[This overlapped with Acadia's post]

Acadia, cedarwolf, are you using a USB-powered external or does it come with a power adapter? USB-powered external sometimes just get too little power to function correctly.(Wouldn't explain why it worked first time, though, and probably they just wouldn't work at all)

Acadia, I'll repeat my question. Did you just reinstall Windows without installing separate chipset drivers? This may not be necessary for your laptop, but my pc's motherboard came with a cd with chipset drivers. Without them my AGP video card and network card would not be identified properly by Windows XP. USB2 should be XP (SP1/SP2) native, but you may have some particular chip.

cedarwolf, your drive is not overheating, is it? Is it hot to the touch?

Don't just reformat your external drive if you don't get it to work. As rty advises extract the hard drive from its case and try it on its own - or have someone try it for you, if you're not sure about doing this yourself.

Message edited on: 09/27/2005 03:30

Acadia, have you solved this problem yet? If I understand your post correctly, you have formatted your system drive and reinstalled an OS (which OS, BTW?). Did you install specific chipset/USB2 drivers? This may be necessary to get your system to run all hardware optimally, or even see it.

Momodot, try Macromedia Flash instead. I just tested the trial, and it still does what you described about SmartSketch - extrapolating shapes and painting-within-the-lines. That's actually pretty nifty functionality. Only thing is, Flash seems a bit like overkill for just making drawings. And it costs $399. Sorry for steering you towards Freehand.

If you use "fdisk /mbr" you will not lose partitions, only the MBR is rewritten. However, it is always best to backup anything important before doing anything on such a base level. That said, I have never had any problems with "fdisk /mbr". Hope this works for you. After you get things to work, make sure you run chkdsk on all of your partitions. There are bound to be some lost clusters somewhere after all this trouble.

Momodot, you must have meant FutureWave's SmartSketch. This morphed into Macromedia Flash, but is probably not anything like SmartSketch anymore. You may want to try a demo of Macromedia Freehand to see if it has any SmartSketch technology. (Note: Freehand's future is a little uncertain as Adobe wants to acquire Macromedia - exit Freehand in favour of Illustrator, probably). On the other hand, CorelDraw is a very nice program.

Corel bought JASC/PSP about a year ago, probably to have some entry-level editor to compete with Photoshop Elements. And PSP has some loyal following of course, although most were not too happy about Corel aquiring JASC. Guess PSPX will be the proof of the pudding...

Something else to consider; Corel is about to release version 10. (Although it may be some time before we can buy the international English version) http://www.corel.com/servlet/Satellite?pagename=Corel3/Products/Display&pid=1047025393924 That's a nice price actually (if you're in the US, that is)

If you registered PSP4, you may actually be able to upgrade to PSP9. It seems you have to contact Corel directly to "negotiate" upgrade pricing according to their website, although amazon.co.uk lists PSP9 Upgrade for 31.97. (I don't know in what way the upgrade checks if you're allowed to install it, so it may not be wise to buy that without contacting Corel) BTW Amazon UK lists PSP9 full including Photo Album 5 for 69.99. (Full on its own is 89.96????) And if you don't mind buying through one of those private sellers on Amazon you can get PSP8 new from about 9.

You better run, you better take cover... ;-)

As already mentioned, have you tried "fdisk /mbr" from a DOS/Win98 boot floppy? Rebuilding the bootcfg or using fixmbr from the recovery console in XP may not be enough. XP will not forget previously identified partitions, unless you get fdisk to overwrite the entire MBR. It is possible XP is looking for something in the wrong place.

and can I get a link too, please?

Message edited on: 08/16/2005 04:49

(d)"I have a qwuestion about A Garcias models. In Vue 4 I could not find a way to export so why would he have locked the objects knowing that was the case." This you would have to ask Alan about. Those are his models, and so far as I know, -he- was the one who set all the parameters. Didn't e-on make this intentionally so? Because there wasn't a way to export models in Vue d'Esprit 4 - and likely no parameters to lock objects from export - when they introduced export in Vue 4 Professional they had to make it impossible to export models made in earlier versions. Has anyone ever really exported one of his own previous vob models? Because I have never been able to. That said, can't they get the suppliers to the cornucopia store to supply their models without restrictions or in different formats? Or at least show a clear warning if a model can't be exported, for example if it was created in Vue4 or earlier. (Maybe they already have, but I haven't really seen the cornucopia store yet, as it has been down for servicing ever since I first saw the opening anouncement!)

That's not a really fair comparison. Those are price differences after taxation. Plus, I can shop around for cheaper petrol/hotels/bread. However, annoying as those price differences may be - especially since Vue is shipped from/manufactured in France - just imagine how much fun you'll have with Infinite. If you can afford it, get it.

Kate: The demo version - so probably this goes for the full version as well - does not have to be installed to C:. I have it installed to my programs partition on D: and it works fine. I just tried it on E: and it works fine as well. You can even have poser installed to a different folder (with the script still in the default runtime). However, you cannot have a folder name in your path starting with a number - like 3d - or the letter x (internal variable?). BTW I'm running XP, but it should work like this on W2K.