It's been a miserable summer to start:

First, we had to move to a new apartment to get away from noisy neighbours during which I accidentally sliced open two of my fingers. They have healed OK except to be replaced by two blisters.

Then I had to wait almost two weeks to get the cable and internet transferred.

My site at Geocities will soon be history, the Geocities servers are shutting down, the Free ones anyway. I tried getting through to tech support from my ISP - usually they provide so much web space per user - No luck. Eventually I settled on www.webs.com - my only grudge; because it's the Free server I had to upload each file one at a time - that meant 68 pages plus 48 images - one at a time...

To top it all of, I broke my watchstrap; A guy I loaned my bike to ruined my tire - he rode it while the tire was flat; My digital camera is on the frits; My TV screen is going bad (to be fair I had it for 18 years) and worst still, My computer crapped out on me. I had to switch to my old Compaq Deskpro which also is starting to act up.

If I was a superstious person, I'd say this apartment was CURSED!!!

Anyway, this is my first update at my new site, just a collection of bits and bytes of some minor problems experienced with computers I'd like to cover.

Mass Downloading From Facebook

My Uncle wanted me to download a group of photos of Facebook, 627 photos to be precise. Saving them one at a time was not an option.

I found a FireFox extension that turned out to be a piece of crap. I still had to confirm the saving of each individual picture. I did finaly find a program that worked, the site doesn't post the download anymore - Facebook apparently intimated them out of it. It was called Facedown.

Do a websearch or try this link FACEDOWN

BSOD

Had a problem with my Compaq. The dreaded BLUE SCREEN OF DEATH or BSOD kept happening every other time I tried starting up my computer,

It is corrupt, absent, or not writable.

In this case I just booted into the Recovery Console -
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/314058 and ran chkdsk - It did not work....

...so I booted up with a WinXP Live CD and ran chkdsk from that and it worked. It's been my experience that these utilities seem to work better from third party boot disks than from the original WinXP CD - go figure!! :-)

Malewarebytes malfunctioning

Malewarebytes - www.malwarebytes.org - currently my recommended choice of Anti-Adware/Spyware/Malware programs. I'm tempted to tell people to skip the antivirus programs and just use this.

On numerous occassions, for others, I have successfully cleared out malware infections that the anti-virus program could not prevent or get rid of. I'm surprised sometimes how easily these programs can be disabled.

The only computer I've encountered problems with this program was installing it on my own system. I kept getting this error: vbAccelerator SGrid II Control - Run-time error '0' - and Run-time error '440' Automation error

Done some research online and found the answer here:
www.malwarebytes.org/forums/index.php?showtopic=12044

Download and run a small utility called malwarebytes remover -
www.malwarebytes.org/mbam-clean.exe

Then just reinstall Malwarebytes and hopefully, problem solved, it did in my case.

Batch Renaming

I find myself renaming batches of files alot. Renaming a group of files at a time is easy enough. Just hold down on the Ctrl key to select more than one file at a time, then right-click on one of the files and chose Rename from the menu.

Or hold down on Shift and click on one file and then a second, all files between the first and last will automatically be chosen.

example:

I took these files and simply decided to rename them pics and this is the end result.

Note this doesn't change the extensions - so if you had a song there called mysong.mp3 it would be renamed pics.mp3.

But I also needed a way to change extensions and found out how to do it. You have to use the CMD prompt. Click on Start then run (in Vista just type cmd in the search bar) then type in cmd and hit enter.

Navigate to the folder with the files in it. In my example the pics are in c:\Stuff2 - so at the prompt I would type in cd\stuff2

Then if I wanted to rename all extensions to pic from jpg I would type ren *.* *.pic

Saving Pictures With Extra Long Names

Tried at one time to save a picture off a web page. This web site would tag the pics with key search terms to make them easy to find. But the tags also become the name of the image in question. A lot of tags meant some very long picture names. And there are limits.

When I tried to save the pic....by right-clicking on it, chosing Save Image As... and then nothing. I assumed it was the extra long name interfering. So how do you save a picture like this. The solution was simple - right-click on it and chose the option to Copy Image, which copies it to the clipboard.

Then I opened up PhotoFiltre - www.photofiltre.com - my photo editing software of choice.

Right-clicked inside the program and picking from the menu Paste as new image (all my images used on my site created the same way).

Then it was just a matter of saving the picture with the name and format of my chosing.

Printer Low On Ink

My Epson Stylus Color 777 takes two ink cartridges, one for colour and one for black. And it's not unusual for me to run out of one or the other when trying to print up a documents.

I usually print up only information, very few pictures, so I'm usually run out of black ink first. I don't always have money to run out and buy more so what I do is change the color of the letters in the document from black to another colour usually blue or red thus I can continue to print, at least until the colour ink runs dry as well.

I also edit saved HTML files to do the same.

Just a note: If one ink cartridge runs out of ink, even if the other is full, most printers will lock up and not allow you to print unless you replace the empty cartridge.

tinyurl.com

I get calls from people with their computer problems on a regular basis. Sometimes it just a matter of pointing them to the right web site...but what if the web site has an extra long address - for example: this is a address to Microsoft Word Viewer -
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=3657ce88-7cfa-457a-9aec-f4f827f20cac&DisplayLang=en

One solution is to go to tinyurl.com paste in the long web address and press on the MakeTinyURL button and the end result, a shorter easy to remember web address -
http://tinyurl.com/25keg8

Xnview Cache - Save Hard Drive Space

My image viewer of choice is the Free Xnview - www.xnview.com

I only have one warning - that the caching of thumbnail files can lead to a very large file. As you view more and more pics, info is cached in a file called xnview.db. The full path is C:\Program Files\Xnview\cache\xnview.db.

Its currently at 2.5MB in size on my system but at one time I checked it and it was amazing 120MB. To check or change this option - open Xnview, click on Tools, then Options or just press F12.

On the left hand menu click on the word Thumbnails then on the right hand side, across the top click on the cache tab. Simply uncheck Enable Cacheing to disable.

Editing 256 Colour Pictures In PhotoFiltre

Most pictures today are made up of millions of colours but there are still formats with lower colour resolution like .gif files.

My choice of photo editing software is PhotoFiltre - www.photofiltre.com

One downside here is that if you open up a 256 colour pic the editing tools down the right hand side become unusable. The only way to edit them is to save them as say a .jpg. This automatically ups the colour resolution and makes it an editable file. You might have to close the picture first and reopen it. If you come across a .jpg file you can't edit try saving it over has a .jpg file.

256 colour editing is almost not an issue these days because most pictures are very high resolution. But they are still out there.

Burning Video Files

If you have a video file in mpg format then you can just burn that to a CD/DVD (even as a data disk) and if your DVD player supports it, it will most likely play. If you convert a movie to DVD format and just burn it as a data disk - it will not play...or will it.

When you convert a movie to DVD format you'll get a bunch of files like -

VIDEO_TS.BUP
VIDEO_TS.IFO
VTS_01_0.BVP
VTS_01_0.IFO
VTS_01_1.VOB.

They have to be burned properly (see my previous post).

I decided to try a little experiment to see if a bunch of converted DVD files just copied to a disk can be viewed on a DVD player. So I converted a small movie and just copied the files over as a data cd. Then put it in my DVD player.

The movie wouldn't start up automatically, instead it showed a listing of the CD contents:

01. VIDEO_TS
02. VTS_01_0
03. VTS_01_1

I decided to try to play each file individually.

01. VIDEO_TS - This file did nothing.

02. VTS_01_0 - This one only showed the DVD menu.

01. VIDEO_TS - This one was the movie that played flawlessly.

(...insert evil laugh sound here...). It worked! I've proven all of them wrong...(more evil laughing)...

If you look at the DVD file structure there is usually one or more files with a .VOB extension. These are just playable movie files.

If you double-click on a .vob file on your computer, most up-to-date media players can play such files now. If yours can't, VLC - is recomended. www.videolan.org/vlc/

Saving Flash Files

I use the Opera www.opera.com - browser and without bogging down your system with third party programs/extenions/plugins/widgets/gadgets/whatever the two ways I rather use to save flash files is: