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Saturday, June 12, 2004

Show #47

Time to talk tech from our brand new studios!

 toc | toc 

Noon-1p

John in Yucca Valley

burned a CD with some precious photos - now he can’t read the CD. It’s often the case that the data is intact but the Table of Contents damaged. That’s why you should always verifiy a CD burn succeeded BEFORE you delete the originals. There are many CD Recovery programs. Try the free CDCheck first.

John in San Diego

want to make some money on his airline pilot pay site (by the way, great idea for a site, John). You could sell banner ads, of course. John Battelle makes a compelling case for ads that fit your site in Business 2.0 but who has the time to “hand” sell ads? I use Google’s AdSense program and I’ve found it works very well. It’s maintenance free and easy to implement and you can make pretty good money. You’ll have to apply to run Google ads, and most personal sites are turned down, but if you’re approved you’ll find it provides very palatable text ads that are easy to incorporate into your site and that are usually related to the content of your pages.

Terry in Aliso Viejo

is buying a notebook for her college bound daughter. Check my recommendations to George from Palos Verdes last week. And make sure to equip her with a good anti-virus and spyware protection. I recommend these free programs:

• AVG Free anti-virus
• Spybot Search & Destroy
• AdAware
• Spyware Blaster to block browser hijackers
• Yahoo Toolbar the new beta has a free version of PestPatrol

And read up on fighting spyware at Spywareinfo.com

1–2p

John in San Bernardino

wanted to know how hard it is to add RAM. It’s a snap - literally. Make sure you get the right kind - most RAM vendors like Crucial or Kingston have RAM selectors on their web sites that will help you choose - then open the case, and snap the RAM in. You can’t really go wrong - just make sure to discharge any static electricity before handling the RAM. He was also looking for a way to read Macintosh formatted disks on Windows machines. I recommend MacDrive from Mediafour.

Nicole in Los Angeles

needs help with Microsoft Word. She’s trying to replace all the occurrences of period-space-space with period-space, but Word won’t let her enter period-space in the replace field of the Find & Replace dialog. Here’s a workaround. Select an occurrence of period-space in your text then copy it to the clipboard (press Control-C to copy it). Use the special text ^c in the replace field to insert the contents of the clipboard. I would also check the AutoCorrect function to make sure you don’t have it set to replace period-space with period-space-space. There’s a great discussion of this whole issue on MSDN’s Channel 9. To permanently change Word’s settings for the number of spaces after a period, you’ll need to change the Grammar settings: Click Tools > Options > Spelling and Grammar. Under Grammar, select “Check grammar with spelling.” Then click Settings and set the number of spaces after a sentence.

Bob in Santa Clarita

has an unusual situation. He has cable modem service but his ISPs are SBC Yahoo! and America Online. For some reason from time to time he won’t be able to log on. Rebooting his Windows XP machine fixes the problem. This is an unusual combination, most cable companies both provide the Internet access and act as the ISP. I’m not sure what’s wrong here. Anyone have any suggestions?

2–3p

Jeremy in Palmdale

called to suggest that Bob was a little confused. If he has SBC Yahoo! he has DSL - not a cable modem. Of course! Jeremy suggests that the AOL dialer is conflicting with the SBC PPPoE dialer. I agree. The easiest and best solution is to uninstall the SBC software and use an external router to do the dialing. I’d get an inexpensive Netgear broadband router and set it up to do PPPoE. You can enter your SBC login details when you set up the router. Not only is this a more reliable setup it’s also safer since the router will act as a firewall.

Steve in Lancaster

is hearing clicks and pops when his iTunes music is playing back.

He wrote back later with this solution:

 Somebody at Apple Discussions iTunes forum posted that his
similar ‘pops & clicks’ disappeared after plugging his HK SoundSticks
directly into one of the on-board USB ports (vs a hub).

So, I unplugged my SoundSticks from a hub and directly into an on-board port.
Have gotten through 2 complete albums (very rare!) without a single glitch - fingers blue
& numb from keeping them crossed!

Pretty obscure - but hey - whatever works!

Keep up the great work, Leo - pleasure talking to you.

Steve

Mick from Silmar

says it’s the sound card. Turn the volume down on the computer and boost the volume with the amplifier on your speakers instead.

His question: he got a virus infection and in the process of cleaning things up key system files were deleted. He can’t boot his Windows XP machine. What’s he do next?

First step is to get a good copy of the data on your hard drive. I use Norton Ghost to do that. You can create a Ghost boot CD and if you have a CD burner in the machine you can make a backup of the entire drive. I’d do that before taking any further action, just to make sure you have a good backup. You can even use the Explorer feature in Ghost to restore your data to another PC. If you don’t have Ghost or a burner, you could remove the drive and put it in a working machine as the secondary drive to copy your data. Either way, make sure you back up your data before trying to fix XP.

Unlike older versions of Windows it’s not easy to get XP back on its feet. I’d suggest booting to the Windows XP install disc, act as if you’re going to install XP (in other words, don’t choose the recovery option). Once you accept the license agreement you’ll be offered a chance to Repair the existing XP install. This has yet to work for me (now you know why I spent so much time talking about backing up first) but it’s about your only option. If it fails, you’ll have to format the drive and install from scratch. Read the instructions here carefully before you try this.

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