FAQS! FACTS! FAX!  234 (19/10/00)

DRIVEN TO DISTRACTION

I have been trying to download some historical audio recordings from a German museum site but a window appears to tell me that I need an "mmsystem281" driver before I can proceed.  A web-search provides a lot of pleas from other people who are trying to find this driver but without success. Can you please tell me what "mmsystem281" is and how to get hold of it?

Peter Barratt

Good old mmsystem281is number eight on our top ten list of common Windows error messages and it’s all to do with missing or corrupt files associated with the Media Player and Win.ini (an important Windows system file). It’s reasonably easy to fix, but a bit too long-winded to go into here; for full details have a look at the Microsoft Knowledgebase article at: http://support.microsoft.com

/support/kb/articles/Q141/3/49.asp

FIVE MINUTE WONDER

How do I change the settings to enable me too browse the net for longer than five minutes at a time?

Ray Osborne

In Internet Explorer go to Tools > Internet Options, select the Connections tab and with your default dial-up connection highlighted, click on the Settings button. In the Dial-Up Settings box click on Advanced and the Advanced Dial-Up box appears with the time-out settings. The chances are ‘Disconnect if Idle’ has been set very low, increase it to 10 minutes, say, and see how you get on with that.

PLAY THE GAME

My children have recently bought computer games, which the instructions say must run from DOS. However when I go into DOS the computer will not recognise the D drive. I have tried typing D, d. D: d: and it merely says not valid or similar.
John Morrison, York

You have to install a DOS driver program for your drive that should have been supplied with your PC. It’s usually on a floppy disc, occasionally on a CD-ROM; you should peruse the ‘readme’ text accompanying the driver for loading instructions. If you can’t find it, and you know the make and model of your CD-ROM drive you can download the driver from the manufacturer’s web site or try driver libraries such as:

http://www.topdownloads.net/software/

drivers/driverscdrom.html

http://ciscom.cnet.com/downloads/

0-10010.html?tag=stbc.gp

IMPORT BUSINESS

I have just installed a 20Gbyte disk in my PC and set it up as the master drive with Windows 98. I want to get all my settings and mail from Outlook Express as well as my favourites list from IE5 from my old disk, which is now the slave?

Russell Gibson

Both Internet Explorer and Outlook Express have an ‘Import’ function on the File menu, which will retrieve all of the information you require from the slave disc.

BAD ATTITUDE

In Boot Camp (October 5th), there is a reference to Bad Sectors. I have occasionally seen this term fleetingly referred to but never any comprehensive information. Do you think you could give us some details of the causes, and if they show up with Scandisk, whether there is any means of clearing the fault. A friend ran Scandisk on a good computer, which he rarely uses, only to find that it indicated a large number of bad sectors.  He ran Scandisk several more times and each run produced substantial increases in the number of bad sectors until about a third of his disk was shown as bad. It was suggested that re-formatting might help. In the end I suggested he continued running his computer, because the large amount of remaining good sectors was adequate for his requirements.  In two years, the disk is still in good order and the level of bad sectors has remained constant.

C. Harrison

A bad sector is an area of the disc that programs like Scandisk determines is not capable of reliably storing data. This can be due to a number of reasons, from defects in the magnetic material coating the disc to mechanical problems with the read/write heads and mechanism. In fact many brand new disc drives have bad sectors but these are detected during manufacture and ‘mapped out’. In other words tests show they are not going to get any worse and the rest of the drive functions perfectly well, so the ‘firmware’ program that controls the drive is programmed not to use those parts of the disc. However, if bad sectors develop subsequently that is a sign of potential trouble. Occasionally the problem stabilises, as in the case of your friend’s drive, and sometimes reformatting makes bad sectors disappear, but this may only be temporary. It is sensible to take the appearance of bad sectors as a warning of possible catastrophic failure, backup files and replace the drive as soon as possible. These days hard disc drives are not expensive, but the data they contain can be irreplaceable!

AUSSIE ANSWERS

I've just read the query from Carol's Hardy (F!F!F! 5th October) about sending pictures as e-mail attachments. While your advice is sound, I suggest that the problem might lay at the Australian end, if she is sending several pictures in the same e-mail attachment. In this case the files are compressed into a 'package', sometimes by a Zip program, sometimes by a Mime program. If the recipients in Aussie can't unzip them ...then they can't read them! It’s a quite common problem. The quick solution is for Carol to only send a single picture in any particular e-mail attachment. That way it (usually) doesn't get compressed and can be read by the recipient. The 'proper' solution is for them to install a Zip and Mime compression
programs -- Tucows (www.tucows.com) has several -- and learn how to use them (not difficult). An even 'better' solution is for Carol to upload the pictures to a photo album site and then send the address/password to her friends who can look at the pictures on the website without ever having to download them all. There are a number of such sites - I find Photopoint  http://www.photopoint

.com/help/intro.html very user friendly and Carol would upload pictures to it as e-mail attachments in the usual way.
Dick Hardwick

Thanks for the tip

DONGLE DENIAL

I have just loaded some software we use at work to a new PC. It does not work. When I contacted Technical Support they told me to fit a ‘dongle’. A what? Please can you explain this in non-technical terms? What does it do and more to the point, what is it?

Malcolm Stockill

A dongle is a device designed to stop unauthorised use or duplication of licensed software. Dongles are usually built into an adaptor or plug that connect to the PCs serial or parallel ports. Inside there’s a microchip memory containing codes or data that the program looks for every time it runs. In other words, no dongle, no program…

FOILED BY FOLDERS

I have just tried to create a new folder in Windows Explorer as per your instructions (F!F!F! October 5th). I am unable to give it a name as it just comes up as ‘New Folder’. What am I doing wrong?
Geoff Inwood

When you click on New Folder on Explorer’s File menu the new empty folder appears at the bottom of the directory ‘tree’. You’ll notice that the name is highlighted with a flashing cursor at the end. That means you can instantly rename it; as soon as you start typing the words New Folder disappear and the new name replaces it. Press return and it’s done. You can go back and rename a folder you’ve created, but there’s a bit of a trick to it. It has to be done slowly, click once into the name field -- it will highlight – wait one second then click again – it stays highlighted and a cursor appears, rename by typing in a new name – or wait another second and click again and the highlight disappears but the cursor remains, so you can edit the existing name.