From the Newsgroups

The following is some excerpts from discussions recently held on the newsgroup that I feel are important and should be shared. To visit our newsgroup, go to news://news.oncomputers.info/News.Oncomputers.

On April 10th, Diamond Dave posted and asked if anyone could recommend which DVD recording format he should go for when selecting a recordable DVD drive, as there are different options out there. He didn't want to get stuck with one that would be obsolete in six months. Robert Proffitt suggests going with the DVD-R standard. He suggests this due to the fact that Apple uses it. Since Apple is still a leader in multimedia applications, this seems like a good recommendation. Rob (ultramaroon) said that he didn't want to be in that predicament and bought a Sony DRU500A that did two formats. MissM suggested going to http://www.dvdrhelp.com/dvdplayers.php which offers which DVD players support which format.

Sunfirey2k wanted to know how to disable the "pop-up spam" that is sent to people running XP directly connected to the internet. Here is how that spam works, and how to disable it. XP was built on the same technology that NT was built on. NT, being designed for the office, has a service call Messenger (NOT MSN Messenger IM service) that is used to send messages to other computers. Usually used by a network administrator to send a message to his users, perhaps advertising that a server was being rebooted, or something to that effect. This message appears as a pop-up on the user's computer. Since XP is built on the NT technology, it has this service built in. Someone as come up with a way to scan the internet, and send messages via this protocol to all users. To stop this from happening, all you have to do is shut off the Messenger service, as both AaronK and Robert Proffitt pointed out. To do this, go to Start -> Settings-> Control Panel. Open up Administrative Tools and open up Services. Scroll down the list until you see Messenger and click on Stop. That will shut the service off. If you don't ever want it to come back, double click on it and change the startup method from Automatic to none. Sunfirey2k was confused and thought this was the MSN Messenger service. These are two separate animals. MSN Messenger doesn't run as a service like this, so if you shut this off, MSN Messenger will still work.