Computing desk
< April 15	<< Mar \| April \| May >>	April 17 >

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.

April 16

Previously selected links

Does anybody know of any way, be it browser, add-on or anything, to know when the last time you clicked a specific link was. I ask because I find it increasingly annoying when I see some user page, talk page or contribs link that is purple rather than blue and I have no idea why or when I clicked it. Thanks--Jac16888 ^Talk 00:52, 16 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Any respectable browser will have a good history function which should allow you to see at least what day it was that you clicked on the link. Google Chrome goes a step further and gives the time the link was clicked. All of this is moot, of course, when you or your browser clears the history. Xenon54 / talk / 00:56, 16 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]

You're right. I am a complete idiot. Cheers--Jac16888 ^Talk 01:00, 16 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Internet searches for non-linear notations

Mathematical formulas use numbers in different positions to signify different things: for example, right-hand subscript for the base in a positional numeral system, right-hand superscript for exponents. Sequence summations and sequence products, derivatives and integrals, matrices, and other mathematical expressions and formulas use numbers in different positions to mean different things. Chemical formulas use numbers in different positions for indicating different things: for example, right-hand subscript for number of atoms; right-hand superscript with + or - for ionic charge; left-hand superscript for isotope; left-hand subscript for atomic number.
Because the layout of those expressions is not completely linear, the task of searching for any of them on the Internet seems to be very challenging. How can one do an Internet search for a mathematical expression, a mathematical formula, a chemical formula, or a chemical equation?
-- Wavelength (talk) 01:18, 16 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Just look for keywords that you'd associate with the formula or equation. Keep in mind that a lot of the pages containing those formulas will be pdf's rather than html pages. Indexing software can make a pretty bad mess of pdf's sometimes. In some cases though, it will index a formula like "H₂O" as H2O, so you can look for that. 66.127.52.47 (talk) 02:06, 16 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]

For chemicals, IUPAC nomenclature is a standardized way to turn complex formulae into deterministic, unique names. Mathematical expressions often have a common-name; for example, the Euler identity refers to the same expression, no matter how it is notated. Nimur (talk) 05:24, 16 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you for those two replies, although I still seek a way to use non-linear notations. -- Wavelength (talk) 15:44, 17 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]

For chemical compounds and chemical reactions, InChI, SMILES and SMARTS are deterministic ways of turning a potentially complex chemical structure into a simple linear string of symbols. SMARTS was designed to be used as a query language, and many chemical databases are set up to do SMARTS searching. The other way chemical searches are done is to embed a structure-drawing applet into the search page. If you want an example of these in use, take a look at Chemspider. -- 174.24.208.192 (talk) 18:21, 18 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you for your answer and those links. It is a long time since I first noticed SMILES in infoboxes, but I did not take the time to find out more until after I read about it in this context. -- Wavelength (talk) 14:16, 19 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Do Internet search engines understand mathematical markup languages? -- Wavelength (talk) 17:15, 16 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]

It's worth noting that MathML has means to represent both presentation and semantic meaning. Presumably, there are "n-to-n" mappings between semantically-equivalent equation-representations and equivalently-formatted equation-representations. ("A = B" is semantically the same as "B = A"; and similarly, "(A/2 = B/2)" is not rendered the same as "

{\frac {A}{2}}={\frac {B}{2}}

") This would be a challenge for a search index, because an end-user would expect those logical equivalences to be preserved even though the linear representations are very different. This are trivially simple cases - imagine the difficulty with complicated expressions! I am not aware of any search-engines which even make an effort at addressing this problem. Nimur (talk) 18:27, 19 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Quality loss in rotated compressed images

When you open an image saved in a compressed format such as JPG, then edit it and save it, you will lose some of the image quality. Is that also true if the only thing you do is to rotate the image 90 or 180 degrees before you save it? My guess is that it won't affect picture quality, but I'm not sure.Sjö (talk) 06:30, 16 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]

It depends on what program you use. There is a plugin for IrfanView that lets you rotate images in 90° increments (and crop them) losslessly. But, the last time I heard, Photoshop does not do it losslessly.--Best Dog Ever (talk) 06:49, 16 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Yes. The problem is that JPG is a lossy compression format. I don't know what programs actually do that conversion before the rotation, but I'd assume many do. You could do it though in a non-lossy format (BMP, and others, I don't know offhand), and then convert it to JPEG. Shadowjams (talk) 07:27, 16 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Watch out, because re-compressing a JPEG can cause a further loss of quality. If the quality settings aren't exactly the same as those used to write it originally, there's even more danger. But doing work in a lossless format will allow you to save intermediate results, and only lose information once. (On the other hand, as long as the input and output formats have sufficiently high quality, it shouldn't be too bad.) Paul (Stansifer) 12:07, 16 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]

These programs can rotate and crop JPEG files losslessly. -- BenRG (talk) 08:27, 16 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]

External hard drives

Are external hard drives prone to fail more than internal hard drives if they are both subjected to the same conditions and time left on and data transferred etc? Thank you 82.43.89.71 (talk) 13:11, 16 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]

There's no reason to suppose so. The actual hard disk drives inside an external disk enclosure are the same kinds that are sold for use in desktops and laptops. -- Finlay McWalter • Talk 13:23, 16 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Heat, which affects lifespan, might differ between the two. The external drive has inherently better cooling, but adding a powerful case fan to the internal hard disk could more than overcome this diff. On the other hand, an external drive is probably more likely to fall off the table. StuRat (talk) 17:21, 16 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]

External 3.5" drives, especially cheap ones, often have worse cooling than internal ones. The external drive is in a tiny little box with no airflow (the small fan inside the box cool's the box's power supply but not the drive) instead of in a larger box with multiple fans. I get the impression that consumer external drives are made for occasional use, backing up files once in a while. These days they often use special purpose drive configurations; i.e. in the past, an USB external drive would have an IDE or SATA drive inside the box, plus a USB bridge chip to the internal interface. Now they put the USB interface onto the drive itself instead of IDE/SATA. That saves a little bit of cost and parts and lets them make the external enclosure slightly smaller. It also defeated the maneuver of taking apart an external drive to extract (and use in a PC) the internal drive it contained. 66.127.52.47 (talk) 18:30, 17 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]

dvd/vcr recorder

Can anyone help me to record from a vcr tape onto a dvd disc from a toshiba dvd/vcr recorder, i have put in both the recorded tape and the blank disc and pressed record but nothing happens i bought the machine second hand without an instruction manual. please assist, many thanks, roofingtop. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Roofingtop (talk • contribs) 15:34, 16 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]

If you tell us the model number, we can help you find the manual online. (Or you could google something like toshiba manual sd-v296 (substituting your recorder's model number for the "sd-v296")). If I was lucky in guessing you actually have the SD-V296, here is a page where you can click "Resources" and then can click the "Owner's Manual" link to get the PDF file. Comet Tuttle (talk) 16:46, 16 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Just a note of caution: In my experience, just Googling for a manual brings up many, many links but no manuals. Go directly to the manufacturers website and follow the support options there. You might have to look through the "older products" list and/or be liberal with your understanding of the product number - for example, suffix letters sometimes denote the market region, language or colour of the unit. So, for Toshiba USA you might want to start looking here, info for Europe seems more difficult to find online (you might have to call them). Astronaut (talk) 13:48, 17 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Laptop trouble (part 4)

Resolved

So, my old laptop is totally destroyed, sometimes, more often all the time, the screen refuses to work properly, showing random coloured patterns rather than the picture it should have, apparently the graphics card has melted or somthing, and I am about to throw it away. However, there is a folder with a few things on it that I would like to copy over to my new laptop first.

Problem is, my old laptop, the few times it does work properly, refuses to load. It claims my copy of windows, which I installed not long before it stopped working, is not genuine, even though I am sure it is, and that I have to activate it, but that also the activation time has expired, perhaps due to my not using it at all for some weeks after it stopped working before discovering that I hadn't backed up a few of my files on it. When I tell it to activate, the computer simply restarts, if I ask it to remind me later, it comes up with a black screen for a few seconds, then restarts. Is there anything I can do to get this stuff off my computer, short of smashing it open and plugging the hard drive into another computer somehow?

80.47.175.45 (talk) 15:37, 16 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I have managed to get it on in Safe Mode, but it seems to believe every file saved on the computer doesn't exist, therefore making it rather difficult for me to copy anything off of it. 80.47.175.45 (talk) 15:39, 16 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Turns out, starting it isn't the problem. Quite simply, the entire Documents folder has disappeared, taking with it all the work once in it, which may well be why it wasn't backed up with everything else. It says all the folders in it are unaffected, though refuses to tell me where they are, and that the Documents folder can now be safely deleted, useful information, I'm sure, however, it takes me no closer to rescuing this work of mine. It also seems the Search refuses to find anything that was once in it, but also it turns out now, a number of other random files that I have found myself right where they should be. What is going on here? 80.47.175.45 (talk) 15:56, 16 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Well, fixed now, it turns out it was renamed 'My Documents' and moved into another folder. Opening a program one of the files had been saved in then going to open the file I was looking for, I managed to find the location of this mysterious folder, and have rescued all my work. Thanks for all your help and sorry for taking up so much of your time. 80.47.175.45 (talk) 16:25, 16 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]

It's too late now, as you've moved on; but one solution to the problem of "broken laptop, need stuff from the hard disk" is to open up your broken laptop, remove the hard disk, and plug it into another PC as a second drive. If your notebook hard disk happens to be a SATA drive then this is easy; if it's an older PATA drive then there are adapters available; here is one that appears to be close to what you'd want. Comet Tuttle (talk) 16:42, 16 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]

PATH in Ubuntu

How can I know if a specific program is in my PATH? If it is not, how can I add it?--ProteanEd (talk) 16:33, 16 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Assuming we're talking about a command called foo, type which foo at the bash prompt, and it'll tell you where it's getting foo from; if foo isn't found in any of the directories on your path, which will report nothing. You can change the PATH variable for a single login only by simply by changing it as detailed here. If you make that same change to ~/.bashrc then all bashes that are subsequently spawned will have the change. But can I counsel caution - people sometimes put too much stuff into their PATH, and get confused when things work for them, but not for others, or when things don't work in other contexts. For things that are executed in a script (where you pay the penalty for more typing only once), it's generally a very good idea to refer to things by their absolute name (e.g. /usr/bin/foo) so there can be no mistake which foo you're getting. -- Finlay McWalter • Talk 16:43, 16 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for the prompt answer. Now I have another doubt. I type "which foo" and I get nothing (=> not in the PATH). I type "foo" and the program starts running. However, how does Ubuntu find the program, if it is not in the PATH? --ProteanEd (talk) 16:59, 16 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]

In that case it's probably a shell intrinsic (that is, it's implemented by the bash interpreter itself, rather than by an external command). Commands like set and if are like this. Look it up in the (gargantuan) bash manpage. -- Finlay McWalter • Talk 17:09, 16 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Or it could be a shell alias. Type alias foo and it'll show you what the alias is to. -- Finlay McWalter • Talk 17:29, 16 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Firefox live bookmarks

Firefox's live bookmarks contain fifty items-- which is more than I need because I check them frequently and like to use "Open all in tabs"(a slow process with that many items). Is there any way I can change the number of items that appear in a live bookmark? 69.107.248.69 (talk) 16:55, 16 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]

WMV to MP4 converter

Are there any WMV to MP4 converters that are actually free instead of just advertising themselves as free but requiring you to pay if you actually want to do any converting (beyond a short sample)? --Tango (talk) 16:59, 16 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]

ffmpeg, MEncoder, and HandBrake can do this; but WMV can use several different codecs and you might find they're not all equally well supported. -- Finlay McWalter • Talk 17:07, 16 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]

And WMV#Video compression formats says that VLC media player (which has a transcoding wizard) reads all the WMV formats. -- Finlay McWalter • Talk 17:11, 16 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Mplayer can do this for some wmv codecs, I think. 66.127.52.47 (talk) 18:30, 16 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Font display issue in Word

File:Bliss demo.jpg

You'll need to view the full resolution to understand...

I recently purchased Jeremy Tankard's Bliss Pro font family. They all work beautifully in all programs, except for Bliss Pro ExtraLight (and its italic) in Microsoft Word 2007, running on a Windows 7 laptop. Does anyone have any advice on how I can get it working properly in Word? Thanks! ╟─Treasury Tag►First Secretary of State─╢ 17:16, 16 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]

It looks like it just might be an issue with having bold text on, did you check that ? StuRat (talk) 18:11, 16 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Yep, 'fraid it's not that. ╟─Treasury Tag►belonger─╢ 18:13, 16 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Most Microsoft Office products have extremely poor font support in my experience, and have for ages. I know, that doesn't help you, but it's likely the root of the problem. I don't know a workaround. But this is not uncommon, in my experience. It's especially bad with font families that have all sorts of weighted versions—I'm not surprised its an ExtraLight that's coming out wrong. Word (and Powerpoint) is pretty bad at making sense of complicated font families. --Mr.98 (talk) 23:41, 16 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Formatting your hard disk

I recently started watching reruns of Bewitched, which reminded me that I had figured out how to look at old columns by Dr. Bombay but forgot about him. ~~If you don't know who he is, click on the link farthest to the right on my user page~~. I guess it would be all right to link to a user space article. As a matter of fact, I'd like someone to evaulate the article, which still lacks a lot but has everything encyclopedic I've found so far, and possibly some material that isn't.

The Doctor advised someone to reformat the hard disk, which means the problem must have been pretty extreme; I'm currently reading his 2006 columns when I go to a library that gives me access to them. So the question has to be asked: when you reinstall everything, where is the software to make that happen, since it obviously isn't on the disk any more?Vchimpanzee · talk · contributions · 19:17, 16 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I'm a little confused by what you mean. When you reformat a hard disk, typically you run the reformat program from another bootable media like a CD-ROM, USB stick, or in years past a floppy disk. Then, to reinstall everything the OS is copied from the CD-ROM / USB / floppy to the computers hard drive, and finally a boot sector is written to the hard disk to that the computer can boot directly from it. 82.43.89.71 (talk) 19:35, 16 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I did leave that part out, but the computer still needs something to tell it what to do with the CD-ROM, USB stick or floppy disk that has what's being reinstalled.Vchimpanzee · talk · contributions · 19:45, 16 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]

That stuff is usually on the BIOS, not on the hard disk, although some older computers, like mine, don't know what to do with a USB stick, and do need to have a driver installed on the hard drive for it to work. StuRat (talk) 19:49, 16 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks. I see you can lose the BIOS too, and that means you're REALLY in trouble.Vchimpanzee · talk · contributions · 19:55, 16 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]

It would be extraordinary for someone to "lose the BIOS". Your computer's BIOS is stored in an EEPROM chip on the computer's motherboard. When you first boot up the computer, its BIOS goes through a list of what sorts of drives to try to boot. Usually it first looks for an optical drive, and if it finds one, it attempts to boot from it; if this fails, it looks for a hard disk, and if it finds one, it attempts to boot from it; and if this fails, it looks for a USB drive that it can boot from, and attempts to boot from that. So if you format your hard disk and you want to reinstall Windows from a disc, the BIOS first finds your optical drive, reads the first few disk sectors from it, identifies that the disc is a boot disc, and then starts executing the code that it loaded from the disc in order to load up the installer from the disc. Anyway, "losing" the BIOS is technically possible — there has been malware that targets the user's BIOS; and it's probably also possible to corrupt your BIOS if you were to, say, unplug the power from your computer during a BIOS update that you initiated — but I've never seen it occur. Comet Tuttle (talk) 20:27, 16 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Or you can corrupt your BIOS from a botched BIOS update that got me 3 replacement motherboards for my Dell laptop. Back in the days the CIH virus would corrupt the BIOS and really brick a computer, and there's this whole section of how to fix it on computer columns, from buying an EEPROM flasher to finding another computer with the same motherboard, boot it up, swap out the BIOS chip while it's on and run the BIOS flashing utility. Good thing these kind of things don't happen anymore. --antilived^{T | C | G} 14:48, 17 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]

.txt mess

Resolved

Hi! I've been working in Java with about 100,000 Spanish text files downloaded from the web, and by one way or another, they are not all using the same encoding. They all display correctly in Microsoft Notepad, but when I load them into Java using a FileReader, the characters with diacritics are printed incorrectly in some files. What is a quick and easy way to convert all the 100,000+ files into UTF-8 encoding, given they seem to arbitrarily be of slightly different encodings? Thank you!--el Aprel (^facta-_facienda) 20:59, 16 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Firstly, what does "printed" mean in this context? If you mean you're sending stdout to the console, does the console on your system actually support the chars (and glyphs) you're sending it?

Secondly, to convert chars from one encoding to another, the only way that springs to mind is:

read bytes from the input
construct a new java.lang.String using the charsetName option, specifying the charset that the input file is encoded with
recode that to the output charset with that string's .getBytes call (the one that lets you specify charsetName)
emit those bytes to the output

(hmm, java.nio.charset.Charset has some convenience methods that might be easier for you, depending on what you're doing)

Available charsetNames are listed in java.nio.charset.Charset and this list (!!!). But that leaves you the problem of determining the input charset, and I'm not aware of a standard call to do that. I guess there are heuristic ways to figure out what charset a given text is, but as you expect the input text to be Spanish there appears to be only two special charsets plus the UTFs. -- Finlay McWalter • Talk 21:34, 16 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you for your response, Finlay McWalter. My main problem is in fact identifying the charset used for each document. I figured that if Notepad can render all the documents correctly (or at least the sample that wasn't decoded correctly in Java), then there must be some way to recognize from the text file the encoding. Any ideas?--el Aprel (^facta-_facienda) 21:47, 16 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Try ISO/IEC 8859-1. -- Finlay McWalter • Talk 21:49, 16 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Okay, so it looks like some are already UTF-8 and others are ISO 8859-1. How can I have the program recognize the correct encoding for each document like Notepad does?--el Aprel (^facta-_facienda) 21:56, 16 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]

You're going to have to do some kind of heuristic. In your case, hopefully they only use ASCII plus the stuff you just need for spanish (which I figure is upper and lower case c-cedilla, ene, and accented vowels). So you can scan and if all the chars are within that range, it's probably ISO 8859-1 Spanish. Or you can scan for the binary prefixes used in UTF-8#Description. Either way it's going to take some iterations, if there are weird chars you're not expecting. This claims to do a codepage heuristic; in general (which is probably too general for you) a statistical scheme is described here. -- Finlay McWalter • Talk 22:07, 16 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]

And here is how Raymond Chen says notepad does it. -- Finlay McWalter • Talk 22:11, 16 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you for all the information, Finlay McWalter. You have been very helpful. :) --el Aprel (^facta-_facienda) 22:14, 16 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]

You're welcome. Please let me know how you actually get on. -- Finlay McWalter • Talk 22:15, 16 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]

The "BOM" that Chen talks about is, incidentally, the byte order mark. -- Finlay McWalter • Talk 22:44, 16 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Okay, here's what I ended up doing: the bad decoding produced missing-character symbols (�) that weren't, obviously, present in the UTF-8 files Java recognizes, and since it turns out there were only two different encodings used in the files (UTF-8 and ISO-8859-1), I could recognize the ISO-8859-1 encoding just by the presence of the missing characters �. I'm posting my recoder code, for anyone who might run into this problem in the future and find it useful. Just put the while() loop inside a for() loop for multiple files.

Java code to find and recode ISO-8859-1 to Java-friendly UTF-8

BufferedReader reader = new BufferedReader(new FileReader("yourFile"));
String line;
while((line = reader.readLine()) != null) {
                if(line.contains("�")) {
                    rencode(yourfile);
                    break;
                }
            }
            reader.close();

private static void rencode(String file) throws IOException {
        BufferedReader reader2 = new BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader(new FileInputStream(file), Charset.forName("iso-8859-1")));
        Vector<String> lines = new Vector<String>();
        String line;
        while((line = reader2.readLine()) != null) {
            lines.add(line);
        }
        reader2.close();

        BufferedWriter writer = new BufferedWriter(new FileWriter(file));
        for(String thing : lines) {
            writer.write(thing);
            writer.newLine();
        }
        writer.close();
    }

--el Aprel (^facta-_facienda) 23:15, 16 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]

can any netbooks continue running while shut?

Can any netbooks continue running, playing streaming music, downloading, doing whatever, while physically closed shut? I am specifically interested in the EEE PC 1005ha. Can that do that? I don't mind if it has to be set in a setting somewhere, I'm just interested in whether any have that capability. Thank you. 84.153.218.136 (talk) 21:18, 16 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]

What kind of operating system (Windows, Ubuntu...) are you running on your EEE PC 1005ha ?
(If you supply that information, then you will probably get a much better answer! :-)
--Seren-dipper (talk) 21:35, 16 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Does closing it turn it off ? I'd think it would only turn the back-light off on the display. StuRat (talk) 21:51, 16 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]

As with most every laptop, it suspends it. Unlike most every laptop, the netbook is so small it would be quite useful to have it in a closed, bricklike position while it plays music through the headphone jack, for example, or finishes downloading, as another example (in this case a program can cause it to shut itself down once the download is finished). it would be much more manageable that way. It is running windows 7. any chance this, or any other netbook would have such a capability? Thanks. 84.153.218.136 (talk) 21:54, 16 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]

On my Eee 1000 running Kubuntu 9.10 this is configurable. It can be set to do nothing, turn off the screen, lock the screen, suspend to disk, suspend to ram, or shut down when the lid is closed. These can be configured separately for each power management profile as well, mine only locks the screen when the lid is closed and it is plugged in, so music keeps playing, but suspends to ram when running off of the battery. So I don't think this is an issue with the particular laptop, but instead depends on what OS you are running. I have no idea if Windows 7 has similar configuration options, but if it doesn't, it should. ;) Winston365 (talk) 22:29, 16 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I do not know for sure, but I strongly suspect that you may choose close-the-lid-behaviouor in Windows for netbooks, the same way you may do it on laptops.
On a laptop running WindowsXP it is done here:
START -> Control Panel -> Power options
Then in the "properties for Power options"-window there you coose the tab: Advanced. (Where you may choose what will happen when you close the lid on the laptop). :-)
--Seren-dipper (talk) 22:37, 16 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Oops! I forgot to mention that I looked this up on a non-english WindowsXP so my translations of the menu options (above) may be slightly off, compared to the actual wording in English WindowsXP.
--Seren-dipper (talk) 22:43, 16 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]

What Winston365 says for Kubuntu is also true for a Gnome environment like regular Ubuntu. For most laptops the lid-closed switch is just a special key on the keyboard, and is detected by the keyboard driver. On Linux it's relayed to the Freedesktop hardware abstraction layer (HAL), which on a Gnome platform reports it to Gnome Power Manager, which has the same options that Winston365 reports on KDE. I don't know for sure if the Xandros distribution that Linux EEEPCs use works the same way, but I'd be surprised if it doesn't. -- Finlay McWalter • Talk 23:17, 16 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Keep in mind that the hard drive may not be made for being used intensively while being jostled around... I wouldn't recommend closing a netbook while it is still on and then putting it in a bag and carrying it about. --Mr.98 (talk) 23:35, 16 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]

At least some netbooks have solid-state drives which wouldn't mind be jostled. You could probably look this up in your manual to see what kind of harddrive you've got. APL (talk) 05:05, 17 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]

On a Mac shutting the lid puts it in sleep mode so you can move it safely without damaging the hard drive. I don't know whether it'll play music whilst in sleep mode though. Chevymontecarlo. 08:01, 17 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]

On windows machines you can change the setting for what happens when the lid's closed. Go to power settings. It's under there. Shadowjams (talk) 08:55, 17 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Start with Windows_SideShow for netbooks/laptops that you can access certain apps, while the computer is ostensibly 'shut down'. It appears the minority of computers on the market support this.Cander0000 (talk) 06:58, 18 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]

On Windows 7 you can go to the start menu and open the control panel. Once the control panel is open you can then select "Hardware and Sound" followed by "Power Options". Once you have the Power Options control panel open you can click the link in the left sidebar that reads "Choose what closing the lid does". In that menu you may change the options relating to the closing of the lid and pressing the power button while the computer is plugged in or on battery power. TwinnedChimera (talk) 07:12, 18 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]