If you put this back into the real world for a moment imagine that you dump a load of random documents, photos and other files on a desk, then employ a maid to come along and clear it all up for you. The maid isn't necessarily going to have any idea about who you are or what you do, so they're not going to do a particularly great job at organising it and you're going to have no idea as to where they put it. As the self-balancing binary tree teaches us, if you want to find something there's no better way to do so than to organise yourself first.

Have you tried turning it off and on again? Is it plugged in?

Windows XP comes with two repair options when you insert the CD. The repair you are prompted for at the first screen (ie. Press ENTER to install, R to repair) (aka. The Recovery Console) is useless unless you know exactly what's mucked up. The second repair (and part of the semi-amazing-usefulness of XP) requires you to go to install at the first screen. The installation routine will then scan your hard drive for a Windows installation and prompt you to repair it by pressing the R key. Upon pressing the R key setup will begin copying files to repair your copy of Windows. For this you will require your license key. If the installation routine doesn't find your copy of Windows to repair (ie. it prompts you for a partition to install Windows to) then you may need to do some poking in the Recovery Console.

Isn't there some kind of chicken and egg situation with writing a VB.NET compiler in VB.NET?

I have an iPaq 2200, which is amazing, apart from not having a built-in mobile adapter. It's got an SD/MMC slot and a CF2 slot and commercial IR with some universal remote software (oh the fun I have playing with that...). Also if you get some decent sized memory cards and can find some good Media Player software on the net then you've got something that is infinitely better than the iPod. I haven't done any serious development on the iPaq, but from my tinkering the most annoying thing has to be waiting for Visual Studio to deploy the .NET Compact Framework onto the device each time. Also the emulator isn't compatible with Data Execution Prevention feature of XP, so to use it you need to make changes to the boot.ini file to disable it.

I find it quite amusing that in the UK versions the guy playing the PC is so much more likable than the guy that plays the Mac, even my non-techy friends commented that based on personality they should have swapped parts.

You lucky people! I have to wait until it comes out on DVD because in the UK it's only shown on Sky One and I can only afford Freeview :( (which doesn't come with Sky One, although it does come with Sky Three, but by the time BSG appears on there the next season's DVDs have come out!)

Once you have the IDs you could use COUNTIF. If the client IDs are sequential then you could have a table of 1 to the current highest client ID and then add a few more rows for good luck and use either a formula or conditional formatting to hide the cell's value if the COUNT of a particular ClientID is 0 Otherwise it's VBA Macro time (have fun)...

Based upon most of the Dell users I know, anyone considering buying a Dell doesn't really deserve Linux...

One of ASP.NET's little quirks, you need to give the ASP.NET Machine Account (Usually ASPNET) write access to the Temp folder in the Windows directory. I believe it needs this to compile classes used for serialising the SOAP requests.

US rate: 10 pieces of pocket fluff Indian rate: 10,000 pieces of pocket fluff You see, Dell is currently trying to take over the world's pocket fluff economy so they can release it into thier PCs and cause them to overheat and die much quicker. This is why there is always so much dust inside a Dell computer of any age. Clearly there is more pocket fluff in India so its relative value is lower. P.S. Maybe if you send them more pocket fluff they'll upgrade the Hard disk!

Does it work with Visual Studio .NET 2003?

Just checking that Word, Excel and that lot is installed isn't quite what I want to do. If you go into Add/Remove programs can click Change on MS Office and then select add or remove components, you can see a listing of all the sub-components (ie. .NET programability support in Office 2003, or Mail Merge templates). Basically I want to check that all of this is installed during my programs installation.

As far as I can tell, the Install Root key only contains the path to which Microsoft Office was installed. Any other ideas?

Hi all, Seeing as there's no MS Office board, I thought I might try here. Basically what I want to do is during setup is to check that all components of Microsoft Office have been installed and if not, launch Windows Installer to install the rest of the components. Doing this during setup is not a problem for me, it's just the checking of components of Microsoft Office that's the real difficulty.

I'm currently working on a forum/message board engine for .NET - it's nowhere near finished yet, but if the project goes according to plan it would be possible to do what you describe (and it will be free!). Head over to http://pixa.dyndns.org/[^] for more information.

JCParker wrote:

McAfee AVG ZoneLabs Panda BitDefender Product of Last Resort -> Norton

You'd rate Panda above Norton? At least Norton allows your PC to work! Last time I tried to use Panda (clean machine, totally fine otherwise) it suffered RPC Server Failures whenever you tried to log on to Windows! One jolly trip into safe mode later to remove Panda and *tada* no more RPC failure

What happened to workarounds for Opera? Now there's a good browser!

When you run an application (debug build) from Visual Studio .NET 2003, you get the Locals and Autos windows. When you break program execution they display whatever variables happen to be around. They also display + signs next to variable names that refer to classes so you can see details about all the properties and members of that particular class. My problem is that when I click the plus sign, it goes away and neither Locals, Autos or Watch windows expand the properties or the class and I was wondering if anyone has any suggestions as to how I might solve this?