Recent content by Fixer1234

Pettervu, I was surprised to get an alert on this old post. I should have documented the solution better. My recollection is that I had to download the ATI driver "suite" (then called ATI Catalyst Control Center, now AMD Catalyst Control Center), from the computer manufacturer's web site. The...

Pauli has a good point with the font packages. At one time I went nuts with font packages, basically loading every package I could find. There were hundreds of REALLY cool fonts of every conceivable variety. There was the better part of 1,000 font files taking up space on the hard disk (I...

You have several things going on. The true type fonts and the ITC fonts are different publishers' versions of the same font family. I would just uninstall the ITC versions where you have duplicates and keep the true type version. Many fonts actually have a separate font file for each version...

If you haven't already done it, download the free Winpatrol program (http://www.winpatrol.com/). It monitors any attempted changes, including startup programs.

Don't know if this sheds any light on it, but msdia80.dll appears to be some type of debugger ("dia" stands for "debug information accessor"), associated with Microsoft Visual Studio 2005. If you have that program loaded, or did at one time, the activity could be related to that. If you never...

It may just be coincidence, but the ratio is exactly the same as trying to fit an A4 template onto letter sized paper. Check whether there is a print setting somewhere set to letter size.

It looks like the second run found pretty much the same problems as the first, which is a good sign. It also looks like the problems are file corruption, not hardware errors, which is another good sign. Corruption doesn't preclude moving the file unless it is corrupted in a way or to an...

Great. Thanks for getting back with the results. It's always better, anyway, if you can use a program without having to install it.

The identification you are seeing refers to the hardware. Since one is 8111E and the other is 8111G, it is correctly identifying different hardware. I don't know if they are supposed to use different drivers. It is possible that both use the same driver, or it is just using the driver you...

Pat, if the problem can be demonstrated to be malware, do you really want to recommend wiping the recovery partition? I wouldn't see any reason to go that far unless a full (retail) Windows installation DVD was available. Certainly not as a first step, anyway.

A couple of things to check before getting into the weeds: Do the template margins fit within the print border of the printer? On the printer properties, is it set to fit the page? What type of printer are you using? Try this test: print to a PDF driver that saves the output as a PDF file...

Did chkdsk find nothing or did it find problems but either didn't fix them or fixed them and more of the same returned? Ideally, you want to figure out if the problem is hardware (hard disk failing), malware, or some type of corruption. If chkdsk found nothing, it probably isn't a hardware...

The recommendations for maintenance seem to be changing, perhaps because problems with the maintenance, itself, can create more issues than it solves. Defragmenting the hard disk was something that could be done for free and was often done frequently. Now, it's recommended only if...

It's not just lack of security updates, it goes to the architecture. When XP was developed, some of the current kinds of threats didn't exist. You reach a point where there is only so much you can fix with patches when the foundation needs to be replaced.

If you normally don't have problems installing software and you do it regularly, it suggests that the problem is with what you are trying to install, not your computer. Most of the time, that error message is correct. If there is a problem with the installation file, you don't want to start...