[mornington]

does anyone, anyone, know how to set dss player-lite to playback more than one recording at once?

this is driving me insane.

[venetia]

You can probably see if it is overheating by going into the BIOS which is where you can probably set the temp it cuts off at...

[maryjo]

Thanks mornington!

I've just ordered an 80GB external hard drive off ebay (£65 and it's teeny tiny and doesn't need plugging in!) so that I can take a lot of stuff off my HD (and put the rest of my music on my ipod, *finally*), so when that arrives I'll hopefully be able to speed thing sup a bit. It's so slow right now that defragmenting would probably take about a week!

I don't want to spend any money on my computer right now since I know I will be upgrading in a few months... thanks for the tips though, I love location-specific advice! Though Gultronics scares me a bit.

[mornington]

maryjo what happens is pretty much what you describe; your laptop will just switch off to protect itself from overheating. It could be that the fan isn't sucking in enough air. The slowness could be because you've got a lot of stuff on there, so it's having to work harder - first of all try defragmenting your hard drive (it's in the settings box but I can't remember where) and getting rid of anything you don't use - old docs you can save to disk.

otherwise, you might have to replace the fan - don't take my word for it - but take it into somewhere like PC World, where they do a healthcheck, or maybe try Gultronics on tottenham court road (particularly if the does need replacing)

and powerbooks are lovely things. but I'm biased.

[maryjo]

If your computer is overheating and the fan isn't working well enough to cool it down, what happens?

I have a 4-year-old Iridium Starbook 505 laptop running Windows XP. I have downloaded all the Windows patches and updates, run spyware and virus scans regularly (admittedly just using the Norton antivirus you can download free from Google) but it is still running slower than it used to... And occasionally it just spontaneously switches itself off with no warning.

When it turns itself off it's always *really* hot, and the fan is always *really* loud, so I'm wondering if it might be an overheating problem. Is there any way I could find out if it is that?

I'm going to get a Mac powerbook when I get to the US and can take advantage of the cheaper prices and educational discount there - I just want my wee laptop to live that long! *strokes laptop gently and lovingly*

Also, nereid - have you tried running your scans in safe mode? Just press F8 immediately when you turn the computer on and it will give you a menu of options for modes to startup in, select 'safe mode' and run your scans from there. It will probably work. I saved my computer from earlier crashy tendencies by doing that, though this time around it doesn't seem to be working so well.

[tyger]

janie, your drive might just be giving up the ghost. they just do that, due to amount of use/age/computers hate the world and want your life to be as difficult as possible. but, hopefully it is just that the lens needs cleaning, in which case you can buy a cleaner (it's usually a set of a disk with brushes on the underside and cleaning solution) at a computery-type store. it'll just give you audio prompts like 'go to track 4 to clean lens' or some such thing. good luck!

[northpole]

Sorry that you couldn't get Windows Media Player to work, Syba. It sounds like the installation of it somehow got corrupted, and even with the new version you downloaded, it doesn't sound like it was fixed.

When I Googled the extension info you provided, it seems like most of them come up with .avi at the end, which normally should be supported by WMP, but it sounds like your installation is FUBAR'd. Ugh.

On the other hand, I'm glad the VLC player worked! I, too, hate downloading more applications than what I need, but also like you, I had vids I just couldn't play with anything else.

~North "once in a while I get a good idea. This was one of those times" pole~

[janie90]

Yo, I got a question. I own a hp pavilion 4125 laptop, and i watch dvd's on it, the past month the dvd player has been messing up the movies when I attempt to play them, like skipping and sometimes just not working. I check the dvd's, they are scratched at all, my laptop is 5 years old, do I need to clean the dvd player??? If so, how do I do that? Any advice will be appreciated.

[sybarite]

Northpole, you are a genius, that player works just fine. Thanks!!!

[sybarite]

View menu doesn't come up in WMP even when I try Alt and V. The file extension on both videos seems to be: ws_pdtv_xvid-fov.(BT) ... um, whatever that means. I will try to DL that player if nothing else presents itself but because of its size I may hold off.

Syb 'son of cluelessness' -arite

[sybarite]

Northpole, I haven't been able to try out your suggestions yet (I only really go online with the laptop at weekends) but will do so at the first opportunity. Thanks for the help!

[northpole]

Syba, you might also want to try downloading and using the free media player available from VLC (http://www.videolan.org/vlc/).

It plays all the common (and some of the not so common) video file types, such as MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4, DivX, mp3, ogg, etc.

I've liked it and it has played some videos I've downloaded via torrents that I couldn't seem to play with any other player.

It is a fairly large player to download (9.2 MB that is self-extracting; 15.4 MB normally) so you may want to try playing with differnt codecs and such in Windows Media Player first.

Also Syba, when you are in WMP, if you hold "Alt" and press "V", you should be able to get the "View" menu to appear.

Out of curiosity, what is the file extension (eg .avi .mov etc) of the vids you're trying to view?

~North "it says press any key: where's the 'any' key?" pole

[sybarite]

Thanks lot49 and tyger. Lot, my player doesn't seem to have a View menu at all, so I downloaded another one (Media Player 10, if it matters) yet this doesn't seem to have a View menu either. It's as if I'm missing some elementary viewing software... but it's a Sony VAIO and came with all kinds of shit, so I doubt it.

It is possible I threw stuff overboard at some point, but again I doubt it... is there somewhere I can check this, or download basic video software? Or is it something else?

Apologies for this and for my ineptitude, but the boy's trying to introduce me to the new series of Dr Who, and I can't watch it!

[tyger]

syb, you can try right-clicking on the video file in the playlist and see if it gives you the option 'web help'. if you click on that, there might be a thing you need to download to make stuff work. like, for example, for a few vidcasts i like to watch i need a DivX codec for them to run the video part of the file

[lot49]

Okay, under the View menu (in Windows Media), do you have a "Show Video" option? If so, this should be selected. I think you can only see this option on the View menu when the file is playing.

[lot49]

I had the same problem with Windows Media and can't for the life of me remember how I got it to play video. I know I messed around with it for a while. Let me open up Media and see if I can remember.

[sybarite]

'K, this is more evidence of me being a computer moron, but I can't seem to get my laptop to play video. It's a Sony VAOI with Windows Media Player and Real Player on it, but when I play a video file (TV shows) using either it just plays the audio. When I go to 'visualisation' it just offers me a bunch of different wavy graphics. Any suggestions?

[nereid]

Is there a certain kind of virus/adware that *knows* when you're running a virus scan? I swear, every damn time I run my virus scan or adware scan, my computer shuts down. WITHOUT FAIL. Should I take it in to be looked at?