A woman sent me a message on Facebook. The volume controls on her Windows 7 laptop where not working. I suggested first the classic fix of turning the computer off and on again. Didn't work. So next I suggested to remove the sound drivers and reinstall them by doing the following:
This will uninstall the sound drivers and reinstall them. This worked.
Speaking of sound issues. Just about every time I turn on or restart my desktop, my sound icon has a red x on it and if I put my mouse over it, up pops a message saying The Audio Service is not running. Sound still works by the way. So to get rid of this x I just click on it to open the volume control, Click on the little blue speaker icon to mute it then click on it a second time.
My Sister was trying to print up an email but didn't know how to do it. You could just right click on it or use the menu system built into the browser but your email will print up with all the menus and ads and whatever is displaying around and on that message. To print up a clean copy you should use the print option within the email program it self. She has an email account with outlook.com so in this case you would click on the word Actions (top right hand corner) then Print message.
Other email services should have similar options. Gmail has a small printer icon for example. Some websites also include their own embedded buttons, use them if available for best printing results.
Another option to get good printing results without all the extra fluff it to use a browser extension. I tried one for Opera called Print Waste Minimizer but it does work on mine but I have gotten to work on Chrome. One that does work on Opera is called cleanPages. It advertises itself as cleaning up the pages for easy reading but also has the option for clean printing as well.
Then a guy came to me and he wanted me to put on a program to Rip DVD's. He had a DVD that he wanted to copy to his hard drive in a format where he could then put it in Windows Movie Maker to edit. This was a burned of DVD already (a local church service). DVDs that you burn yourself can be just copied to your hard drive and still be able to play it. Rippers are usually for copyrighted DVDs / CDs. Unless you want to convert a DVD to a common video format like AVI or MP4. Then rippers can still come in handy.
My choice for rippers right now is Next DVD Ripper. - www.nextvideosoft.com/next-dvd-ripper-free.html So I downloaded and ran Next DVD Ripper, clicked on the big DVD Ripper button, Then you click on the Rip DVD button again, Then another small window opens, just click on OK. Then another asking you to choose a format, I chose AVI. Then you'll see a list of all the video titles. Check them all, then click on the Start button and wait.
Sounds simple enough except, when I picked AVI as the format and all was said and done. The videos on the hard drive had no sound. I figured it was a codec issue and downloaded an AAC codec to install. Did not work. Tried different one's, downloaded, installed, still didn't work. Downloaded VLC and sound worked perfectly but it did nothing for the sound in Windows Movie Maker. So finally I decided the only thing to do was rip it again trying a different format, this time I picked MP4. I decided to test it first buy only ripping a single title and see if it worked. It did. So I ripped the entire thin again.
And finally, to my own problems, I decided to clean the dust out of a older Windows XP computer that I have set up for doing things like, DVD copying, using Micrografx Windows Draw 6, my favourite desktop publishing program that will not install on my Windows 7 desktop. Anyway after cleaning out enough dust bunnies to stuff a pillow, :-) , I thought it would work a little bit better than usual. What was I thinking, it started freezing up after just running it for a few minutes. Same thing in Safe mode.
When I cleaned it out I took of the CPU fan and heat-sink, applied new thermal paste, and suspected that I did something wrong. I went into the BIOS to a section called PC Health Status to check the temperature and sure enough, I found out what the problem was. The temperature was 101°C / 213°F. So I had to dissect the computer again and try to isolate what went wrong. It didn't take long to figure out. The CPU fan in this case is one of those that just clips on, with a level on either side. One of the ends wasn't clipped in tight enough and became dislodged. It actually lifted the heat-sink slightly of the CPU so their wasn't any contact. So I took the whole thing off again, cleaned of the thermal paste and put a new coating on. Reapplied the heat sink making sure the fan was securely on this time and now my XP system runs at a comfortable 34°C / 93°F. This is just in the BIOS settings of course. In Windows it goes to about 39 or 40 and remains steady.
Then one more minor problem that turned out not to be a problem after all. I noticed one day that my CPU was busy because of a process called svchost.exe. I know this was been a problem on and off forever with Windows so I was going on-line to check out what it might be when it stopped again and the Windows update notification popped up. So it seemed to be a issue of my system updating.
Finally, I use the Seamonkey email client. It's able of handling RSS feeds. I use to use Opera for my news feeds until after version 15, that no longer supported RSS feeds. I already had a numbers of feeds set up and decided to add another from www.nlbuysell.com
So I clicked on the RSS feed button. This took me to another web page. All I needed was the web address in this case was http://www.nlbuysell.com/rss.xml . Then I had to go to Seamonkey and in my case just right click on the Blogs & News Feeds account and then click on Subscribe..., then it was just a matter of typing or copy and paste the rss feed web address to the Feed URL: line. Click on Add and then Close and that's it.
