ffemtreed

Thanks everyone for the replies. I thought about the average age of account thing and I don't think it will hurt her. We have LOTS of accounts that are older with zero balances. I didn't even think of a credit increase to help a tad though. I have another AMEX card with a 10K limit on it. In the past AMEX let you move credit around your cards fairly easily. Maybe I can move like 9K from the other Amex to help with the utilization a little more. I can't see how that would hurt at all. I wish I had the 25K sitting in the bank to just pay off the Amex, but unfortuatly I need my extra cash for the down payment and reserves for the mortgage.

Thanks for the info! not the answer I was hoping to hear though. I don't want to dispute anything because I don't want any red flags going up at Amex and them decreasing my limits on other cards or anything like that. Its not worth it to us right now. I was hoping that I could just remove her and they would automaticlly drop the tradeline off her reports since she has no bearing on the card anymore.

Those scores for her were from the Mortgage broker. We pulled her two myfico reports in late april that showed her 710 midscore. We thought we were good to go, but when the mortgage company pulled her scores yesterday her mid score dropped into the 650's. So we pulled her Myfico reports again last night and sure enough her scores dropped from her Apr reports we pulled.

Hey everyone, its been awhile but I need some help for my wife. We are in the process of getting a mortgage and her score tanked over 60 points from 710 to 650 in two months which messes up our mortage since she needs 680 for us to qualify. From looking at what happend is that a couple of her old student loans got removed from some of her reports which killed her average age of accounts. Nothing else has changed on the reports, nothing negative and we paid down some balances over the past 2 months. Definatly nothing that should have tanked her score like that. We compared her reports side by side just to make sure. Anyways enough rambling about that, My main question is I have an AMEX account with a 25K balance (34K limit) that she is an AU on and reporting to all 3. That is our only credit debt, I am thinking that if I remove her as an AU that might be just enough to bump her scores to the 680. What I don't know is that when I remove her as an AU will AMEX actually remove the tradeline from her CR, or will she have to go through the dispute process and get it removed? Thanks in advance for any insight. Jim

the 75 dollar financing fee was a balance transfer fee from my credit card.

I am not going to sue them over this, I don't want the vehicle anymore because I now see how shady they are, same goes with any vehicle on the lot! I guess I am just wondering if there are any regulatory agency's that I should file a complaint with? All I really want from this dealership is my deposit and 75 financing fee I paid back.

same exact VIN number! They said they would refund my deposit. But I am still going to be out 75 bux for the finanacing fee I paid. It seems really wrong that they can do this. I can understand if I didn't put down 500 dollar deposit, but we had a deal.

Here is the situation, I went to a car dealer looking for a car to buy. I test drove it and all seemed well. Negotied a price with the dealership and put down a $500 dollar deposit on the vehicle. Worked out the finacing and was waiting for a check to arrive in the mail. (This was on Thursday 1/10/2008) well called today to make sure we have the insurance any everything straightened out so we can come get the vehicle tonight and they told us someone hit it last night and it was totallled. This is a crock of baloney, because it was sitting on a dealership lot wedged in between a bunch of other cars and there where no accidents or anything reported that night. Now for the kicker! I did some search and found the exact car sold on Ebay for 3 thousand dollars more than I had negotiated for. Do I have any recourse here?

I would absolutly pull the hard drives in those servers and put them in a safe. Don't try ANY investigation at all on those drives. if you really want to look around image the drive with a forensics drive imaging tool (Symantec Ghost I beleive has a -f option) and put the image on a new clean drive leaving the original "UNTOUCHED". Thanks for the input ZX10...this was all done before I came on board (last month). My job is NOT related to the system setup, security, and maintenance, but only to the software application that was installed and running. I was not made aware of the situation with the installer's history. As I have had them investigate along the way, more and more suspicious activity has come to light. I am not there, so I have tried to guide them long distance. We did everything we knew to do, and still couldn't access the network. That's when I decided to put it out here, since you and some of the others are so well versed. I hoped you could think of something we didn't. The owners are in a rather paranoid state...which is no surprise. They seem to trust me, even though I don't have a long history with them. It is agreed that the installer should not have been allowed on premises, but he lied to a new employee to gain access while the owners were not there. No excuse on their part for not confirming his story, but they just did not know to set up secure access procedures. This guy seems to really have taken advantage...sad to say the folks that own the company are not computer literate at all. There is much more to this story that I won't share publicly, but suffice it to say we are questioning if the fellow was hijacking the system and using it for possibly illegal purposes. At best, I suspect he was sabotaging the system periodically for financial gain, since at least two other reputable IT folks have been in there since last Thurs. and questioned so much of what I was questioning. We have disconnected the server(s). It also seems this fellow had set up a dual server system (I was never informed of this until today), and refuses to give them the password to the second server. We don't know what is on it or what it was for...and he is not talking. The owners are very peaceful people, but I am encouraging them to seek legal counsel, and, if he recommends it, seek criminal charges if they are applicable. I sincerely doubt that the server they could access has logging enabled...this guy takes the cake. At this point, we are sequestering the two machines in a secure location. Plus, I think they should not be touched so that any evidence present will be preserved. They are purchasing a new server machine, and will reinstall everything. The owners are scared to use the machines even if the drives were wiped and reinstalled with OS and applications. Hard lesson to learn. It really ruffles my feathers that this guy did this to some really nice, but naive folks. Thanks again to all of you who stepped up and offered help and guidance. You are the best!

I can assure you that SQL databases aren't accessed through a mapped drive. Are you sure its an SQL database? or is it an Access database? Users of an SQL database should never see the flat files associated with the database. What type of server are we talking about here? Windows 2003 with SQL 2005 on top of it? MSDE sql engine ? SQL express? Linux running Mysql? Also remember there are two sets of permissions if using a windows server. NTFS and Share level permissions. Users can click network places, see the mapped drive P, but cannot get to the folders on the server. Permissions for sharing have been set on the server and SQL and verified correct. They installed the database SQL as mapped, but no previous mapped areas. The configurations were correct as of last Wed. Thursday, nothing worked. Nothing new installed. Limited server access to change settings or install new software. The software/SQL worked for over a month before this. They said the switch, connecting cable, and NIC were changed on Sat. Still no access. We are going to pick this apart, piece by piece to find the problem. They insist that anti-virus and firewalls are off, but I am not convinced. Can still access internet from stations and server. Router appears OK. Hard to do long distance.

The user stations cannot access the server at all. It was originally set up as mapped. They can see the mapped drive on the station, but cannot access the server at all. SQL configuration was verified as correct. The software application used in this instance is functional on the server, where SQL resides. Going to try an walk them through some of the investigation process, thanks to all of you giving some guidance here. G I'll make doubly sure that the firewall(s) are off and anti-virus is disabled. Will check connections and NIC card and start adding components back in to see if we can isolate the problem. Please explain this part more -- users can see the mapped drive but can not access the data? They can see the files in the folder but can't open them? If so this is a file permissions error. As for the SQL part of this, you don't map a drive to an SQL database, thats not how SQL works. from what I gather is that you recently converted from using some type of mapped drive database to an sql based database. The old mapped drive database is still there but that isn't working either. I am leading down the path now that the client workstations application isn't configured correctly to access the SQL database or doesn't have permissions to access the database. Is this a new migration? you said it was working Wednesday, how long before wednesday was this same setup working? in other words was this just setup on Wednesday?

Just for clarification here on the problem. It sounds like everything works except the users at the workstations can't access the SQL database thats on the server? please correct me if I am wrong.

So you can get to the internet from the server? That almost makes it easy to diagnos this problem. It has to be software config related. I am still going to go back to my original thought of a software firewall. Not sure why it changed from Wednesday to Thursday. The fact that you can't ping, but still can get out tells me there is a firewall in play here. If the server is sitting in a DMZ then I would look at the router, if the server is hooked to the same lan segment as the 10 workstations then I would look at the config on the server, firewall specificlly. I would totally disable it. Is there any Anti virus stuff installed on the PC's and Server? If there is (which i hope there is) I would make sure they don't have other stuff included with it as part of a "security suite". For testing purposes I would disable ALL virus scanners,firewall and etc. I would also unplug the internet connection while doing this. If it still doens't work with all this turned off, I would then focus on the SQL server applet and program thats accessing the database. I would look at things like file permissions, is the ODBC connection setup correctly? Is the ODBC a User DSN or System DSN? Do your users have roaming profiles? are the same people logging into the same workstation each day? There are lots of variables that can cause this problem. I think we pretty much figured out the network was physically OK if everyone on the network can browse the internet. Sorry for the gender bender, it was completly unintentional!

I think his lan is setup properly since all the workstations can browse the internet just fine. Unless he has done something really crazy like creating VLANS and setup routes between all the VLANS. It would be really nice to know exactly which equipment was used to setup this network and where the IP addresses are coming from? DHCP from the router? DHCP from the server? all staticly assigned?

Just sitting here thinking, more about this. It almost has to be something simple. Is the server turned on? I know thats a very very dumb question but I have seen companies that hide servers in closets and assume its always on. Did the network cable come unplugged from the server? Do you have a link light on the NIC card (in the server) and also on the switch/port that its plugged into? Is this an application problem where the server rebooted and it just needs to be logged in for this program to run? Does it need to be logged in as a certain user? I guess what I am asking, does the application you are trying to access start as a service or application?