Simon formatted an external hard drive under windows vista but now wants to use files backed up on it with windows xp but he keeps getting asked to re format the drive.

The drive should have been formatted as NTFS1 or FAT32 to start with…the result he’s got now is actually yet another example of Uncle Billy’s underplot for Vista to hook in the market.  Even back in 1992 MS admitted that they use formats as commercial weapons. The only thing he can do is to copy the stuff to a hard drive on Vista…format the drive to FAT32 and copy it back. Failing that…try reading it with one of the new Linux distros…which may or may not work. A live Linux CD would answer that. If it does then copy the data to another drive that has been formatted with XP.

Another way of solving it maybe to partition the drive using Vista..and then copy the data to a new FAT32 partition on the drive which XP will read.

Hope that helps.

Joe sent an email outlining his problem with several video cards failing. Heres what I think:

First off, Joe’s integrated on board video card socket stopped working so he bought a proper PCI Express card which worked fine for a few weeks then died. He then bought a new card which wont turn on his monitor!

This looks like a motherboard error.

The first thing to do is to check the bios and make sure the graphics adapter is set to pci and not onboard and then reboot. If there’s still nothing then it’s a major motherboard problem I would say. Normally, if a card just stops working then it points to the motherboard. It may be just a crap fitting job though so best check the mobo is screwed down well and all pci cards are fitting perfectly and beddded down.

It’s always best to take out all other cards and boot it up with just the graphics adapter. As above, check the bios. If for some reason the bios reverted to the onboard graphics when a pci graphics card was being used that would cause no monitor too.