Ask DACS
December 2008

by Jim Scheef

Ask DACS is a question and answer session held at the start of the monthly general meeting. We solicit questions from the floor and by email (AskDACS@dacs.org). Hopefully we find the answers from those present at the meeting.

There were no questions by email this month. You can send questions to askdacs@dacs.org and they will be considered at the next meeting.

Q: I use Firefox and installed Slacker (Internet radio) and now I can’t get it to unload. No matter what I do, whenever I start Firefox, Slacker loads.

A: A general lack of familiarity with Slacker made this question difficult to answer at the meeting. In fact, there was much disinformation and resulting confusion. Later investigation confirmed that Slacker is neither and Add-in or an Extension; it is a website that runs a very extensive Flash application to find and play Internet “radio stations”. (Unfortunately this does not appear to include streaming programs from actual broadcast stations.) One of the last suggestions from the meeting seems to be the more likely solutions: somehow the member made Slacker his home page for one of multiple home pages in Firefox. Firefox allows the user to designate more than one web page as a home page and it will open these pages in multiple tabs. Clearing Slacker from the home page list should solve the problem.

Q: My laptop is freezing intermittently. When it is frozen, it must be powered down by holding the power button. Once it has frozen, it will continue to refreeze during boot-up for some number of retries. I think it is a software problem. How can I debug the problem?

A: Suggestions quickly centered on a failing hard drive with failing RAM a close second. Warnings included an admonition to back up all valued data immediately.

Q: I have an external hard drive that works over the local area network. It seems to work fine but I don’t know how to assign it a drive letter. The drive is visible on the network and I can see shared directories on the drive. When I try to save a file to the network drive, there is no drive letter.

A: From the audience: In Windows Explorer, there is a function called “Map Network Drive”. On XP this is on the Tools menu. In Vista “Map Network drive” appears on the Windows Explorer tool bar when you are on the Computer view.

Naturally there is also a command line program to map a network drive. This works on any version of Windows (or even DOS) that has Microsoft networking enabled. The command syntax is:
prompt>NET USE [drive letter | *] \\targetComputername\sharename <options>

Type “NET USE /?” in a command window to see the complete syntax. This command line tool can be used in a batch file to automate mapping several drive letters automatically.

There must already be a network share on the remote computer, or in this case, the network attached storage drive for any of these methods to work.

Q: When I run AVG antivirus scan, it does not find any viruses but does report some “discrepancies”. For example, one file reported is \system32\NTOSKRNL.EXE plus two other files. Is this serious or can I ignore it?

A; The file NTOSKRNL.EXE is part of the core of Windows and could have been replaced by Windows Update. The other files sound like they are part of Sun Java which is updated periodically. I suspect you need to run something (an inoculate function perhaps) to tell AVG that these files have been updated. One member pointed out that AVG has a known problem of reporting some key Windows components as Trojans on some foreign language versions of Windows. There is more information on the DACS Community Forum

There was one question this month in the AskDACS section of the DACS Community Forum.
Q: I would like to know how to open Outlook Express from Firefox. I now have to open Internet Explorer, then open Outlook Express and close Explorer. Is there a way to open OE directly from Firefox?

A: You can read the answer at www.jasetaro.com/dacsforum/viewtopic.php?t=71.

Disclaimer: Ask DACS questions come from members by email or from the audience attending the general meeting. Answers are suggestions offered by meeting attendees and represent a general consensus of those responding. DACS offers no warrantee as to the correctness of the answers and anyone following these suggestions or answers does so at their own risk. In other words, we could be totally wrong!

Submit any question to: askdacs@dacs.org.