I hear you say !.....wrong.....you have to ring a phone number to cancel the contract at the end of the two months and AOL only have about two phone lines working on this, so you can't cancel in time and then once they can charge you.....BOY do they charge you.

 

[lovetoread]

hey guys!

I upgraded to aol7, now when i reboot or start up computer, aol starts automatically. I woke up this morning and my internet had been on all night. I looked around to try and figure out how to change it, but i can't find anything...HELP!!!!

Have you gone into your computer's internet settings and changed it? You can pick the option of the puter asking you before it connects to the net. Btw, I loved AOL6, I just opted to go with a DSL line.

 

[Shy Tall Guy]

hey guys!

I upgraded to aol7, now when i reboot or start up computer, aol starts automatically. I woke up this morning and my internet had been on all night. I looked around to try and figure out how to change it, but i can't find anything...HELP!!!!

You don't state which OS you are running, but I assume it is some version of Windoze. For any program that starts on bootup, you can change that by going to your user profile under the "Documents and Settings" folder on your boot drive, selecting the user name folder (or the "All Users" folder), selecting the "Start Menu" folder, then select the "Startup" folder. Anything in this folder will start automagically when the computer boots.

If you don't find AOL there, or if it still starts automagically then look under the "All User", "Administrator" or "Default User" folders and delete it there too.

Be careful though - there is probably a "tray icon" there also, and if you want that to remain then leave the icon alone; it should not start automagically if just the icon is there. If you delete it by mistake, you can drag any icon onto the tray and it will be copied there. Personally I prefer to leave such crap out of the tray and put them on the task bar "start area" instead.

If you still can't get it to work right post here again.

 

[estevie]

Shy Tall Guy, you are a genius! It worked...wooooohoooo...thank you sooo much!


hugggggs and kisssssses!!!!!!

 

[Shy Tall Guy]

Shy Tall Guy, you are a genius!

Hardly - just been there, done that.

It worked...wooooohoooo...thank you sooo much!

Good - glad it was a simple fix. I have a hard time remembering all of the differences between all the different versions of Windoze.

hugggggs and kisssssses!!!!!!

Now if I can just find someone who will do that in person instead of online

 

[OUTSIDER]

STG what do you use then ?

 

[Lord]

Shy Tall Guy: thats only in the version of windows 2k pro i think? dont know bo ut windows 2k me or windows 2k........its definetly not in win95 and win98 becuz theres no access settings and well......u know what i mean ;o

 

[estevie]

well, i didn't use his exact instructions...i went to run, typed msconfig and went to the start up option. It showed everything that starts up when i turn on my computer and I just unclicked the AOL box. I run WinMe, btw.

 

[Shy Tall Guy]

STG what do you use then ?

On my main computer I use Windoze 2000 (NT 5.0). I won't use XP (the next version of NT (6.0 ?) due to the licensing issues I hear about it (online verification); I would have run out of licenses a long time ago because I had to reinstall the OS about ten times in the last 6 months due to a bad hard drive. No problems in that regard with W2K and W2K supports multiple processors.

I am going to install Linux-Mandrake (Red Hat with enhancements) on one of my other computers, I have Win98 on my laptop (smaller footprint - my ThinkPad only has a 2GB drive and 100MB of RAM). I also have NT 4.0 and Win95 laying around for testing purposes. I have used other OSes at one time or another:

QNX
Unix
Linux
Minix
OS2
Every single version of Windoze since 1.0
GEM
Mac OS (various versions up to the latest)
Next OS
Various versions of MS and PC-DOS
Various versions of CPM and DR-DOS
Apple DOS

And probably half a dozen others I have forgotten including a real time OS sold by Intel that I forget the name of (RTOS?).

 

[Angel]

I won't use XP (the next version of NT (6.0 ?) due to the licensing issues I hear about it (online verification)

Uh, I have XP and I have no clue what you're talking about.

 

[sexy-girl]

Uh, I have XP and I have no clue what you're talking about.

i think they dropped the idea of online verification for XP ? ... and its not really NT 6 its meant to be the mix of nt and windows

i still use win98se on my machine

 

[Shy Tall Guy]

Shy Tall Guy: thats only in the version of windows 2k pro i think? dont know bo ut windows 2k me or windows 2k........its definetly not in win95 and win98 becuz theres no access settings and well......u know what i mean ;o

Yeah, Win NT, including Win2K, has users and security so you find those options there.

Windoze 98 does have users - at least the version on my Thinkpad does. It doesn't have "Documents and Settings", but I think ME does (I think it adopted the NT folder hierarchy too so that they will all be the same). In Windoze 98, if you go to the "Windows" folder you can find "All Users" and "Start Menu" folders, both of which have "Startup" folders.

There are variations because the different devo teams at MS don't always talk to each other, but that is changing. Eventually there will be only NT based systems; I believe ME is the last non-NT version of Windoze to be released - XP is NT based. This is a good thing; NT is much more stable than the DOS based versions of Windoze. The NT kernel is an adaptation of the OS2 kernel MS and IBM developed, which is funny when you consider how MS bad mouthed OS2 bigtime when they brought out NT (I know people that were on both devo teams).

Yes, ME, 98, 95, and backwards were/are still based on DOS as the underlying OS, whereas NT 3.x, NT 4.0, Win2K and XP have NT as their kernel. ME no longer allows Real-Mode DOS access to apps or users, but it is still based on DOS nonetheless. Eventually ME will fade and Win2K or XP will take its place - I just hope MS gets rid of the stupid registration/activation tech required by XP. Until they get rid of this, or there is a workaround, I will not use XP.

 

[Shy Tall Guy]

Uh, I have XP and I have no clue what you're talking about.

See this

and this too

For the techies

 

[Shy Tall Guy]

i think they dropped the idea of online verification for XP ? ... and its not really NT 6 its meant to be the mix of nt and windows

i still use win98se on my machine

XP is most definitely an NT kernel version of Windoze as is Windoze 2000.

There is no such thing as a mixture of NT and Windoze; NT is Windoze, just with the "New Technology" kernel instead of the old tech DOS kernel.

As far as I know, they have not dropped the the verification/registration/activation requirements for XP; you will either have to call in on the phone, or activate it online under certain circumstances where the hardware changes enough to require it; (such as replacing the CPU, the hard drive, etc.). This is nothing really new; vertical market software has been usingthis technique for years. The tech consists of examining unique ID data for certain hardware in your computer and using that to tell if the hardware has changed since the last install.

 

[Unclebill]

And while we're expounding on the tech side of Windows ...

one major difference between NT and Windows/DOS is the when the NT kernel is loaded, the system BIOS is no longer used. The NT kernel containes the code to handle ALL system processing. The ROM BIOS is functionally inert once NT is running.

In the DOS/Windows environment, most basic I/O functions are handled by the ROM BIOS via system calls.

 

[OUTSIDER]

STG we get it........you don't like windows, you can stop typing windoze now, it stopped being cute a long way back

 

[Lord]

Lord

XP has many bugs in it, most of the comp versions have many bugs in it i mean win95 still has bugs wtf? why dont they fix the bugs b4 they go on with another os? thats fuqed ;/

 

[Shy Tall Guy]

Re: And while we're expounding on the tech side of Windows ...

one major difference between NT and Windows/DOS is the when the NT kernel is loaded, the system BIOS is no longer used. The NT kernel containes the code to handle ALL system processing. The ROM BIOS is functionally inert once NT is running.

In the DOS/Windows environment, most basic I/O functions are handled by the ROM BIOS via system calls.

I haven't checked lately and I could be wrong, but I think you are only partially correct; I believe the NT kernel still uses the BIOS for some basic functionality, if not much of it. I do believe the BIOS is reentrant so that isn't a factor. NT probably does bypass some of the BIOS (probably mostly for performance reasons) but that is not its main difference from earlier versions of Windoze - the main difference is its microkernel architecture.

What does happen is that the NT kernel is a protected mode OS and does not allow anything except inner system modules direct access to memory or system functions, including and especially the BIOS. Most code runs at a privilege level that does not allow direct access to memory much less the BIOS - you have to make calls through programming APIs. This makes the code more portable.

 

[Shy Tall Guy]

STG we get it........you don't like windows, you can stop typing windoze now, it stopped being cute a long way back

Actually I do like Windoze and I don't type it that way because I think it is cute - I type it that way by reflex/habit; I code in Java, and most of the Java world is Linux based, and there Windoze and M$ are just common ways of referring to Windows and Microsoft due to the animosity held towards them.

 

[Shy Tall Guy]

Re: Lord

XP has many bugs in it, most of the comp versions have many bugs in it i mean win95 still has bugs wtf? why dont they fix the bugs b4 they go on with another os? thats fuqed ;/

The first thing I teach anyone in Software QA (and I have taught a lot of people) is that all software has bugs.

The second thing I teach is that it is impossible to completely test even the simplest software. It is also the nature of software engineering that sometimes a bug fix introduces new bugs.

As for MS sending out buggy OSes before fixing previous buggy versions - subsequent versions of the OS are bug fixes to prior versions; W95 has bug fixes for 3.1/WFW, W98 has bug fixes for W95, WME has bug fixes for W98, NT4.0 had fixes for NT3.51, W2K has fixes for NT4.0 and XP has fixes for W2K. Same goes for all other software.

I personally do not like the way MS runs their software engineering departments, especially the OS - they too often rely on the intelligent monkey approach; they throw a lot of people at the testing of the software, with the testers doing a lot of ad-hoc testing pounding away on the keyboard. They are getting better, but they have so much money and so many people that it is tempting to throw people and money at the problem of putting out good software.

 

[Unclebill]

Re: Re: And while we're expounding on the tech side of Windows ...

What does happen is that the NT kernel is a protected mode OS and does not allow anything except inner system modules direct access to memory or system functions, including and especially the BIOS. Most code runs at a privilege level that does not allow direct access to memory much less the BIOS - you have to make calls through programming APIs. This makes the code more portable.

Another motivation behind it was stability of the OS. No application is allowed to access any hardware device directly; EVERY device available is accessed via system service calls.

A program attempting to access hardware directly or memory outside that assigned to it by the OS is terminated.

This also prevents the possibility of two applications accessing a single device simultaneously, e. g., a sound card. Also, since the NT kernel controls access to each device and maintains a list of devices in use by each application, it avoids having a device become unavailable if an application crashes. That happened to me in Windows 95. A program I installed for my granddaughter crashed. The OS did not crash, but when the program was restarted, it could not access the sound card because the resource was in use. Unfortunately, it was in use by the prior instance of the same program which had crashed. The solution, shutdown and restart!