Two sane questions and a stupid question

[devi]

Sane No.1: Does anyone know anything about those 'buy a piece of rainforest' schemes as seen on Good Gifts and similar places? If you do buy some, does it actually mean anything? Do the bought pieces of forest actually get protected from logging and so on? Apparently they're 'held in public ownership'. I wonder what that means.

Sane No.2: For the Londoners - what's your favourite London-related charity? Why?

Stupid: Um... how do you actually format a hard disc? Do you just go to the DOS prompt and type format c:? It's been so long since I've done it, and none of the GUI-based system tools (eg System Restore) are working on the sick machine. They just won't display.

Comments

[al-fruitbat.livejournal.com]

I remember reading a Tube ad for that company, and they do sell revolving goats (http://www.goodgifts.org/goodgifts/product_info.php?cPath=67&products_id=76).

[ultraruby.livejournal.com]

London Play is a good London charity....but then I have to say that, cos I'm on the board. (www.londonplay.org.uk)
Are you thinking of making a donation or doing some volunteering? And what sort of things are you interested in?

[bluedevi.livejournal.com]

I have a crazy stunt in mind (shhh, details when I've actually decided how to do it). I was going to do it anyway just so I could write about it, but I've been putting it off for six months because it's probably going to be quite gruelling. I thought if people sponsored me to do it, it would make me do it. And be of some use too.

[ex-humanfema327.livejournal.com]

if you want to reformat a drive you have to boot from another drive like a cd or floppy disk. if you have windows xp cd that will offer you to reformat when you boot from it.

[bluedevi.livejournal.com]

Hmm, the XP CD won't actually boot at startup, it seems. But I'm reinstalling from it anyway. We'll see, and thanks.

[caescarna.livejournal.com]

To boot a PC from a cd - you need to set the CD device in the BIOS as the first available device to boot from. Also - creating rescue disks and setting a system restore point prior to each installation of software / hardware are good ideas.

[lostcarpark.livejournal.com]

It depends how new your PC is. Anything built within the last five years should be able to boot off CD, but you generally need to go into the BIOS settings and make the CD the first boot device.

If this doesn't work, you may need to make boot disks, which do the first part of the install before looking for the CD. There's a utility on the CD for making these. However, if your PC can't boot off CD, chances are it won't be capable of having enough RAM for XP to be worthwhile.

Regarding formatting, there are a couple of routes you can take.

If the drive itself is suspect, the safest course is to download the utility from the manufacturer. Nowadays these are generally interchangable, but it's safest to check the make of hard disk and download the utility from that manufacturer. Generally these need to run from DOS, so you may need to make a DOS boot disk. You can get one here (or at least a utility to make one).

The utility will chack out the disk at the surface layer, and can perform a "low level format", which will move bits of the logical space around to avoid damaged areas.

If you're not concerned about the drive integrity, you can skip that step and use the Windows CD to delete existing partitions and create and format new ones. Alternatively, you can boot in DOS and use FDISK to delete and recreate partitions. But if you're installing Windows, you're probably best off using its installer.

[nisaba.livejournal.com]

Eaves Housing. ladycat works there, and it's horrific the kind of things that still happen in what we like to think of as modern times. Surely kidnapping women in poor countries and selling them into sexual slavery in "civilised" places such as the UK went out with the dark ages?

Sadly not.

[verlaine.livejournal.com]

q.v. extremely depressing but all too realistic film Lilya 4-Ever.

[clarisinda.livejournal.com]

1) I'd wondered that too. Don't know.

2) St. Mungos (www.mungos.org). They help loads of homeless people in London, (particularly round King's Cross/Euston where I work) get off the streets, find homes and back into work. I've been supporting them for a couple of years - admittedly in part because I felt guilty ignoring all the homeless people I see round here every day. I don't know how much difference if any it makes really, but surely it's better than doing nothing? I don't know...

3) I haven't a clue.

[clarisinda.livejournal.com]

sorry, that link won't work - try this (http://www.mungos.org/).

[addedentry.livejournal.com]

huskyteer approves of St Mungo's because they let homeless people keep their dogs with them. I think it helps that she often beat their team at football.

[iresprite.livejournal.com]

I don't have any answers, but I really wanted to point you to this post in light of your posts about the posh prick you had in class.

Intelligence, apparently

[a-llusive.livejournal.com]

Intelligence, in case you missed it.
I tried e-mailing you, but it failed.

Re: Intelligence, apparently

[bluedevi.livejournal.com]

la-revolucion.com is still not working. Have you tried gmail? See a couple of posts back.