For more Leo and friends all week long, listen to the TWiT Netcast Network

«Previous Show

Next Show»

Saturday, August 14, 2004

Show #65

Give me a ring with your question, comment, or suggestion. 1–800–520–1534. If it has a chip in it we’ll talk about it - and there are no dumb questions!

Have you installed Windows XP Service Pack 2 yet? Share your experiences good and bad on the show today. Or vote in our poll: How has the install of Service Pack 2 gone for you?

Today’s news items

MSBlast is one-year-old and they still haven’t caught its author. The 19-year-old creator of a variant plead guilty this week, but he was just a script kiddy.

Will Gmail have to change its name? One company says the Google email service doesn’t own the copyright.

What’s happening to software sales? According to CNET, the big 25 software companies (like CA, SAP, Veritas, BMC, Oracle, and FileNet) say sales were off dramatically in June. They offer no explanation. Oracle was actually discounting its database software as much as 90%.

---

Noon-1p

Rhonda in Redlands - notebook or desktop?

Things to keep in mind: a notebook is slower, more expensive, and less upgradable than a desktop, but if portability is important, a notebook is appropriate. Notebook hard drives are slower and not as big (although you can get an external firewire drive if you need more capacity). The screens are not as big (although you can use an external monitor, mouse, and keyboard when you’re at your desk). Maximum RAM is usually lower with a notebook.

Cynthia in Midway City - protecting a new computer

Read my step-by-step guide for protecting a new machine. The Tips section has a number of useful guides for first time users.

Trevor Evans says: If downloading updates is too slow using dial up, consider ordering it on CD in the future for a fee. Service Pack 2 will be available in the future but Service Pack 1a is available now. It can be a great relief for dial up users who want to use the phone.

Glen in Placentia - Firewire vs USB 2.0

Glen is using a card reader for his camera’s memory cards, he’s disappointed with the speed of USB 1.1. That’s probably true. Today’s fast 40x and 80x flash cards are REALLY fast (each X = 150 kilobytes per second, so 40x is 6 MB/sec, 80x is 12 MB/sec). USB 1.1 tops out at 1.5MB/sec. USB 2.0 is nominally 480 KB/sec or 60 MB/sec. Firewire 400 is 50MB/sec. So either should be fast enough for even 80x memory.

Remember that nominal speeds are like automobile MPG estimates - real world speeds are usually 60–70% of the nominal speeds. I find that in real world applicatons Firewire is much faster than USB 2.0.

---

1–2p

Leeza in Pasadena - XP SP-2 horror story

She ran Windows Update this week and on reboot her computer crashed with the Blue Screen of Death. She unplugged it and it restarted fine and has been running fine ever since. Hmmm.

Curt in Long Beach - cross-platform web compatibility

He uses Dreamweaver for his page but notices it looks very different on Windows and Mac machines. I think it looks fine on my machines. Anyone have any suggestions? Check your site on the W3C HTML validator - it can often find problems in your page syntax.

Bob in Virginia - computer reboots every minute

Sasser alert - follow the instructions at RemovingSasser

Rob in San Diego - Are Raptors worth the bucks?

Rob is doing video and audio editing. He’s thinking of buying Western Digital’s high-speed Raptor drives. They’re pricey for the capacity ($156 for a 74 Gig drive at NewEgg), but they definitely are faster. I like mine very much.

---

2–3p

Billy in Huntington Beach - ex-boyfriend is messing with his girlfriend’s computer

It’s hard to tell exactly what he’s done. It could be as simple as knowing her Hotmail password. It could be as bad as putting a trojan horse on her computer that’s capturing everything she’s doing. Here are some steps she should try:

1. Update and run her anti-virus to check for Trojans - this doesn’t guarantee lack of trojan, but it’s a start. I would also run a couple of online anti-virus checkers

• Housecall from Trend Micro, makers of PC-Cillin
• Panda Active Scan from Panda Software

2. Change ALL passwords. Do it on another machine.

3. Finally, if he still seems to be able to get in, reformat and reinstall Windows. If your system is truly compromised that’s usually the only way to rid yourself of the intruder. Make sure you don’t backup the trojan when you backup your data.

Halley in San Berdoo - extracting audio from concert DVDs

Use DVD Audio Extractor - free to try for 30 days, $25 to buy.

sobruce77 says Why not just play the DVD and record the audio using the built in Windows recorder, or an audio recorder like Ulead? You could, of course, but you wouldn’t get the original digital audio - just the analog playback.

Phil in Calabasas - Tivo trouble

His picture is freezing and the Tivo is slooooow. Rebuild the Tivo using the preferences menu. If that doesn’t work your hard drive may be dying. You can replace it with any drive if you put the Tivo software on first. You can find a variety of (illegally modified) Tivo systems at www.dealdatabase.com/forum. www.weaknees.com does Tivo repair.

Mary Ann in Huntington Beach - sorting MP3s by the Comments field

Mary Ann is an aerobics instructor who likes to sort her MP3s by Beats Per Minute. She’s put that information into the Comments tag. She has added the Comments tag to the Details view of XP (right click on the fields at the top of the details view on any folder with music in it to see the the list of available tags) and she used to be able to sort by it. Something happened, though, and she can’t sort by Comments any more. All the other fields still work, just not comments.

I’m not sure why - it’s probably a damaged registry entry. I suggest trying Windows XP’s System Restore feature to go back to before this happened. I’ll look for the relevant Registry key.

You could also use an MP3 program that displays and sorts by tags. iTunes is one. The Godfather is a must have MP3 organizer that could help, too, either by adding the BPM to the file name, or by organizing the files on-screen.

Any other suggestions for this stumper????

Trevor Evans says: I don’t have any ideas for the Win XP registry, but may suggest two programs which might help. WinAmp is a great program which has an area called “Media Library” where in the “Local Media - Audio” area you can customize the columns to include the comments from the ID3 tag and sort by them in the same way as was done in the XP folder. Another which has trial version (maxiumum 10 mp3 files) is from the Collectorz, really great software. It is a great MP3 database software you can try for sorting or searching anything.

Jason in Laguna Hills - only sees 131 GB of his 250 GB hard drive

This is not uncommon. The IDE spec never anticipated drives bigger than 136.9 GB - that’s because it used 28-bit addressing. Newer systems support 48-bit addressing. Check for a BIOS upgrade to your motherboard that supports the new super-size hard drives. An external ATA card with its own BIOS can also solve this problem. Or you may be able to use software from the drive’s manufacturer to trick the system into using the larger drive.

Dan says: unless he has a SP1-integrated version of the XP install disk, he won’t be able to run the drive in it’s full capacity without partitioning it. XP will recognize and format over 137 gigs if your install disk is SP1 or later.

Here is a link to slipstream windows XP SP1, to create a bootable XP SP1 CD.

Trevor Evans says: Slipstreaming is the process where Windows updates like service packs (SP) are applied on the files on the Windows install CD before installing them and creating a bootable updated version of the Windows install CD. This allows a person to just install without the step of updating it after the installation, a great time saver when you want to do a clean installation in the future. The same instructions for slipstreaming SP1 can be done with the newly released SP2, which includes all update up to it release that also includes SP1.

---

Chat Logs and Show Audio

Show Archives
Hour 1 Chat	Hour 1 Audio
Hour 2 Chat	Hour 2 Audio
Hour 3 Chat	Hour 3 Audio

«Previous Show

Back to Top

Next Show»