Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Computing/2010 October 2

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October 2

GIS for Newbies

Can someone explain how GIS works in a much simpler way than the article? I find the lead is rather nonspecific whereas the remaining body is overly inaccessible to someone with no knowledge on the topic, at least in my personal opinion. Is it a computer program that stores data based on coordinates or locations on the map? I am not really sure. Are there any good non-Wikipedia websites that offer an intro to what GIS is? Thanks. --128.54.231.9 (talk) 09:06, 2 October 2010 (UTC)

GIS is a field of study. It covers the maths for describing (and converting) geographical locations and relationships, the data formats to store geographical info, and the software to process, change, render, and edit geographical information. -- Finlay McWalter ☻ Talk 10:58, 2 October 2010 (UTC)

Any authoritative, yet simpler introduction to the subject other than wikipedia? --128.54.231.9 (talk) 05:46, 3 October 2010 (UTC)

There's this book, which I haven't read, but which gets a couple of decent customer reviews. I have no idea whether it's simpler than our article. Even if you don't buy the book, the publisher's description might be of interest, as it gives an overview of the subject. --NorwegianBlue ^talk 12:26, 3 October 2010 (UTC)

Uninterruptible power supply

Resolved

I want to build a UPS. I have an old car battery, would that in combination with a dc-ac inverter be enough to power one desktop computer with lcd screen? How long would it run for? 82.44.55.25 (talk) 16:16, 2 October 2010 (UTC)

Car batteries are not designed to be deeply discharged, or to remain discharged for any length of time because this shortens their life. It would be better to keep you car battery charged with a charger that supplies power at about the same rate as your computer uses it, and rely on the battery only when the mains supply fails. (This is how a purpose-built UPS works, with a circuit that cuts the charging to a trickle when no current is being drawn.) Your dc-ac inverter uses switch-mode circuitry, and there can sometimes be a problem when this is connected to another switch-mode power supply in your computer. My laptop goes "haywire" when I try this, but your desktop might be OK if you have a good quality inverter. Dbfirs 16:49, 2 October 2010 (UTC)

How long would a standard car battery be able to run a desktop computer with lcd screen for? 82.44.55.25 (talk) 10:10, 3 October 2010 (UTC)

A typical car battery holds about 80 ampere-hours, that's less than a kilowatt-hour. The time that it would run your computer for depends on the power requirement of your computer and monitor, but for example, perhaps three hours at 300 watts consumption. As a car battery ages, its capacity reduces, so you might only get two hours out of a used battery. Dbfirs 17:08, 3 October 2010 (UTC)

Thanks :) 82.44.55.25 (talk) 17:11, 3 October 2010 (UTC)

Under intensive use (CD writing etc), a computer might draw up to 400 watts, so perhaps not even two hours with the monitor as well. Dbfirs 17:13, 3 October 2010 (UTC)

I fear it's much worse than that. That 400W is the DC output of the PSU, but the PSU isn't very efficient. Power supply unit (computer)#Energy efficiency puts it at 75% or so; so to supply 400W you'd need to consume ~540W on the AC end. When running off the battery, that 540W has to be supplied by the inverter, which itself isn't going to be perfectly efficient. If we handwave that at 75% efficiency also, that means you'd be drawing 720W off the battery to give the computer's components 400W; that virtually halves the time estimate. But 720W into 12v is a discharge of 60A; can an ordinary lead-acid battery safely and successfully discharge at 60A for a prolonged period? -- Finlay McWalter ☻ Talk 17:34, 3 October 2010 (UTC)

That's true, though I think you are putting forward the worst case. Some power supplies can be up to 94% efficient according to the same article. One must also factor in to the argument that it is rare for a normal home computer doing regular tasks to draw 400 watts. As little as 100 watts might be more realistic for some models in light use. I agree that a single car battery would struggle to sustain a 60 amp supply for very long, and perhaps several batteries in parallel might be needed. There is also the possible problem caused by putting two switch-mode transformers in series. It creates havoc with my laptop, but that might just be the fault of its cheap power supply or my cheap DC to AC inverter. (I would need an oscilloscope to see what was really happening.) Dbfirs 19:45, 3 October 2010 (UTC)

Yes, indeed. A practical concern remains regarding what one does with the time the UPS gives. Particularly for servers, given their high draw and the rubbish performance of UPSes (which mostly have rather expensive lead-acid batteries in them) it's only wise to use the UPS to bridge only small outages, and to use the rest of the leeway it grants for an ordered shutdown. The trouble is that shutdown wakes all the processes up (by sending them a SIGTERM) and they all get to do some disk activity, and the cache swap thrashes terribly, and only then the disks be synced and the system stopped - all the very opposite of the conservative power-sipping one wants when power is scarce. I used to have a modest server (dual-core Xeon, 6 disk raid, redundant PSU) running off a UPS which had a little indicator that showed the expected uptime at the current draw; it usually hovered at around 20 minutes. But when the power failed and the UPS told the server, the server started shutdown, and that 20 minute estimate plummeted to about 5 (which, as the batteries aged, fell such that the server barely got down in time). The worst-case scenario (yes, I like those) was the dreaded kangaroo-start, where some electrician somewhere was woggling the power on and off every few minutes. The server would shutdown, then restart, then down, etc. - but it took about 2 minutes in the achingly slow BIOS and OS load before it started the apcupsd (which, given the power was back off, told it to shut back down again). So each cycle chewed through maybe 4 minutes of UPS at full drain. TL;DR: batteries suck. -- Finlay McWalter ☻ Talk 20:13, 3 October 2010 (UTC)

For a server and several hard drives, I agree that one wouldn't get much use out of an old car battery. If the OP wants to use a computer for a significant time without mains power, then several batteries in parallel might be advisable. Finlay's comments on efficiency prompt me to wonder whether it would not be better to supply direct 12v and 5v supplies to the equipment from separate batteries. Are there any UPS units that do this? Dbfirs 08:10, 4 October 2010 (UTC)

DC power is common in telecoms back-office equipment, and are sometimes used for server applications, but I'm not aware that they're available for consumer/soho grade equipment. The very few places where people really care about workstation uptime (I guess military and emergency-response) rely on generators. There's some mention at Uninterruptible power_supply#DC power -- Finlay McWalter ☻ Talk 10:39, 4 October 2010 (UTC)

comments on efficiency prompt me to wonder whether it would not be better to supply direct 12v and 5v supplies... To improve the efficiency, look at a DC-to-DC converter. This should be more efficient than using an inverter to raise 12V to AC line voltage and then the PC's power supply to reduce down again. A linear type won't be too effective here since the voltage drop is large expressed as a ratio of input (12V) with the output probably being 5V or lower. The difference in voltage is essentially lost as heat. A switching type with DC input and output might work well though, the efficiency can be >75%. You'd need one with multiple outputs to match the inputs on your PC motherboard - or else use one DC-DC switching converter to an intermediate required voltage - say 5V and then linear converters to go from 5v to any lower voltages required by components -e.g. 3.3V. See DC-to-DC_converter. CDROM drives and hard disks might require 12V for the spindle motors - so just a linear converter for those taken off the battery direct - typically a car battery will provide something like 12.8V. 92.236.82.86 (talk) 22:28, 4 October 2010 (UTC)

Note that modern PCs including the motherboard and GPU typically draw a significant amount of their power from the 12V, often downconverting it internally as needed. In fact Google and Intel have sometimes advocated eliminating the 5V and 3.3V and just allowing the motherboard to downconvert as necessary particularly for data centres. Google already does this internally I believe, see [1] for example.

For those of us who can't afford specialised systems, there are things like the picoPSU which function as normal ATX power supplies but take 12V [2]. Their best current device is 160W max 200W peak which may not seem like much but as I mentioned a few days ago with some references you can actually supply quite a decent computer with that, people tend to seriously overestimate how much their computers use even under maximum load. (Efficiency for the 5V and 3.3V are around 94%+ [3].)

In terms of the 400W mentioned earlier, with a modern system I would expect you'd need a fancy graphics card (at least one PCI-express connector) and 4+ cores for a system to be using that under maximum load. And I'm more thinking the load at wall, since these are the more common figures you get as it's a lot easier to plug your computer into a kill-a-watt or other power meter then it is to measure the power usage from the PSU. Check out some of the links of posted before in previous discussions or silentpcreview or similar places for real world measurements. Of course if you are concerned about power usage, a 80 PLUS PSU, probably a gold or platinum is a good either.

BTW, I'm not so sure how well the 12V battery with linear regulator would work. The ATX standards specify a tolerance of 5% which means you don't want to go below 11.4V. But I'm not so sure whether going that low is such a good idea even if in theory it should be fine, most quality PSUs have far better tolerance then that. If we say 2.5% instead or 11.7V and looking at the graph at lead acid battery it seems you still have ~33% capacity. If you are using a battery designed to be deep discharged which you probably should be for UPS purposes (as our article on batteries mentions) this is quite a waste. More importantly, that's the open circuit voltage. My guess would be under a decent load say 17A depending on the battery of course you'd probably be wasting 50% of more the the capacity before it gets too low.

(If we're talking li-ion you probably have even less choice. Li-co or li-pol for example. You usually have 4.1 - 4.3V open circuit for a fully charged battery, this drops IIRC under load perhaps to about 3.6-4.0V but that's already getting to low if you only use 3 in series so you need four but you're now way too high for a linear regulator. The good news is you usually want to cut off at about 3V or even sooner under load to avoid causing damage which may lead to explosions so 4 batteries should provide at least 12V.)

I'm not sure what Google and others do. But for the home user with off the shelf components, a better option may be a higher voltage battery with switching conversion. In fact in such a case it's potentially better to eliminate the extra step/double conversion, the picoPSU designers do have some devices with a 12V-whatever which already do this although their best is 80W max, 120W peak [4]. The other alternative is to do something which can do up and down conversion although my understanding is this is more complicated then something which does down conversion only. The picoPSU designers do have something designed for automotive use which takes 6V-30V and can output 250W max (300W peak) [5]

Of course there may be better devices out there. It's not something that interests me that much I was just aware of the picoPSU for mostly unrelated reasons. In particular the picoPSU or I guess it's probably better to call them mini-box.com are unsurprisingly by the name concentrated on small box low power systems.

Nil Einne (talk) 11:11, 5 October 2010 (UTC)

A quick example of what I'm talking about. Some stats for a system with a Core i7-965 Extreme 3.2GHz and various GPUs. [6] Notice you actually need SLI/Crossfire (whether two cards or one of those cards with 2 GPUs) to go above 400W (and we're talking about at wall measurements)? Now I'm not sure what their load was, if you really want to maximise power usage with such a system perhaps Furmark combined with Intelburntest would be best? Although it's questionable if you'd ever achieve that in a real world situation IMO. Note that furmark is extreme enough that AMD/ATI at one stage (not sure if they still do) made their drivers detect if it was running (by exe name) and limit the GPU accordingly because they were scared it would kill the card MOSFETs/VRMs (I think it may have done so in some cases) [7]. Nil Einne (talk) 12:05, 5 October 2010 (UTC)

Odds

what are the odds of matching any 3 cards drawn from a deck of 52 playing cards with a single card drawn from a separate deck of 52 playing cards —Preceding unsigned comment added by 70.68.31.151 (talk) 17:34, 2 October 2010 (UTC)

There are 52 possible cards and 3 of them have the possibility of matching the original 3. So, 3 in 52 is your odds of getting one of those cards out of the deck of 52. -- kainaw™ 18:29, 2 October 2010 (UTC)

... though, being pedantic, 3/52 is the probability (which was probably what was being asked!) The "odds" are 49 to 3 against. Dbfirs 19:36, 2 October 2010 (UTC)

actually, that's not correct. drawing three cards is drawing without replacement, so your odds probability is 1/52 + 1/51 + 1/50 or .058839 (not the .057692 that 3/52 would suggest). Or so it seems to me... --Ludwigs2 04:50, 3 October 2010 (UTC)

No, Kainaw was right. That second term of 1/51 only applies when there was no match on the first card, so it needs to be multiplied by the probability of that, which is 51/52, giving 1/52. Similarly 1/50 needs to be multiplied by 50/51 and 51/52, again giving 1/52, so this method also produces a probability of 3/52. By the way, the RD/Math#Math desk would have been a better place for this question. --Anonymous, 05:06 UTC, October 3, 2010.

Ah, you're right (on both counts, actually). fair enough. --Ludwigs2 06:41, 3 October 2010 (UTC)

Mac database interface

I'm going to be putting together a rather simple document database, with a fairly small (e.g. probably less than a thousand records) dataset, for a rather elderly person soon, one that runs on a Mac. I haven't looked at the commercial-off-the-shelf database software lately, and wondered if anyone had any opinions as to what would be a good fit.

Requirements:

• Runs on a Mac.
• Pretty straightforward interface for a non-tech savvy person. (Note that I am tech savvy, so it doesn't have to be dumbed down to set up. It just needs to allow me to make a GUI for navigating the data that will be simple for this rather elderly person.)
• Needs to be able to handle PDFs natively. How this might work probably will depend on what is out there. Ideally it'd be nice if they could be viewed from within the database, but if they were externally linked (so they'd open up with Adobe Reader or something), that might be fine.

Free is nice but not required. I could of course labor to create something in MySQL/PHP and then install a MAMP on this guy's machine... but that's probably the most labor-intensive solution and it'd be nice to not have to re-invent the wheel. And it would also make it harder for future people to use, as they'd have set up the MAMP, which is just an extra pain in the neck I'd love to avoid.

Any thoughts? I have not played with OO.org Base for a long time but when I did the interface was clunky and it was pretty slow. I've been thinking about Bento but I've never used it and can't seem to find anything about its PDF capabilities (though I see it has a trial period, so maybe I'll give that a shot first). In a fix, bibliographic software like EndNote might work, though my past experience with them was that they were a pain to use and more complicated than I'd want this to be, but again it has been awhile. Any thoughts? --Mr.98 (talk) 17:35, 2 October 2010 (UTC)

If document management specifically is your goal, perhaps a document management system would be more appropriate than a naked database. I haven't personally used it (but then the for-money DMSes that I have used have been fairly unimpressive) but perhaps OpenKM will meet your goals. It will index a variety of documents, including PDFs. -- Finlay McWalter ☻ Talk 17:40, 2 October 2010 (UTC)

I haven't really looked at DMSes, I'll definitely check them out. Thanks. It looks like the OpenKMS GUI is a bit too scary for my target audience (this guy is not tech savvy), but maybe DMSes in general are a fruitful thing to investigate. --Mr.98 (talk) 01:56, 3 October 2010 (UTC)

Can you give more details about the way this database will be used (e.g., what are the kinds of data that need to be entered, how complex are the operations that need to be run on it, does it need to act as a server or is it a simple one-client db...?). A combination of Spotlight, metadata keys and smart folders can satisfy most simple file-oriented database requirements with minimal effort and an intuitive GUI. --Ludwigs2 18:29, 2 October 2010 (UTC)

FileMaker is popular with Mac users because of its ease of use.--Best Dog Ever (talk) 19:07, 2 October 2010 (UTC)

For mac, FileMaker is most likely what you're after as their isn't a mac version of Microsoft Access.Smallman12q (talk) 00:51, 3 October 2010 (UTC)

All of the FileMaker databases I've looked at in the past are basically big card file stacks. I find that kind of hard to deal with as an interface, personally, being more or less limited to looking at one piece of data at a time. Access is too far on the "pain in the neck" side of things even if it did have a Mac version. (Hence OO.org Base isn't really very appealing to me.) I say this as a very long-time Access programmer. :-) --Mr.98 (talk) 01:56, 3 October 2010 (UTC)

What I'm imagining is a pretty easy database scheme — titles, dates, authors, keywords, some notes, etc. And of course the documents themselves. The whole thing has to be pretty easily searchable. It'd be nice if the interface was something like a search box that then gave you a list of matching records, which could then be clicked on for the information about the record, and a link to the document itself. Pretty basic stuff. One could again whip it up with MySQL/PHP, but only with a great investment of time... It's a very simple model, nothing fancy, nothing even relational. What I'm looking for is more something that will allow me to make something with an easy-yet-powerful interface (not just searching through a stack) with a minimal amount of effort/time investment in setting it up. --Mr.98 (talk) 01:56, 3 October 2010 (UTC)

again, most of this is covered by Spotlight metadata - for instance, I can open a find window in the Finder and search for all PDF documents whose author is X and whose title contains Y, use Quicklook to choose the correct one, open it in Preview for viewing or to make annotations and add spotlight keywords. I can't really see why you need a relational database beyond what the system already offers you. You might need a metadata editor to fix pdf files that lack or have misinformation in their metadata if you're getting your pdfs from sketchy sources, but if you have well-formed files the system is already doing what you seem to want. --Ludwigs2 03:34, 3 October 2010 (UTC)

Spotlight is not a real database GUI. Trying to use it for anything complicated or systematic will not work. Plus you get the entire computer and not the specific dataset in question. Additionally, whenever a major OS change is made, the Spotlight interface and even method of operation can change. A filing system that is not predictably systematic is not an option. Anyway, thanks for the suggestion, but that's not going to work out for what I'm trying to use it for. --Mr.98 (talk) 14:04, 3 October 2010 (UTC)

Spotlight can easily be restricted to a single folder, and the underlying technology hasn't changed much at all since it's creation. Look, 98, I understand the resistance to using built-in technology (it seems somehow 'less than' and/or lacks a 'coolness' factor, plus there's that human irrationality where people will go out of their way to do unnecessary things because they don't feel like they've accomplished anything unless they've taken some kind of action), but if you're really trying to help this person then it behooves you to spend an hour looking into what's already there. spotlight is in fact a 'real' relational database system, deeply integrated into a 'real' graphical user interface (aka the Finder) and if it serves your needs you're not going to find anything easier to use or set up, not by half. Do as you like, but from the description you've given of the problem so far, I will (frankly) be surprised if you find anything as effective that doesn't involved extra costs, extra efforts and a noticeable learning curve. --Ludwigs2 16:17, 3 October 2010 (UTC)

Spotlight just doesn't seem like the right ticket for me. Let's just also point out that I might want this to be easily transferrable to other machines. I don't want to be having to go through and modifying everyone's Spotlight preferences every time they want to have a copy of the database. (I don't even want to modify *my* Spotlight preferences just so I can use this database!) And again, my experience with Spotlight so far is that depending on its identical functionality across OS versions is a very bad idea (it acts very differently between 10.4 and 10.6, I can say from experience). There's also zero possibility of setting up a custom interface or changing things if they aren't working the way I'd want them to. It's just not going to cut it for me for a variety of reasons, and frankly I don't think it's actually what it's good at. Spotlight isn't meant to be a customized database program; it's meant to be a filesystem searching program. I appreciate your help but it's just not what I'm looking for. I don't think you need to attribute my judgment on this to "human irrationality". I've been a database and UI designer for a looonggg time now and have a pretty good idea of what kinds of capabilities I would need such a system to have, and Spotlight (while it is very useful and clever) doesn't really have them. What I don't know is what the options are for off-the-shelf stuff... --Mr.98 (talk) 17:01, 3 October 2010 (UTC)

As I said, do as you like. but if this is what you're saying now then you clearly did not express the problem clearly above. why don't you start again from the top and explain in greater detail what it is you're trying to do. --Ludwigs2 17:10, 3 October 2010 (UTC)

Well, I didn't take into account every interpretation of my request, no, and I was fishing around for various ideas that I didn't want to artificially constrain by being overly picky from the beginning. I'm not unhappy with you for making the suggestion but I admit to some frustration at your absolute insistence of it being the One And Only Correct Choice and then criticizing me for not agreeing with you on it. --Mr.98 (talk) 20:58, 3 October 2010 (UTC)

It looks like what I'm looking for is really bibliographic/citation management software that is smarter than the stuff I have previously used. Something like Papers but not just tailored for use with scientific journals. (I've been playing with the trial download of Papers, and other than the fact that it has a lot of stuff that I don't need, and it is so rigidly insistent that everything I cite be a journal article, it works pretty well close to what I want in terms of interface.) Maybe EndNote, for all of its problems, is what I'm looking for in the end, since it does allow you a lot of flexibility in re-jiggering your fields. I'll fish around a bit along these lines as there do seem to be some options here. --Mr.98 (talk) 20:58, 3 October 2010 (UTC)

Mendeley's desktop client might do the trick; it's geared towards journal articles, but it's got an "other" category and a large set of fields. Paul (Stansifer) 20:49, 4 October 2010 (UTC)

noindex

Resolved

 – Ks0stm ^(T•C•G) 17:24, 3 October 2010 (UTC)

My facebook profile used to be within the top 10 for a search for my full name plus the City, State I live in. This concerned me greatly, so into my facebook profile I copied the text
<html> <head> <meta name="robots" content="noindex" /> <title>Don't index this page</title> </head>
hoping that it would remove my facebook profile from google searches. I did this quite some time ago (around 8 months to 1.5 years ago), and when I recently checked for it in search engines I couldn't find it. The only thing is that in the "page info" for my facebook profile url, the only robot orders it states are "noodp" and "noydir". Does one of these work in the same way as "noindex", or am I just lucky that my facebook profile isn't showing up in Google (I notice that other people with my same name's facebook profiles show up in google, but mine doesn't)? Ks0stm ^(T•C•G) 19:44, 2 October 2010 (UTC)

I don't know if Facebook sterilizes user profile content... I would guess they do... however you'd probably be better suited (even if your current approach works now) to change the privacy settings in Facebook itself. One of those allows you to not be listed in public search engines. There are other privacy settings you may be interested in as well. Shadowjams (talk) 20:18, 2 October 2010 (UTC)

Aha, found what you were talking about. This seems to explain why. Now, how do I get it to where I still don't show up in public searches once I turn 18 in a month? Ks0stm ^(T•C•G) 20:23, 2 October 2010 (UTC)

To make your Facebook account not show up on Google: Facebook > Account > Privacy Settings > Applications and Websites > Public Search > Edit Settings > Disable Public Search. They've hidden it good, no? --Mr.98 (talk) 02:07, 3 October 2010 (UTC)

Yeah, I never would have found that on my own. Thanks, that's pretty much all I needed. Ks0stm ^(T•C•G) 17:24, 3 October 2010 (UTC)

AppleMac 12" laptop, White

Resolved

 – Issue with extension settings

The above is running system 9 and the ability to 'drag and drop' has been lost. Any ideas as to how this might be restored please?--85.211.193.110 (talk) 21:08, 2 October 2010 (UTC)

What does it do when you try? I suspect it is a hardware problem (an issue with the mouse or trackpad) and not the operation system. Try hooking an external mouse up to it and seeing if that changes anything. The hardware must be ancient by computer standards if it is running 9. --Mr.98 (talk) 02:11, 3 October 2010 (UTC)

also, which generation Mac is it. a 12" white laptop is most likely an iBook g3 or ibook g4 - if the latter, you could upgrade it to Leopard Tiger relatively cheaply. in os 9 (If I remember correctly) drag and drop was added via a system extension - you could be seeing a corrupt extension or an extension conflict. have you added any new extensions or control panels recently, or added modules to existing extensions? --Ludwigs2 04:45, 3 October 2010 (UTC)

Yes it is an iBook, yes, it is, like me, OLD, but otherwise still useful. I don't use a mouse, just the trackpad. Nothing happens when I try to move an icon, it just stays put and don't move. I have not added any new extensions or control panels.--Artjo (talk) 06:42, 3 October 2010 (UTC)

You forgot to indent using colons. see wp:cheatsheet.

this is kind of hard to diagnose. if you can click on icons then it's probably not a mechanical problem, but you don't normally get random software failures - usually they happen just after you did something or changed something in the system (added a program, changed a setting, etc...). what were you doing just before this problem started happening? --Ludwigs2 06:47, 3 October 2010 (UTC)

Do you own a mouse your could try it with? The point is to try to figure out if there's something wrong with the touchpad (dragging will work with mouse.) or if a software setting has become screwed up somehow. (dragging won't work with mouse either.) APL (talk) 08:00, 3 October 2010 (UTC)

Problem SORTED. Fiddled with extension settings and all well now. Many thanks for your input, much appreciated. --Artjo (talk) 09:29, 3 October 2010 (UTC)

What controls this?

I have a desktop system at home, WinXP on a Dell box, and a similar system at the office, also WinXP but on a different Dellbox. From time to time I decide to clean the junk out of My Recent Documents, usually by exploring to C:\D&S\User\Recent and deleting away.

However, it's also possible to do this with popup menus, and here the two systems operate differently. I assume there's a configuration parameter that drives this, but don't have a clue what to call it or look for.

At Home	At Office
1) Click Start	Click Start
2) Hover to My Recent Documents	Hover to My Recent Documents
3) Slide to a document	Slide to a document
4) RIGHT-click	RIGHT-click
5) Popup menu appears	Popup menu appears
6) Click on Delete	Click on Delete
7) "Are You Sure" dialog appears; click OK	"Are You Sure" dialog appears; click OK
8) "Deleting" dialog appears, then closes	"Deleting" dialog appears, then closes
9) AYS closes	AYS closes
10) Start and Recent menus close	Start and Recent menus stay open
Begin at step 1 for the next file	Begin at step 3 for the next file

Naturally, the sequence of events where the Start menu does not close and needs not be renavigated is preferable. Anybody know what controls this behaviour, and how it can be configured on my home system?

Many Thanks, 97.116.127.118 (talk) 21:45, 2 October 2010 (UTC)

Hmmph. Failed to notice I wasn't logged in, sorry... DaHorsesMouth (talk) 21:49, 2 October 2010 (UTC)

For what it's worth, my XP system works like your "Home" configuration does. The first thing I would ask is the usually-difficult-to-answer question of what software differences, especially shell extensions, are installed on your home machine vs. your office machine. Comet Tuttle (talk) 16:40, 4 October 2010 (UTC)