Computing desk
< November 7	<< Oct \| November \| Dec >>	November 9 >

Welcome to the Wikipedia Computing Reference Desk Archives
The page you are currently viewing is an archive page. While you can leave answers for any questions shown below, please ask new questions on one of the current reference desk pages.

November 8

Problem making hyperlinks

I'm using MS Word 2004, and I'm having trouble making hyperlinks. When I paste a web address - say, www.blabla.com - into my document, rather than actually making it into a hyperlink, it just changes it to { HYPERLINK "www.blabla.com" }. How do I fix this? --Lazar Taxon 00:24, 8 November 2007 (UTC)[reply]

This is just a guess, but do you have an option titled something like "show fields" turned on? It could be that it is turning into a hyperlink, but that it's not showing it as a blue, underlined link. What happens if you place the cursor in the braces? Does that region of the document become shaded? --Tardis 15:42, 8 November 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Tardis is right: select Tools/Options, then the View tag, and make sure Show field codes is unchecked. AndrewWTaylor 19:34, 8 November 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Setting up a LAN 2

I have been allocated $5 million dollars to set up a high-speed, reliable LAN network for a school of 400 iMac's and about 1,000 students. What hardwares do you guys reckon will be good and what kind of internet connection should I get in order to allow high-speed access from all 400 computers simultaenously? Thank you. 71.18.216.110 02:00, 8 November 2007 (UTC)[reply]

$5 million? And our school's physics budget is only $1000 for 300 students... Depends on what you going to do with the network, you will want at least a gigabit backbone connected to a proxy running squid cache server and DansGuardian, connected to a fibre network or something that's available to your school. If the infrastructure (ethernet cables) is not laid already, a large chain of Wireless access points would be easier IMHO, but then getting an Airport card for every single iMac (unless you have the newest iMacs with it already built in) would be quite a hefty expense. --antilived^{T | C | G} 04:15, 8 November 2007 (UTC)[reply]

First hire me, my fee is 4.75 million dollars. You say you want high speed access simultaneously available to all 400 stations simultaneously but realistically only a fraction of them are going to be using any signifigant bandwidth at any one time. Seriously though, hire a consultant. -- Diletante 04:37, 8 November 2007 (UTC)[reply]

I agree. Hire a consultant, but to give you a quick overview, a T3 (~43Mbit/s) would provide, at full use, around 100kbit/s per computer (comparable to the upstream caps on many dsl/cable connections and ISDN), assuming minimal ethernet cable loss. I'm almost certain that all 400 workstations will never be all active and using the uplink at the same time, but if they are, it would be smart to run a caching proxy (as antilived mentioned), which will significantly reduce external bandwidth consumption and require less public IP address allocations due to the use of NAT (which, trust me, will save you lots of time justifying/configuring IP addresses for each workstation).

Anyway, a dedicated T3 averages $4,000-$16,000/month. The next big step up would be an OC3 (~150Mbit/s), which would almost certainly be overkill, but it nets around $20,000-$45,000/month, and will assure each workstation, at 100% internet use, ~350kbit/s— assuming minimal ethernet cable loss, which is comparable to half of entry level residential DSL downstream caps (768kbit/s). These figures are rough. It would be a good idea to survey other local schools/districts to figure out actual network use. Usually sysadmins in academia will be glad to talk about anything related to thair jobs if you buy them a $10 dollar lunch and listen to their complaints about "/lusers." :P When in doubt, bring up conversation about BOFH. :D --slakr^\ talk / 05:12, 8 November 2007 (UTC)[reply]

I'd love to know what school has a budget like that for a LAN. In my country, that kind of money might be able to build a small school. Holy shmoly! Sandman30s 14:33, 8 November 2007 (UTC)[reply]

No offense, but out of 1,000 students there are bound to be some who could actually do your job, blindfolded. Just hire a student as a "consultant" who does all the work for a little slice of that massive budget --⁪ffroth 18:31, 8 November 2007 (UTC)[reply]

fonts for CoCo2

What were the fonts used in CoCo2 computer? Or in DOS 5 or DOS 6 on old computers? (back before windows got popular) Can I use these fonts on my Win XP? I want it to look like early to mid 90s DOS, but keep the same pixel old look even at large sizes.--Sonjaaa 05:20, 8 November 2007 (UTC)[reply]

(this is the old DOS font- fixedsys)
I extracted the fonts from a CoCo emulator.. unfortunately, while it has the .FNT extension, the old fontedit.exe can't read it so I guess it's just raw pixel data instead of one of Microsoft's byzantine but standardized formats. I can't find anything in opentype or ttf either, sorry. You can actually use the CoCo2 emulator and run that instead of XP, if you want. --⁪ffroth 18:17, 8 November 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Kill the Neighbours

Is it possible to connect my laptop to my HiFi and if so how? I wish to get revenge on my neighbours for celine dion at 4 in the morning I was thinking a little Entombed or Slayer might do the trick...but how to connect the laptop to the hi fi... —Preceding unsigned comment added by 12.191.136.3 (talk) 12:49, 8 November 2007 (UTC)[reply]

lol yes you get a cable, with the one end that plugs into your earphone port, and the other end with RCA plugs (the red and white) that plug into your HiFi. But this is assuming you have such a setup. Some laptops have a digital out connection (either S/PDIF or CoAx) that you can connect with a digital (fibre) cable to newer HiFi amps. You then have to switch your amp to whatever the incoming port is called eg. Aux. Sandman30s 14:28, 8 November 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Yeah, you're going to need some kind of cable converter --⁪ffroth 18:22, 8 November 2007 (UTC)[reply]

You can get great quality sound out a real hi fi, rather than the toy computer speakers or laptop builtin speakers. Graeme Bartlett 20:17, 8 November 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Virus Help!

Does anyone know where I can get quick reliable anti-virus program that actually deletes the virus?! It also has to be free and no e-mail & stuff. Please help me out! BTW, even when I change my homepage on my computer it still pops up to this site:

(warning enter at your own risk) is it safe?

http://thesafetyfiles.com/

Have I become another victim of viruses? someone please help!

Regards, ♥ECH3LON ♥ 21:13, 8 November 2007 (UTC)[reply]

I would start with Spybot - Search & Destroy, being sure to also use the immunize function. When I did a search for "thesafetyfiles.com" there were a ton of results from Yahoo Answers, but I am unable to access those sites from this computer. Please consider switching to Mozilla Firefox or another alternate browser. --LarryMac | Talk 21:30, 8 November 2007 (UTC)[reply]

I am home now and can access the Yahoo sites. There are manual removal instructions [1] here; the page also offers a download of an automatic removal tool, I'm trying to check on the legitimacy of that. By the way, along with a spyware scanning program like SpyBot, for antivirus you might want to look at AVG Anti-virus or Avast, both are free and well-reviewed. --LarryMac | Talk 22:59, 8 November 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Haha that site is hilarious... Intruders can access my C:\ even though I'm on Ubuntu! --antilived^{T | C | G} 04:20, 9 November 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Viewing Chinese and Japanese text in Firefox - probably a really easy question

I'm using Mozilla Firefox in Windows. Currently I always see "?" or little boxes in place of Chinese and Japanese characters, for example on the Chinese astrology page on Wikipedia. (There are no problems displaying some other characters, like the Russian alphabet or IPA symbols.) Character Encoding is set to Unicode, but when I switched to Chinese Traditional or Chinese Simplified it made no difference. There's probably a plugin I can get to fix this easily but I searched Google and didn't get any helpful answers. What should I do? --60.241.217.147 23:31, 8 November 2007 (UTC)[reply]

You probably need fonts that have Chinese characters. --Spoon! 03:57, 9 November 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Install Eastern script support in Regional Settings in your Control Panel. --antilived^{T | C | G} 04:18, 9 November 2007 (UTC)[reply]