Need tech support? post it here!

[alex]

So - as of yesterday, my CD burner no longer works. If I tell it to burn a CD, it sets out to do that, but then the computer looks as if it's about to freeze while making some really strange noises (the cd drive is always pretty loud, but it makes a ticking noise that I had not noticed before).  After a few minutes of this, it ejects the CD (allegedly still blank, so at least it doesn't seem to fuck up my cd-rs, although of course I have no way of testing whether they will indeed still work elsewhere), gives me an error message ("unknown error", of course) and everything goes back to normal again. I've tried three different programmes (itunes, roxio and windows media player) and the same thing happens with all of them, only some slight variations in the phrasing of the error message, so it doesn't appear to be a software issue. Any ideas what that could be and what I could do about it? We're talking a fairly new Dell Notebook, Windows XP here.

Also, I have no idea if this is a related problem or not, but in the last few days my itunes started becoming really glitchy during playback, to an extent where listening to music just is no fun anymore because the songs keep skipping a bit. I tried listening to a couple of songs through various other pieces of software that I have on my computer (mediamonkey, windows media player, possibly something else too) and the same problem occurs with them too, so it doesn't appear to be an itunes issue. What's up with that?

[alex]

update: It will now longer play CDs or import songs from CDs anymore. The exact process varies from CD to CD (it doesn't recognise the existence of some at all, with others it acknowledges that they're there but will not show the contents, and with others yet the contents are there, but it still won't play or import them). I've mostly tried this with audio CDs, but just to make sure, I also fed it a data CD and that won't work either.

I'm curious as to what's going to stop working next now.

[Good Intentions]

Well, it's dead. Sounds like your laser is on the fritz. All I can recommend as a possible (but don't hold your breath) solution is to clean your lens. You get discs to do that. When I salvaged a hi-fi system I cleaned the lens with a moist chamois, and that fixed my playback issues (skipping, not picking up the disc, etc)

[SPACERACE]

also could potentially be fried windows cd burning drivers. they tend to go after a while for no real reason at all, and sometimes an OS reinstall will cure it. it just depends on what's easier for you, replacing hardware or software.

[Good Intentions]

That wouldn't stop the disc from reading.

[SPACERACE]

probably true that it wouldn't stop it from reading completely, but my burner would give a ridiculous number of read errors when ripping CDs, and would manifest that in very long seek times on data CDs before i switched OSes on my PC. now, using ubuntu, it works perfectly.

[milly balgeary]

i hate saying it, but what if your burner works flawlessly and you've went completely crazy alex? i know that's probably not it, but this is tech support, and we're going to hit all the possibilities. it is our code.

[RavingLunatic]

I had a problem with my CD burner a couple years ago. I called tech support and the guy put me through some useless exercises and then finally just said, "Just give me your address and we'll send you a new one." Turned out the new one was a newer and better model than my old one. And I got it for free. You should try doing this Alex.

[alex]

Okay, thanks people. The computer's still under warranty, so I think I'll just let them fix things for me - I was just a little wary of that, because if they make me send it in, I'll first have to get an external HD to back up my data since, uh, I can't burn any backup DVDs right now. So if any of you would have had a real simple DIY solution, I would've tried that out first.

i hate saying it, but what if your burner works flawlessly and you've went completely crazy alex? i know that's probably not it, but this is tech support, and we're going to hit all the possibilities. it is our code.

Yeah, this possibility is also very, very real, I guess. Would anyone here know how to fix that problem?

[RavingLunatic]

Oh, crap. I forgot about how most people don't have laptops where you can just take the CD drive out whenever you want to. That sucks having to send in your computer. Hopefully they don't mess it up. And if you're getting an external hard drive, I recommend getting a Lacie. It's not too expensive (I recently bought a 160GB for under $100), and I've had my main one for about 3 years now and it's been solid. I never turn the thing off either. I mean, I've let it run for months at a time, which I've been trying not to do lately, but it's been perfect.

[alex]

Thanks, Ryan. I'm not sure if they're going to make me send it in anyway (and I haven't looked into how easy it is to just take out the CD drive - it shouldn't be that difficult, I guess), I was just considering worst case scenarios. We'll see.

[alistarr*]

haven't read the rest but, if it's a laptop with a cd drive, then either it has a button which disconnects it (so it will be obvious), or you'd have to open up the box to unscrew it. unscrewing it would void your warranty, even if it's just a tiny little screw, so i just wanted to make sure you knew not to do that (don't wanna seem condescending though).

and hard drives are much of a muchness, as far as i can see. if you want one that sits flat on your desk nicely get the lacie one, it's silver and pretty. if you want one that stands up on its end nicely get a western digital mybook, it's black and has a green light on the front. hard drives are so cheap now it's a bit crazy.

[diesel_powered]

I wholeheartedly endorese the LaCie drives. They're a bit more money than some, but they are rock solidly reliable. Rock. Solid.

So here's a random question:

I work at a tiny radio station at my school. It consists of a mac mini, a mixing board, and a transmitter. Unfortunately, it doesn't have a compressor attached and the vast differences in levels are rather annoying because I have to futz with the levels during my shift. Does anyone know of a compressor plugin for either iTunes or one that can be stuck on the audio section of the mac mini? Besides iTunes' built in compression scheme that isn't hard enough for radio?

[SPACERACE]

you could normalize

[alistarr*]

pushing that fader was my favourite thing about doing radio.

wait, second favourite to the rare pleasure that was hitting the +10db button.

[SPACERACE]

how the fuck do i use one of these "isight" cameras to take pictures? i thought that's what cameras did. i guess i was wrong, because this thing just loads ichat when i plug it in and fucked if i'm going near ichat.

[alistarr*]

is it a webcam? they're not so good for taking pictures.

edit (because i always make silly remarks in here and never actually advise): but if you're stumped then maybe you could load up the options panel (depending on what the particular brand/software does) to change brightness etc and hit print screen...?

[Maaik]

My computer's fucking up again.  Really seriously this time.

AVG ran its normal daily scan yesterday, and apparently found a trojan horse ("Flooder" I think it was called).  After it was done with its thing, it asked me to restart the computer, so I hit "yes" and it shuts down.  Only when it tried to restart, I got the blue "HP Invent" screen, followed by the Windows XP loading screen followed by... black screen, a flash, then the HP screen again.  Over and over and over in this endless loop of not-being-able-to-start-up-itude.  So I just hit the power button and let it go to sleep.

Over the course of the day while I was at school, tMO tried to start the computer up again, getting the same result.  I think the power may have gone out or the power strip may have gotten switched off, but when I got home, I turned that back on, tried the computer again, and this time got the option to go into safe mode (which I forget how to do that manually now).  So I go into safe mode, I was able to log on and run another virus scan, which found the trojan horse again and apparently locked it in its vault.  With that done, I went ahead with a spyware scan as well and got rid of a lot of that (over 300 evil little doodads).  So I'm feeling good about the whole thing, go to restart the computer and... it goes back into its loop.

Uhh...help?

[YojimboMonkey]

The following instructions are written under the assumption you're using Windows XP.  

Windows is set by default to automatically reboot when it encounters a STOP error (or BLUE SCREEN OF DEATH).  If you can get it to boot into Safe Mode, you can at least gather more information about the blue screen error by doing the following: Right-click My Computer and select Properties from the resulting menu.  This brings up your System Properties dialog.  Click the Advanced tab, then under the Startup and Recovery section, click the Settings button.  Remove the checkmark next to "Automatically Restart."  Now when you restart and Windows hits an error, you should at least be able to see what the error is.  Make a note of it and report back and we'll figure out the next step.

[Maaik]

Windows is set by default to automatically reboot when it encounters a STOP error (or BLUE SCREEN OF DEATH).

Death is the only adventure

So I did all that and saw what my computer did not want me to see:

Code:

STOP: c000021a {Fatal System Error}
The Windows Logon Process system process terminated unexpectedly with a status of 0xc0000022
(0x00000000 0x00000000).
The system has been shut down.

Since then, I have been curled into a fetal position, weeping into a bottle of scotch.

[Heathcote]

I'm so unhappy, life in safe mode is just not for me!

if i turn on my computer not in safe mode by the time it gets to the desktop it just TURNS OFF THE MONITER!

[YojimboMonkey]

Maaik:  boot into safe mode, put windows CD in drive, run SFC /SCANNOW.  It looks like you maybe have a corrupt file that's part of the windows user init process.  SFC will check all system files and if any are missing or corrupt will replace them from the CD or any cached service pack files.

Heathcote:  Safe Mode is not meant to be used normally, but only temporarily for figuring out and fixing problems.  You seem to have a display problem.  I think the first thing I would do would be to go into the Device Manager and remove your display adapter driver.  If that sentence was confusing to you, maybe you should get a clever friend to help.  But if you boot into Safe Mode, then right-click My Computer, click Properties, click Hardware, then click Device Manager, that will bring up your Device Manager.  Then in the Device Manager, find any devices listed in the Display Adapters category, right-click them and choose Uninstall.  Then reboot.  It is very important that you do not fuck with anything else in the device manager if you don't know what the hell you're doing.  After the reboot, your display will still look funky 'cause the display drivers will need to be reinstalled (hopefully you have a CD or something, maybe you'll need to download them from the internet, again, get a clever friend to help if you aren't sure how).  If that doesn't work, let me know and I'll think of something else.

[Good Intentions]

Heathcote - did this just start happening? Did it never really work right? Did you install new software that is graphics intensive? It might just be that your resolution or refresh rate is at a setting your monitor can't handle, which means that fixing it might involve nothing more than changing a software setting.

[heather marie]

How do I put a playlist (.p3u file?) in a folder? Example: I am making Lucy & Brian a mix but I don't know if I will be able to mail it before they leave, so if I want to put all the songs in a folder with a link for the playlist, how do I go about that? I already have the playlist in iTunes set up, I just don't know how to go about uploading said playlist or whatever. Help, nerds.

[Good Intentions]

I don't know iTunes, but I imagine it would be just like standard .m3u or .pls files. iTunes will store your playlist files somewhere - it should tell you (somehwere in Options) or it will be pretty obvious. Just track down that file, and put it in the relevant directory.

A playlist file is just a text file with the locations of the music files. It will almost certainly contain directory inforrmation, which is bad for what you want. You wanna open the playlist file with Notepad or something similar, and where the file names are written, remove the directory information. An example:

A two-song playlist, example.m3u, made in WinAmp:

#EXTM3U
#EXTINF:267,The Fall - The Man Whose Head Expanded
\music\The Fall\Perverted by Language\01 - The Man Whose Head Expanded.mp3
#EXTINF:183,Stephen Malkmus - The Hook
\music\Stephen Malkmus - The Hook.mp3


If someone copied this file and tried to play it, it will only work if the mp3s are in exactly the right place, ie, 01 - The Man Whose Head Exploded.mp3 is in the directory \music\The Fall\Perverted By Language and Stephen Malkmus - The Hook.mp3 is in \music. This is rather unlikely, especially if you threw the files together in a directory and passed the directory to your friends. You want it to look like this:

#EXTM3U
#EXTINF:267,The Fall - The Man Whose Head Expanded
01 - The Man Whose Head Expanded.mp3
#EXTINF:183,Stephen Malkmus - The Hook
Stephen Malkmus - The Hook.mp3

Which means that the music player will look for the files in the same directory as the playlist, which is what you want. Most music players (definitely WinAmp, FooBar and MMS, but I suspect not iTunes) will recognise if the music files are in the same directory as the playlist already: sometimes the easiest thing to do (especially if you fear hacing .m3u's) would be to move all the songs to one folder, make a playlist containing those songs, and save it in that same folder, and it will look like the second example above.