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Saturday, February 21, 2004

Show 15

It’s a rainy Saturday - let’s talk tech!

Coming up in the 1 o’clock hour - how to cheat on the Pepsi iTunes giveaway.

Such a shame - 321 Studios has been instructed by a Federal judge to stop selling their excellent DVDXCopy. The judge is saying you don’t have the right to copy DVDs you own. 321 will appeal.

A caller says his Tivo keeps recording stuff without his permission. You can turn off Tivo’s suggestions feature in the Preferences. On my DirecTivo I click Messages and Settings→My Preferences→Tivo Suggestions.

You don’t have to worry about wasted space since the suggestions are automatically erased if the space is needed. For improved suggestions use the thumbs up and down buttons. For a good laugh read Jeffrey Zaslow’s “My Tivo Thinks I’m Gay” article from the Wall St. Journal. It mentions the King of Queens episode that started it all.

Dan in Cypress says his Windows XP computer is dialing out automatically. There are three possible reasons for this. 1. Your email program is set to automatically check the mail periodically. Or some other program is dialing out to get online. 2. Some spyware is trying to update its ads. Fix that with Spybot S&D. 3. You’ve got a trojan dialer installed. This was a scam perpetrated by porn sites to gouge you big time by routing calls through Caribbean island republics. Check your phone bill!

Another caller is worried about using GPS in the tunnels - will he get lost? No. Built-in auto GPS has dead reckoning that works no matter where you are. It’s true handheld GPS devices will lose signal when there’s no line of sight to the satellites, but the maps still work until you reacquire the signal.

Daniel in Santa Ana wanted a recommendation for a GPS and PDA combo. I think the standalone GPS devices work better, but if you must I recommend the HP iPaq 4155 with the Bluetooth Pharos GPS device. He asked about TomTom - haven’t tried it, but I will.

Our caller from West Virginia wanted to know if XP has something equivalent to the System File Checker in Windows 98SE and Me. Nope. XP automatically checks the integrity of Windows system files and repairs them as needed.

Bill in Orange has an Explorer window that keeps popping up whenever he boots into Windows. It’s most likely that there’s a renegade Explorer command in one of the startup areas, the Startup folder, autoexec.nt, or the system registry. He’s using Windows 2000 so he can’t run MSConfig to examine the startup entries, but Mike Lin’s free Startup Control Panelwill do just as well.

I did a little research after the show and found a http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;[LN];170086 Microsoft Knowledge Base article that describes a similar problem that can be caused by a corrupt entry in the Windows Registry. The article describes the registry surgery you’ll need to perform to fix the bug.

A caller from Prescott Arizona wanted to make font sizes bigger for his elderly clients. In Mac OS X you can use the built-in magnification feature by pressing Command-Option-8. Zoom in with Command-Option-=; zoom out with Command-Option-dash. You can change these settings in the Universal Access system preference pane.

Windows has a similar magnifier. Activate it by opening Magnifier in the Programs→Accessories→Accessibility folder under the Start menu. You can also increase the size of items by using a lower screen resolution - 640 by 480 is usually the lower possible - and using the Appearance manager to increase text and font size. Open the Display control panel and click the Appearance tab. Individual programs can be configured to use larger fonts, usually in the Options… item. In the case of Internet Explorer you may have to override the font settings used by web page designers. You can do this by opening the Internet Options… item in the Tools menu then clicking the Accessibility… button. Check the “Ignore font sizes” box.

Katie in Lancaster keeps getting infected with Welchia and MSBlaster. Both are network worm viruses which can infect you as soon as you get online. To prevent these infections when you first install XP follow these steps in order:

• Install Windows XP
• Turn on the Windows firewall (Open Network Connections, right click your online connection, click Properties, click the Advanced Tab, then check the Internet Connection Firewall.)
• Get online and run Windows Update at windowsupdate.com, then install all Critical Updates. If you have to restart re-run Windows Update until there are no more critical updates to install.
• Install an anti-virus and update it immediately.

Make sure to run Windows Update regularly, or better yet, turn on Automatic Updates by opening the System Control Panel, click the Automatic Updates tab, then check either “Download the updates automatically” or the scheduled updates installer. You should also enable the automatic updates in your anti-virus.

Never lose in the Pepsi iTunes giveaway - details are online at MacMerc.

Howard in Fallbrook wanted to know the difference between a Pentium and Celeron in notebooks. I prefer the Pentium M in notebooks - it’s faster and a real power miser. My current fave is the Asus S5ne I have on loan from PROPortable. You don’t need to get Centrino, that’s just Intel marketing speak, but do get one with an internal Wi-Fi card - it’s nice not to have anything sticking out.

A Rancho Cucamongacaller was having trouble getting to his office computer from home using Symantec’s PCAnywhere. That’s because the host PC is behind a router which acts just like a firewall. In order to get any server working behind a firewall you’ve got to punch a hole in the firewall. In the case of a router this is usually called port forwarding. PCAnywhere uses TCP port 5631 and UDP port 5642. Port forward those ports to your desktop’s local IP address (192.168.1.xxx) and you should be able to log in. Read the details online at Symantec’s web site.

That’s it for today. Tune in and call in tomorrow!