NSR: Any computer tech heads here?

[Dark Savante]

Hi, again folks

quick question hoping someone can help me out here :o

I have an .mkv extension file that I wish to transcode so that I can play it on a standard DVD player. The problem is that Nero does not even recognise .mkv extensions and I don't know any transcoding software that does. Can anyone tell me one that will let me transcode and burn to a DVd to play on a standard player?

Thanks.

[sidpaul]

here u go Ds
.mkv to vob (http://www.videohelp.com/guides.php?guideid=840#840)
or click on thishere (http://www.trustfm.net/divx/GuideAvi2Svcd.html) and choose view. has lots of screenshots to help u!!!! :)

[Dark Savante]

here u go Ds
.mkv to vob (http://www.videohelp.com/guides.php?guideid=840#840)
or click on thishere (http://www.trustfm.net/divx/GuideAvi2Svcd.html) and choose view. has lots of screenshots to help u!!!! :)
Cheers!!

Can't thank you enough. I'll give this a shot, looks like a toughie.

[bostonsoccermdl]

Wow...I know nothing about computers and it sounds like you guys are speaking a foreign language.

DS, if you need any help looking up internet porn, I can help you with that... :eek: :D

Beat me to it... lol. (On both accounts)

[Republic of Mancunia]

Does anyone know anything about firewalls?

First of all let me apologise in advance for the lack of techie speak, now onto the problem: I've just spent about 8 hours in sheer panic messing around with my PC, trying to 'fix' it, when all that was wrong with it appears to be firewall related.

I've been running ZoneAlarm (free version) and for some reason when booting up my PC one of ZA's processes (vsmon.exe) starting using up just about all of my CPU's resources and it's memory too. I was getting "low memory" warnings before even attempting to run any application and when I did it was taking 20 minutes or so for simple things like "my documents"to load up. Like I said it, it took about 8 hours for me to realise what the problem was,(I really dont know what I'm doing :confused: )

Anyway what I still don't understand is why this was happening? Can anyone explain or suggest a possible reason? The only way I could get my computer back up to speed was by uninstalling the firewall.

Another question while I'm here.... Is McAfee firewall any good and worth the money? I'm trialing it now for 30 days and use their anti-virus software anyway. If it's not worth the money are there any good free alternatives to ZA out there?

cheers.

[Achtung]

Sounds like a memory leak, which would be a bug in ZoneAlarm. I've heard the new version is prone to bugs anyway. If you can, try an older version of ZA, I think 5.5.

McAfee products generally do the job well, just that they can be a bit intrusive as well. If that doesn't bother you, they're worth the money. Their anti-virus is top notch, though to be honest I haven't used their firewall.

[StrikerCW]

I have Macafee's firewall (well it came with the system, it is their Security pack or somesuch) and it seems to do an ok job. My comp hasn't crashed yet from viruses.

As another good thing that I think everyone should do when on the internet is get Firefox (or something similiar) and get the extension that blocks JavaScripts. It apparently blocks out a good amount of potential viruses before they get there. And you can always allow by clicking the options button at the bottom and choosing which script on the page to allow.

[Republic of Mancunia]

Thanks for the input guys, and reading up on what a memory leak is it did sound like that was the problem. Other people also seemed to be having the same problem too after checking the ZoneAlarm users forum.

However, the problem has returned. :eek: It now overloads MSKServer, which is a process associated with McAfee Spamkiller and that takes all of my memory instead. If I kill the process from task manager then everything works fine except virus scan as it contnually hangs after getting through around a quarter of my hard drive with cpu usage at 100%.

Is it possible that this is virus related as it seems to have targeted two anti-virus related products? Or is just happening because they are pretty much the first things that load up upon start up and maybe the problem goes deeper than that?

Maybe it's because I've fried my memory (if that's possible) as I've been continuing to use my PC long after getting low memory warnings rather alot lately, (from playing football manager 2006 for hours on end).

I'm really clueless as to what's going on and any more input will be truly appreciated. I'd re-install windows, which is usually my solution to everything and see if that works but my dog ate the cd a couple of years ago. :D

[Stud83]

run msconfig and see what applications you have loading at startup. You can probably remove some of them, including anti-virus.
What kind of pc and memory do you have? You should probably get additional memory regardless to avoid low memory warnings.

[Achtung]

run msconfig and see what applications you have loading at startup. You can probably remove some of them, including anti-virus.
What kind of pc and memory do you have? You should probably get additional memory regardless to avoid low memory warnings.

Just beat me to it. Yeah definitely disable a lot of unnecessary startup stuff initially and see if that helps.

The low memory warnings could be swap space issues as well. How much space do you have free on your hard drive?

[Republic of Mancunia]

run msconfig and see what applications you have loading at startup. You can probably remove some of them, including anti-virus.
What kind of pc and memory do you have? You should probably get additional memory regardless to avoid low memory warnings.

Thanks. I started disabling different things here and there and rebooting to see if it made a difference. The only joy I got was when I disabled absolutely everything on startup but then when I launched (manually) McAfee security centre my virus scan was disabled and wouldn't start, even when clicking "enable".

My solution? Un-installed Spamkiller and the firewall. Tried to un-install the AV but it said it was already running when it wasn't :confused: so I just Re-installed the AV over the top of the existing one which now works fine.

I'm kicking SpamKiller into touch. For some reason McAfee won't let me download it from their site again and I had only a couple of weeks left on my subscription for that service anyway. Suppose I'll just have to put up with special offers to "enhance my penis" in my inbox for now. :)

Firewall.... lol, I'm back on ZoneAlarm (clean install) and everything is now running fine, even when allowing everything to begin upon startup.

As for my PC, well, it's about 3 years old and is not modified whatsoever:

Microsoft XP Home (SP2)
1.8 Ghz processor
60 GB hard drive
256 MB DDR Ram

Just beat me to it. Yeah definitely disable a lot of unnecessary startup stuff initially and see if that helps.

The low memory warnings could be swap space issues as well. How much space do you have free on your hard drive?.

According to my comp it's not actually a 60GB hard drive, it says it's 57.2 GB and I have 47.1 GB of free space. Could there be a reason for the difference in figures or do they just round up the numbers?

One last thing I should throw in. The very first time this happened, I re-started my comp as I couldn't figure out why it was running so slowly and when it did my computer ran something called "chkdisk" (sp?) and said that it was scanning for bad sectors, I think it found some and moved them but I have no idea what this means.

Hopefully everything is sorted now and I haven't had any problems as of yet. Thanks for everyone's help.

[Motterman]

One last thing I should throw in. The very first time this happened, I re-started my comp as I couldn't figure out why it was running so slowly and when it did my computer ran something called "chkdisk" (sp?) and said that it was scanning for bad sectors, I think it found some and moved them but I have no idea what this means.

Double click My Computer. Right click on your C drive, select Properties. Go to Tools menu, and click on Check Harddrive/Volume for Errors. This will run a more powerful tool called Scandisk, rather than Chkdisk. Oh yeah, select option to Automatically Fix Errors as well...

One more thing: back your sh!t up cause your drive may be about to crash

Have a nice day :)

[Republic of Mancunia]

Double click My Computer. Right click on your C drive, select Properties. Go to Tools menu, and click on Check Harddrive/Volume for Errors. This will run a more powerful tool called Scandisk, rather than Chkdisk. Oh yeah, select option to Automatically Fix Errors as well...

One more thing: back your sh!t up cause your drive may be about to crash

Have a nice day :)

Cheers Motterman, but from the tools menu I get error checking or defragmentation options and not check harddrive/volume for errors. I clicked error checking and got a couple of boxes which were Automatically fix file system errors and Scan for and attempt recovery of bad sectors. I checked both and rebooted thinking this was the same thing you were talking about, but upon restart it ran chkdsk again:

Verifying files
Verifying Indexes
Verifying security descriptors
Verifying file data
Verifying free space

A load of stuff quickly flashed up but I managed to see "0 bytes in bad sectors"

It then seemed to run something else which only took seconds and said, "The file type is NTFS, the volume is clean" . Maybe this was Scandisk, I don't know but it found no problems anyway. And about backing up.....I'll get right on it, good advice.

[Achtung]

According to my comp it's not actually a 60GB hard drive, it says it's 57.2 GB and I have 47.1 GB of free space. Could there be a reason for the difference in figures or do they just round up the numbers?

That's perfectly normal. The process of formatting "steals" sectors of your hard drive. It's the same reason my 4GB iPod only holds 3.7GB of music (well that and the OS).



One last thing I should throw in. The very first time this happened, I re-started my comp as I couldn't figure out why it was running so slowly and when it did my computer ran something called "chkdisk" (sp?) and said that it was scanning for bad sectors, I think it found some and moved them but I have no idea what this means.

Hopefully everything is sorted now and I haven't had any problems as of yet. Thanks for everyone's help.

As Motter said, a crash is a possibility, but the more likely cause is that you shutdown your computer incorrectly, or a program either crashed or was closed improperly, leading to something funky going on with the hard drive accessing memory. If it didn't find bad sectors, you *should* be fine, but in general its a good idea to backup stuff.

[Motterman]

Cheers Motterman, but from the tools menu I get error checking or defragmentation options and not check harddrive/volume for errors.

My bad, you said XP, that was Win2K

[Dark Savante]

Sorry to butt in here, just a quick Q
does anyone know anything about external hard drives?

I have just gotten one and it is a FAT32 I need to change it to NTFS will a simple format (from admin tools, disk management) allow me to do this?

Cheers.

[Achtung]

Sorry to butt in here, just a quick Q
does anyone know anything about external hard drives?

I have just gotten one and it is a FAT32 I need to change it to NTFS will a simple format (from admin tools, disk management) allow me to do this?

Cheers.

http://www.microsoft.com/technet/prodtechnol/winxppro/maintain/convertfat.mspx

:)

[Dark Savante]

http://www.microsoft.com/technet/prodtechnol/winxppro/maintain/convertfat.mspx

:)
*tiptoes out of thread leaving rep on Achtungs doorstep*

Ta

:)

[Dark Savante]

Um...me again :/

My PC is playing up something chronic and was hoping someone here could help me find a fix.

The dealy:

My PC is on pretty much 24/7. When not logged on here or sleeping I am constantl downloading things or upping stuff. My PC gets a proper break probably once or twice every 14days. As far as I'm aware as long as your fans are working and the machine is kept cool this shouldn't be a problem?

Anyway, I am getting a lot of blue screen error crashes of late, but that's not the worrying thing. The big problem is that when my machine crashes it doesn't reboot unless I leave it turned off for about 2hours :eek: in other words the monitor is on, the machine starts up (in terms of PSU and fans) but I get no ASUS intro display or any kind of signal - a black screen and then my monitor's green light goes to orange standby...as if the signal from my PC is being rejected?

The fact that my PC is doing this and I can't even access the BIOS from boot when it does this, is a huge concern. I took out my GFX card and cleaned it and the connections on Sunday and had a good look at all my components and didn't find anything wrong. I have a Tsunami case so I can see all components on start-up and all fans are working perfectly and when I do run Asus fan management (when machine works again after 2hrs) all fans are running at optimum..so I'm at a loss.

Any ideas?

The blue screen errors(BSE) are Machine_Check_Exceptions...I've had them before, but an ASUS update fixed that problem for a time, but seems to have returned...but a BSE has never caused my machine to not reboot or have to be left off for 2hrs to work again...so I don't think that's the problem.

What would usually cause susch a discrepency time between start-ups? and why does my machine work again if I leave it off for a period of time, but wont work if I try an immediate reboot? Is this PSU related?

My GF doesn't like me using her laptop to talk about football...so I need my machine back to full working order ASAP :( is this going to cost me money to fix?

Hey, hey, HEYYYY!! are you still alive? Done reading? :p Help meeee!!!

[Achtung]

Sounds like an issue that could be heat-related, and we're talking on the CPU. When you are able to boot up and get into the BIOS, what kind of temperatures are you seeing on the CPU?

By the way, you may be able to get some help from these folks (http://forums.anandtech.com/categories.aspx?catid=27&entercat=y). ;)