I have the HP DC5000 DVD writer. I recently went over to Vista and it now doesn’t work. Thanks!
I went over to the HP site and found this page. Basically it says that there are no Vista drivers for the drive. Now you can try the drivers found on that page, it’s unlikely that they’ll work but it doesn’t hurt to try.
You can also try calling HP and asking them: “Are you going to make a Vista driver for this device?”
The Fake Geek
I have my Linksys WiFi router on the top floor of my house. My room is in the basement and I have a laptop there. When I’m near the the router or on the same floor I get a nice speed but when I’m in the basement the speed drops by half. What should I do ? Should I install the D-Link Wireless RangeBooster N Router (DIR-625) will that help? What can you suggest?
The basement is a very unfriendly place for a wireless signal. There are cables running through there and all sorts of
things that can mess it up. Now what you have is called a G router. G was the standard for a while until the smart guys in Silicon Valley came up with some called the N router.
Basically it’s a faster stronger version.
The N would give you more range down into the basement but keep in mind that your going to want to buy an N adapter card for your laptop. You can use an N router with the WiFi in your laptop now but it’s not gonna give you the full power of N.
If you don’t want to shell out that much money there is a slightly simpler router. Right now your laptop has it’s WiFi adapter hidden inside it’s body which will weaken the signal. You could buy an external antenna (such as a USB key or PCMCIA card) and that should boost it a little bit.
Something else I would recommend is buying a stronger antenna for your router. Many companies make these but I’ve heard that a small site called RadioLabs makes some pretty good ones. You can check them out here.
The Fake Geek
How do I get full screen in the Safari web browser?
You can do this a variety of ways:
The Fake Geek
I am thinking about buying a powerbook G4 the one I’m looking at has a 1ghz processor and the operating system is OS 10.4, the hard drive is 60gb and there is 1 GB of ram. Could you please tell me if this machine is capable of running Virtual PC? I need to run Microsoft Office 2003 on it.
Well first of all keep in mind you could buy the Mac version of Office and use that instead of running the Windows based program in virtualization. Buying the Mac version would probably cost the same of buying Virtual PC. But sometimes it’s true that you want to run more then just that one Windows program. So the answer is….
Yes! You can run Virtual PC on any G3 or higher computer with a version of OS X that is higher then 10.2.8. So that’s just fine and dandy. However you should know that Virtual PC runs kinda slow on the older Macs. The new dual core Intel-based iMacs are much better at virtualization.
It shouldn’t be too bad if your just running Word though.
The Fake Geek
Sometimes my computer seems to be running slow. How can I check
to see if there are unwanted things running on it?
To see if there are any unwanted applications running on your computer all you have to do is press these three keys at the same time: CTRL SHIFT ESC.
This combination will bring up something called the Task Manager and show you all the applications and processes you have running at the time. An application is one of your programs and a program will have one of more processes.
It’s not unusual to have about 30 processes running at the same time. If you have more then this then you might want to look into what each process does and stop the ones you don’t want. You’ll also want to be doing regular things such as disk defragmenting. For all that information just refer to this handy page here.
The Fake Geek
I’m looking for a new computer but I don’t want to have Windows Vista I want to stick with Windows XP. Do you know anyone who still sells computers with XP?
Sure do! Probably the most popular seller is Dell and you can see their selection here. They offer Windows XP on a select amount of desktops and laptops, not all of them. Check out their site and see if there’s anything you like on there.
Some manufacturers (I think Acer is one of them) offers computers with XP on them but only if you order the machine directly from them. I don’t know what models they’d offer and I’m sure you’d be paying a little more going that route….
Finally you can try your local little computer shop. These guys build the computers themselves in the back anyway and I’m sure many of them would be happy to oblige a request to put XP on the system. Keep in mind though that not all of them may do this but chances are they’ll cut some kind of deal with you.
The Fake Geek
I want to play music and sounds. Why does my computer’s sound crackle? I’m using Windows vista.
So I take it your just sitting there at your computer and you put on a song or video and it just starts to crackle. That’s got to be annoying!
First let’s make sure exactly where the problem lies. Try another pair of speakers with your computer and if the cracking still exists then it’s something to do with your computer. That’s when you try to fix it.
There are a few possible reason for this but chances are if your using Vista you may have to update the drivers for your motherboard (if it’s intergrated sound) or sound card (if it’s PCI card based sound.)
Go to the manufacturer’s website and find out what kind of motherboard you have and after you have that information go the the motherboard manufacturer’s site and download the newest drivers (ditto for the sound card route.)
If that doesn’t work and you do have a separate sound card you can try downloading PCI Latency Tool 3.1, it’s a free tool that fixes something called PCI latency. It can sometimes cause these type of problems with audio or video on separate PCI-based cards. I’m not sure if it’s completely compatible with Vista but it shouldn’t hurt to try it.
The Fake Geek
I’m looking to buy a new computer and I’m wondering how much storage I should have if I wanted to search the net, take pictures using a digital camera and burn music CDs?
Considering the the hard drives that come with computers today I’d say the lowest you’d want it to come with is 250 GB. Now looking at your needs your probably not going to use all that space but keep in mind that needs can change. If your dabbling in photography today (perhaps taking family pics) you might be inclined to use Photoshop in the future (which generates some hefty files) or even move onto video (in which case you’d want a 500GB drive minimum.)
For the casual internet surfer they don’t need much storage per se but as soon as you start to load those pictures and music onto your computer then that’s when you’ll be happy you have more.
And large hard drives are getting to be quite cheap.
The Fake Geek
I need to upgrade my computer and I’ve been told that RAM is the best option for doing this. How much is 2 GB stick of RAM?
RAM is indeed the cheapest and best way to upgrade a lagging computer. The cost for your proposed upgrade will be determined by what type of RAM you need. Different types (and speeds) of RAM will have different costs. If you need to know how to figure out what type of RAM you have then I would recommend using the free and very useful program CPU-Z.
If you needed (for example) PC 5400 DDR2 RAM then the cost is going to be around $200 bucks (as of September 1, 2007.)
The Fake Geek
I have a Linksys WRT54G router and I have a wireless network set up in my house. Recently the router has been randomly disconnecting. Why does it do that and what can I do?
This a common problem with all consumer-grade routers. They will work fine for a while but after a year or so many will start to drop the signal. This occurs for any of the following reasons:
There are a few things you can do. Try these in the following order:
There are also other things you can do (such as messing with the MTU) but if you’ve tried the above and the signal is still being dropped (by no less then TWO computers) then it’s probably time to get a new router.
The Fake Geek
