PCs: the missing manual

PCs THE MISSING MANUAL

Andy Rathbone

Beijing • Cambridge • Farnham • Köln • Paris • Sebastopol • Taipei • Tokyo

PCs: The Missing Manual by Andy Rathbone Copyright © 2006 O’Reilly Media, Inc. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. Published by O’Reilly Media, Inc., 1005 Gravenstein Highway North, Sebastopol, CA 95472. O’Reilly books may be purchased for educational, business, or sales promotional use. Online editions are also available for most titles (safari.oreilly.com). For more information, contact our corporate/institutional sales department: (800) 998-9938 or [email protected].

Printing History: December 2005:

First Edition.

Nutshell Handbook, the Nutshell Handbook logo, and the O’Reilly logo are registered trademarks of O’Reilly Media, Inc. PCs: The Missing Manual, The Missing Manual logo, Pogue Press, the Pogue Press logo, and “The book that should have been in the box” are trademarks of O’Reilly Media, Inc. Many of the designations used by manufacturers and sellers to distinguish their products are claimed as trademarks. Where those designations appear in this book, and O’Reilly Media, Inc. was aware of a trademark claim, the designations have been printed in caps or initial caps. While every precaution has been taken in the preparation of this book, the publisher and author assume no responsibility for errors or omissions, or for damages resulting from the use of the information contained herein.

This book uses RepKover™, a durable and flexible lay-flat binding. ISBN: 0-596-10093-0 [M]

[3/06]

Table of Contents

The Missing Credits ................................................................................... ix Introduction................................................................................................. 1

Part One: Your PC’s Main Parts Chapter 1: Inside Your PC.......................................................................... 7 Finding Out Your PC’s Horsepower ..........................................................................................................8 The PC’s Case ........................................................................................................................................... 10 Opening Your PC’s Case ......................................................................................................................... 12 Motherboard ............................................................................................................................................. 16 CPU (Central Processing Unit) ............................................................................................................... 16 Adding Memory (aka RAM) .................................................................................................................... 18 Installing Expansion Cards ...................................................................................................................... 25 Ports ........................................................................................................................................................... 32 Power Supply and Battery ...................................................................................................................... 47

Chapter 2: Keyboards and Mice .............................................................. 57 Keyboard Basics ....................................................................................................................................... 57 Mouse Basics ............................................................................................................................................ 71 Game Controllers ..................................................................................................................................... 80

Chapter 3: Monitors and Video ............................................................... 83 Monitor Basics .......................................................................................................................................... 84 Installing a Monitor .................................................................................................................................. 88

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Plugging Two Monitors into One PC ..................................................................................................... 89 Plugging Two PCs into One Monitor ..................................................................................................... 93 Using TV Sets as Monitors ....................................................................................................................... 94 Watching TV on a PC ............................................................................................................................... 99 Troubleshooting Your Monitor ............................................................................................................. 100 Video Card (aka Display Adapter) ....................................................................................................... 104

Chapter 4: Printers ................................................................................. 113 Printer Basics ........................................................................................................................................... 113 Installing a Printer .................................................................................................................................. 119 Choosing Printer Paper ......................................................................................................................... 126 Adjusting Printer Settings ...................................................................................................................... 129 Printing Envelopes .................................................................................................................................. 131 Printing Specialized Items ..................................................................................................................... 132 Printing Digital Photos Professionally .................................................................................................. 135 Printing Digital Photos on an Inkjet Printer ........................................................................................ 138 Printing Web Pages ................................................................................................................................ 141 Printer Troubleshooting ........................................................................................................................ 142

Part Two: Multimedia Chapter 5: Digital Cameras, Camcorders, and Webcams.................... 147 Digital Camera Basics ............................................................................................................................ 148 Moving Pictures from Camera to Computer ...................................................................................... 148 Moving Pictures from a Card Reader to a PC ..................................................................................... 152 Viewing and Editing Photos .................................................................................................................. 153 Sharing Photos with Friends ................................................................................................................. 158 Troubleshooting Digital Cameras ........................................................................................................ 162 Camcorder Basics ................................................................................................................................... 164 Connect the Camcorder to Your PC .................................................................................................... 164 Editing Video ........................................................................................................................................... 167 Editing with Movie Maker ..................................................................................................................... 171 Webcams ................................................................................................................................................. 176

Chapter 6: Scanners................................................................................ 183 Choosing a Scanner ............................................................................................................................... 183 Installing a Scanner ................................................................................................................................ 184 Three Ways to Scan an Image .............................................................................................................. 186 Using Windows Scanner and Camera Wizard ................................................................................... 188 Digitizing Old Photos and Slides .......................................................................................................... 194 Troubleshooting Scanners .................................................................................................................... 195

Chapter 7: Sound .................................................................................... 199 Understanding Sound Adapters (Sound Cards) ................................................................................ 199 Sending Sound into and out of Your PC ............................................................................................. 203

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Choosing Music File Formats ............................................................................................................... 213 PC Music for Musicians ......................................................................................................................... 215 Troubleshooting Sound ......................................................................................................................... 218

Chapter 8: Digital Music Players ........................................................... 223 Choosing a Digital Music Player .......................................................................................................... 223 Your Digital Player and Your PC .......................................................................................................... 226 iPod and iTunes ...................................................................................................................................... 227 Windows XP’s Media Player ................................................................................................................. 239 Troubleshooting Digital Music Players ................................................................................................ 247

Part Three: Storing Information Chapter 9: Hard Drives and Floppy Drives........................................... 253 Your PC’s Drives: An Overview ............................................................................................................ 253 Hard Drives: An Introduction ............................................................................................................... 255 Your Hard Drive’s Available Space ...................................................................................................... 256 Removing Unused Programs and Files ............................................................................................... 256 Speeding Up a Hard Drive .................................................................................................................... 260 Installing a Hard Drive ........................................................................................................................... 262 Troubleshooting Hard Drives ............................................................................................................... 274 Floppy Drives: An Introduction ............................................................................................................ 277 Formatting a Floppy Disk ...................................................................................................................... 278 Installing a Floppy Drive ....................................................................................................................... 278

Chapter 10: CD and DVD Drives ............................................................ 281 CDs: An Introduction ............................................................................................................................. 281 Playing CDs ............................................................................................................................................. 282 Buying the Right Type of Blank CD ...................................................................................................... 283 Ripping CDs ............................................................................................................................................. 286 Burning CDs ............................................................................................................................................ 289 Duplicating CDs ...................................................................................................................................... 298 Erasing CDs ............................................................................................................................................. 299 DVDs: An Introduction ........................................................................................................................... 300 Playing DVD Movies ............................................................................................................................... 301 Buying the Right Type of Blank DVD ................................................................................................... 302 Specialty Disc Formats .......................................................................................................................... 304 Ripping DVDs .......................................................................................................................................... 305 Burning DVDs ......................................................................................................................................... 305 Buying a CD or DVD Drive .................................................................................................................... 307 Installing a CD or DVD Drive ................................................................................................................ 308 Troubleshooting CD and DVD Drives .................................................................................................. 312

Table of Contents PCs: The Missing Manual, eMatter Edition Copyright © 2008 O’Reilly & Associates, Inc. All rights reserved.

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Part Four: Talking to the World Chapter 11: Getting Online .....................................................................317 Different Ways to Connect to the Internet .......................................................................................... 317 Setting Up a Modem .............................................................................................................................. 324 Subscribing to an Internet Service ....................................................................................................... 327 Setting Up an Internet Connection ...................................................................................................... 330 Dialing into the Internet ........................................................................................................................ 335 Troubleshooting Online Connections .................................................................................................. 339

Chapter 12: Email....................................................................................343 Choosing an Email Program ................................................................................................................. 343 Setting Up Outlook Express .................................................................................................................. 352 Composing and Sending Email ............................................................................................................ 355 Reading and Processing Email .............................................................................................................. 362 Managing Your Address Book .............................................................................................................. 368 Email Etiquette ........................................................................................................................................ 370 Troubleshooting Email Problems ......................................................................................................... 372

Chapter 13: Surfing the Web ................................................................. 375 Choosing and Setting Up a Browser .................................................................................................... 375 Managing Forms and Passwords ......................................................................................................... 384 Blocking Pop-up Ads and Other Nuisances ........................................................................................ 387 Browsing the Web .................................................................................................................................. 388 Viewing RSS Feeds ................................................................................................................................. 401

Chapter 14: Networking .........................................................................403 Choosing a Network .............................................................................................................................. 404 Networking Hardware: What You Need ............................................................................................. 409 Setting Up a Simple Home Network .................................................................................................... 414 The Network Setup Wizard ................................................................................................................... 419 Securing Your Network ......................................................................................................................... 425 Sharing an Internet Connection ........................................................................................................... 435 Sharing Printers ...................................................................................................................................... 437 Exchanging Files Between PCs .............................................................................................................. 439 Sharing Monitors .................................................................................................................................... 447 Networking Two PCs .............................................................................................................................. 448 Troubleshooting Network Problems ................................................................................................... 458

Part Five: Maintenance, Security, and Troubleshooting Chapter 15: Security ...............................................................................463 Backing Up Your Computer .................................................................................................................. 463 Creating Passwords ................................................................................................................................ 475 Activating Windows Update .................................................................................................................. 478

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Preventing Theft ..................................................................................................................................... 481 Phishing ................................................................................................................................................... 481 Adware, Spyware, and Other Threats ................................................................................................. 482 Installing a Firewall ................................................................................................................................ 490

Chapter 16: Fixing Common Problems .................................................495 Undeleting Deleted Files ....................................................................................................................... 495 Quitting Frozen Programs ..................................................................................................................... 497 System Restore ....................................................................................................................................... 497 Resetting Windows XP Passwords ....................................................................................................... 501 Troubleshooting Driver Problems ....................................................................................................... 503 Speeding Up a Slow PC ......................................................................................................................... 518 Windows Activation ............................................................................................................................... 519 Windows’ Troubleshooters ................................................................................................................... 520

Chapter 17: Advanced Troubleshooting................................................ 521 Watching Your PC Start ......................................................................................................................... 522 Editing the BIOS Settings ....................................................................................................................... 525 Replacing Firmware ............................................................................................................................... 533 Searching for Clues with Google ......................................................................................................... 534 Reverting to Old Programs ................................................................................................................... 535 Swapping Parts ....................................................................................................................................... 536 Microsoft’s Knowledge Base ................................................................................................................ 536 Last Resort: Data Grabs with Knoppix ................................................................................................. 538

Part Six: Appendices Appendix A: Setting Up a PC .................................................................543 Appendix B: Memory Cards and USB Drives.............................. online at www.missingmanuals.com/cds Appendix C: Other Cool Things You Can Do Online................... online at www.missingmanuals.com/cds Appendix D: Dealing with Technical Support ............................. online at www.missingmanuals.com/cds Appendix E: Packing a Laptop Bag .............................................. online at www.missingmanuals.com/cds Index ........................................................................................................ 551

Table of Contents PCs: The Missing Manual, eMatter Edition Copyright © 2008 O’Reilly & Associates, Inc. All rights reserved.

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PCs: The Missing Manual, eMatter Edition Copyright © 2008 O’Reilly & Associates, Inc. All rights reserved.

The Missing Credits About the Author Andy Rathbone started geeking around with computers in 1985 when he bought a 26-pound portable CP/M Kaypro 2X. Like other nerds of the day, he soon began playing with null-modem adapters, dialing computer bulletin boards, and working parttime at Radio Shack. He wrote articles for various techie publications before moving to computer books in 1992. He’s written the Windows For Dummies series, Upgrading and Fixing PCs for Dummies, TiVo for Dummies, and many other computer books. Today, he has more than 15 million copies of his books in print, and they’ve been translated into more than 30 languages. Andy can be reached at his Web site, www.andyrathbone.com.

About the Creative Team Peter Meyers (editor) works as an editor at O’Reilly Media on the Missing Manual series. He lives with his wife in New York City. Email: [email protected]. Sarah Milstein (editor) is O’Reilly’s senior editor for Missing Manuals. She’s pleased to finally understand that “1394” really means “FireWire.” Email: milstein@oreilly. com. Carla Spoon (copy editor) is a freelance writer, editor, and proofreader. She works and feeds her tech gadget addiction from her home office in the shadow of Mount Rainier. Email: [email protected]. Web: www.carlaspoon.com. Jim Aspinwall (technical reviewer) is a PC deployment project manager and consultant, and the author of several PC articles and books including PC Hacks, published by O’Reilly. Email: [email protected]. Rob Bourns (technical reviewer) first learned about electronics in the Marines when he worked as a Ground Radio Repairman. He now works as a Splicing Technician for the phone company. He has lived in Sebastopol, California most of his life. Email: [email protected].

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PCs: The Missing Manual, eMatter Edition Copyright © 2008 O’Reilly & Associates, Inc. All rights reserved.

Andy Carciere (technical reviewer) served for 25 years as a school administrator. During those years he championed the use of technology as a tool to enhance learning. Andy currently consults with districts and schools on the administrative and instructional use of technology to improve the teaching and learning process. Email: [email protected]. Justin Watt (technical reviewer) is currently a senior web producer for O’Reilly Media, Inc.’s Online Publishing Group. He blogs at justinsomnia.org, where you can read about his adventures in Northern California. Email: [email protected]. Rose Cassano (cover illustration) has worked as an independent designer and illustrator for 20 years. Assignments have ranged from the nonprofit sector to corporate clientele. She lives in beautiful Southern Oregon, grateful for the miracles of modern technology that make working there a reality. Email: [email protected]. Web: www.rosecassano.com.

Acknowledgements Thanks to Matt Wagner for making this book possible, to my beautiful wife Tina Rathbone for editing each chapter before submission, to Sarah Milstein for helping create a detailed outline, and to Peter Meyers for whipping the book into shape.

The Missing Manual Series Missing Manuals are witty, superbly written guides to computer products that don’t come with printed manuals (which is just about all of them). Each book features a handcrafted index; cross-references to specific page numbers (not just “see Chapter 14”); and RepKover, a detached-spine binding that lets the book lie perfectly flat without the assistance of weights or cinder blocks. Recent and upcoming titles include: Access for Starters: The Missing Manual by Kate Chase and Scott Palmer AppleScript: The Missing Manual by Adam Goldstein AppleWorks 6: The Missing Manual by Jim Elferdink and David Reynolds Creating Web Sites: The Missing Manual by Matthew MacDonald eBay: The Missing Manual by Nancy Conner Dreamweaver 8: The Missing Manual by David McFarland Excel: The Missing Manual by Matthew MacDonald Excel for Starters: The Missing Manual by Matthew MacDonald FileMaker Pro 8: The Missing Manual by Geoff Coffey and Susan Prosser

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PCs: The Missing Manual PCs: The Missing Manual, eMatter Edition Copyright © 2008 O’Reilly & Associates, Inc. All rights reserved.

FrontPage 2003: The Missing Manual by Jessica Mantaro GarageBand 2: The Missing Manual by David Pogue Google: The Missing Manual, Second Edition by Sarah Milstein and Rael Dornfest Home Networking: The Missing Manual by Scott Lowe iLife ‘05: The Missing Manual by David Pogue iMovie HD & iDVD 5: The Missing Manual by David Pogue iPhoto 5: The Missing Manual by David Pogue iPod & iTunes: The Missing Manual, Third Edition by Jude Biersdorfer iWork ‘05: The Missing Manual by Jim Elferdink Mac OS X Power Hound, Panther Edition by Rob Griffitths Mac OS X: The Missing Manual, Tiger Edition by David Pogue Office 2004 for Macintosh: The Missing Manual by Mark H. Walker and Franklin Tessler Photoshop Elements 4: The Missing Manual by Barbara Brundage QuickBooks: The Missing Manual by Bonnie Biafore Quicken for Starters: The Missing Manual by Bonnie Biafore Switching to the Mac: The Missing Manual, Tiger Edition by David Pogue and Adam Goldstein Windows 2000 Pro: The Missing Manual by Sharon Crawford Windows XP Power Hound by Preston Gralla Windows XP for Starters: The Missing Manual by David Pogue Windows XP Home Edition: The Missing Manual, Second Edition by David Pogue Windows XP Pro: The Missing Manual, Second Edition by David Pogue, Craig Zacker, and Linda Zacker

The Missing Credits PCs: The Missing Manual, eMatter Edition Copyright © 2008 O’Reilly & Associates, Inc. All rights reserved.

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PCs: The Missing Manual, eMatter Edition Copyright © 2008 O’Reilly & Associates, Inc. All rights reserved.

Introduction

In January 1983, Time magazine featured a PC on the cover as its “Man of the Year.” The accompanying article quoted a then-recent advertisement describing why everybody needs one: “A PC can send letters at the speed of light, diagnose a sick poodle, custom-tailor an insurance program in minutes, and test recipes for beer.” Nearly 25 years later, email arrives within minutes, not microseconds (that is, as long as the messages aren’t trapped by a spam or virus filter). Veterinarians still diagnose poodles by looking in their ears, programmers do the grunt work to tally your insurance premium, and most people prefer testing their own beer recipes, thank you very much. In short, the personal computer has not quite lived up to its early hype. One major culprit? The modern PC has grown so complicated that most people treat it as a necessary nuisance that performs a few simple tasks, but rarely with grace. Instead of an exciting liberator, the machine’s become a clumsy commodity, like an old VCR that mostly manages to record your show, but never quite displays the correct time. That’s where this book comes in. In clear, jargon-free language, it helps you perform the many basic computing tasks that have grown complex, complicated, or just plain annoying: • Finding an Internet provider, and setting up your PC so you can browse the Web, send email, and share the Internet connection with other PCs in your home.

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Introduction

• Buying and configuring a wireless network so the signal reaches everywhere in your apartment or home—including the back porch. • Buying and installing those long black strips of silicon, called memory, so your old workhorse of a PC can keep up with your need for speed. • Replacing or upgrading your computer’s innards, including its hard drive, CD/DVD drive, mouse, keyboard, power supply, and so on. • Printing all or parts of a Web page so it doesn’t run off the paper’s right edge. • Buying the right memory card for your digital camera, and then printing your photos, emailing them to a friend, or posting them to a photo-sharing Web site. • Recording your old records onto your PC so you can turn them into CDs. • Transferring your home movies to your computer, editing them with Windows Movie Maker, and copying the result to a DVD. • Setting up an automatic backup system for your PC’s files and settings. • Moving your old PC’s files to your new PC. • Locating, removing, and avoiding spyware and viruses. • Sharing one monitor between two PCs or connecting two monitors to one PC. • Creating quick and easy-to-set-up two-PC networks for home or when you’re on the road.

About This Book The underlying mechanics behind contraptions like a wine press, a stapler, and the hula hoop haven’t changed much through the years. In contrast, PC manufacturers, and a certain operating system developer in Redmond, Washington, never stop tinkering with what a computer can do. As a result, your PC is a ragtag assemblage of new parts, old parts, and obsolete parts left in to keep last month’s software still working. Yet one feature has grown consistently worse with each new computer model: documentation. Most PCs arrive with a single page of printed setup instructions, usually with lots of large arrows pointing, Twister-style, in geometrically confusing directions. To learn about the hundreds of features on your PC, you’re stuck with trial and error. Some PCs come with built-in help menus, but they suddenly disappear when you need them the most: when your PC won’t start. The purpose of this book, then, is to serve as the manual that should have been in the box. In this book’s pages, you’ll find step-by-step instructions for using every part of your PC, letting you fine-tune the tasks you’re familiar with, figure out the ones you’d only heard of, and learn about the ones you didn’t know you needed— until now.

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PCs: The Missing Manual PCs: The Missing Manual, eMatter Edition Copyright © 2008 O’Reilly & Associates, Inc. All rights reserved.

PCs: The Missing Manual is designed to accommodate readers at every technical level. The primary discussions are written for advanced-beginner or intermediate computer users. But if you’re a first-timer, special sidebar articles called “Up to Speed” provide the introductory information you need to understand the topic at hand. If you’re a seasoned veteran, on the other hand, keep your eye out for similar shaded boxes called “Power Users’ Clinic.” They offer more technical tips, tricks, and shortcuts for the experienced computer fan.

Introduction

Assumptions This book makes three basic assumptions about you. First, it assumes you’ve got Windows XP installed on an IBM-compatible PC (meaning a computer not named “Apple” or “Macintosh”). The book tosses in a morsel or two of information about Linux, a competing operating system, but only as a last resort to resuscitate a PC when Windows XP has grown too faint to revive. (To confirm you’ve got Windows XP, rather than some earlier Windows variant, click the Start menu, right-click My Computer, and then choose Properties. Your Windows version appears in the System area of the Properties window.) Tip: Still on the fence about which PC to buy? Or thinking about trading up for a new machine? Check out the handy, semi-annual PC buying guide, written by the Wall Street Journal’s tech expert, Walter Mossberg. You can find the latest one online at http://ptech.wsj.com/archive/ptech-20051013.html.

Next, you should be reasonably familiar with Windows XP’s very basics: how to open and close windows, for instance, and how to navigate to folders and open them. Here’s a very quick primer on a few terms and concepts that you’ll frequently bump up against in your computing life: • Clicking. This book gives you three kinds of instructions that require you to use your computer’s mouse or trackpad. To click means to point the arrow cursor at something on the screen and then—without moving the cursor at all—to press and release the clicker button on the mouse (or laptop trackpad). To doubleclick, of course, means to click twice in rapid succession, again without moving the cursor at all. And to drag means to move the cursor while continuously pressing the button. • Keyboard shortcuts. Every time you take your hand off the keyboard to move the mouse, you lose time and potentially disrupt your creative flow. That’s why many experienced computer fans use keystroke combinations instead of menu commands wherever possible. Ctrl+Z, for example, is a keyboard shortcut for undoing your last action in Windows (and most Windows programs). When you see a shortcut like Ctrl+S (which saves changes to the current document), it’s telling you to hold down the Ctrl key and, while it’s down, to type the letter S and then release both keys.

Introduction PCs: The Missing Manual, eMatter Edition Copyright © 2008 O’Reilly & Associates, Inc. All rights reserved.

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Introduction

Note: In order to cut down on the number of clicks you have to endure when adjusting various settings on your PC, do yourself a favor and switch your Control Panel window from Category View to Classic View. Choose Start ➝ Control Panel and then click “Switch to Classic View” from the task pane along the Control Panel’s left side. That displays all the Control Panel icons whenever you visit this all-important command center.

Finally, this book assumes you’re not going to try to absorb all the information it contains. It’s a manual you can reach for on the bookshelf or in the glove compartment during your time of need, and then close back up when the engine starts, the flat’s repaired, or you’ve found the place to pour the windshield wiper fluid.

About ➝ These ➝ Arrows Throughout this book, and throughout the Missing Manual series, you’ll find sentences like this one: “Click Start ➝ All Programs ➝ Accessories ➝ Calculator.” That’s shorthand for a much longer instruction that directs you to click the Start button to open the Start menu. Then choose All Programs. From there, click Accessories and then click the Calculator icon. Similarly, this kind of arrow shorthand helps to simplify the business of choosing commands in menus, as shown in Figure I-1. Figure I-1: In this book, arrow notations help simplify folder and menu instructions. For example, “Right-click the selected files and choose Send To ➝ CD Drive” is a more compact way of saying: “Right-click the selected items. When the shortcut menu appears, click Send To, and then slide to the right and choose CD Drive.”

About the Outline PCs: The Missing Manual is divided into five sections, each containing several chapters:

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PCs: The Missing Manual PCs: The Missing Manual, eMatter Edition Copyright © 2008 O’Reilly & Associates, Inc. All rights reserved.

• Part 1, Your PC’s Main Parts, covers everything inside or connected to your PC. You’ll learn how to find out what’s in your PC without opening its case, as well as how to deal with the dusty parts inside if you need to. You’ll also learn how to diagnose and identify broken parts, and buy new parts to replace those that are ailing. You’ll find out everything you need to know about connecting keyboards, mice, monitors, video cards, and printers, as well as putting them to work, and fixing them when they refuse to perform.

Introduction

• Part 2, Multimedia, explains how your PC handles sound, photos, and movies, and how it works in conjunction with digital cameras, camcorders, Webcams, scanners, MP3 players, TVs, and similar gadgetry. You’ll learn how to connect these devices to your PC, transfer their contents, and do things like create playlists of favorite songs and edit your home movies into finished creations. • Part 3, Storing Information, covers your PC’s storage tanks otherwise known as drives: hard, floppy, CD, and DVD, as well as flash drives and the tiny memory cards found mostly in digital cameras. You’ll learn how to install each type of drive, and how to create custom-made CDs and DVDs. • Part 4, Talking to the World, lets you accomplish that very task, thanks to your PC and a few helpers. You’ll learn how to find an Internet provider, enter its settings into Windows XP, and start sending email or instant messages. You’ll also learn all about choosing a Web browser, visiting Web sites, and making Internet-based phone calls. To communicate with other computers you might own (to exchange files or to share an Internet connection, for example), you’ll find out how to set up a network of two or more PCs. • Part 5, Maintenance, Security, and Troubleshooting, shows you how to keep your PC running smoothly and ensure your work stays safe. You’ll learn troubleshooting tactics, how to remove viruses and spyware, and about other mundane, but sometimes necessary, PC chores.

About MissingManuals.com At the www.missingmanuals.com Web site, you’ll find articles, tips, and updates to the book. In fact, you’re invited and encouraged to submit such corrections and updates yourself. In an effort to keep the book as up to date and accurate as possible, each time we print more copies of this book, we’ll make any confirmed corrections you’ve suggested. We’ll also note such changes on the Web site, so that you can mark important corrections into your own copy of the book, if you like. (Click the book’s name, and then click the Errata link, to see the changes.) While you’re at the Missing Manuals Web site, feel free to download a few appendices that didn’t fit into this book. Here’s what you’ll find, all free for the download.

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Introduction

• Memory Cards and USB Drives. Digital cameras store your snapshots onto tiny memory cards, little postage-stamp-sized plastic doodads. This appendix explains the different types of memory cards and USB drives you’re likely to encounter, how to tell them apart, which ones you need, and how to save and retrieve information to and from them. Check out the “USB Drive Travel Kit” section, which lists the most useful free and small programs that fit on USB drives, ready to save the day. • Other Cool Things You Can Do Online. This appendix covers some of the many fringe benefits you get with an Internet-connected PC: sending and receiving faxes, gambling online, playing games against others, printing directions for your next road trip, sending greeting cards, sending and receiving instant messages, creating and maintaining your own Web site, and dialing up long-distance friends with the Web’s newest darling, Internet-based phone calls. • Dealing with Technical Support. Before picking up the phone and making that dreaded call, be sure to read this appendix. It explains what to prepare in advance, so that your conversation is as smooth and as helpful as possible. And, if you’re lucky, some of the alternative tech support options listed might keep you from picking up the phone at all. • Packing a Laptop Bag. Keep a printout of this appendix in your laptop bag. By running down the list, you’ll know you’re well-stocked enough to meet just about every on-the-road emergency. In the meantime, we’d love to hear your own suggestions for new books in the Missing Manuals line. There’s a place for that on the Web site, too, as well as a place to sign up for free email notification of new titles in the series.

Safari Enabled When you see a Safari® Enabled icon on the cover of your favorite technology book, that means the book is available online through the O’Reilly Network Safari Bookshelf. Safari offers a solution that’s better than e-books. It’s a virtual library that lets you easily search thousands of top tech books, cut and paste code samples, download chapters, and find quick answers when you need the most accurate, current information. Try it for free at http://safari.oreilly.com.

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PCs: The Missing Manual PCs: The Missing Manual, eMatter Edition Copyright © 2008 O’Reilly & Associates, Inc. All rights reserved.

chapter

Chapter 1

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Inside Your PC

It took them a decade, but computer engineers finally realized people don’t enjoy opening a computer case to add new parts. The engineers tweaked the design, and now, unlike your computing forefathers, you don’t need to reach for the screwdriver to install a new mouse—you simply plug its cable into a convenient outlet on your PC’s case. But although today’s mice, keyboards, printers, scanners, monitors, and scores of other parts slip into a convenient jack, a few parts still hide inside the case. Some contain fragile circuitry that could be damaged by fumbling fingers. Others stay hidden simply because they rarely need replacing. Today, you need to open your PC only when performing these occasional tasks: • Adding or replacing memory if your PC runs too slowly (usually noticeable when you have several programs open simultaneously). • Adding cards to your PC to give it new abilities—a FireWire port required by a digital camcorder, for instance. • Replacing the power supply if your PC refuses to turn on. • Changing the battery when your PC begins forgetting the time and date. • Identifying parts that are causing problems. This chapter gives you an introduction to your PC’s case and the parts that call it home—the motherboard (page 16), memory chips (page 18), slots (page 27), cards (page 25), and power supply (page 47). This introduction tells you what these parts do, when you need to find them, and, if necessary, how to repair or replace them.

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PCs: The Missing Manual, eMatter Edition Copyright © 2008 O’Reilly & Associates, Inc. All rights reserved.

Finding Out Your PC’s Horsepower

Along the way, you’ll learn how to look up your PC’s computing “horsepower,” a handy thing to know when puzzling over the System Requirements list on every software box. Finally, this chapter identifies all the connectors on the outside of your PC’s case, what plugs into them, and what to do if a cable doesn’t fit. Note: If you’re a laptop owner, you’re in luck: everything in this chapter applies to both laptops and PCs. “Laptop Life” boxes explain any differences on how to deal with them.

Finding Out Your PC’s Horsepower Video store clerks never interrogate their customers about their VCR’s voltage or motor speeds. But try to buy software at a computer store or online, and you’re expected to know these intimate details about your PC’s inner workings. The System Requirements fine print for most software, including Windows XP, lists terms like these: • Processing power. This refers to your CPU (page 16), which stands for Central Processing Unit and is your PC’s brain. Engineers measure a CPU’s clock speed—how fast it thinks—in GHz (gigahertz) or MHz (megahertz). The bigger the number, the faster your CPU thinks. For example, Windows XP requires a 233 MHz CPU, but works faster if your PC’s got a 500 MHz or faster CPU. • RAM (Random Access Memory). Memory (page 18), a temporary storage area for Windows to work in, is measured in megabytes (MB). The more RAM you pack into your computer, the more programs Windows can run simultaneously. Windows XP requires 128 MB of RAM, but works best with 512 MB or more. • Video. Most software, including Windows XP, says it requires a “Super VGA” or higher resolution monitor (page 84) and video adapter (page 107), the internal device feeding all those pretty pictures to your monitor’s screen. This cryptic requirement means very little. Nearly every computer sold in the last decade sports both a Super-VGA monitor (if it in fact ships with a monitor) and a Super-VGA video adapter. Some graphics-hungry programs, like games, also want to know the video adapter’s brand, model, and amount of memory. • Hard drive (hard disk) space. You may already know the size or storage capacity of your hard drive (page 255), your computer’s holding tank for stored programs and files. However, most software wants to know the amount of free space left on your hard drive. After all, your new software needs some elbow room. Windows XP, for instance, consumes two or three gigabytes of space; most programs require much less. Most hard drives today hold between 40 and 120 GB of space. • CD drive reading and writing (saving) speed. Here, bigger numbers are better. Today’s compact disc drives (page 307) are fairly speedy, reading information at a speed of about 52X (the “X” means 52 times faster than the original CD models) and burning (recording) at about 32X—plenty fast for most software and file-saving tasks. 8

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Note: The first CD burners took 74 minutes both to read and write to a CD. So a 52X CD recorder burns a CD in less than 90 seconds.

Finding Out Your PC’s Horsepower

• DVD drive reading and writing speed. Again, bigger numbers are better. Today’s DVD drives (page 307) both read and write to DVDs at 16X. DVD burners can also read and write to CDs, making them a handy “do-it-all” drive. • Software version numbers. Age discrimination saturates the computer industry, and software often refuses to work with older, previously released versions of other programs. If that hot new Freeway Designer software requires Traffic Simulator v3.0 and you’re still simulating traffic with Version 2.0, Freeway Designer won’t run. • Operating System and Service Pack. It’s not enough to know that your computer runs Windows XP, Microsoft’s newest operating system. Microsoft has released two additional upgrades to Windows XP known as Service Packs (see page 480) to fix XP’s security holes and other shortcomings. If your PC doesn’t match every requirement listed on a box of new software, the software probably won’t work well or at all. So, how do you know exactly what’s inside your PC? Reading your computer’s receipt or packing slip often provides clues, but you’re not lost if those things have fallen behind the desk. Some computer manufacturers, including Dell (www.dell.com) and Gateway (www.gateway.com), affix serial numbers to the case of every computer they sell. If you spot a number-bearing sticker on the case of your Dell or Gateway PC, visit the manufacturer’s Web site, head to the site’s Customer Support area, and type in the sticker’s number. (Dell calls its serial number a Service Tag.) The Web site displays your computer’s packing slip, listing the specifications of every part it contained when sold. Tip: Can’t read the serial or Service Tag number stamped on the sticker? Visit the company’s Web site, anyway. You can usually download software that extracts the number from its hiding spot on one of your computer’s chips, and, with your permission, ships the number off to the company’s Web site. Armed with your PC’s tag number, the site then displays your PC’s specifications.

When suitably prodded, Windows XP also coughs up specific information about your PC. Table 1-1 shows how to make Windows XP divulge the information System Requirement lists most frequently mention. Figure 1-1 shows how to print a handy list of your PC’s system information that you can carry when shopping for new parts or software.

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The PC’s Case

Table 1-1. Locating your PC’s System Requirements information

The Information You Need

How to Find that Information

Operating System, Service Pack number, Central Processor Unit (CPU) type and speed, and available Random Access Memory (RAM).

Start ➝ Right-click My Computer ➝ Properties. The General tab lists the information.

Hard disk size and amount of free space.

Start ➝ My Computer. Right-click your hard drive icon and choose Properties. The General tab lists the information.

CD drive–burning (recording) speed.

Start ➝ My Computer ➝ Right-click CD drive ➝ Properties ➝ Recording tab. In the Desktop CD Recording section near the window’s bottom, click the “Select a write speed” drop-down menu to see your drive’s available recording speeds. (If you don’t spot a tab marked Recording, Windows XP can’t burn CDs on that drive.)

DVD drive–burning (recording) speed.

Windows XP doesn’t recognize DVD burners; it simply lists them as DVD drives (or sometimes CD-burning drives). To find out your DVD drive’s recording speed, you need to look at your PC’s documentation, poke around the menus of your DVD-burning program, or visit the drive manufacturer’s Web site and look up the drive’s model number.

Program version number.

Open any program and choose Help ➝ About.

Display type, resolution, and number of colors.

Start ➝ Control Panel ➝ Display ➝ Settings tab.

Video card memory in MB (megabytes).

Start ➝ Settings and Help ➝ Control Panel ➝ Display ➝ Settings ➝ Advanced ➝ Adapter.

DirectX version, a set of utility programs often used by games.

Start ➝ All Programs ➝ Accessories ➝ System Tools ➝ System Information ➝ Tools ➝ DirectX Diagnostic Tool ➝ System tab.

The PC’s Case Unlike your PC’s glowing monitor, your PC’s case usually sits unnoticed beneath the desk or in a dark corner. After you switch the power on or off, you usually touch the PC’s case for only two reasons: • You want to plug something into your PC, like a new mouse, digital camera, or glowing blue game controller. • You want to place something inside your PC like new memory or a new drive, or you need to replace something that’s not working. Plugging something into the case is easy enough, once you find the right port (page 32), a general term describing any hole, jack, or plug you use to connect things like a mouse or speakers to your PC. Putting something inside the case takes more

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effort, but it’s probably easier than you think, thanks to the design of your PC’s case.

The PC’s Case

Figure 1-1: This list shows the items most frequently mentioned in a software box’s System Requirements’ area. To see this information about your own computer, click Start ➝ Help and Support ➝ Use Tools to View your Computer Information and Diagnose Problems ➝ My Computer Information ➝ View General System Information about this Computer. Click the Print icon to have the printer spit out a handy crib sheet you can take to the store.

PCs aren’t designed like cars, which force owners to find a specific muffler for their ’67 Chevy El Camino. Most PC cases contain standard-sized parking spots called bays for sliding in standard-sized drives—boxy storage units like CD drives or hard drives. For example, almost any hard drive slides smoothly into almost any case’s drive bays (Figure 1-2) and locks into place easily with screws or a bracket The holes in your PC’s case also line up exactly with the holes in the computer’s motherboard (page 16), a large flat card stuffed with your computer’s main circuitry. And the holes in the PC’s power supply (page 47), a metal box that pipes electricity throughout your PC, also align with the holes in your PC’s case. This “matching holes” design lets you easily attach standard-sized parts to your PC’s case with just a few screws. Many of your PC’s other internal parts hail from the same IKEA school of easy assembly, but they use slots and matching tabs. For instance, the motherboard contains standard-sized slots, good for plugging in memory (page 18), which comes on little circuit-filled sticks that let your computer juggle information.

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Opening Your PC’s Case

Cards (page 25), larger flat parts that add features like better video to a PC, slip into slightly larger slots on a motherboard. POWER USERS’ CLINIC

Wringing Out the Most Technical Details As you can see in Figure 1-1, Windows XP freely divulges general information about your computer—its available hard drive space, for instance, and its amount of installed memory. However, that’s not detailed enough when you’re troubleshooting annoying error messages or hunting down replacements for misbehaving drivers—the software Windows relies on to talk with external devices like printers and scanners. Sometimes you may need to read specific technical info over the phone during a call to Tech Support. That’s where the System Information window comes in. Useful for troubleshooting problems in specific areas, the System Information window provides a quick way to locate details like driver dates and versions, names of installed codecs (files that let your PC play back media like MP3s or DVDs) and lists of programs that automatically start when you turn on your computer. To see every technical detail Windows XP has to offer, click Start ➝ All Programs ➝ Accessories ➝ System Tools ➝ System Information. If you click any of the items listed in the Components section along the left, Windows XP spills that item’s dossier across the box’s right side.

Windows XP’s System Information tool digs up enough detailed information to solve most problems, but it’s a mere doctor’s checkup compared to the neurological MRI scan SiSoftware’s Sandra (www.sisoftware.net) provides. Download the free version of this program to let Sandra’s special modules detect the most esoteric information about every part of your computer. For instance, if you doubleclick the Mainboard Information module, Sandra shows your motherboard’s name, model, and serial number; the manufacturing date of your memory chips; and the name, manufacturer, and driver date of every device plugged into all of your computer’s ports. Admittedly, much of this information is overkill except to computer technicians. (And technicians usually buy the software’s pay version, which grants access to even more advanced information.) But when you need specific information about something in your computer that’s misbehaving, SiSoftware’s Sandra’s free version rarely fails. If you reach a dead end while troubleshooting, try Googling one of Sandra’s arcane strings of technical details. You may hit upon a solution you’d never find elsewhere.

Opening Your PC’s Case In most cases, opening your PC’s case boils down to sliding off a side panel. But before starting, make sure you have a fresh backup of your most important files. Chances are, nothing catastrophic will happen. But since you should back up your files every day anyway, now’s a good time to make sure last night’s backup worked (see page 463). Before opening the case, turn off your computer and unplug its power cord from the wall. Then examine your computer to see where its case opens. Some newer, expensive computers pop open at the press of two large pushbuttons, as seen in

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Figure 1-3, top. (Cases on expensive computers sometimes have built-in padlock holders to keep out potential thieves.)

Opening Your PC’s Case

Figure 1-2: Top: Thanks to the standard design of a PC case, this hard drive slides easily into a shelf called a bay, where a mounting bracket holds it in place. Bottom: Some bays hold items in place with screws. Note how the screw holes in the bay precisely align with the screw holes in the CD drive, making it easy for a few screws to hold the drive in place.

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Opening Your PC’s Case

Many computers use two thumbscrews—screws with large round heads that you can twist off with one hand—to hold the side panel onto the case. Twist off the thumbscrews and slide off the panel with an easy push (Figure 1-3, middle and bottom). Older models sometimes use two or three regular screws instead of the easier-to-remove thumbscrews. Once you remove the screws or thumbscrews, slide the side panel toward the back of the computer and outward. After you move the panel a few inches, you should be able to easily pull it off. Set the panel to the side, and you’re in. Figure 1-3: Top: You can open some cases by pressing two large buttons that sit on opposing sides of the case. Press the buttons and lift upwards; the case begins to hinge open. Middle: Screws hold most other cases together. To open the case, remove the screws or thumbscrews (inset) that hold the side panel in place. Bottom: After removing the screws, slide off the panel, pulling it toward the back of the computer.

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Tip: It’s easy to lose screws when removing a PC’s case and its internal parts. To prevent mix-ups, place screws from different parts of your PC into different hollows of an empty egg carton.

Opening Your PC’s Case

LAPTOP LIFE

Opening up a Laptop Unlike PCs, laptops don’t use standard-size, easily replaceable parts. Instead, laptops use tiny, specially fitted parts that aren’t interchangeable between models or manufacturers. Simply put, laptops aren’t easy to upgrade or repair. Instead of opening the laptop’s entire case, you open only small plastic flaps to gain access to specific areas, like memory, batteries, and hard drives (each of these items are covered in their respective sections in this chapter).

Unlike PCs, most laptops come with a manual that describes exactly which screws and flaps to remove to reach any upgradeable parts. If you’ve lost your manual, visit the Customer Support area of the laptop manufacturer’s Web site and download a copy. Most manufacturers store their online manuals in PDF form; you can easily read these files as long as you have Adobe’s free Reader program (available at www.adobe.com/reader).

Troubleshooting Overheating Problems Most PC cases are trouble-free, since they rarely break. The only troubleshooting you might have to perform is making sure the case keeps your PC’s parts enclosed and cool: whirling fans inside the case constantly cycle air through strategically placed vents to prevent parts from overheating. If your PC’s case ever feels very warm or even hot to the touch, it’s definitely overheating, and it needs immediate attention. Follow these guidelines to test for proper cooling and learn how to fix potential cooling problems. • Check the air flow. Find your case’s vents and make sure they’re not pushed up against the side of a desk or wall. The case’s side vents need at least an inch or two of clearance. Leave at least six inches of breathing room between the back of your PC and anything else. • Clean the vents regularly. Feel free to leave your PC turned on while you remove dust and pet hair with a vacuum cleaner’s brush nozzle. (Most of the dust clogs the computer’s back fan vent.) If you notice a dust beard growing from your computer’s vents, pick up a can of “Dust Off” or similar compressed air from your local computer or office supply store. Take the computer outdoors, remove its case (page 16), and spray off any dust clogging the vents and parts. • Leave the sides of the case attached. If you just installed a new part (a DVD drive, for instance), run the computer with the case open or with a side-panel removed while you confirm that everything works okay. But don’t leave it that way for regular use, even if you want to look fashionably geeky. Case vents are designed to move the air flow over the PC’s hottest parts. Leaving the case open or off disrupts the air flow and can make your PC run hotter than it should.

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15

Motherboard

• Listen for the main fan. Behind a vent on the back of your PC lives a large fan that constantly pushes air through your PC. If that fan stops spinning, your PC will overheat. You can usually see or hear the fan spin, but if you’re not sure the blades are moving, try this test: stick a thin strip of paper (not wire) through the vents to feel the fans brush against it. If the fan isn’t moving, you’ll need to replace your PC’s power supply (page 47) since that’s where the fan lives. Note: Built to last, PC cases don’t wear out. But if you find yourself contemplating a shiny new case with glowing blue lights, set aside a day or two to move your old PC’s guts to its new housing. For more information about choosing cases and bolting down parts, check out Building the Perfect PC (O’Reilly).

Motherboard Your PC’s motherboard, a large flat, rectangular piece of circuitry, serves as a platter for your computer’s brains, memory, cards, and connectors. Everything inside your PC ultimately connects to the motherboard, which shuttles information between the parts. Since the motherboard lies buried deep inside your PC, you’ll spot it only under a few circumstances: when replacing the battery, replacing the power supply (page 47), adding memory (page 18), or adding cards (page 25). When rummaging inside your computer during one of those tasks, use Figure 1-4 as a roadmap.

CPU (Central Processing Unit) The CPU, the chunky chip serving as your computer’s brain, determines how quickly your computer follows instructions. The more powerful the CPU, the faster it can fling around information, leading to less time waiting at the keyboard. Windows XP works well with CPU’s from two companies: Intel’s Pentium 4 (fastest) or Celeron (slower) CPU, or AMD’s Athlon 64 (fastest) or Sempron (slower) CPU. Engineers measure a CPU’s “thinking” speed (known as clock cycles) in megahertz (MHz) or gigahertz (GHz); the bigger the number, the faster the CPU, and the more you pay for it. This knowledge comes in handy when shopping for computers, as you know that a 3.6 GHz PC is slightly faster (and more expensive) than a 3.2 GHz. It’s mostly gamers and movie editors who need super fast, super expensive PCs. For word processing and e-mail, most people do fine with a bargain-priced 2.4 GHz Celeron or Sempron. Once you bring your computer home, you can’t do much more with the CPU besides look at its perch on your motherboard. (And even peeking isn’t easy,

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because the CPU’s always covered with a fan or metal flippers to cool it down.) In theory, you can pop an old CPU off the motherboard and pop in a faster one, but it’s rarely worth the effort, for several reasons.

Card in slot Ports

Slots

Battery

CPU

Drive connectors

CPU cooler

Memory in slots

Back of case

Power supply

Main power supply connector

Power cables for drivers

CPU (Central Processing Unit)

Figure 1-4: Your motherboard contains your CPU, battery, memory, memory slots, cards, slots, and connectors for plugging in parts and cables. Motherboards vary slightly in their layouts, so your’s probably looks somewhat different. But these main components appear on every motherboard. (The power supply connects to the case, not to the motherboard, but its wires lead to the motherboard to feed it power.)

First, replacing a CPU is expensive and time consuming. Second, different types of CPUs require different types of motherboards—they’re not nearly as interchangeable as most computer parts are. Finally, a PC’s only as fast as its slowest part. That slow part is most likely the hard drive, the video card, the memory, or all three. In most cases, adding a slightly faster CPU to your motherboard won’t make a noticeable speed difference. If you’re itching to speed up your PC, try adding more memory (page 18) or a faster hard drive (page 255), instead. When it’s time to replace your CPU, it’s usually time to replace the entire computer.

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Adding Memory (aka RAM)

Adding Memory (aka RAM) Many people confuse memory with hard drives, because they both store the same things: programs, documents, digital photos, and other files. What’s the big difference? POWER USERS’ CLINIC

Identifying Your Motherboard To save money, many of today’s motherboards include built-in video, sound, modems, and network ports. When searching for drivers for those items (page 508), you need to know your motherboard’s manufacturer, model, type, and chipset, all explained below. This information usually appears on your PC’s invoice or packing slip, but if it’s not listed, here’s how to find it yourself. Manufacturer and model refer to the motherboard’s creator and identifying name. Sometimes the manufacturer prints this information directly on the motherboard or on an affixed sticker. But when faced with an unidentified motherboard, search other areas for clues: your PC’s BIOS boot strings—the words and numbers that appear when you first turn on your computer—or the System Devices area of Windows XP’s Device Manager. The motherboard’s type (also called form factor) refers to its physical size. The motherboard’s size must match the PC case so the mounting holes and brackets align. Most modern PCs use a size called ATX (which stands for Advanced

Technology eXtended) for the case, motherboard, and power supply. The chipset refers to the manufacturer of the chip that serves as “traffic director” for routing information through the motherboard. Intel motherboards usually use Intel chipsets. But manufacturers of cheaper motherboards often buy chipsets from third parties. To locate the chipset’s maker, try searching on Google for the motherboard’s manufacturer and model. Such a search usually turns up the motherboard’s online manual, features list, or even a photo with the parts labeled. When stumped for clues, try using software written specifically to identify motherboards. Motherboards.org (www. motherboards.org) has a Tools section that lists several free programs for revealing a motherboard’s identity. The free version of SiSoftware’s Sandra (www.sisoftware.net) (page 12) can often identify a motherboard, as well.

Well, your computer uses your hard drive as a huge parking lot that stores all the information that you want to permanently store. But managing all that space slows down the hard drive. Just as finding your car and getting it out of the lot takes time—you find yourself waiting for Windows XP to load a program or file. Compared to a lumbering hard drive, memory is as speedy as a freeway. That’s why Windows loads programs and files off the hard drive and into your PC’s memory to use them. PCs would run much more quickly if everything was stored in RAM and computer operations could skip hard drives altogether. Why don’t PCs work this way? Because memory’s expensive when compared to hard drives. Hard drives cost only about a dollar or so per gigabyte; memory costs about $200 per gigabyte. To save you money, Windows pulls a little trick when it runs out of memory: it stakes out a chunk of empty hard disk space and uses it to dump information that won’t currently fit into memory. By juggling information back and forth from the 18

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hard drive to memory, Windows XP works a little more slowly, but still gets the job done.

Adding Memory (aka RAM)

UP TO SPEED

The CPU Wars: AMD vs. Intel Two major companies, Intel and AMD (Advanced Micro Devices), make CPUs for PCs. AMD’s CPUs cost much less, but lack the prestige of Intel’s name and high-priced chips. Both brands work equally well, although some say that AMD currently holds the edge. Intel’s fastest CPU is the Pentium 4; its top CPU for laptops is the Pentium M, designed especially to prolong battery

life. AMD’s fastest CPU is the Athlon 64, and, for laptops, the power-saving Turion. A few years ago, most people bought PCs based on CPU speed. Today’s breed of CPUs work so quickly that the other parts of the PC have to work to catch up. The biggest battles now take place among video card manufacturers, as they try to create cards that crank out graphics as quickly as the games can serve them up.

Note: The chunk of hard drive space used as makeshift memory goes by several names: “virtual memory,” a “paging file,” or a “swap file.”

But perhaps the biggest difference between memory and a hard drive is durability. Once stored on a hard drive, information stays put when you turn off your PC. Information stored in memory, however, disappears whenever your PC crashes or you turn it off. FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTION

Breaking Through the Byte Barrier What’s the difference between a kilobyte (KB), a megabyte (MB), and a gigabyte (GB)? And what about megahertz and gigahertz?

holds about one book, one large digital photograph, or one minute of music. Multiply those items by 1,000 to realize the massive size of a gigabyte.

Here’s the easy answer: computers measure storage capacity in bytes. A kilobyte contains 1,024 bytes, a megabyte contains 1,048,576 bytes, and a gigabyte contains more than a billion of the darn things. Each one holds 1,000 times more storage space than the previous one.

When describing storage, most keychain drives hold between 256 and 512 MB. One CD holds about 700 MB, or the equivalent of one music CD. And most hard drives sold today can store at least 40 GB of information.

In more practical terms, think of a single byte as containing a single number or letter. One kilobyte—1,000 bytes—holds about a paragraph or two. One megabyte of storage space

The same 1,000-fold increase applies to megahertz and gigahertz, the terms used to measure a CPU’s speed. One GHz equals 1,000 MHz, so a 2 GHz CPU is actually four times as fast as a 500 MHz CPU.

You only have to fiddle with your PC’s memory under two conditions: • You want to add more memory to speed up your computer. • You suspect a memory chip is bad. Usually this is a last resort when your PC’s not working correctly. Chapter 1: Inside Your PC PCs: The Missing Manual, eMatter Edition Copyright © 2008 O’Reilly & Associates, Inc. All rights reserved.

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Adding Memory (aka RAM)

Memory comes on modules—little chip-filled sticks about the size of a piece of Wrigley’s chewing gum. Each module lives in its own little slot on the motherboard; two little levers (one on each side of the slot) lock it in place (Figure 1-5). To remove memory, unlock its levers and pull it out; to add memory, push it into the slot and lock it in place with the levers. Figure 1-5: Top: To add memory, push the module all the way into its slot on the motherboard. (Sometimes you need to push really hard to make sure the memory fits snugly into its slot.) As you push, little levers on each side of the slot move inward, trying to grasp the module’s little notch. Bottom: Give the levers a little push toward the module to lock it into its slot. To remove a module, reverse the steps. Pull out the levers to lift the module from its slot, and then lift the module with your fingers.

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Warning: To avoid damaging your memory from static, wear latex gloves to handle the chip, insert it, or remove it from its socket. If you’re out of latex gloves, buy a “grounding strap” from a computer store. The strap eliminates static when you attach it between your wrist and the computer’s chassis.

Adding Memory (aka RAM)

Adding or Replacing Memory Adding memory to your PC is the single best way to improve its performance. With more memory installed, you can run more programs simultaneously, open and save your files more quickly, and boast about how much RAM you have to your friends and neighbors. Fortunately, inserting additional memory modules into your motherboard’s slots is as easy as pushing toast into a toaster. The hard part of adding memory comes when choosing the specific type of memory your PC needs. First, memory comes in different sizes (memory and slots use several physical sizes, and they must match), capacities (128 MB to 1 GB or more), types (SDRAM, DDR SDRAM, RDRAM, and others), and speeds (memory rated at 166 MHz can run faster than memory rated at 133 MHz). Second, motherboards can access only a certain amount of memory. You can add 4 GB of memory to nearly any motherboard, for instance, but if the motherboard can access only 2 GB, you’ve wasted your money. Finally, some motherboards insist you install memory in matched pairs. These finicky motherboards insist that you install two modules of the same type of memory. They won’t recognize a single module until you fill a nearby slot with another module of the same size, capacity, and speed as the first. Yes, these tasks make for daunting homework assignments, and memory vendors know it. So, to find your own PC’s picky memory requirements, visit the Web sites of the most popular memory vendors: Crucial (www.crucial.com), Kingston (www. kingston.com), or SimpleTech (www.simpletech.com). All three Web sites offer online tools for choosing the most compatible memory for your particular computer. Choose your PC’s make and model from a dropdown list; the Web page then lists your PC’s memory type, its motherboard’s memory capacity, and whether you have to add the memory in pairs. Best yet, the page lists the exact type of memory module you need, as well as the price. Don’t know your PC’s make or model? Then download and run Crucial’s free Memory Advisor program (Figure 1-6), which sniffs through your PC and supplies you with all the info you need. If you can’t locate the right type of memory for your particular computer using these Web sites, resort to some sleuthing on your own. Track down your motherboard’s make and model (page 16), visit the support area of the motherboard

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Adding Memory (aka RAM)

Memory currently installed

manufacturer’s Web site, and look up the memory requirements for that particular model. Motherboard’s total capacity

Number of slots on your motherboard, and the memory of the currently installed modules

Your PC’s manufacturer and model

Figure 1-6: In less than a minute, Crucial’s Memory Advisor program (www. crucial.com) scans your computer and dishes up exactly what you need to know when replacing memory: the amount of memory your motherboard can handle, the type of memory you need, the number of empty and used memory banks, a suggested memory module for your computer, and its price. Print out the page and check prices at local shops before buying.

The size, type and capacity of memory you should install to upgrade your PC

LAPTOP LIFE

Upgrading Memory Almost all companies that sell PC memory online also sell laptop memory. Laptop memory uses a smaller physical size than PC memory—the size varies among models and manufacturers, and many laptops contain only a single slot for memory. All those restrictions significantly jack up the price of buying memory for laptops over memory for desktop PCs. When shopping, be sure to buy memory created specifically for your laptop’s brand and model, or it won’t fit. To remove your laptop’s old memory, unscrew a plastic flap on your turned-off laptop, remove the flap, and locate the

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memory. (Some Sony Vaios make you remove the keyboard to find the memory hidden underneath.) Most memory pulls directly out of its slot; some memory uses little clasping levers, just like desktop PC memory (page 20). After removing your laptop’s memory module, push in a higher capacity module, lock it in place (if necessary), and replace the cover. When you turn on your laptop, it automatically notices the upgrade. If your laptop doesn’t notice the improvement, the memory’s the wrong type, the motherboard can’t handle that much, or you inserted the module incorrectly.

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Adding memory Even when you know the type of memory your PC needs, you need a little gradeschool arithmetic to choose the right capacity. Follow these guidelines when upgrading your PC’s existing memory:

Adding Memory (aka RAM)

• Determine the memory your computer currently contains. When you rightclick My Computer and choose Properties, Windows displays the amount of memory (RAM) inside your PC. (It’s listed on the bottom line of the window, or very near the bottom.) • Determine the type and amount of memory your motherboard can handle. The online calculators at the memory vendors’ Web sites (page 22) list your motherboard’s memory limit. Subtract the amount of installed memory from your motherboard memory limit to find out how much more memory you can add. • Determine the amount of memory you need. Microsoft says Windows XP requires 128 MB, but 512 MB is more realistic. Your only limit is your bank account and the amount of memory your motherboard can physically process. If you work with lots of digital photos or video, consider upgrading to 1 GB or more. FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTION

What Do I Do with My Old Memory? Since my memory slots were all full, I replaced a 128 MB module with a 512 MB module, giving me an extra 384 MB. Now what do I do with my orphan 128 MB memory module? They say you can never have enough memory, but that’s only when the memory’s inside your computer. Leftover memory causes headaches for PC and laptop owners. Before assuming that you must simply eat your loss, ask if the company accepts trade-ins. That not only gets rid of your old memory, but lowers the price on your new memory. (Some of these dealers resell your used memory as

new memory since there’s little way of telling the difference, but that’s another story.) Some online dealers also buy and sell used memory, but don’t pay much for it. New memory’s never been so inexpensive, so most people want the new stuff. When stuck with an extra module or two, don’t take it too badly. A stash of parts comes in handy when troubleshooting. Store the leftover chip in the static-proof packaging left over from your new memory (or in a zip-lock baggy) and keep it around as a replacement should you suspect a module is bad.

• Count your motherboard’s empty sockets. If the online Web sites can’t count your motherboard’s empty sockets, pop off your PC’s case (page 12) and look for yourself. Spot an empty socket? Then you can fill it with a memory module to increase your computer’s memory. But if your sockets are all full, things become trickier. To upgrade, you must replace a low capacity memory module with a higher capacity module. Replacing a 128 MB module with a 512 MB module, for instance, gives you an additional 384 MB of memory.

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Adding Memory (aka RAM)

• Buy and install the memory that meets your needs. Once you decide the amount of memory you need, buy it online or from your local office supply or computer store, and install it by pushing it into the empty slot as described on page 20.

Troubleshooting Memory Problems Memory doesn’t leave much room for troubleshooting. It either works or it doesn’t. Unfortunately, it’s not always obvious when it doesn’t work. Sometimes your PC tells you upfront. Many PCs tally up their memory when you first power them on, and use cryptic error messages mentioning “parity” and “memory” if something’s wrong. Other symptoms aren’t as obvious, including inexplicable Windows crashes ending with “The Blue Screen of Death”—an ugly blue screen displaying an indecipherable error message. Sometimes large programs crash when you load large files, as they stretch your memory to its limits. Many people check their memory as a last resort, when they can’t find anything else to blame for their PC’s intermittent, undiagnosed problems. TROUBLESHOOTING MOMENT

Testing for Bad Memory Bad memory looks identical to good memory, so eyeballing the module won’t reveal its state of health. If you suspect one of your memory modules has gone bad—or your PC has intermittent problems you can’t blame on anything else—take all the modules to a computer repair shop for testing on their professional machines. In a pinch, you can test the memory yourself. Remove all your memory modules except one. Then run any or all of these free memory testing programs: • Free memtest86+ (www.memtest.org) • DocMemory (www.simmtester.com) • Windows Memory Diagnostic (http://oca.microsoft. com/en/windiag.asp) Your computer runs fine with only one module during the test because all three programs create a bootable floppy disk or CD. Restart your computer with the program’s floppy or CD in the drive, and the software begins testing your memory immediately, keeping Windows or any other program from loading.

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If the first memory module passes the test, turn off your computer, replace the memory module with another one, and turn the computer back on to run the testing program and test the new module. If one of your memory modules fails the test, you’ve most likely found the culprit—unless the slot itself is bad. To rule out that final possibility, move the module to a different slot and test it again. On the rare chance the slot is bad, put your modules into different slots, leaving the bad slot vacant. If all your slots were full of memory, and now one’s slot’s bad, you’re in a quandary. You could just run your PC with less memory. But if you need the memory and can’t afford a replacement motherboard with good slots, pitch your lowest capacity memory module and replace one of your other memory modules with a higher capacity module to make up for the loss, as described on page 23.

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But before assuming one of your memory modules has gone bad, try the following tips:

Installing Expansion Cards

• Reseat the memory in its sockets. Turn off and unplug your computer. Then remove and reinsert one memory module into its slot. Repeat with the adjacent slot until you’ve removed and reseated every module. Then plug your computer back in to see if you’ve cured the problem. If you have another memory module lying around, use it to replace your other modules, one at a time, restarting your computer each time to see if the problem disappears. • Clean your memory chip’s contacts. A memory chip’s contacts—the shiny tabs that plug into the motherboard’s slots—often tarnish with age, creating a bad connection. To fix them, remove your memory chips and carefully rub the contacts with contact cleaner, which you can pick up from any hardware store. (A pencil eraser also works in a pinch.) Reinsert the cleaned-up modules into their sockets, turn on your computer, and see if the eraser trick cleared things up. • Check the memory’s type, slot position, and capacity. Double-check to make sure you replaced your memory with the correct type and that you didn’t add more memory than your motherboard can recognize (page 23).

Installing Expansion Cards Expansion cards, envelope-sized “mini-motherboards” like the one shown in Figure 1-7, live on from computing’s early days. Cards let people expand their PC’s power, often by adding new connectors called ports. Twenty-five years ago, for instance, many people installed a card with a special port that accepted the latest new computing gadget: a mouse. Today, people still add new ports to their PCs by pushing cards into special slots on their motherboard. For instance, digital camcorders dump video into PCs through a FireWire port, a high-speed connector missing from most PCs. If your PC doesn’t have a FireWire port, open your PC’s case, and push a FireWire card into one of your motherboard’s empty slots. The new FireWire port appears on the back of your PC. The new port appears because of the way cards are shaped. Most cards contain ports on one edge and a tab on their bottom that you push into the motherboard’s slot. When pushed into a slot, the cards’ ends poke through the back of your PC, looking like a row of silver strips. Figure 1-7, top, shows a card before it’s installed; below it, a figure shows the newly installed card joining a row of previously installed cards viewed from the outside of your case. Most items that once came on cards now plug into much-more-convenient USB ports (page 34). But when you need something that USB can’t offer, like a FireWire port, expansion cards do the job. With a price tag averaging $30 to $100 per card, adding an expansion card is much cheaper than buying a new computer. Cards can add more than new ports to a computer. Adding an MPEG decoder card, for instance, adds special circuitry to the motherboard. Your computer uses a Chapter 1: Inside Your PC PCs: The Missing Manual, eMatter Edition Copyright © 2008 O’Reilly & Associates, Inc. All rights reserved.

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Installing Expansion Cards

chip on the MPEG decoder card to convert video into MPEG format, which is the format commonly used to store video on DVDs. Figure 1-7: Top: Sliding this sound card into a slot on your PC’s motherboard provides a quick way to add better sound to your PC. Other types of cards let you add things like FireWire ports, a microphone, or a joystick. The tab on the card’s bottom (circled) slips into a slot on your PC’s motherboard. Bottom: The rear ends of installed cards poke through the lower back of a PC, so that you can access any ports the cards contain.

Newly installed card

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Other installed cards

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Identifying Cards and Slots Engineers redesign slots every few years, making each new breed faster and more powerful. Since slot types aren’t compatible with each other, they all use a slightly different size to keep folks from pushing the wrong type of card into the wrong type of slot. Your PC contains a motley crew of differently sized slots, all meant for different types of cards.

Installing Expansion Cards

The newest, most powerful slots handle the most souped-up cards, usually the latest, super-fast video card to please the gaming and graphic design crowd. Motherboard designers always add a few of the newest slot types to their latest motherboard. But the designers always leave in a few older slots to stay compatible with older cards. With such an assortment of slots to choose from, few people use every slot in their computer. If you’re ready to expand your PC with a new port, new circuitry, or something not available through a USB port, start by peeking at your motherboard’s slots (page 28) to see what type of empty ones it contains. Key distinguishing characteristics are slot size and color. Once you’ve identified your slot type, you’re ready to shop for the appropriate card to fill it. Your PC’s motherboard probably comes with a mixture of these slot types: ISA, PCI, AGP, or PCI-Express, all described below and shown in Figure 1-8. Ranked in order of popularity, these slots live on most motherboards: • PCI (Peripheral Component Interconnect). Colored white, PCI slots sit together in a row on most motherboards today. Since they’re the most popular, most stores sell a wide variety of PCI cards. When shopping for a PCI card to add to an empty PCI slot, look for the acronym PCI on the card’s box to ensure the card fits. (Don’t confuse “PCI” with “PCI-Express,” a newer and different type of slot explained below.) • PCI-Express (Peripheral Component Interconnect—Express). Usually colored black, the newly released and powerful PCI-Express slots aim to replace all other slots in the coming years. Found only on the newest computers, PCIExpress slots come in small (dubbed “1X”), medium (4X and 8X) and long (16X) sizes. Some new video cards fit into the long PCI-Express 16X slot, but the other sizes are so new, hardly any cards use them. • AGP (Accelerated Graphic Port). Usually brown, AGP slots differ from other slots in that they accept only video cards. (And the newest video cards are beginning to switch over to PCI-Express format.) Your AGP slot, if you have one, lives on the end of your PCI slot row, toward the middle of your motherboard. • ISA (Industry Standard Architecture). Black ISA slots, found only on old computers, let computer hobbyists run their stash of treasured but obsolete parts— like those 20-year-old modems they can’t bear to part with. If your computer has an ISA slot, it usually sits at the beginning of the row of PCI slots, on the motherboard’s edge. Most people never use it.

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Installing Expansion Cards

Tip: Unlike other cards, which usually stick to PCI slots, video cards come in three different types: PCIExpress (black), AGP (brown), or PCI (white). Since your video card must match your slot, you need to make sure you buy the right type of card to fit your slot.

PCI

ISA

AGP

Figure 1-8: Top: This motherboard, made in 1998, contains a row of four white PCI slots, which accept most cards sold today. To their right sits one brown AGP slot, used only by some video cards. To the left sits one black ISA slot (rarely seen, as it accepts only very old cards). Bottom: This motherboard from 2004 bears a row of three white PCI slots. To their left is a large black PCI-Express slot used by the latest video cards. On the far right lives a small PCI-Express slot that’s so new, very few cards yet fit it. You identify slots mostly by their color (which you can’t see in this black and white photo). Many motherboards also print the slot’s type next to the slot in fine print.

Three PCI-slots

Two PCI-slots

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Adding or Removing a Card Before you install a card, turn off and unplug your PC, remove your PC’s case (page 12), and take a moment to orient yourself. Your new card’s shiny silver edge (the side containing the card’s ports, if it has any) aims toward the back of your PC, where it pokes through one of the case’s several rectangular openings (as shown on Figure 1-7, bottom). Once you have your bearings, follow these steps to insert and attach your new card.

Installing Expansion Cards

1. Remove the thin piece of metal covering the opening in your PC’s case near the empty slot. A piece of metal covers the opening where your card will poke through (Figure 1-9). Remove the screw that holds the cover in place, and lift out the cover. Figure 1-9: A row of rectangular openings along the back of your PC’s case lets each card poke through. The opening lets you access the card’s ports after you close the PC’s case. A little metal strip, held in place by a single screw, covers each unused opening. Unscrew and lift out the metal strip near your vacant slot. Save that strip, as you’ll need to reinsert it if you ever decide to remove a card.

2. Position the card directly over the slot. The card’s flat metal end points toward the newly uncovered rectangular opening in the back of your PC (Figure 1-10). A notch in the card’s tab aligns with a ridge in the motherboard’s slot. The design lets cards and slots mesh like pieces

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of a puzzle. You won’t be embarrassed by accidentally pushing a PCI-Express or AGP card into a PCI slot, because the card won’t fit.

Installing Expansion Cards

Flat silver end of card

PCI card

Notch in card’s tab

Ridge inside slot

Figure 1-10: To insert a card into a slot, hold the card over the slot, pointing the card’s flat silver end toward the back of your computer. Align the notches in the card’s tab with the little ridges inside the slot. Push down gently but firmly until the slot devours the card’s entire bottom edge.

PCI slot

3. Push the card into the slot. If the card resists, try pushing with a gentle rocking motion until it slips into the slot. 4. Fasten the card in place and then replace your PC’s cover. Some PCs hold a card in place with a single screw, shown in the top of Figure 1-11. Other cases use a long, thin, push-down bracket, as shown in the bottom of Figure 1-11. Reverse these steps to remove a card: lift the bracket or remove the screw that holds the card in place. Then pull the card upward until it pops out. Pulling a little bit on each end of a card in a seesaw motion removes the most stubborn cards. Removing a card leaves a long rectangular opening in the back of your PC. If you’ve lost the original metal cover to the opening, pick one up at a computer store. You need to block that hole to keep dust and spiders from entering your PC, as well as to improve your computer’s air flow so it can stay cool inside.

Troubleshooting Card Problems Unlike other parts covered in this chapter, cards almost always require drivers— specially crafted pieces of software that let your operating system recognize and 30

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talk to the cards. Once you’ve installed a card, Windows usually recognizes it, and begins searching through its own built-in stash of drivers for the right one.

Installing Expansion Cards

Figure 1-11: Top: Some PCs hold cards in place with a single screw along the top. When you accidentally drop the screw onto the motherboard—and this happens often—turn your PC upside-down, shake the screw out, and try again. Bottom: Other PCs let you push down a single cover or bracket to hold all the cards in place. If your PC uses the bracket, don’t screw the cards down—just use the bracket.

Card holding bracket

If you’re lucky, Windows automatically locates the right driver, installs it, and begins chattering with your PC’s new accessory. Chapter 1: Inside Your PC PCs: The Missing Manual, eMatter Edition Copyright © 2008 O’Reilly & Associates, Inc. All rights reserved.

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Ports

If you’re not lucky and Windows doesn’t even notice your newly installed card, run Windows’ Add Hardware Wizard (Start ➝ Control Panel ➝ Add Hardware). The Wizard searches your PC for the new hardware, finds it, and leads you through the process of installing the driver. If you’re downright cursed, Windows needs your handholding in locating and installing the right driver (page 514). Some PCs don’t have any cards in their slots. That means the circuitry for most of your PC’s ports—its network, sound, and video ports—are built into the motherboard itself. Sly engineering wizards compressed all those circuits into a chip or two and placed it on the motherboard. Reducing a bulky card to a tiny chip saves space, cost, and, unfortunately, performance. Sliding in a high-performance card overrides the motherboard’s built-in circuitry, letting you beef up your computer. If your newly added replacement for a motherboard’s onboard task—video, for instance—doesn’t work, you probably need to enter your PC’s BIOS area (page 525) and disable its onboard video. That tells the PC to stop using the motherboard’s built-in circuits and to use the more advanced circuitry on the newly added video card, instead. Tip: The contacts on cards sometimes tarnish with age, leading to a bad connection and bad behavior. To clean them, turn off and unplug your computer. Remove the problem card and rub its contacts with a plain ol’ pencil eraser until they’re shiny again. Push the card back down into its slot, fasten it down, cross your fingers, and turn on your computer.

One more thing: If one of your cards doesn’t work, or the installation program has trouble with it, turn off your PC and move the card to a new slot. Sometimes that gives the PC a fresh look at things, and helps it recognize the card more easily.

Ports The word port sounds like some kind of a well-protected haven—after all, boats pull into them when the weather’s rough. Ports stay well protected on computers, too, usually located as awkwardly as possible on the back of your computer, as shown in Figure 1-12. But rather than havens or harbors, computer ports are any type of connector on your PC, from the small rectangular hole of a USB port to the odd-shaped nub of a serial, game, or parallel port. Whatever the shape, ports provide quick entrance for the cables of portable music players, digital cameras, printers, speakers, and other mainstays of the computerized lifestyle.

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Thanks to Windows “Plug and Play” technology, you needn’t turn off your computer before plugging something into a port. Serial

Ports

Figure 1-12: A wide variety of connectors have graced the rumps of computers over the past 20 years. Today, most computers have more ports than you need, simply to stay current with older parts. The ports used most often, USB ports, live on the back of this computer, but sometimes live on a PC’s front panel, as well as on the sides of some keyboards and monitors.

Parallel

PS/2 mouse PS/2 keyboard USB Network Digital monitor VGA monitor Telephone cable to wall’s telephone jack Telephone handset FireWire

Speakers Microphone

Digital sound Line in

Note: The one exception is the elderly PS/2 mouse jack (page 44); you must turn off your computer before plugging in a PS/2 mouse. USB mice—the ones with rectangular plugs—don’t require you to turn off the computer first.

Engineers think up new port types every few years. Not everybody lives on the cutting edge, though, so new ports usually began life on cards (page 25), drop-in pieces of circuitry that stick out the back of your computer. (You can spot the cards in Figure 1-12; they’re the horizontal strips near the bottom of the computer’s case.)

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Ports

Older, more established ports—USB, serial, parallel, PS/2, and occasionally networking—come built into the motherboard (page 16). You can see built-in ports in Figure 1-12; they’re that cluster of connectors above the strips of cards. The rest of this section contains close-up pictures of the ports you need when plugging in their appropriate gadgetry.

Video (aka VGA) The vast majority of monitors plug into this usually blue, 15-hole female port (Figure 1-13). When plugged into a VGA (Video Graphics Array) port, a monitor runs in analog mode, an elderly video standard that still thrives today. Many PCs today include a built-in VGA port. Digital monitors, by contrast, known for their sharper images and shocking price tags, plug into differently shaped ports rarely found on PCs. Instead, people install digital ports by adding a video card (page 25). To find the video card and its digital monitor port, if you have one, look among those shiny strips of metal consuming the bottom half of your computer’s back panel. If you have a digital monitor but no digital port, you’re not left in the dark. Many digital monitors contain both a VGA and a digital port, so you can plug them into either a VGA port or a digital port. When plugged into a VGA port, a digital monitor’s picture won’t look quite as sharp. It’s fine for most work, but if the picture’s not detailed enough for your eyes, start shopping for a digital video card. Some digital video cards contain two video ports—one analog and one digital. Extremely versatile, they let you plug in whatever monitor you own: either a regular, analog monitor or an expensive digital monitor. Or, for the ultimate in sprawling-desktop extravagance, plug in both types of monitors and spread your desktop across both displays (page 89). Analog monitors, digital monitors, and video cards get their own coverage in Chapter 3.

USB Ports (aka Universal Serial Bus) Most computer accessories plug into a USB port—a rectangular slot (Figure 1-14) usually hidden on the back of your computer. Newer computers also sprout a few USB ports along the case’s front, keeping them handy for digital cameras, MP3 players, and other dump-and-go portables. USB-loving parts include keyboards, mice, hard drives, printers, scanners, sound boxes, network adapters, PDA cradles, digital cameras, keychain drives, portable laptop lights, fans, and many other bits of digital gadgetry. Some USB keyboards sport extra USB ports on their sides, letting you chain even more USB gadgets through a single port. But no matter how many USB gadgets

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you crave, you’ll probably run out of desk space before running out of ports: your PC can juggle up to 127 simultaneous USB devices.

Ports

Figure 1-13: Top: Most monitors plug into a VGA port, found on nearly every PC built in the past 15 years. Bottom: The vastly more expensive digital monitors plug into a digital video port. Unlike most cables, monitor connectors are secured into their jacks with two screws. Turn the two thumbscrews next to the port to tighten them, keeping the monitor’s cable from accidentally falling out of the computer when you move the monitor on your desk.

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Ports

Tip: Some USB accessories insist that you install their drivers before plugging them in; others want the drivers installed after you attach them. You can look up a particular device’s preference in its manual, if it has one. Or, you can create a Restore Point (page 500) before plugging in the device. If the device doesn’t work, the Restore Point lets you erase Windows XP’s bad experience, install the device’s drivers, and then try again.

Figure 1-14: Most computer parts today plug into a rectangular USB port. If the cable from your USB gadget won’t reach your computer, pick up an extension cable. Don’t get carried away, though, as some power-hungry USB goodies can’t handle cables longer than six feet.

Most USB devices are “Plug and Play,” meaning you simply plug them in, and wait a few seconds for them to formally introduce themselves to Windows. When Windows XP gives the “installed and ready to use” pop-up message, feel free to start using them. If Windows XP snubs them at the door, though, you probably need to install a driver (page 514) for your new USB gadget. Troubleshooting USB problems The most versatile of computer connectors, the USB port lives a surprisingly trouble-free life. Most of the time, Windows XP recognizes devices when they’re first plugged in, letting you use them within a few seconds. Should things go wrong, however, try these suggestions: • The plug doesn’t fit. Your first USB problem may be simply plugging in the cable. Unlike most plugs, the symmetrical USB plug doesn’t show which way is “up.” Still the plug fits only in one direction, so if you’re having trouble inserting the darn thing, flip it over and see if it finally slips into the jack. • The plug is the wrong size. If the plug still doesn’t fit, you may be dealing with a size issue. USB plugs come in three sizes, as shown in Figure 1-15. Most cables use the larger size plug, but some small, portable devices use the smaller size. 36

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(Most small USB devices come with a converter cable bearing a large plug on one end for your PC and small plug on the other end for your gadget.)

Ports

Figure 1-15: USB plugs and ports come in three main sizes. The vast majority use the standard, rectangularshaped size called “Series A” (left). Others use the fatter, six-sided size called “Series B” (middle). Small consumer devices like digital cameras and MP3 players often use the smallest size called “Mini-Series A/B” (right).

FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTION

The Two Speeds of USB: 1.1 vs. 2.0 When I plug in my digital camera or keychain drive, Windows XP sends me an error message saying the device will work faster if plugged into a USB 2.0 port. What’s USB 2.0, and how do I know whether I have USB 1 or 2? Your device will still work, thank goodness, but more slowly, and here’s why. USB ports now come in two main speeds. The slow, early-issue USB 1.1 ports worked fine for things like keyboards and mice, which didn’t transfer information very quickly. But sending huge digital camera files through a USB 1.1 port is like pouring gallons of molasses through a straw. To keep up, engineers created the newer USB 2.0 ports. The new ports send data 40 times faster than their predecessor, and they’re also backwards compatible, working fine with USB 1.1 ports.

If speed is an issue—and it is with most scanners, digital cameras, iPods, and portable hard drives—then upgrade to USB 2.0. Upgrading is a relatively simple matter of plugging a USB 2.0 card (page 25) into one of your motherboard’s slots. The cards, available for under $30, usually come with drivers; if yours didn’t, connecting to Windows Update (page 478) automatically downloads and installs the USB 2. 0 drivers that Windows XP needs. Most computers sold after 2003 come with USB 2.0 ports. To see if your computer already supports USB 2.0, rightclick My Computer ➝ Properties ➝ Hardware tab ➝ Device Manager ➝ Universal Serial Bus controllers. If you spot the words “USB2 Enhanced Host Controller” somewhere on the Device Manager’s right-side pane, your computer supports USB 2.0.

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Ports

• Windows XP doesn’t recognize the USB device. Sometimes Windows XP doesn’t recognize your newly plugged-in part and gives up. That means Windows XP doesn’t have a driver (page 514) for it. To fix the problem, unplug the device and run its installation software to install the driver, so that Windows XP embraces your gadget when you plug it in again. • The cable doesn’t work. USB 2.0 pipes information through the cable 40 times faster than USB 1.1, so manufacturers strengthen USB 2.0 cables with extra shielding—an extra cover of wire wrapping—to keep the data running smoothly. The extra shielding thickens the cables somewhat, but sometimes USB 2.0 and USB 1.1 cables look identical. Your old USB 1.1 cables may still work with some USB 2.0 gadgetry, but not with all. If Windows XP doesn’t recognize your USB 2.0 device anymore, make sure you’re using its own cable, not a leftover from an older, USB 1.1 gadget. • Windows XP no longer recognizes a familiar USB device. When Windows XP suddenly doesn’t recognize your trusty digital camera or other gadget, try unplugging the camera, counting slowly to five, and plugging it back in. Windows XP often recognizes it the second time and begins talking with it. That’s because Windows takes a second or two to recognize a knock at the USB port’s door, both when you first plug in something and when you unplug it. If you unplug and plug back in a device too quickly, you may confuse Windows, keeping it from noticing that you plugged the device back in. • Your PC doesn’t have enough USB ports. Although new PCs often come with six or more USB ports, many older computers pack only two ports. When you find yourself with more gadgets than ports, pick up a USB hub (Figure 1-16). A hub works like a sprinkler system attachment, plugging into one port and splitting the signal into four or more. Be sure to buy a powered USB hub. The $15 to $30 box plugs into a wall outlet as well as a USB port, and supplies extra electricity to any USB devices that need the juice. • Your device doesn’t have enough power. Two of a USB port’s four wires shuttle information to and from a device; the other two supply electricity. The port’s power keeps you from adding batteries to glowing optical mice or clip-on laptop lights. Some devices like cell phones and MP3 players even use USB ports as chargers. Plug one of these gadgets into a port, and after a few hours, the USB port has charged the internal battery. But sometimes a hoggy device wants more power than the port can deliver. USB ports can dish out only a limited amount of power—500mA (milliamps) at 5 volts, to be precise. If a gadget stops working or complains about a loss of power, try plugging it into another USB port to spread the load. If it still complains, your only solution may be a powered USB hub (page 39). By plugging into the wall, the hub’s able to supply your USB accessories with all

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the power they need. Figure 1-17 shows how to see how much power a device is trying to grab, helpful when troubleshooting power problems.

Ports

Figure 1-16: A powered USB hub not only turns one USB port into four USB ports, but supplies extra juice to USB devices that draw a lot of current—usually devices with bright lights, motors, hard drives, or other power-sapping features.

Figure 1-17: To see how much power your USB gadgets draw, click Start ➝ Control Panel ➝ System ➝ Hardware ➝ Device Manager. Click Universal Serial Bus Controllers, and then double-click any of the USB Root Hub entries. On the Power tab, Windows XP displays what’s plugged into that port (a mouse, in this case) and how much power it draws. If it’s over 500 mA (milliamps), it’s overloading that particular USB port.

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Ports

FireWire (aka IEEE 1394, i.Link) The groovy sounding FireWire port, popular mostly with digital camcorder buffs, began life years ago inside Apple computers. The super-speedy new port let video hounds quickly pour digital video in and out of their Apple computers. WORKAROUND WORKSHOP

Turning a USB Port into a Different Port Just about every computer accessory plugs into a USB port these days. In fact, some new computers leave out older ports to make room for the more popular USB ports. But if your gadget uses an older port that’s missing from your computer, you can use an adapter to transform a USB port into just about any other port. The USB Gear Web site (www.usbgear.com) sells adapters and cables that let you use USB ports for just about anything. Count on spending between $10 and $25 for each item. The site sells run-of-the-mill gender and size changers, for instance, which are useful when your standard USB cable won’t fit into the smaller USB port on a portable device.

But they also sell adapters that transform USB ports into serial ports for connecting modems, game ports for firing up a joystick or game controller, infrared adapters for wirelessly beaming data with a laptop or PDA, wireless network adapters for connecting to the Internet at coffee shops, and USB cables that let you network two computers on-the-fly, even if they lack network jacks. Many adapters are worth tossing into a laptop bag for those special moments when you find yourself cursing a cable that doesn’t fit.

To weasel out of Apple’s licensing fees, PC engineers renamed FireWire to “IEEE 1394.” (It was the 1,394th standard the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers had published.) Similarly, Sony, a big player in the digital camcorder market, called the port “i.Link,” and includes it on most of their PCs. Most PC manufacturers don’t include the port, although it’s gaining momentum. Whether called FireWire, IEEE 1394, or i.Link, the odd-shaped plugs and ports shown in Figure 1-18 let PCs move information about 40 times faster than a USB 1.1 connection, and just a little slower than USB 2.0. Tip: Connect a FireWire cable between two PCs’ FireWire ports and run Windows XP’s Network Setup Wizard to create a speedy, on-the-fly network (page 449) for exchanging data or sharing an Internet connection.

Troubleshooting FireWire problems FireWire’s fairly dependable. Being “Plug-and-Play,” just like USB, Windows XP usually recognizes the camcorder, scanner, or other accessory as soon as you plug it in. (And if it doesn’t, you need to install the accessory’s driver (page 514). The most common problem comes when your new device—most camcorders (page 164), some iPods (page 209), and some portable hard drives—requires a

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FireWire port and your PC’s missing one. To let them gossip, slip a FireWire card into your PC (page 25); the card adds a FireWire port.

Ports

Figure 1-18: Top: FireWire jacks and ports come in two sizes. The larger, six-wire plug transmits power as it exchanges information. Bottom: The smaller, four-wire plugs lack the two power wires, so those devices need their own power source. Whatever size its port takes, FireWire transmits information at 400Mbps compared to 10Mbps for USB 1.1 and 480Mbps for USB 2.0.

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Ports

FireWire cables and jacks use two sizes of connectors. PCs usually favor the larger size jacks (Figure 1-18, top), and portable gadgets prefer the smaller jacks (Figure 1-18, bottom), forcing you to find a FireWire cable with a different-sized plug on each end. Luckily, most gadgets come packaged with the right type of cable, but if yours didn’t, buy an adapter or new cable at a computer store. Warning: Technically, FireWire is hot-swappable, meaning you can plug FireWire devices in and out of your PC without turning off either the computer or the gadget. But some camcorders take hot-swapping literally—producing a spark or short that can fry your camcorder when you plug it in. To be safe, keep your camcorder turned off (the computer can stay on) before you connect or disconnect the FireWire cable. (Sony camcorders are immune to this problem, as their “i.Link” cables don’t transmit any power.)

Ethernet and Phone If your computer has an Ethernet (aka network) port (Figure 1-19, top), you can connect it to a network—a sort of social club that lets computers share information, printers, or, perhaps most important of all, an Internet connection. Since everybody wants to connect to the Internet, most PCs today come with a built-in network port. If your PC escaped the assembly line without one, add it by sliding a network card into one of your PC’s vacant slots (page 25). Or, buy a USB network adapter—a handy converter that plugs into a USB port and sports a network port on its other end. To put your network port to use, you need a network cable (page 413), some surprisingly inexpensive network gear (page 404), and Windows XP’s built-in Network Connection Wizard (page 419). Almost all PCs also come with a phone jack (Figure 1-19, bottom), just like the one on the back of your telephone. The phone jack means your computer contains a modem, handy for connecting to the Internet through a dial-up connection. Most modems can also send and receive faxes with Windows XP’s built-in fax software, described in the online appendix, “Other Cool Things You Can Do Online,” available on the “Missing CD” page at www.missingmanuals.com. To put the modem to work, connect a plain old phone line between your computer’s phone jack and the phone jack in your wall. Subscribe to an Internet Service Provider (page 329), run Windows XP’s Internet Connection Wizard (page 331), and start browsing the Internet. Many people who use dial-up modems eventually purchase a second phone line dedicated to the modem so their family can still make calls and their friends won’t

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always hear a busy signal. Another solution is to switch to broadband service (page 321) if it’s available in your area.

Ports

Figure 1-19: Top: It’s easy to confuse an Ethernet port, used for connecting to other computers as well as the Internet, with the plain old phone jack below. They look almost identical. Even worse, the Ethernet and phone jacks usually sit side-by-side on a computer. However, an Ethernet plug is a tad wider than the phone plug, so it never fits into a phone jack. Bottom: Running a phone line between your phone jack and the phone jack in your wall lets your computer connect to the Internet; some computers even use the phone line to send faxes. Although a phone line’s plug fits into an Ethernet port, it feels loose and won’t snap into place.

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Ports

Keyboard/Mouse (PS/2) Most mice and keyboards (Chapter 2) plug into the ubiquitous USB port like everything else. But in the old days, mice and keyboards required their own special ports, dubbed “PS/2” ports after the model of IBM computer that introduced them in 1987. The ports, shown in Figure 1-20, remain useful for people with older, PS/2style mice and keyboards. Figure 1-20: A computing leftover, PS/ 2 ports work with oldstyle mice and keyboards. Although the two ports look identical, the mouse won’t work in the keyboard port and vice versa. To keep the right plug in the right jack, match the plug’s color with the jack’s color. (Keyboards often use green for their plugs and jacks; mice cables often use purple plugs and jacks.)

Although you can leave your computer on when you plug or unplug items from ports, the PS/2 mouse remains the exception. In fact, if your PS/2 mouse cable accidentally falls from its jack, and you quickly plug it back in, your mouse pointer stays frozen in horror on the screen. Press the Windows Key (page 64) to bring up your Start menu, and choose Restart to let the computer recognize your mouse once again.

Sound Most computers route their sound through 1/8-inch stereo jacks—just like the headphone jacks found on iPods and most portable music players. Since the computer’s row of little sound jacks look identical, the hardest part is figuring out what plugs in where. When plugging in speakers, microphones, or music players, look for tiny symbols etched into the metal next to each jack, as shown in Figure 1-21 and the table that follows.

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Then, after making sure the sound level’s turned way down (page 221) push each connector into its proper jack.

Ports

Figure 1-21: Frustrating farsighted people worldwide, speakers, microphones, and sound sources plug into closely spaced 1/8inch wide ports. To keep people from accidentally plugging things into the wrong port, manufacturers etch tiny identification symbols next to each port. Plugging a jack into the wrong port won’t damage the equipment, but unless you turn down your computer’s volume beforehand, you may hear some startling noises.

The Symbol

The Connector Microphone Speaker Line In (used mostly for recording audio from prerecorded sources like radios or tape decks)

Joystick/Game Controller/MIDI Port Not many people use their PC’s game port (Figure 1-22) anymore. Today’s crop of joysticks, steering wheels, foot pedals, and game pads plug into the faster and more versatile USB port. Today, the 15-hole female game port primarily attracts musicians, as some synthesizers and other MIDI (Musical Instrument Digital Interface) instruments still plug into the port for recording. If you spot a game port on your PC, it’s probably attached to your PC’s sound card.

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Ports

Musicians, too, are beginning to abandon the game port as they ditch MIDI for digital recording, and migrate to the much faster FireWire port. Look for the game port to sink deeper into the Computing Port Graveyard in the coming years. Figure 1-22: Older joysticks and some musical instruments still plug into the game port, found mostly on sound cards or older computers.

Serial and Parallel Ports A leftover from computing’s early years, a serial port (Figure 1-23) still looks frightening, with nine sharp pins protruding from its D-shaped metal hoop. Years ago, dial-up modems suckled up to the port, to let people connect to the Internet. Today, almost all PCs come with built-in modems, leaving the serial port to collect dust and poke stray fingers. Another vestigial tail of computing, the parallel port (also Figure 1-23) resembles an elongated nub with 25 holes. Speedy in its day, the parallel port once connected to nearly every printer and quite a few scanners. Today, printers and scanners attach through the more versatile USB port (page 34). Printers and scanners both prefer the faster USB 2.0 port rather than the older USB 1.1 port. If the cable of your printer or scanner doesn’t fit into your USB port, chances are it’s supposed to plug in the parallel port. Garage sale addicts still use the two ports to wring a few more ounces of life out of their aging printers, scanners, portable organizers, bar code readers, and other early issue computing doodads. A small but enthusiastic crowd of hackers and

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hobbyists rewire their PC’s slow-but-versatile serial ports to work with home-built robots, small trains, backyard monorails, light controllers, and other creations.

Power Supply and Battery

Figure 1-23: Most people don’t use their PC’s serial port (left) or parallel port (right), shown above the oldschool PS/2 ports for the mouse and keyboard. Almost everything that once plugged into these two ports now plugs more conveniently into a USB port. A few old (and dreadfully slow) modems still plug into the serial port, and some old printers and scanners still use the parallel port.

Power Supply and Battery Your computer’s power supply lives inside the PC’s case, where it converts the wall outlet’s 120 volts into the lower voltage sucked up by your computer’s parts. It needs attention only during two main events: if you spot a ton of dust clogging its main fan, and when your PC refuses to turn on. A few swipes with a vacuum

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Power Supply and Battery

cleaner’s brush attachment (page 15) solves the first problem, but the second one is much more complicated. Luckily, most people never need to tackle replacing their power supply; the computer usually wears out first. Note: Don’t confuse a PC’s power supply with an Uninterrupted Power Supply (UPS). The PC’s power supply is a small box that lives inside your PC. A UPS (page 546) is an optional add-on, usually in the form of a large, heavy box that sits outside your PC to protect your work from power outages.

If your desktop PC’s power switch doesn’t seem to have any effect, do what the techies do: put your ear to the computer case and listen closely for any sounds. Normally, turning on the computer starts the power supply’s whirling fan. But if you can’t hear the fan blowing air over your PC’s parts—nor any other noises inside your PC—then the power supply is dead and must be replaced. Before jumping to this unpleasant and rare conclusion, try a few sure-fire tests: • Press the power button for about 10 seconds, and then wait another 10 seconds. Then press the power button again. Repeat. Sometimes that’s all it takes to resuscitate a frozen PC. • Juggle the power cord in its outlet, and where it plugs into the back of your PC. It may be loose. • Check the little red switch on the back of your PC to see if a practical joker has switched it to 220 from 110 (see page 53). If you’re still seeing no signs of activity, your power supply is dead. In fact, if the power supply’s fan stops working but your computer still runs (page 16), you still need to replace the power supply. Without the power supply’s cooling fan, your computer will overheat, leading to even more expensive repairs. When your power supply needs replacing, the next section explains how to handle the chore. Warning: Even after you unplug the power supply, its internal capacitors store up dangerous amounts of electricity. Don’t try to pry open the power supply’s case and repair it yourself. You have to replace—not repair—the power supply.

Replacing a Dead Power Supply Yes, even unplugged power supplies contain dangerous amounts of electricity. And yes, replacing one sounds like a stunt from a reality TV show. However, the dangerous parts are sealed inside the power supply’s metal box, away from sensitive fingers. Many people prefer the convenience of letting a repair shop handle the job of performing this transplant procedure. Replacing the power supply yourself, however, saves money, results in a better power supply, and gives you a conversation starter at cocktail parties. If you’re handy with a screwdriver, your first step is choosing the right replacement. 48

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When shopping for a replacement power supply, you need to know the replacement’s proper wattage, which is the maximum amount of power it can feed to your PC. You also need to know its physical size, so it screws back into the same place as the old one.

Power Supply and Battery

TROUBLESHOOTING MOMENT

Quieting a Noisy PC Newer PCs sound much quieter than older models, but you’ll almost always hear a constant whine. The biggest noisemakers? The fans that cool the sweat from your PC. The biggest (and noisiest) fan cools your power supply; another cools your CPU. And if your computer’s built for games or other demanding graphics software, a third fan cools your video chip. Some even add a fourth fan to cool the hard drive.

Replacing the power supply gives you a great chance to shush your computer. The two prime power supply vendors, PC Power and Cooling and JS Custom PCs, sell quiet models with high-quality ball bearing fans, extra insulation, and other ways to dampen the noise. Building the Perfect PC (O’Reilly) lists more information about quieting a noisy PC when building one from scratch.

Finding the replacement’s correct wattage If you haven’t upgraded your PC with additional parts, buy a replacement power supply that’s the same wattage as your old power supply. Look for your old power supply’s wattage, usually between 200 and 300 watts, stamped on a sticker along its top or side. You may need to first remove the power supply from the computer case (page 12) to see the sticker. But if you’ve upgraded your PC, especially by adding a faster video card or extra drives, your original power supply probably isn’t dishing out enough wattage. In fact, the upgrade’s extra drain may have put the final knife into your old power supply’s ailing heart. How then do you know how many watts to buy for your replacement? To answer this admittedly difficult question, vendors like PC Power and Cooling (www.pcpowerandcooling.com) and JS Custom PCs (www.jscustompcs.com) offer free online wattage calculators. If you check off your PC’s main parts on the Web site’s form, the site tallies up your computer’s wattage requirements. Tip: Google the phrase “power supply wattage calculator” to find similar wattage calculators and compare notes.

When in doubt, buy a replacement with more wattage than you need, despite the higher cost. For an extra 20 to 40 bucks, those extra watts offer room for future upgrades, as well as peace of mind. Plus, buying a high wattage power supply isn’t like replacing all your nightlights with 100-watt bulbs. Your computer draws different amounts of power depending on its current task, so the power supply dishes out only what the computer currently needs. If your computer doesn’t need extra power, the power supply won’t suck extra power from your outlet.

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Buying a replacement power supply that fits your case Power supplies come in several sizes, but the vast majority use a size called ATX, named for the Advanced Technology eXtended moniker that Intel slung onto its motherboards in 1995. If your computer’s strong enough to run Windows XP, it’s probably using an ATX power supply, widely available both online and at computer stores. Your computer’s packing slip, the sticker on the old power supply, or the PC manufacturer’s Web site (page 9) can usually tell you what size you’re looking for. Searching online for the power supply’s part number (found on its sticker), often turns up a vendor for hard-to-find power supplies, as well. POWER USERS’ CLINIC

A Power Supply’s Voltage and MTBF The power supply converts the standard 120 or 240 volts of AC power into the lower DC voltage your computer needs. Circuits, like those in the memory and motherboard, want either 3.3 or 5 volts, but the moving parts (drive motors and fans) insist on 12 volts. Power supplies come rated mostly by MTBF (Mean Time Between Failures). A MTBF rating of 100,000 hours means the manufacturer estimates it will die after constantly powering your PC for about 11 years under ideal conditions.

If you’ve blown through several power supplies, call your electric company and ask them to test your outlet for power fluctuations. These electrical spikes can reduce the power supply’s life considerably. Also, plugging a computer into a UPS (Uninterruptible Power Supply) filters the line, prevents voltage spikes, and lets you wring the most life from your power supply.

For a higher quality replacement—one bearing both an accurate wattage rating and a long life—buy from a third-party vendor like JS Custom PCs or PC Power and Cooling. Warning: Many Dell computers don’t use standard power supplies, and the voltage difference can toast your computer’s motherboard. When replacing a Dell PC’s power supply, make sure the replacement is designed specifically for a Dell computer.

But if you’re having trouble finding a replacement, call your PC’s customer support number and buy a replacement directly from the manufacturer. Although the power supply won’t be as high-quality or quiet as one from a third-party manufacturer, you’ll still save money by installing it yourself. Warning: Don’t skimp when replacing your power supply. It feeds electricity to every part in your computer. High-quality power supplies keep the power flowing at a constant rate; cheaper ones can cause subtle fluctuations that shorten the life of your PC.

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Replace the old power supply After opening your computer case’s (page 12), look in the back of the computer for the three or four screws surrounding the topmost fan. (That fan, located adjacent to the power cable, lives inside the power supply itself.) Inside your computer, usually near the top, the power supply clings to the back wall with those screws. The power supply lives in a gray metal box that has dozens of colored wires poking out of it (see Figure 1-4). When you find the power supply, follow these steps to remove it and install the replacement.

Power Supply and Battery

1. Remove the power cord between the computer and the wall, and then unplug all of the power supply’s cables and connectors. Remove the PC’s power cord first, both from the wall outlet and from where it pushes into the power supply. Next, look inside your computer to find the thick bundle of wires protruding from the power supply. Locate where the wires plug into your motherboard (Figure 1-24) and into your drives (Figure 1-25). Tip: As you unplug wires, consider drawing a quick diagram of how the various plugs fit into their jacks so you can push the new ones into the same places.

First, remove the largest plug from its jack on your motherboard, shown in Figure 1-24. If you spot any other plugs or wires leading from your power supply to the motherboard, unplug them from the motherboard, as well. Figure 1-24: The power supply’s largest plug provides power to the motherboard, where it’s shuttled off to other parts as required. To remove it, pinch in the little latch on one side of the plastic connector and pull the connector straight up. (Don’t tug on the wires, no matter how tempting.) The plug fits into the motherboard’s jack only one way, with the plug’s latch clasping onto the motherboard jack’s latch.

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Note: When removing or inserting plugs into jacks, pull on the plastic connector, never on the wires. Too much stress on the wires may pop them out of their connectors. (If a pair of needle-nose pliers can’t put the wires back into the connector, bring your PC to the repair shop, beg for mercy, and ask them to refasten the wires with their “Molex Pin Extractor” and “Molex Crimp Tool.”)

Next, remove the smaller plugs (called Molex connectors) from their sockets on the back of your drives, shown in Figure 1-25. Finally, disconnect any cooling fans that connect to the power supply—you sometimes find fans cooling highpowered video cards, as well as the CPU. Figure 1-25: Most drives connect to the power supply with the large plastic Molex connector. Be sure to grip the plastic connector itself, not the wires, which can pull out of the plug amid much cursing. The Molex connectors sometimes take a little sideways motion to loosen their grip. The connectors reattach to the drives only one way, so you can’t plug them in the wrong way.

2. Remove the screws holding the power supply to the case, and remove the old power supply. Locate the screws surrounding the fan on the outside of the case. Depending on your PC’s model, remove two, three, or four screws. Save the screws in an egg carton or ice cube tray. You may need to snap off plastic cooling vents—large snap-on molded plastic shafts that direct the air around the CPU. Save the vents for the new power supply. 3. Attach the new power supply. Locate the screws you removed in Step 1 and attach the new power supply. The holes in the power supply line up exactly with the holes in the case; if they don’t, your power supply is upside down, sideways, or the wrong size. Reattach any plastic cooling vents you removed earlier.

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4. Set the correct voltage for your country. A little red switch beneath the power outlet, shown in Figure 1-26, lets you set the voltage to either 110/115 volts (North America and Japan) or 220/230 volts (most European countries). If necessary, flip the power supply’s little red switch to match your country’s voltage.

Power Supply and Battery

Figure 1-26: A little red switch on the back of the power supply lets you toggle the voltage between 110/115 to 220/230. Although it’s usually set for 110/115, many countries manufacture and sell power supplies. If it’s not set to your correct voltage, use a little screwdriver to flip the switch so your correct voltage shows.

5. Attach the new power connectors to their jacks. Reattach the wires to the motherboard, your drives, and any cooling fans. When finished, plug your old power cable into the back of your power supply. (Most power supplies don’t come with new power cables.) Don’t plug it into the wall yet, though. Don’t be surprised to see some of your power supply’s wires dangling unused. They’re for upgrades you may install later. 6. Reattach the case panel, plug in your PC, and turn it on. Your PC should whir back into action. If it doesn’t, turn it off and make sure you fastened your motherboard’s connectors tightly in the right places. Try pushing the power cord tightly into the back of your computer, too; sometimes that doesn’t make a good connection. If your PC still doesn’t turn on and you don’t even hear the power supply’s fan, somebody sold you a dud. Exchange it for a new one.

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When you’re sure the new power supply works, feel free to throw away the old one. (Some hobbyists save them in case they need to salvage a Molex connector.)

Replacing the Motherboard’s Battery Just like a cheap pocket calculator, your expensive PC contains a battery. Without it, your PC would forget the date, time, and the names of its parts whenever it’s unplugged or loses power. Batteries last a fairly long time—from three to seven years. The first symptom of a dead battery? Your PC complains about its amnesia when turned on, leading to odd error messages occasionally mentioning the words BIOS or CMOS (page 522). Luckily, replacing the motherboard’s battery is a cheap and easy fix. Tip: Most motherboards use 2032 lithium batteries, an inexpensive battery about the size of a quarter. Since your motherboard probably uses one, too, save time by picking up a replacement 2032 battery at a nearby camera store, electronic supply store, or even a drug store.

1. Turn off the computer and remove its side panel or case (page 12). 2. Locate the motherboard’s battery. A small round silver disc (as shown in Figure 1-27), the battery usually lies flat in a small plastic holder. Figure 1-27: A flat, round battery on the motherboard lets computers remember the time and date when you unplug them. To replace the battery when it’s dead, pop it out of its holder and push in a new battery, available at most computer shops, drug stores, and office supply stores.

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3. Remove the battery. Note which side of the battery faces up, so you can insert the new one the same way. Next, unlatch the battery and lift it from its holder. Sometimes just pressing down on one edge of the battery pops it from the holder.

Power Supply and Battery

4. If necessary, buy a replacement battery that matches the old one. Most, but not all, computers use 2032 lithium batteries. (The number’s stamped onto the battery’s flattest surface.) If you haven’t already bought a replacement, buy one now. 5. Install the replacement battery. Push in the new battery facing the same way as the old battery—usually with the numbers facing up—or your motherboard won’t recognize it. Most battery holders won’t let you insert the battery the wrong way. 6. Close the computer’s case. Reattach the side panel, if your PC uses one, and then reattach the screws or thumbscrews to hold it in place. When your PC boots up with a newly installed battery, it may still display confused words about “Setup” or “New Devices.” But after automatically identifying its parts once again, the computer memorizes them until the battery dies again, anywhere from 5 to 10 years later. LAPTOP LIFE

Replacing a Laptop’s Batteries Unlike PCs, most laptops don’t use batteries on their motherboards. However, a laptop’s power battery dies after several years of heavy use. To replace it, push a release latch on your laptop’s case, and slide out the battery. Buy a replacement battery from either

your laptop’s manufacturer or a third-party like FedCo Electronics (www.fedcoelectronics.com). Don’t be surprised at the high price. Laptop battery replacements usually cost at least $100.

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chapter

Chapter 2

2

Keyboards and Mice

You can try reasoning with your PC all you want, but computers rarely take notice until you tap your fingers across the keyboard or nudge the mouse on your desk. This chapter explains the intricacies of those two primal, yet very effective, ways of getting your computer’s attention. This chapter introduces the various types of keyboards and mice you can use with desktop and laptop PCs, and which ones to choose for different situations—an ergonomic keyboard with an adjustable tilt, for instance, if typing hurts your wrists or fingers. You’ll learn how to manipulate both mice and keyboards to their best advantage, and how to adjust them when they’re not performing to your satisfaction. In case your mouse dies, one section explains how to continue working in Windows with only a keyboard. Should your keyboard die, you’ll want to review the section that shows you how to finish up your typing with only a mouse. You’ll also uncover the mysteries behind certain keys like “Scroll Lock” (which doesn’t actually work), and how to transform a foreign country’s keyboard into something that does work. Finally, for those times when you’re ready to completely stop working, the section on game controllers explains calibration, which may give you an edge when playing the kid down the street. (Doubtful, but it’s worth a try.)

Keyboard Basics Most people type on 83-, 101-, 102-, or 104-key keyboards. But if it’s time for a new one, don’t worry about having to choose from all these variations: buy the 57

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Keyboard Basics

standard 104-key model, which has been standard issue on most new computers since 1995. The 104-key keyboard contains the four familiar clusters of keys shown in Figure 2-1, each used for the tasks described below.

Function keys

Dedicated keys

Typing area

Cursor keys

Numeric keypad

Figure 2-1: Your keyboard divides its keys into four main groups, each used for different tasks. Your fingers do the bulk of their work tapping letters and numbers in the typing area. The Function keys control different features in different programs; press F11 in Internet Explorer, for example, to fill the entire screen with your currently viewed Web page. The Cursor keys move your “insertion point”— that blinking line that shows where the next key you press will appear onscreen. The Numeric keypad, every bank teller’s friend, lets you quickly enter numbers with one hand. Some manufacturers also add a row of dedicated keys—you can press a key to skip forward on CDs, for instance.

Tip: When shopping online for a mouse or keyboard, look in the “Input Devices” section, since that’s the official category name for these products.

• Typing keys. Most of the time, your fingers tap on the typing area, which mimics the layout of typewriters (mechanical devices often seen in black-and-white movies). Notice the little bumps on the base of the keyboard’s “F” and “J” keys. By feeling for those bumps with your index fingers, you can correctly position your hands on the keyboard without having to look at your fingers. (This trick comes in handy, for example, when typing in dimly lit rooms.) • Function keys. Pressing a Function key usually calls up a different task in every program, so you can’t simply memorize these 12 keys and be done with it. However, a handshake agreement among programmers means that the F1 key brings up the help screen in nearly any program. Even better, pressing F1 is

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usually context sensitive, meaning it summons help for the specific item you’re viewing. Pressing F1 while you’re ogling the Control Panel’s Keyboard settings, for example, brings up a help topic that explains the subtleties of that specific area.

Keyboard Basics

• Cursor keys. The cursor (also called arrow) keys move the insertion point—that slowly blinking vertical line showing where your next keystroke appears. Press the cursor keys to move the insertion point slowly, or press the keys above it— Home, End, Page Up, or Page Down—to move it by leaps and bounds. Pressing Home in Microsoft Word, for instance, moves your insertion point to the beginning of your current line; pressing End moves it to the line’s end. To move to the document’s first word, press Ctrl+Home; to move to the document’s last word, press Ctrl+End. Tip: For precise editing while word processing, hold Shift while pressing the left or right cursor keys. Doing so highlights items character by character.

• Numeric keypad. The numeric keypad, which is on the far right side of the keyboard, helps righthanded typists quickly enter numbers into documents or spreadsheets. Lefthanded typists can enter keys from the left side with a plug-in USB (page 34) numeric keypad for around $20 from Amazon (www.amazon. com) or USB Gear (www.usbgear.com). Pressing the NumLock key toggles the keypad between numbers and cursor keys. Every time you turn on your computer, the NumLock light (above the keypad) is illuminated, indicating that the numeric keypad is active. If you don’t want this to happen—that is, if you’d prefer that the numeric keypad automatically start in the cursor-key-on position—you need to change a setting in your computer’s BIOS (page 525). Tip: When balancing the checkbook or performing other math chores, peck at the numeric keypad to control Windows’ built-in calculator (Start ➝ All Programs ➝ Accessories ➝ Calculator). The asterisk multiplies; the slash divides.

Some keyboard manufacturers toss in a row of dedicated keys along a keyboard’s top edge. The keys’ functions vary among manufacturers and keyboard models, but most offer one-button access to your e-mail and let you skip tracks on a CD, change your PC’s volume level, and so on.

Types of Keyboards Just as some people are picky about their pillows, some people remain faithful to certain styles of keyboard. Keyboard manufacturers sell a variety of styles to please many

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tastes. Most computer and office supplies stock four main keyboard styles, each described below, although some styles merge several categories to create their own. LAPTOP LIFE

Coping with a Laptop’s Keyboard Laptop manufacturers made several concessions to make laptops smaller than breadboxes. Early models shrunk a standard, desktop-sized keyboard to bean-sized nubs. When that idea bombed, manufacturers enlarged the keys, but stripped the keyboard’s right half, dumping the numeric keypad and many cursor keys. Most stick with that format today. However, your laptop’s numeric keypad and cursor keys still live on the keyboard, but in disguise. To see them, locate your laptop’s “Fn” key; it works double-duty, just like pressing Shift creates a capital letter. For instance, press Fn followed by the Up or Down cursor key to mimic the PageUp or PageDown key. Some keyboards even toss in

some keys specific to the laptop’s model. Pressing Fn+F3 on a Sony Vaio mutes the sound, for instance; Fn+F5 changes the screen brightness. Similarly, pressing NumLock on a laptop embeds a numeric keypad within the keyboard, with the 7, 8, and 9 keys becoming the top row. Look below those three to see the other keycap’s double duty keys. The odd slant of a laptop’s embedded numeric keypad turns off many people, however. If you miss your desktop’s full-sized keypad, consider buying an add-on USB keypad (page 34) for about $20. Finally, if some of your laptop’s keys suddenly begin producing numbers instead of letters, press the NumLock button to toggle them back into letters.

• Cheap. People who rest comfortably with hotel room pillows may simply grab the cheapest keyboard. Often disguised with names like “value-priced,” these standard, 104-key models last a surprisingly long time for their small price tags. Most come with USB (page 34) or PS/2 (page 44) connectors, and work with nearly any PC. • Ergonomic. If long-term typing bothers your hands or wrists, try the skewed tilt of an ergonomic keyboard, as shown in Figure 2-2. Microsoft popularized the ergonomic keyboard in 1995, dubbing their new model “The Natural Keyboard. ” Instead of being straight and flat, ergonomic models angle the keyboard into a slight V shape, complete with a wrist rest, to reduce or prevent repetitive strain injury and carpal tunnel syndrome. Some people dislike the keyboard’s fixed tilt, preferring more expensive ergonomic models with adjustable tilts. Fentek 60

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(www.fentek-ind.com) sells a wide variety of ergonomic models with both fixed and adjustable tilts.

Keyboard Basics

• Wireless or cordless. If too many cables clutter your desktop, a wireless keyboard (often sold as a combo with a wireless mouse) substitutes radio waves for messy cables. Unrelated to wireless networks (page 406), wireless keyboards use different technology. Instead of hooking up to a network, a wireless keyboard comes with its own proprietary receiver unit that plugs into a USB port, giving you a range of around four to six feet between the receiver and keyboard. Popular with some gamers, wireless models let you lean back in your chair with your keyboard in your lap. Should you lean too far back in your recliner, a popup message warns you that the keyboard’s out of range. Receiver units use proprietary communication standards, so your old receiver probably won’t work with your new wireless keyboard. Figure 2-2: Designed to make typing as painless as possible, Microsoft’s Natural MultiMedia keyboard includes features from two main keyboard types. Its ergonomic, Vshaped layout slightly angles the keyboard’s left and right sides. A wrist rest along the bottom adds support during long typing sessions. The keyboard also hails from the multifunction school, as it includes dedicated buttons along the top to control the Windows Media Player and fetch frequently accessed programs and folders— Windows Messenger, Internet Explorer, My Documents, and others.

Tip: Besides reducing cable clutter, plastic cable ties or tubes are less expensive and more reliable than wireless keyboards and mice. Available at most computer and office supply stores, the ties and tubes convert cable spaghetti into one thick noodle that’s easier to tuck behind a table leg until it enters your computer.

The latest wireless keyboards ditch radio waves in favor of Bluetooth (page 452), a similar cable-replacement technology. Since few computers come with Bluetooth built-in, add it by plugging a Bluetooth adapter (available on Amazon for about $30 to $40) into one of your PC’s USB ports (page 34).

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When shopping for an office environment, buy a wireless keyboard/mouse that uses encryption technology. You don’t want the techie in the adjacent cubicle reading your love letters as you type them. • Multifunction. Multifunction keyboards jack up their price tag by adding extra goodies: built-in speakers, dedicated keys, extra USB ports, trackballs (page 73), thumbprint recognition systems, and other doodads. If you buy one, be sure to download the keyboard’s latest drivers from the manufacturer’s Customer Support area so Windows XP can recognize the extra features. And beware—that keyboard’s drivers may not be compatible with the next version of Windows, which could turn your expensive multifunction keyboard into a plain $15 keyboard. Although many keyboards sport USB ports (page 34) along their sides, some of those USB ports aren’t powered. They’ll work fine for things like a mouse. But USB gadgetry that requires power, like clip-on keyboard lights, cooling fans, or wireless mice, may not work in your keyboard’s USB ports. If your gadget doesn’t work in the keyboard, and your computer’s out of USB ports, plug the power-hungry device into a powered USB hub (page 39). When keyboard shopping, don’t just look at the picture on the box or read the description. Take the keyboard out of its box, put your fingers on it, and start typing. Feel the weight of each key press, its responsiveness, and the sound it makes. You don’t need to attach it to a computer while testing, since most judgments come down to whether a keyboard “feels right.”

The Mystery Keys A few keys seem strangely out of place on a computer keyboard. Some keys atop the cursor area (Figure 2-3) furrow many brows, as they don’t appear to do anything. The mystery is unraveled below: Figure 2-3: Found on nearly all computer keyboards since day one, these keys are leftovers from the mid-80s. Windows still uses the PrintScreen (PrtScr) key, but the SysRq, Scroll Lock (ScrLk), and Pause/Break keys no longer work in the vast majority of Windows programs.

• PrtScr/SysRq. In the pre-Windows days, a tap on PrtScr sent a picture of your visible screen to the printer for passing around at the board meeting. Today, that key routes the same picture to Windows Clipboard, a temporary storage area for pasting the picture into other programs. (Press Alt+PrtScr to send a picture of the current window to the Clipboard; this is the method used to grab 62

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many windows in this book.) If you’re desperate for a paper copy of what you see on your screen or in a window, paste the Clipboard’s contents into any graphics program—press Ctrl+V while in Windows Paint program, for example—and press Ctrl+P to print the image from there. (Actually, you can even paste most screen Clipboard pictures into Word, which can save you from opening a separate graphics program.)

Keyboard Basics

FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTION

QWERTY, Meet Dvorak What’s a Dvorak keyboard? Any typing student can tell you that a keyboard’s haphazard layout doesn’t make much sense. But it did in 1873 when Remington needed a way to keep their new mechanical typewriter keys working smoothly. To reduce key jams, the company separated commonly used pairs of letters on opposite sides of the keyboard. This “QWERTY” keyboard layout, named after the first six letters in the keyboard’s top left row, still lives on in computers today. Typewriters had overcome their early design hurdles by the mid-1930s, when Dr. August Dvorak designed a new layout specifically for speed and efficiency. The new so-called Dvorak layout placed vowels and other frequently tapped keys on the “home row” where your fingers normally rest. The QWERTY layout lives on today, mainly proving that typists despise learning new layouts. A few enthusiasts cling to the Dvorak method, however, and some people use other Dvorak layouts designed for one-handed typists. If you’re willing to make the switch, Microsoft offers downloads and instructions for all three Dvorak layouts at its Accessibility Web site (www.microsoft.com/enable).

To convert your keyboard from QWERTY to Dvorak in Windows XP, choose Start ➝ Control Panel ➝ Regional and Language Options ➝ Languages tab ➝ Details ➝ Add ➝ Dvorak. Choose the newly added Dvorak from that page’s Default Input Language box, and then click OK. Adding the Dvorak layout (or a layout for any foreign language, for that matter) places a new icon—the Language Bar—on your taskbar. Click the Language Bar icon to see a menu listing all your currently installed layouts. Click the one you want, be it Dvorak or QWERTY, and Windows instantly accommodates you by rearranging your keyboard layout. (Touch typists don’t care that the keycaps themselves don’t change.) To switch back to QWERTY permanently, highlight the Dvorak entry from where you first created it (back on the Languages tab), choose Remove, and then click Apply. That eliminates your choice of layouts, and the Language Bar icon vanishes, leaving you back at QWERTY.

Don’t bother puzzling over the barely pronounceable SysRq, the key’s bottom half, as it doesn’t do anything. (Linux, a competing operating system popular with techies, resurrects SysRq as an escape hatch to resuscitate frozen computers.) • Scroll Lock. Almost all programs ignore this key. Microsoft Excel, the holdout, still lets Scroll Lock work as it did in pre-Windows days: press Scroll Lock to scroll through your mammoth spreadsheet with the arrow keys rather than mousing with the more traditional scroll bars along the spreadsheet’s sides. Press Scroll Lock again, and the arrow keys revert to moving your cursor, rather than your entire spreadsheet.

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• Pause/Break. A holdover from the telegraph era, the Break key’s on the verge of extinction. But programmers still use it in “command-line” mode—a text-only mode that gives techies fuller control over their computers. When rivers of onscreen text flow past, press Pause/Break to pause the flow while you catch your breath. Press any key to continue the flow. Holding down the Windows logo key while pressing Break brings up the System Properties box (page 499), just as if you’d chosen System from the Control Panel. Note: Although most Windows programs completely ignore the Esc (Escape) key, a few programs return to their “normal” view when you press the key. For instance, pressing Esc switches Adobe Reader—a viewing program for documents stored as PDF files—from a full-screen view to its normal window view. Esc also closes Windows’ Start menu, and other open menus.

The Windows Keys Some people work more quickly when their fingers stay on the keyboard—mouse be damned. These mouse haters appreciate Microsoft’s addition of special “Windows” keys to its latest keyboard model in 1995. Other keyboard manufacturers played copycat, and now almost every modern keyboard sports the Windows logo key and the Application key, as described in Table 2-1. These two keys provide quick access to common tasks—calling up the Start menu and navigating its submenus, for instance, rather than having to reach for the mouse to click the Start button. Table 2-1. The Meaning of Microsoft’s “Windows Keys”

Function

Keystroke

Press either one of the two Windows logo keys, located below the left and right Shift keys, to bring up the Start menu, just as if you’d clicked the Start button. The Application key, located by the right Shift key, brings up the same menu you see if you right-click the cursor’s current location. Tip: If you find yourself accidentally hitting the Windows logo key when reaching for the Shift key, you can disable either one or both Windows keys with a small program from John Haller’s Web site (http:// johnhaller.com/jh/useful_stuff/disable_windows_key/). (Some people simply pry off the offending keyboard button caps, leaving a low-profile stub.)

A press of the Windows logo key followed by another key creates shortcuts for several common tasks, as explained in Table 2-2.

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Table 2-2. Windows logo key shortcuts

Keyboard Basics

Function

Keystrokes

Minimizes all open windows and displays your desktop (a great way to find a buried icon). Repeat to place the minimized windows back on the desktop.

+D

Rarely used. This shortcut minimizes all windows like but without a toggle to put them all back.

+M

Rarely used. This restores windows minimized by (Stick with the easier-to-remember +D toggle.)

+D, +M.

+Shift+M

Brings up the Search program for locating files, folders, networked computers, or people.

+F

Opens My Computer in Explorer view for seeing files in a “tree” setting.

+E

Opens Display System Properties (the same as choosing System from the Control Panel).

+Break

Displays the first page of Windows XP’s Help and Support menu. (Pressing F1 by itself brings up the more helpful context-sensitive (page x) help screen.)

+F1

Handy when stepping away from the keyboard, this quickly displays Windows XP’s Welcome screen, forcing people to type a password for re-entry (unless your account isn’t password-protected [page 478] of course).

+L

Note: Although most desktop and laptop keyboards include a Windows logo key, many IBM ThinkPads leave it off. Instead, ThinkPads come with a program with the unfriendly name of TpKMapAp, which you can use to convert the rightmost Alt key to a Windows key.

The Ctrl+Alt+Del Cure for Frozen Programs When one of your programs freezes on the screen, pressing the Ctrl+Alt+Del keys simultaneously provides a handy way to pry the troublemaker off your screen. That magic key sequence brings up Windows XP’s Task Manager (see Figure 2-4), which is useful for not only killing frozen applications, but also for viewing technical details about your computer to help diagnose problems. To kill the program, click the Task Manager’s Application tab, right-click the problematic program, and then choose End Task. Windows XP whisks the program off your screen. You lose any unsaved work from the misbehaving program, unfortunately, but at least your computer and your other open programs stay up and running.

Controlling Windows with only a Keyboard Faced with a broken mouse? Wireless mouse lose battery power or disappear behind a couch? Loath your laptop’s touchpad? Looking for a quick keyboard shortcut? You can completely control Windows without ever touching a mouse by following these tips. Chapter 2: Keyboards and Mice PCs: The Missing Manual, eMatter Edition Copyright © 2008 O’Reilly & Associates, Inc. All rights reserved.

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• Launch programs. Press to launch the Start menu, and then press the arrow keys to navigate to the program you’re after. Highlight your program’s name, and then press Enter to launch it. (Should you press by mistake, press Esc to close the Start menu and return to your work.) • Move from one window to another. Hold down Alt and press Tab. Each subsequent press of Tab moves to the next window (including minimized windows sitting on the taskbar). Let go of the Alt key when your window is highlighted, and Windows lets you work in that window. Figure 2-4: Pressing Ctrl+Alt+Del brings up the Task Manager, which lets you zap frozen programs by rightclicking them and then choosing End Task. The Processes tab shows all the currently running programs, including ones running in the background. Click the Performance tab to see a graph displaying how hard your CPU (page 16) is currently working. The Networking tab graphs the amount of traffic on your network (if you’ve got one), and the Users tab reveals the names of people logged onto your computer, including people accessing your PC from across the network.

• Access a window’s menus. Press the Alt key to see an underlined letter in every option of the current program—“File” has an underlined “F,” for instance. Press one of the underlined letters to see that category’s drop-down menu; for example, press F to see the File menu’s options. Press any underlined letter in

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the drop-down menu to activate that option. For instance, press Alt, F, and O in most programs to open a file.

Keyboard Basics

• Move a window or change its size. Press Alt+Spacebar to see a little menu drop from the window’s top, left corner. (If the window’s maximized—filling the screen—press R to turn it into a window.) Then you can do either of two things: — Change the window’s location. Press M (for Move) to move the window around your desktop with the arrow keys. When you move it to the new location, press Enter to drop it in place. — Change the window’s size. Press S (for Size) to change the window’s size with the arrow keys. When the window’s resized appropriately, press Enter; Windows reverts its attention back to the window’s contents, not its borders. • Right-click something. Tap the arrow keys until you position the cursor where you want to right-click. Pressing the Application key (page 64) works like rightclicking that item, and summons the shortcut menu. • Restart your computer. Should your mouse die in the middle of a Windows session, restart your computer from any window by pressing these keys: ➝U➝ R. If a closing program asks if you’d like to save your work, press Y to save it. Should your monitor ever die in mid-session, leaving you with a blank screen, press ➝ U ➝ R for a graceful exit. Since you can’t see the screen, press Y every 5 or 10 seconds to save any work as the programs close themselves down. Tip: Should your keyboard die before your deadline, page 74 explains how to continue working in Windows XP using only a mouse.

Typing Symbols Frustrating novelists, bankers, mathematicians, and trademark attorneys worldwide, the computer keyboard leaves out common symbols like ©, £, ®, and hundreds of others. Windows handles those extra symbols with an Alt code—a bit of programming wizardry that summons symbols when you type in certain number combinations. For instance, to type © into your novel’s title page, hold down the Alt key while typing the numbers 0169 on your keyboard’s numeric keypad. Release the Alt key, and the © symbol magically appears in your text. (NumLock [page 59]) must be toggled on for this trick to work. Also, you need to hold down Alt while typing the numbers—including the zero at the beginning. And no, typing the numbers along the keyboard’s top row won’t work.) Admittedly, these restrictions are way too much for casual novelists to remember. That’s when Windows’ Character Map program, shown in Figure 2-5, simplifies the process. To call Character Map from its hiding place, click Start ➝ All Programs ➝ Accessories ➝ System Tools ➝ Character Map. When you find the symbol or character you’re after, double-click it. Then use Ctrl+V or Edit ➝ Paste to insert it into your document. Character Map also Chapter 2: Keyboards and Mice PCs: The Missing Manual, eMatter Edition Copyright © 2008 O’Reilly & Associates, Inc. All rights reserved.

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displays the highlighted symbol’s Alt code in the window’s bottom right corner; feel free to jot it on a sticky note for future reference, along with the words “Use Numeric Keypad.” Figure 2-5: Character Map simplifies entering hundreds of symbols like the ones used to designate copyright, trademark, foreign currencies and alphabets, and scientific symbols. Double-click the symbol you need, and paste it into your document by pressing Ctrl+V.

Tip: Choose Wingdings or Webdings from the Character Map’s Font box for many other common symbols: arrows, smiley faces, squares, triangles, clock faces, stars, and more.

Using Keyboards in Foreign Countries No matter how inconvenient it may be to tourists, keyboards in foreign countries use layouts that match the country’s native language, sprinkling foreign characters across the keyboard. When you encounter an unfamiliar foreign layout in an Internet Café, switch to the English layout for easier typing: click Start ➝ Control Panel ➝ Regional and Language Options ➝ Languages tab ➝ Details ➝ Add ➝ English (United States) ➝ OK. Choose the newly added English layout from that page’s Default Input Language box and then click OK. Click the small Language Bar when it appears in your taskbar (shown in Figure 2-6), and click the English layout to quickly switch to your familiar key locations. Since the keyboard’s actual keys don’t magically reposition themselves, this trick works best for touch-typists. If you need to see the letters on the keyboard in their familiar layout for reference, Microsoft’s On-Screen Toolbar (page 74) provides a handy cheat sheet. In most cases, the menus for Windows and its programs continue to display the foreign country’s language, unfortunately. But when you open the computer’s Internet browser and visit an English-language Web mail site like Yahoo (www.yahoo.com) or

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Google (www.gmail.com), you can touch-type your message using your familiar, native-language layout.

Keyboard Basics

Figure 2-6: The Language Bar comes in handy when typing documents that mix words from two different languages. It quickly converts your keyboard’s layout from English to other languages—Spanish, for instance, or Russian—letting you type foreign characters quickly and easily. The Language Bar also works in a pinch when you encounter a foreign layout while traveling. Click the Language Bar to see the available layouts, and then select the one you want to use when typing.

When you’re through, click the Language Bar and revert to the native country’s layout. But feel free to leave the Language Bar icon on the taskbar to help other tourists.

Installing a Keyboard No matter what keyboard you buy, the cable comes with one of two plugs: USB (page 34) or PS/2 (page 44). USB keyboards plug into a USB port while the computer’s turned on or off; Windows XP recognizes the incoming keyboard immediately. (Lefthanded accountants can even plug in two keyboards simultaneously, using the numeric keypad of the keyboard on the left for entering numbers.) In contrast, you can plug and unplug PS/2 keyboards only when the computer is off. Leaving the computer on when you plug in or unplug a PS/2 keyboard can freeze your computer in a state of confusion. If that happens to you, use the mouse to click Start and then restart your computer. When your computer wakes back up, Windows recognizes the newly installed keyboard. No matter what keyboard you plug in, Windows XP always recognizes its basic functions—the four areas described in Figure 2-1. But if your keyboard contains any fancy features like dedicated keys, embedded speakers, USB ports, or other frills, you must install the software that came with the keyboard.

Adjusting the Keyboard’s Sensitivity To type the word “Harrummmmmph,” you can tap the “m” key several times. Or, you can hold down the “m” key until it starts repeating. But how long should you hold it down before it does this? And, when the letter begins to repeat, how quickly should the letters flow? Instead of leaving you to ponder these theoreticals, Microsoft’s programmers simply chose some common settings.

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But if you want to tailor your harrummmmmph to your own specifications, click Start ➝ Control Panel ➝ Keyboard and play with the fine-tuning knobs shown in Figure 2-7, and described next. Figure 2-7: If your typed letters accidentally repeat themselves, you can use the Control Panel’s Keyboard Properties box to adjust the repeat rate to meet your needs. You can also visit this area for general troubleshooting, since the Hardware tab provides quick access to your keyboard’s drivers (the utility programs that translate between your PC and any equipment that’s attached to it).

• Repeat delay. If you’re seeing accidental repetitions as you type, slide this tab toward the Long delay rate. These settings control how long you hold down a key before it begins repeating. • Repeat rate. If a letter repeats too quickly once it starts, slide this tab toward the Slow side. • Cursor blink rate. Tossed in because it wouldn’t fit anywhere else, this sliding tab adjusts the speed that your cursor turns on and off. If that little line blinks too slowly for you to spot it in that sea of text, slide the tab to the right to speed it up a little.

Troubleshooting Keyboards When your keyboard doesn’t work, breathe a sigh of relief. It’s your computer’s most inexpensive part. You can pick up a new one for under 20 bucks at most computer stores. But since 20 bucks also buys a decent pizza, try some first aid with these quick fixes. • Make sure it’s plugged in. This seems obvious, but since keyboards tend to get pushed around the desktop, the plug may have popped far enough out of the port for the computer to forget that it exists. If it’s a USB keyboard, fix the

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problem by pushing the plug further into its USB port. If it’s a PS/2 keyboard, turn off your computer, reinsert the PS/2 plug, and restart your computer.

Mouse Basics

FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTION

My Keyboard’s Dedicated Keys Won’t Work The keys along the top of my keyboard control my computer’s sound volume and CD player, and give me oneclick access to the Internet and e-mail. Unfortunately, they recently stopped working, and I can’t find any place in Windows XP to turn them back on. What gives? Those keys worked fine when you first bought your computer because the manufacturer thoughtfully installed the special software or drivers Windows XP needs to control them. But the keys often stop working if you reinstall Windows, upgrade to a new Windows version, or have problems with the keyboard’s special software.

in Media Player lets you control CDs, for instance, and Web browsers launch from the Start menu. But if you prefer the convenience the keys offer, look for your keyboard’s part number, usually listed on a little sticker underneath the keyboard. Then visit your computer manufacturer’s Web site, and drop by the Customer Support or Download section. Enter the keyboard’s part number, and download the drivers and/or software that lets Windows XP recognize them. When you reinstall the software or drivers, Windows XP should let them work once again.

When those keys go on strike, you have two options. First, you can simply ignore them. After all, they duplicate functions already available through Windows. Windows’s built-

• Recover from spilled beverages. Clumsy elbows and soft drinks have granted early retirement to many older keyboards, but today’s keyboards are nearly waterproof. A rubber membrane covers all the internal mechanics, so the spill coats only the rubber beneath the keycaps, not the keyboard’s inner switches. If you spill a beverage onto your keyboard, quickly unplug it, and then use your mouse to shut down the computer. If you’re using a wireless keyboard, quickly remove any batteries to reduce the chances of electrical shorts. Carry the keyboard to the sink, and rinse everything off as thoroughly as possible. If your keycaps look dingy, clean them with some household cleaner and an old toothbrush. When you’re through, dry the keyboard in the sun (or even in an oven on the lowest setting). When you’re sure the keyboard is thoroughly dry, plug it back in; most of the time, it works fine. When dealing with dried soda residue, remove the keycaps by prying them off with a small screwdriver, as shown in Figure 2-8. Then wash the keyboard, dry it thoroughly, and see if it still works.

Mouse Basics Invented in 1963 as a scrappy wooden box with two wheels, computer mice now live in sleek, molded plastic cases. Every mouse style lets you push a little pointer across the screen, but manufacturers found many different ways to do it. Today’s mice are either mechanical, optical, wireless, or upside-down (trackball), as shown

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in Figure 2-9. Each type of mouse has its own benefits and drawbacks, all described below. Figure 2-8: To clean a keyboard of sticky beverage residue, pry off the keycaps. Working from the bottom row, wedge a small screwdriver beneath a cap, slowly twist the screwdriver, and the cap should jump off. Don’t try to pry off the spacebar, as its special attachments are easily damaged. Remove as much stickiness as you can from the keys and keyboard to avoid future problems with trapped dust. When the keyboard’s clean and dry, push the keycaps back onto their pegs, using Figure 2-10 as a memory jog.

Figure 2-9: From left to right: Rightside up mouse, upside down mechanical mouse, upside-down optical mouse, and trackball. Whether they’re mechanical, optical, or wireless, most mice resemble the one on the far left. The big differences lie in their bellies. Mechanical mice sense the rolling motion of a ball, which needs to be removed and cleaned every month or two. Optical mice dump the ball in favor of a tiny lens that detects texture changes as it’s moved. Trackballs work like upside-down mechanical mice, but since you roll the ball with your hand, it doesn’t become dirty or require cleaning as often.

• Mechanical. If a little rolling ball protrudes from your mouse’s belly, it’s a mechanical mouse, commonly sold with older computers. Mechanical mice work best when rolled over a mouse pad (found at most computer and office supply stores), since the pad’s soft rubber gives the ball the needed grip for smooth rolling. Most people remember mechanical mice as the ones that needed cleaning every few months (page 76), and they’re quickly being replaced by optical mice, described below.

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• Optical. Several links up the technological chain from mechanical mice, optical mice replace ball mechanics with a tiny camera and light. The mice glow eerily as the light reflects off your desktop. The camera views the illuminated textures passing underneath, and adjusts the pointer’s onscreen position accordingly. Most people love optical mice because they banish both the pad and the monthly cleaning ritual. Optical mice work well on any textured surface (even on cloth, like a pants leg). If you have a glass or polished metal desk, you should place a traditional mouse pad or a plain sheet of white paper underneath the mouse to steady the pointer.

Mouse Basics

• Wireless or cordless. Wireless mice are often sold in tandem with a wireless keyboard, both of which send signals to a receiving unit, usually plugged into a USB port (page 34). When a wireless mouse misbehaves, reach for a new battery pack: low battery power is the prime suspect. These little rodents are almost always in motion, and, consequently, they send more information than a wireless keyboard, which means they consume batteries much more quickly. Count on replacing batteries every month or so unless you own a newer unit that “sleeps” when you’re not using it. A few wireless mice take mercy on their owners’ budgets and recharge when resting on their receiving unit. The latest wireless mice communicate through Bluetooth technology (page 452) instead of radio waves. Bluetooth gadgets don’t require receiving units—if your computer is already “Bluetooth capable,” that is. (The newest laptops come with built-in Bluetooth.) If your computer lacks Bluetooth support, pick up a Bluetooth adapter from Amazon for about $30 to $40. Plug the adapter into your PC’s USB port (page 34) to talk to any Bluetooth-capable mouse, keyboard, cell phone, printer, or other Bluetooth-embracing gadget. Note: Wireless mice don’t use the same technology that powers most wireless networks (page 406), so don’t worry about potential interference.

• Trackball. Some people prefer rolling a ball, instead of a mouse, across the desk. A trackball looks somewhat like an upside-down mouse, complete with a ball protruding from the top (see Figure 2-9, right). Rolling the ball controls the cursor, but leaves the trackball in one place, perfect for computing on a messy desk. They also reduce wrist movement and strain. • Programmable. All mice come with two basic buttons (left and right). Other mice speed up common tasks by tacking on extra, programmable buttons— click the fourth button to load your Internet browser and start searching the Web, for instance. Other multibutton creatures aim to replace game controllers (page 80), letting gamers shoot with one button, kick with another, and scurry to the next level with a third. Many mice now include a scroll wheel, a small wheel rim protruding from the mouse’s top. The mouse on the left in Figure 2-9 contains a scroll wheel between its two buttons. By resting your finger on the wheel and rolling it forward or

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Mouse Basics

backward, you can quickly move up or down a document either line by line or page by page. You can adjust the scroll rate in the Control Panel’s Mouse area (page 79). LAPTOP LIFE

Trackpoints, Touchpads, and You Any desktop mouse works fine on a laptop, but that means you need to toss something else into the laptop bag. To reduce baggage overflow, most laptops come with their own built-in gadgets for moving the pointer, shown below. • Trackpoint. The Trackpoint (shown on the left, in the illustration) began life on IBM’s ThinkPad series of laptops, but quickly spread to laptops by many other manufacturers. The Trackpoint’s little red nub pokes up between the keyboard’s b, g, and h keys; push the nub with your index finger to move the mouse pointer without removing your hands from the keyboard. Should your Trackpoint’s little red cover wear out, TrackCap (www.trackcap.com) sells replacements for many different styles.

buttons that serve as the left and right mouse buttons. Two quick taps on the touchpad also mimics a double-click. Most touchpads come with third-party software for changing their sensitivity settings, usually accessible through a Touchpad icon in the Control Panel or taskbar. Even touchpad-equipped laptops don’t mind if you plug in a mouse, steering the pointer with whichever seems handiest at the time. But if you prefer handling the mouse exclusively, disable the touchpad using its Control Panel or taskbar icon. Otherwise, an inadvertent brush of your wrist on the touchpad could send your pointer scurrying in the wrong direction.

• Touchpad. Rub your finger across the top of a touchpad’s little rectangular pad (seen on the right), and the mouse pointer moves along in the same direction. Most touchpads come with two adjacent

Controlling Windows with only a Mouse Stuck with a broken keyboard? Wireless keyboard lose its battery power? Spilled a Coke on the keyboard with a project deadline in 20 minutes? A mouse lets you finish your work without ever touching a keyboard. The trick is the Windows OnScreen keyboard, shown in Figure 2-10. Figure 2-10: The Windows On-Screen keyboard is handy for controlling Windows in an emergency should your keyboard die. It places a keyboard on your screen that lets you “mouse and peck” your way through your current work.

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The On-Screen keyboard won’t win any speed awards, but it works fine in a pinch. To put it onto the screen, click Start ➝ All Programs ➝ Accessories ➝ Accessibility ➝ On-Screen keyboard. The keyboard remains visible while you work, staying on top of all open windows. Click the On-Screen keyboard’s letters to type; every key works just as if you were typing it on a real keyboard.

Mouse Basics

Tip: Should your mouse die before your deadline, page 65 shows how to continue working in Windows XP using only a keyboard.

Installing a USB or PS/2 Mouse The vast majority of mice sold today hook up to your PC using a USB connection (page 34). Push the USB mouse’s plug into a USB port, and Windows XP recognizes it immediately. USB mice are hot-swappable, meaning you can unplug your roommate’s mouse and plug in your favorite mouse without turning off the computer. You can even plug in two mice and use one with each hand. (Only one mouse controls the arrow at a time.) Older mice come with the less versatile PS/2 connector (page 44), which you can’t plug in until the computer’s off. Plug the mouse into its own PS/2 port (the keyboard’s PS/2 port won’t work), and Windows XP recognizes the mouse when you turn on your computer. Note: A few USB mice come with a converter so you can plug them into PS/2 ports. That converter’s often linked to that particular brand of mouse; don’t expect it to work with all other mice, or to let your USB keyboard plug into a PS/2 port.

Windows XP always recognizes a mouse’s basic functions—moving the pointer and clicking menu items, for instance—as soon as you plug it in. In fact, Windows XP offers more than a dozen options for fine-tuning your mouse’s performance (see page 77 for details). To adjust these settings, you first need to install the drivers packaged with your mouse. (Usually you can find the drivers on the CD that comes with the mouse; if that’s gone missing, visit the manufacturer’s Web site, where you can typically download the driver from the customer support area.) BUYER’S GUIDE

A Mouse for People with Hand Tremors Most operating systems contain a wide variety of controls for adjusting a mouse’s speed and accuracy, but may not help people with hand tremors. If hand tremors keep you from controlling the mouse as efficiently as you want, consider IBM’s mouse adapter, which works much the way a video camera’s “stabilizer” smoothes out your video footage.

Plug your mouse into the adapter and plug the adapter into your computer; you don’t need to install any special software. An adjustable dial on the adapter lets you customize it to your own abilities. Montrose Secam Ltd. (www.montrosesecam.com) sells the adapter for less than $100.

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Troubleshooting Mice When mice are sick, they always complain through the pointer: the arrow freezes, disappears, doesn’t move smoothly, or jumps erratically across the screen. When your mouse pointer misbehaves, try the following tips to bring it back to life. Tip: Don’t fret if your firewall (see page 490) alerts you that “pointer32.exe” is trying to connect to the Internet. That’s just a message indicating that Microsoft’s Intellipoint mouse is contacting the mother ship, checking for updated drivers. Tell the firewall to deny it access, unless your mouse isn’t working properly. Many programs, including mouse software, periodically visit their manufacturer’s Web site to fetch software or driver updates.

Plug it in all the way First, make sure the mouse cord is plugged all the way into its jack, be it USB or PS/2. Sometimes unplugging a USB mouse, waiting five seconds, and plugging it back in does the job. Don’t unplug it and plug it back in too quickly, as Windows XP needs time to notice that the mouse was removed, and then notice that it’s plugged back in again. Cleaning the mouse ball If you’re using an older-style mouse that rolls a ball across your desktop, the mouse pointer will eventually begin jumping indiscriminately around your screen. That happens because the mouse ball picks up dirt from your mouse pad and swabs the goo onto its internal parts. To fix the jumping pointer, clean the mouse. Turn your mouse upside-down and scrape off any dirt stuck to the bottom. Rotate the little round plate around the ball in the direction of its arrow until the mouse ball falls out, with an unsatisfactory mini-bounce. Wipe off any visible crud, and blow any dirt out of the hole using a compressed air canister, sold at most computer and hardware stores. Don’t clean the ball itself other than wiping off any stray hairs. Look inside the hole for the rollers; you’ll probably find dark lines of built-up crud along the center of them. Scrape this muck off with an alcohol-moistened cotton swab, as shown in Figure 2-11. When you’ve removed all the dirt from the rollers, push the ball back into the hole, and then rotate the round plate back on. The mouse pointer should stabilize. Cleaning a mouse’s optical sensor Optical mice are easier to clean since they have no moving parts. If the mouse pointer doesn’t move smoothly, try cleaning its lens—the little round spot on the bottom of the mouse near the bright light—with a cotton swab. Sometimes a stray hair interferes with its tracking ability, throwing the pointer off course.

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Most optical mouse problems aren’t related to cleanliness, though, but rather to the surface it’s currently tracking—they don’t like shiny surfaces. Before blaming the mouse, try reverting to an old-fashioned mouse pad.

Mouse Basics

Figure 2-11: The rolling ball inside a mechanical mouse picks up dirt and leaves it sticking to its internal rollers. When the mouse pointer doesn’t move across your screen correctly, it’s time to clean inside the mouse. Remove the mouse’s bottom plate and wipe off any goo sticking to the rollers by using a cotton swab. The dirt usually looks like a thin line sticking to the middle of the roller. Sometimes you must scrape off the most persistent dirt with a fingernail or credit card. Be sure to remove dirt from both rollers to keep the mouse pointer moving smoothly.

Adjusting a mouse Windows XP offers only three small adjustment options for huge 104-key keyboards, yet it offers nearly a dozen options for a mouse’s mere two buttons. Many optional third-party mouse drivers install even more options, doubling or tripling that number. Don’t bother exploring every option; most offer only minor cosmetic enhancements. But if your mouse doesn’t feel right—the pointer doesn’t move at the right speed, or the buttons don’t click consistently—click Start ➝ Control Panel ➝ Mouse to make any of the adjustments described below. Tip: Sometimes messing with the mouse’s options makes things even worse than before. If that happens to you, head back to the Control Panel’s Mouse setting pages and choose the Default option. That resets the mouse to its commonly used settings, letting you start from scratch.

Buttons tab Used mostly by lefthanders and slow-clickers, the Buttons tab (Figure 2-12) lets you change how your mouse’s buttons respond to your touch. • Button configuration. Lefthanders sometimes head here to reverse the actions of their mouse’s left- and right-mouse buttons, making the mouse work more efficiently in the left hand. Be careful here, though, as the button switch takes place immediately—Windows doesn’t wait for you to click the Apply button, as it does in most other windows. If you accidentally click in this box and reverse your mouse buttons, click again with the opposite button to set things straight.

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Mouse Basics

• Double-click speed. If you find yourself double-clicking several times before Windows finally opens the icon or folder, adjust the difference between your single clicks and your double clicks. Change to a slower setting, and then practice double-clicking on the adjacent test folder, fine-tuning the setting until it matches your finger speed. • ClickLock. People with large monitors often drag items long distances. If your finger tires of constantly holding down the button, turn on ClickLock: hold down your mouse button on an item for a few seconds, and the cursor locks on it, letting you remove your finger and drag the item. When you get the item to the correct location, let go of the mouse button to release the lock and drop the item in place. Click Settings to adjust the amount of seconds of hold-down required before the lock kicks in. Figure 2-12: Most people don’t need to bother changing any of the many options available on the Control Panel’s Mouse window. However, the Button Configuration option comes in handy for lefthanders, letting them switch their mouse’s left and right buttons.

Pointers tab Although most people find the humble arrow works just swell as a pointer, the settings here let you replace the arrow with jazzier icons. To revert to the run-of-themill pointer when you’re tired of playing around, choose the (None) scheme. • Pointer Scheme. Windows XP comes with dozens of pointer designs—alternatives to the standard arrow/hour glass combination. Small children and herpetologists may prefer pointing with small dinosaurs or reptiles, for instance. Tip: If you have trouble locating your mouse pointer, check out some of the schemes near the bottom of the Pointer Scheme list. They darken, magnify, or invert the pointer for easier visibility.

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• Customize. Whip up your own pointer scheme by picking and choosing from several schemes. Stick with the standard arrow, for instance, but substitute the walking dinosaur for the hourglass, displayed when Windows is working on something in the background. Click Save As to save your new scheme under a new name for finding again later.

Mouse Basics

• Shadow. This purely cosmetic touch adds a barely visible little shadow beneath your pointer. Pointer Options tab Whereas the Pointer tab changes your pointer’s appearance, these settings offer more practical control over your pointer’s motion, making it more visible and easier to move. Ignored by the masses, these settings come in handy for people who constantly work with one hand on the mouse. • Pointer Speed. Head here if your work involves precise control of the pointer. Moving your mouse halfway across your small mouse pad usually moves the pointer all the way across your large screen. The Pointer Speed option adjusts the ratio of hand movement to screen movement. If you’re constantly pawing at your mouse pad to move an arrow across the screen, slide the control toward Fast. If the pointer zings across the screen with a mere nudge, slide the control to Slow. Tip: If your mouse pointer jumps around the screen when you move it, try slowing down the Pointer Speed. You may have it set faster than the mouse can handle.

The Enhance Pointer Precision box, normally selected, allows for more precise control, so leave it on. When it’s turned on, impatiently flicking the mouse one inch causes the pointer to fly across half the screen. Nudging the mouse slowly and carefully for one inch, by contrast, moves the pointer slowly an inch or two. • Snap to. Many times you don’t open settings to change them, but to doublecheck them. Click this box, and the pointer automatically hovers over any newly opened box’s OK button. That lets you check your settings with a quick click without having to physically move the pointer to the OK button. • Visibility. Turn on the “Display pointer trails” checkbox to turn your pointer into a long string of pointers, which helps keep the cursor in view during presentations. Turning on the “Hide pointer while typing” box keeps the pointer out of your sentences when composing. (Nudge the mouse to revive the pointer.) Finally, turning on “Show location of pointer when I press the CTRL key” places radiating rings like an earthquake map around a lost pointer—again, handy when a mouse disappears on a large display or during a presentation. Wheel tab Many mice have a scroll wheel—a little wheel protruding between the two buttons. Usually, rolling the wheel with your index finger moves the currently viewed page’s Chapter 2: Keyboards and Mice PCs: The Missing Manual, eMatter Edition Copyright © 2008 O’Reilly & Associates, Inc. All rights reserved.

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text up or down a few lines. Here, you decide exactly how many lines, from the piddling one-line-at-a-time to the supersonic 100 lines per flick. Click the “One screen at a time” option for quick page flipping. Most people stay in the neighborhood of one, two, or three lines, but “One screen at a time” comes in handy when speed-reading a large document. Hardware tab Most people click this tab—useful for diagnostics and upgrading—for quick access to their mouse’s drivers (the software that lets your mouse’s hardware communicate with Windows). Click the Troubleshooting button for a robotic walkthrough of common mouse problems and their solutions.

Game Controllers Windows XP’s built-in game controller software works very simply. When you plug your game controller into your PC’s USB port (page 34), Window greets you by name and lets all your games know what model of controller lies waiting in your twitching hands. It can even test the buttons to make sure they all work. FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTION

The Analog vs. Digital Dilemma Game controllers come with either analog controls, digital controls, or both. What’s the difference and which one should I buy? Just like choosing between vanilla and chocolate, there’s no easy answer. It depends on your taste buds, or rather, the particular game you’re playing. The buttons on digital controllers, like anything else digital, contain only toggle switches. For instance, a four-position digital controller lets you navigate the dark underground passage in four directions only: forward, backward, left, or right. Since they simply toggle between “straight” or “turn,” they leave out the subtleties like “turn northwest.” A few extra buttons may let you jump or crouch. In fact, many games turn your keyboard into a digital controller, assigning events to different keys: tapping the Spacebar unleashes a torrent of metal-eating bacteria, for instance. Digital controllers bring speed and a high degree of accuracy to games, since computers easily interpret the simple “On” or “Off” instructions. However, some games, like flight simulators or driving games, require more finesse

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than a simple Up or Down. That’s where an analog controller comes in handy. Analog controllers send a constant flow of measurements to your PC. Move the analog joystick or game pad delicately from Up to Down, and the PC responds to your movement’s speed as well as its direction. That lets you land the plane with just the right finesse for a graceful swoop. However, analog controls aren’t as quick or accurate as their digital counterparts. Different controllers, even of the same model, send slightly different measurements, resulting in less precision. That’s why calibration (page 81) lets your PC grow accustomed to each analog controller’s particularities and automatically adjust for them. Most game players keep at least one analog and one digital game controller in their quivers. The best game controllers contain both analog and digital controls. The Saitek P880, for instance, bears two small analog joysticks along the bottom, along with a digital game pad and digital buttons near the top.

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But the real power lies when you install the game controller’s bundled software. That software lets you program your controller’s buttons to match the particular game you’re playing—that same left button can be a block during a football game, or a rocket launcher in a shoot-'em-up. The software saves each game’s settings as a Profile. When you switch games, switch to that game’s Profile to swap buttons quickly, something that’s beyond the intelligence of Windows XP’s built-in software.

Game Controllers

To save you from programming your own buttons, head to the manufacturer’s Web site and visit the Customer Service or Downloads section. Download and install the game controller’s latest driver, as well as custom-built Profiles for games you own or plan to buy. Tip: Computer games and their accessories represent the PC industry’s technological leading edge. Visit the controller’s Web site often to grab the latest drivers as they appear.

Although you can start playing the kid down the street immediately after plugging in your new game controller, fine-tune your game controller’s action by calibrating it. The game’s software asks you to move the controller’s pad around in all directions so it can measure the response. As the software notices any discrepancies—perhaps the controller doesn’t move to one corner as far as it does to all the others—it stores those settings and compensates for them during game play, automatically “padding” a weak corner’s movements to perform as well as the others. Note: Digital controllers, unlike analog controllers, don’t need calibrating.

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chapter

Chapter 3

3

Monitors and Video

Early computers didn’t use monitors; they simply printed everything on paper, limiting computer games to pretty slow rounds of tic-tac-toe. Monitors arrived a few years later, and once engineers got a taste of steering their first spaceships, video technology was quick to (and of course, continues to) improve. Today’s PCs connect to a huge variety of video gear, and this chapter guides you through how to: • Connect any monitor, TV, or digital projector to the correct port on your PC. • Connect two or more monitors to your PC to double your workspace, letting you work with more programs (or view more documents) simultaneously. • Share one display between two or more PCs to save money. • Adjust the monitor to get the best display possible. • Improve your PC’s video quality by adding a new video card. • Install a new monitor. • Troubleshoot problems when the display doesn’t look right. Laptops and PCs share monitor technology, so nearly everything in this chapter applies to laptops, as well. The “Laptop Life” boxes explain any significant differences.

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Monitor Basics

Monitor Basics Monitors, those screens you stare at all day, come in two basic types: the oldschool, TV-shaped Cathode Ray Tube (CRT) monitors from yesteryear, and the newer, flat, and thin Liquid Crystal Display (LCD) monitors filling the store shelves today. When dealing with either breed of monitor, the same confusing terms pop up on sales floors and Windows menus. These terms top the list: • Screen size. Borrowing some trickery from TV-land, the computer industry measures monitors diagonally to create the illusion of executive-sized desktops. However, a 17-inch monitor gives you only a 13.6-inch-wide Windows desktop. Even an expensive 21-inch monitor offers only about 16 inches of workspace. • Pixels. Like the Sunday funnies, a monitor displays pictures by using tiny colored dots. The industry refers to the dots as pixels. A monitor displays text by simply stacking dots in different configurations, shown in Figure 3-1. • Resolution. Resolution refers to the number of pixels your monitor can use when filling up the screen. For instance, a low resolution setting like 640 × 480 turns the screen into a grid of 640 lines of 480 pixels. A higher resolution of 1024 × 768 creates a grid of 1024 rows of 768 pixels. A higher resolution produces a larger grid, which means a larger desktop—something everybody appreciates when trying to place two large windows next to each other. • Refresh rate. CRT monitors work much like movie projectors, constantly flashing new frames onto the screen. Even when you’re viewing a static image—a Web page, for instance—your monitor constantly refreshes the screen. If the monitor’s not speedy enough, the screen flickers noticeably, like you’re watching an old movie. Measured in hertz, the refresh rate refers to the speed with which the monitor updates the screen. CRT monitors work best at the highest refresh rate they offer, usually from 75–100 Hz. LCD monitors display images differently than CRT monitors, so they don’t have flicker problems. Keep their refresh rate set at 60 Hz. (See page 107 for instructions on how to adjust the refresh rate.) • Contrast ratio. Found on a monitor’s list of technical specifications, contrast ratio measures the ratio of the brightest color to the darkest color that a monitor can display. Higher numbers are best, as they let a monitor display very dark blacks along with very bright whites and colors. CRT monitors average a 700:1 contrast ratio; most LCD monitors now match or exceed that. • Response time. This rating, measured in milliseconds (ms), refers to the time required for an LCD monitor’s pixels to turn from black to white, and then return to black. Lower numbers mean faster response times. A lower response time lets a character dash across the screen without leaving a trail of ghostly images following it.

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• Viewing angle. Another term applied only to LCD monitors. The viewing angle measures how wide an arc viewers can be positioned within and still see everything that’s on a display. A wide viewing angle lets lots of people see the monitor, even if they’re standing off to the side. A narrow viewing angle restricts the view to yourself, and perhaps the guy peering over your shoulder.

Monitor Basics

Figure 3-1: Everything displayed on your screen consists of pixels—little dots like the ones shown here. Your computer turns pixels on or off in different colors to display text or images. To give your monitor more (or fewer) dots to play with, adjust its resolution. A resolution of 640 × 480, for instance, gives your monitor a grid that’s 640 pixels wide and 480 pixels high. Switching your monitor to a higher resolution, like 1280 × 1024, gives it a larger grid, meaning you can pack even more information into the screen. The tradeoff? The monitor shrinks everything to fit the screen.

LCD (Liquid Crystal Display) Today, nearly everybody buys an LCD monitor (also called a digital monitor); these are the sleek, flat-screen models like the one shown in Figure 3-2. As is the case with most technological innovations, problems plagued early LCD monitors. The screens faded when viewed from the sides, for instance—great for privacy when working on an airplane’s seat tray, but not so good for presentations. Also, early LCD screens didn’t update their displays quickly enough to satisfy hardcore gamers: fast-moving characters left unwanted “ghosts.” Manufacturers earned their chops building LCD monitors for laptops, so they fine-tuned desktop LCD displays fairly quickly. Today, LCD monitors surpass CRT monitors in nearly every way: they provide clearer screens, consume less desk space, require much less energy, give off less heat, are easier on the eyes, and, well, they just plain look nicer. Just like their predecessors, most LCD monitors connect to a PC’s VGA port (Figure 1-13, top). The best LCD monitors come with a DVI (Digital Visual

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Interface) port (Figure 1-13, bottom)—a newer port specifically designed to let these new digital monitors display their clearest images. Figure 3-2: Top: With their sleek look, small footprint, and vivid displays, LCD monitors like this one have pretty much pushed CRT monitors out of the marketplace. Bottom: Like many new LCD monitors, this one comes with two ports, letting it connect to a wider range of PCs. The monitor’s DVI port (left) lets the monitor plug into the digital cards found on newer PCs and video cards. Next to it, an old-style VGA port (right) lets the monitor plug into the VGA ports found on nearly every PC, especially older ones.

DVI port

VGA port

To make things simple, some LCD monitors come with both a VGA and a DVI port, shown in Figure 3-2, bottom, so you can plug them into PCs bearing either one of those openings. Tip. When shopping for an LCD monitor with a DVI port, give bonus points to ones that come with their own digital cable. Those cables aren’t cheap; they cost anywhere from $15 to $50, depending on their quality and manufacturer.

Today, the biggest problem with LCD monitors comes from dead pixels—pixels that don’t light up correctly. Some dead pixels constantly display an annoying pinpoint of one color; others stay black. Dead pixels aren’t very noticeable when you view digital photos; after all, one dead pixel blends in easily among 786,432 working ones. But when viewed on a background of one color—a completely blue or white desktop, for instance—dead pixels stand out like a pinhole in the window blinds shading an afternoon sleeper. 86

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Manufacturers don’t want to scrap an entire monitor because of one or two dead pixels, so they ship the monitors to stores anyway. Some people never notice the dead pixels or don’t rank them high on their worry list. Others find the dead pixels bothersome, and want their monitors replaced.

Monitor Basics

Since dead pixels don’t irritate everybody, manufacturers rarely publicize their replacement policies. Some limit replacements to monitors with a certain number of dead pixels—three or more, for instance. Others hinge their replacement on the dead pixel’s location—dead pixels near the corners or edges don’t garner as much sympathy as those living near the center. Others replace monitors only for customers who protest loudly and make several phone calls. Before buying a monitor, ask the salesperson or vendor about the store’s replacement policy. FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTION

The Analog-to-Digital Dilemma The back of my flat-panel digital monitor has two ports— VGA and digital. Since it’s a digital monitor, why does it need a VGA port, which is analog? Should I use the VGA or digital port? Since you already bought the monitor, use the port that fits the one on your video card. Your monitor works with either of them. But to understand which port truly works the best, you need to understand the difference between analog and digital. When computers want to display something onscreen, they communicate with the monitor using their native, numerical language—digital ones and zeroes. CRT monitors, however, don’t work with numbers. Their technology depends on subtle changes in electric current—i.e., analog information. To bridge that analog/digital communication barrier, a PC’s VGA circuitry converts the digital information into analog information before sending it the monitor. That solution works great for CRT monitors. But the arrival of digital monitors meant computers could finally start sending their

numbers directly to the monitor. VGA cards and ports were suddenly obsolete—almost. Digital monitors were too expensive when first introduced, and they required expensive new digital video cards. Few people could afford both the monitor and the card, so manufacturers built VGA ports into many digital monitors, letting them work with the millions of VGA cards already living on computers worldwide. Then, they placed an Analog-toDigital Converter (ADC) inside the digital monitor. That’s right: your PC creates digital information, which the VGA card converts to analog before sending to the monitor. Then the digital monitor converts the analog information back to digital for displaying onscreen. And that’s why digital monitors don’t look their best when plugged into a VGA port: Some of the quality disappears during the two translations. Many people don’t notice the difference, since the converters work very well these days. But to use your digital monitor to its fullest capacity, plug it into a video card with a digital port.

CRT (Cathode Ray Tube) Monitors CRT monitors are bulky and heavy, and they resemble TV sets (Figure 3-3), but they do bear one redeeming quality: they’re relatively cheap, usually costing less than $150—if you can still find any for sale. Gamers and graphic artists held on firmly to CRT monitors, as they preferred CRT monitors’ fast screens and vivid colors. But when LCD monitors finally caught up, Chapter 3: Monitors and Video PCs: The Missing Manual, eMatter Edition Copyright © 2008 O’Reilly & Associates, Inc. All rights reserved.

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those two camps packed up and moved along the technological trail toward LCD displays. Figure 3-3: A computing mainstay for many years, CRT monitors no longer fill the shelves of computer stores. These bulky and heavy monitors lost popularity when higher-quality LCD monitors came down in price.

As CRT monitors slide toward the computer graveyard, they aren’t finding a welcome funeral. The monitors contain toxins like cadmium, mercury, and large amounts of lead—enough to define them as hazardous waste in California, Florida, Maine, Massachusetts, and Minnesota, with other states passing similar restrictions to keep them out of their landfills. On the plus side, CRT monitors have been around so long that nearly every PC recognizes them on contact. Plug nearly any CRT monitor into your PC’s VGA port (page 34), and Windows jumps onto the screen.

Installing a Monitor CRT monitors just plug into a plain old VGA port (page 34): a 15-hole, D-shaped, round port found on nearly every computer. Digital LCD monitors can often plug into either of two ports, depending on their connectors. Some plug straight into a VGA port, just like CRT monitors. The more expensive ones just plug into a DVI port (page 34), found only on a digital video card. If your LCD monitor comes with only a DVI port—and your PC doesn’t come with a DVI port to connect the monitor’s cable—you need to buy and install a video card (page 107) with a DVI port.

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Once you plug a video cable into its port, twist the two knobs next to the connector to hold it in place.

Plugging Two Monitors into One PC

TROUBLESHOOTING MOMENT

Getting Rid of Old Monitors When you finally replace your old CRT monitor with a sleek new LCD panel, don’t just drop the old one in a dumpster; that can get you arrested in some states. If you can’t give your old monitor to a neighbor or keep it around to outfit your PC with dual monitors (described in the next section), here are your options.

electronic gear. Check with your city’s landfill department to see how they’re handling the problem and whether they charge for the service. • Recyclers. A few companies now tread the computer recycling waters. If you’re lucky, you’ll find a recycler in the Yellow Pages who will take the monitor off your hands for a nominal fee.

• Donations. Many large national charities no longer accept CRT monitors (or TV sets, for that matter). But if your monitor or PC still works, some schools, small nonprofits, local computer clubs, or local training programs might accept it.

To find recycling options in your area, contact Earth 911 (www.earth911.org), a fantastic resource for a nation brimming with dead cell phones, monitors, and other technological castoffs. The site offers a huge database of recycling information, sponsored in part by Home Depot, HewlettPackard, and ESRI software.

• Drop-offs. Some cities offer hazardous waste disposal, letting you drop off your obsolete or frazzled

Plugging Two Monitors into One PC Windows XP graciously lets you plug up to 10 monitors into your PC, a feature used mostly by hobbyists adding cockpit windows to their garage-sized flight simulators. Most people who take advantage of this feature stick with just two monitors, placing them side by side to double their desktop’s size. Devote one monitor to your work, for instance, while the other displays notes, email, or a handy Web page. A second monitor also works well for files that don’t fit well on one screen— extra-wide spreadsheets, for instance, or that panorama you created with your new digital camera. Windows XP seamlessly merges the two desktops with a feature called Dualview, letting you drag tidbits from one monitor to the other. And Windows doesn’t care whether you plug in CRT or LCD monitors or a combination of the two; Windows remembers each monitor’s mechanics and sends it the signals it expects.

See if Your PC Supports Two Monitors Before embracing the two-monitor lifestyle, make sure your PC or laptop supports two monitors by choosing Start ➝ Control Panel ➝ Display ➝ Settings tab. If you spot two monitors in the window, as shown in Figure 3-4, you’re halfway there: Windows XP can expand your desktop onto a second monitor.

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Spot only one monitor in the window? Then your computer can’t handle a second monitor until you install a second video card—something not possible with a laptop, but fairly easy to do on a desktop PC (see page 107 for details). Figure 3-4: To see if your PC or laptop supports more than one monitor, choose Start ➝ Control Panel ➝ Display ➝ Settings tab. If you spot two numbered monitors, like the ones in this figure, your PC supports a second monitor, letting you double your desktop’s size (or watch movies at work, on slow days).

Laptop owners, peek under your laptop’s backside plastic flaps to see if you can find a video port.

Plug in the Second Monitor Once you know Windows XP supports two monitors, look for a place to plug in that second monitor. Examine your monitor to see if it bears a VGA or DVI port (Figure 3-2, bottom). Some monitors help out by including one of each. Next, examine the sea of ports on the back of your PC for a VGA or DVI port that matches the port on your monitor. After reviewing your monitor’s connector and the back of your PC, you’ll be facing one of two scenarios: • If a video port on your PC matches a port on your second monitor, connect the appropriate cable between them, be it VGA or DVI. Need a cable? Drop by any electronics, office supply, or computer store for either type of cable. • If your second monitor’s ports don’t match the ports on your PC, you’ve reached a minor impasse. DVI doesn’t work with a VGA port, nor vice versa. (Converter boxes exist, but cost several hundred dollars.) To install your second monitor, you must buy and install another video card (page 107) into your PC that matches your monitor’s connector. One minor salvation: this new video card needn’t be an expensive, high-performer; any run-of-the-mill card for under $75 will do the trick. Note: You may spot one video port on your PC’s video card, and a second—a VGA port—hiding up near your USB ports. That VGA port, built into your motherboard, is probably turned off because your current monitor plugs into your video card. To turn it back on, head for your BIOS (page 525) and change your PC’s Onboard Video setting, a fairly simple matter of selecting On from the Onboard Video menu. 90

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Activate the Second Monitor Once you plug the second monitor into your PC, tell Windows about your new monitor by following these steps:

Plugging Two Monitors into One PC

1. Right-click anywhere on your Desktop and, from the shortcut menu, choose Properties. Or, choose Start ➝ Control Panel ➝ Display. 2. Click the Settings tab, and then click the monitor with the “2” on the screen. The Settings tab (Figure 3-4) displays both monitors on the screen, whether or not the second one’s currently connected. 3. Choose “Extend my Windows desktop onto this monitor” and then click Apply. Windows activates the second monitor: The screens on both monitors flash a bit, and when they awaken, Windows appears on the second monitor. The second monitor wears the same background or “wallpaper” as your first monitor. Since Windows treats them as two pieces of one large desktop, you can’t assign each one different wallpapers or screensavers.

Identify, Position, and Assign the Monitors To test your second monitor, click the Identify button on the Settings tab and watch the numbers “1” and “2” appear on the two monitors, as shown in Figure 3-5. Windows places the number “1” on the primary monitor. The primary monitor, the one used to turn on the Dualview wonderland, earns special honors. That monitor turns on first when you turn on your PC and log in; newly launched programs appear there, as well. (A laptop’s monitor is always the primary monitor.) When you turn on Dualview, Windows assumes your second monitor sits to the right of your primary monitor, the same way the two monitors appear in Figure 3-5. That’s important to know because dragging items off your primary monitor’s right edge makes the pointer vanish, and then reappear on the second monitor’s screen. Tip: The mouse pointer tends to vanish on the wide pastures offered by two monitors. To increase its visibility, head to the Control Panel’s Mouse icon, click the Pointer Options page, and turn on any or all of the options on the Visibility area (page 79).

If your cat’s sleeping to the right of your primary monitor, feel free to put your second monitor on the left. But tell Windows about it: drag the second onscreen

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monitor to the left of the primary monitor. Windows then lets your mouse pointer move off the left edge, instead, letting your sleeping cat lie. Figure 3-5: The Dualview setting lets you connect two monitors to one PC, stretching your desktop across them both. To see which one is which, click the Identify button (on the Display Properties’ Settings tab). Windows XP places a “1” on the primary monitor—the one you log onto when Windows starts—and a “2” on the monitor you added. Windows XP initially places the second monitor on your right side—that means your mouse pointer disappears off your primary monitor’s right edge before appearing on your second monitor. To change the pointer’s “disappearing edge,” return to the Dualview setting window and drag the onscreen monitors into different positions.

Dualview’s monitor positioning proves quite versatile. For instance, if you want to “stack” your monitors for viewing extra long Web sites, drag and drop the onscreen monitor to the top or bottom of the primary monitor. If you ever forget which monitor corresponds to Windows onscreen monitors, just click the Identify button (on the Display Properties’ Settings tab [page 91]), and Windows numbers them for you. If you find yourself working on your second monitor more than your primary monitor, tell Windows to assign primary status to the second monitor: click the number 2 monitor onscreen and choose “Use this device as the primary monitor” from the Settings page.

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Note: Video cards with two video ports sometimes contain built-in software that conflicts with Windows XP’s Dualview feature. If Dualview doesn’t work properly, look for your card’s icon in the Control Panel (Start ➝ Control Panel). Most dual-port cards come from nVidia, ATI, or Matrox. If you spot an icon with one of those names in the Control Panel, open it and try turning its own dual-desktop feature on or off to see if Windows XP’s Dualview kicks in.

Plugging Two PCs into One Monitor

POWER USERS’ CLINIC

Now Presenting… Costing anywhere from $500 to $2,000, digital projectors project a computer’s screen onto a wall or movie screen for audience viewing. When combined with a spiffy slideshow creation program like Microsoft PowerPoint, a digital projector makes you the commander of the conference room— if you can remember your notes and pace your patter to keep the show rolling.

Digital projectors plug into a video port (or connect like a TV, page 95), so Windows treats them like any other second monitor. Tell Dualview to make your digital projector the second monitor, and then tell PowerPoint about your plans: open PowerPoint and select SlideShow ➝ Set Up Show ➝ Multiple Monitors ➝ Display slide show on Monitor 2 ➝ Show Presenter View ➝ OK.

To up your odds for success, turn on Dualview. This feature lets you view your notes (and PowerPoint’s built-in timer) on your laptop’s screen, while the audience views your presentation on a screen.

That lets the audience watch your slideshow on the digital projector, but lets you read your notes on your laptop. Feel free to page through your notes, preview upcoming slides, and view PowerPoint’s all-important “elapsed time counter” to end your show on time.

Plugging Two PCs into One Monitor Sometimes you end up with more PCs than monitors. For instance, some households keep their old PC’s monitor when buying a new PC, effectively decapitating the old PC. In other cases, folks share their desktop PC’s monitor with their laptop. And some families share a monitor with the kids—if they can get away with it. Whenever you share a monitor between two PCs, a KVM (Keyboard Video Mouse) switch (Figure 3-6) spares you the hassle of crawling behind the desk to switch the cables from one PC to the other. You plug your monitor, mouse, and keyboard into the switch, which usually costs between $20 and $50. Then, on the other end of the switch, you get two sets of cables: one for each PC’s monitor, keyboard, and mouse ports. To work on the PC you currently see on your monitor, start working as normal, typing and moving your mouse.

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When the kids want to play with the other PC, press a button on the switch or type a certain key sequence—the Scroll Lock key twice, for instance. That places the second PC’s screen on the monitor, letting the kids do their homework. Figure 3-6: This Linksys KVM switch, available for under $40, lets two PCs share a single monitor (and a mouse and a keyboard, for that matter). Plug your monitor, mouse, and keyboard into the switch. Then, plug the switch’s cables into the monitor, mouse, and keyboard ports of the two PCs. To switch between PCs, push a button on the switch or type a special key sequence on your keyboard.

Some businesses juggle dozens of PCs with one KVM switch, letting one operator handle any problems that crop up with computers that are otherwise unattended. Admittedly, a KVM switch comes with a few drawbacks. Unless you connect the two PCs to a network (page 403), you can’t copy information between them. And some wireless keyboards and mice don’t work well when plugged into KVM switches. But like all niche products, a KVM switch provides a handy solution under the right conditions. Sharing a monitor can be more practical than it first sounds. In some setups, for instance, a PC serves only as a backup system (page 463), or it sends music and photos to a TiVo or other entertainment center. Since these PCs usually run unattended, a $30 KVM switch makes more sense than a second $250 monitor.

Using TV Sets as Monitors Early computer adopters lamented having to buy a second “TV” when they bought their first computer. Why couldn’t they just hook the darn thing up to the TV? For the answer, sit close to your TV screen while a movie’s credits roll by; you’ll quickly realize that televisions lack the crisp detail needed for close-up editing. Televisions work best when displaying pictures, not text, so they usually make lousy PC monitors. However, hooking your PC to a TV works well for several things: showing off digital photos to a group, viewing movies through the PC’s built-in DVD player, or playing some video games.

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Unfortunately, TVs and PCs sprouted from two different evolutionary seeds. The branches began to intertwine a few years ago, so your PC and TV may share the same ports. In that case, connecting a PC to a TV is as easy as connecting a VCR. When they don’t share ports, however, be prepared to weave a long thread of cables and connectors.

Using TV Sets as Monitors

LAPTOP LIFE

Dimming the Lights to Conserve Power Even after more than a decade of development, few laptops pack enough battery power to play a DVD through an entire cross-country flight. The primary culprit? Your laptop’s monitor, which is its biggest power hog. Squeezing extra life from a battery usually requires dimming the monitor to 50-percent brightness—or even dimmer. (Dimming to 40-percent brightness may make the battery last through a night flight.)

• Some laptops offer power scheme adjustments that let you choose different brightness levels for different tasks. To see them, choose Start ➝ Control Panel ➝ Power Options. You can create custom power schemes that, say, tell the screen to brighten when you’re word processing, but lower or turn off when you’re listening to MP3 files or when the battery life drops below a certain level. When you finish creating a power scheme, save it for later access.

You can adjust a laptop’s screen brightness level in several ways, depending on the model and manufacturer:

• Windows XP also comes with some built-in power schemes, available by clicking Start ➝ Control Panel ➝ Display ➝ Screen Saver ➝ Power. These power schemes won’t actually dim the monitor, but they’ll turn it off when you haven’t touched a key for while.

• Some laptop manufacturers add a dedicated key (page 60) for on-the-fly adjustments. Hold down the Fn key and press the Brightness key, for instance; it’s usually an icon of a shining sun on one of the Function keys. When an adjustment bar pops up, press the arrow keys to lower or brighten the screen.

The next two sections explain how to route both your PC’s video and sound so you can see and hear everything on your TV. Note: There’s one area where the TV-PC connection is growing stronger by the day: many TV stations already broadcast their signal over the Internet, which means you don’t have to bother hooking up your PC to your TV. You can watch the tube right on your PC’s monitor. Broadband (page 321) Internet subscribers can tune into TV stations broadcast from Albania to Zimbabwe simply by clicking a link.

Display Your PC’s Video Signal on Your TV A few PCs and laptops—often the newer, more expensive models—come fully equipped to send video to your TV. Connecting the two machines mostly involves using a single cable—the same one that connects a VCR or a DVD player to a TV (this makes sense since you’re essentially using your PC as an input device, to route a signal from your PC to your TV). Older PCs and laptops require add-on equipment, extra cables, and more than a little patience. Follow the steps described next to test the friendliness level between your PC and television.

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Note: The terms “port” and “jack” are synonymous when it comes to the openings on the back of your PC and TV where you plug in cables.

1. Look for a Video Out port on your PC or laptop. PCs and laptops often include an S-Video port (Figure 3-7, top left). Standing for “Separated Video,” S-Video cables often connect high-quality TVs with game consoles, camcorders, and DVD players. If your PC or laptop has an SVideo jack, it often lives next to where the monitor plugs in. PCs occasionally send video through an RCA port (Figure 3-7, top right). Named after the venerable Radio Corporation of America, RCA ports live on the back of nearly every TV; they’re often used for plugging in a VCR. Figure 3-7: Top: Look for either an S-Video (left) or an RCA (right) port on the back of your PC. Then examine the back of your TV for a matching connector labeled Video In. If you find matching ports, run the appropriate cable between the two ports to connect your PC or laptop to the TV. Bottom: This TV has three RCA ports (also known as jacks). One RCA port, labeled Video In, accepts video. (The other two accept stereo sound—one left channel and one right channel.) To connect this particular TV to your PC, connect an RCA cable between the TV’s Video In port and your PC’s Video Out RCA port.

Antenna jack

Video in jack

Audio in (left) jack Audio in (right) jack

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2. Look for a Video In port on your TV. Most TVs come with at least one of three possible Video In ports. They’re easy to spot, because most TV manufacturers do you the favor of labeling their ports.

Using TV Sets as Monitors

— RCA port. This connects many TVs to a VCR or DVD player. Figure 3-7, bottom, shows a TV set’s Video In RCA port. (TVs use RCA ports for sound, as well as video; the yellow RCA port carries the video.) — Antenna or RF port. Almost every TV sports an Antenna port (Figure 3-7, bottom). The cable from your cable or satellite TV provider almost always plugs in here. — S-Video port. More expensive TVs offer S-Video ports as well as RCA ports. S-Video delivers a higher quality signal. Here’s how to handle the ports you find on your PC and your TV: • If your PC and TV have ports that match, you’re in great shape. Connect the two with a cable that matches them, be it S-Video or RCA. Steal the cable from your VCR, if it matches, or buy a new cable at Radio Shack or an electronics store. • If your PC has S-Video and your TV has RCA—or vice versa—buy an S-Video/ RCA converter, available for less than $20 from Radio Shack and other electronics stores. Plug the converter into the S-Video port, thus converting it to an RCA port. The ports then match, letting you connect an RCA cable between them. • If your PC doesn’t have a Video Out port, or your TV has only an Antenna port, buy a PC-To-TV converter. Available for less than $50, the little box plugs into your PC’s USB port (page 34) and provides S-Video, RCA, and Antenna ports for connecting to any port your TV offers. Note: An Antenna port, shown in Figure 3-7, bottom, is often called an “RF” or “Coax” port.

To help you comb through the combination of cables, connectors, and converters you may encounter, Table 3-1 provides a quick reference guide. Identify the ports on your PC and TV and then look them up in the table to find your connection solution. Table 3-1. Connection ports between your PC and your TV

Your PC’s Video Out Port

Your TV’s Video In Port

Connect Them This Way

S-Video

S-Video

Connect the two with a single S-Video cable.

RCA

RCA

Connect the two with a single RCA cable.

S-Video or RCA

Antenna (also called RF or cable)

Buy a PC-to-TV converter, plug it into your PC, and connect an RF cable between the converter’s Antenna port and your TV’s Antenna port.

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Table 3-1. Connection ports between your PC and your TV (continued)

Your PC’s Video Out Port

Your TV’s Video In Port

Connect Them This Way

S-Video

RCA

Buy an S-Video-to-RCA converter. Plug the converter into your PC’s S-Video port to turn it into an RCA port. Then connect an RCA cable between your PC and TV.

RCA

S-Video

Buy an RCA-to-S-Video converter. Plug the converter into your TV’s S-Video port to turn it into an RCA port. Then connect an RCA cable between your TV and PC.

None

Any

Buy a PC-to-TV converter and connect it to your PC. Then connect the appropriate video cable to any of your TV’s Video In ports. Plug the cable’s other end into the matching port on the converter.

All the rules in this section apply to a High-Definition TV’s ports, too. However, some HDTV sets simplify the job by including standard PC monitor ports: VGA and/or DVI. If you spot one of those, unplug your PC’s video cable from its monitor, and plug the cable into your HDTV set instead. Add a DVI port to your PC, if needed, by installing an updated video card (page 107). RamElectronics (www.ramelectronics.net) sells many converters to use between PC ports and HDTV ports. The store’s a gold mine for high-quality—but cable-andport-challenged—home stereo gear.

Play Your PC’s Audio Through Your TV’s Speakers Once you connect the video, the hard part is over. Long ago, PCs and TVs agreed on the same cable for connecting sound. Follow these steps to send your PC’s sound to your TV: 1. Find your PC’s Line Out or Speaker port. This 1/8-inch round port lives on your sound card (page 45). It looks just like the headphone jack on an iPod or other music player. Of course, the sound card’s other four or five ports look identical, so be sure to choose the one for Line Out or Speaker. (The icon shows a little outward-pointing arrow, as shown on page 45.) 2. Find your TV’s Audio In ports. Shown in Figure 3-7, almost all TVs offer one or two RCA ports for incoming sound. If you’re lucky enough to have a stereo TV, you see two RCA ports, shown in Figure 3-7: the red port carries the stereo sound’s right channel. (Remember red for right to always hook up your stereo correctly.) The other port carries the left channel. Mono TVs come with one port only, usually the red one.

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Be sure to choose the pair of ports labeled “Audio In”—not “Audio Out.”

Watching TV on a PC

3. Connect the cable between your sound card’s Line Out or Speaker port to your TV’s Audio In RCA ports. If you’ve ever plugged your iPod or music player into your stereo or boombox, you already own this cable (Figure 3-8). The cable has a stereo 1/8-inch plug on one end and two RCA ports on the other. Can’t salvage a spare cable? Pick one up for a few bucks at any drug store, Radio Shack, or stereo store. Push the small stereo plug into the Line Out or Speaker port on your PC’s sound card (page 45) and plug the two RCA plugs into your TV’s Audio In ports. If you have a mono TV, just plug the red (right) side of the cable into the TV’s Audio in port; leave the cable’s other sound connector dangling and unattached. Figure 3-8: Push the tiny, 1/8-inch plug into your PC’s Line Out or Speaker jack, and plug the two RCA plugs into your TV’s Audio In ports. (The red plug goes into the right port; the other plug goes into the left port.)

Once you connect the cable between the PC and TV, your PC’s screen immediately appears on the TV, and any noise or music plays through the TV’s speakers. You may need to adjust the TV’s picture so the PC screen lines up along the sides. Adjusting a TV works just like adjusting a CRT monitor (page 103), since those monitors borrow TV technology—find the TV’s picture alignment knobs and turn them until the PC’s screen centers itself on the TV.

Watching TV on a PC TV sets make lousy PC monitors, but PCs and their displays make great TV sets. In fact, some PCs already include a TV tuner that lets them double as high-quality TV

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sets. If you’re not lucky enough to own one of those fancy models, though, upgrading your PC to display television rarely merits the cost, for several reasons. First, most PCs have small, 15- or 17-inch monitors that are usually parked in front of a single chair—a far cry from the living room’s big TV, comfy couch, and nearby popcorn maker. Second, adding TV to a PC costs between $50 and $150—that’s more cash than it takes to pick up some new TVs. Finally, TV-equipped PCs can record shows to your hard drive, but they lack the finesse of dedicated TV recorders like TiVo or Replay TV ($100 to $250), which automatically record shows according to your tastes. So, why bother? Some upgraders don’t own TVs or don’t want to buy a second one for their offices. Others want to record shows, but despise paying the monthly dues required by TiVo or ReplayTV. Some newshounds want CNN sitting in a corner of their desktop. And some folks simply like to tinker with their PCs. Your PC needs two things to morph into a TV: • The TV signal. TV shows already stream into your house from the cable company, satellite dish, or a roof antenna; they then enter your house through a cable. Unplug that cable from the back of your TV (if you use an antenna) or from your cable or satellite box. Plug that cable into a signal splitter—a twodollar gadget (shown in Figure 3-9) that splits one cable into two ports. Plug two additional cables into the splitter’s two ports; one of those cables plugs back into your TV (if you use an antenna) or cable box, and the other plugs into your PC’s new TV tuner, described next. • The TV tuner. TV tuners, which cost between $50 and $150, come mainly as drop-in cards (page 25), although a few come as plug-in USB (page 34) boxes. Add one to your PC, plug the cable carrying your TV shows into the tuner card’s port, and install the tuner’s bundled software. Both Hauppauge (www.hauppauge.com) and ATI (www.ati.com) sell TV tuners for PCs. For more information about adding TV tuners or recording shows to your PC, check out The Build Your Own PVR Web site (www.byopvr.com). To switch between channels 2 through 99, load the software bundled with your PC TV tuner. The software places a little keypad on your screen for switching between channels with the mouse or keyboard’s numeric keypad. Note: To tune in channels above 99—including pay channels—connect the splitter after the cable leaves your cable/satellite box. That lets the cable box unscramble the signals before routing them to your PC, which then displays the signal on channel 3 or 4. Unfortunately, this also means you need to use the cable box’s remote to change channels.

Troubleshooting Your Monitor When figuring out what’s wrong with a monitor, the biggest problem boils down to fingering the troublemaker: your monitor or video card (page 104). Since the video card feeds your monitor everything it displays, it’s the prime suspect in most 100

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problems. Still, try the following troubleshooting steps on the rare chance your monitor’s on the fritz. If none of these fix your problem, then the fault lies with the video card; head for its Troubleshooting section (page 110) instead. Connect a cable from here back to your TV or cable box

Connect a cable from here to your PC’s TV tuner

Troubleshooting Your Monitor

Figure 3-9: Disconnect the TV cable where it enters your cable box or TV, and then connect it to the single end of this RF splitter, a handy gadget sold at most electronics stores for a few dollars. The splitter breaks the signal into two identical signals. Plug a second cable into one of the two new ports and connect it back to your TV or cable box. Then connect another cable between the splitter’s remaining port and your PC’s tuner.

Disconnect the cable from where it enters your TV or cable box, and plug it into here

UP TO SPEED

Cleaning the Monitor Monitors look their dirtiest when turned off. Then you can really see the dust, sneeze marks, and swatted gnats. To clean an LCD monitor, reach for the standard “lint-free cloth,” meaning anything sold for cleaning camera lenses or eye-glasses. (Most optometrists give them away during your checkup, if you remember to ask.) Lacking that, stick with a 100-cotton cloth. A little warm water on the cloth removes just about everything. Don’t wipe the screen with

anything made of paper, including a tissue, as the fibers leave scratches that build up over time. The front of a CRT monitor contains glass, not plastic, so it’s much less picky about its cleaning cloth. As with an LCD display, start cleaning with a little warm water. Spray a little glass cleaner on the cloth, if necessary, to get rid of the real stubborn stuff.

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No Picture on the Monitor When your monitor presents you with an empty black screen, look at its power switch. Most monitors light up their On button—or an adjacent light—to let you know that they’re plugged in, saving you from crawling beneath the desk. If you don’t spot a light, check the power cord at the wall, as well as where it plugs into the back of your monitor. Once everything’s plugged in, check for the following problems: • Check the cable for bent pins. If the monitor’s plugged in with a lit power button, unplug the cable from your PC’s port and the monitor. Then carefully inspect the cable’s connectors. If any pins look bent, like the one in Figure 3-10, carefully straighten it with needle-nose pliers, and then plug it back in. You may get lucky. If you’re not lucky and are left holding a broken pin, replace the video cable to solve the problem. Figure 3-10: Sometimes a bent pin in a monitor’s cable connector keeps it from working properly. If you spot a bent pin, like this one on the plug’s bottom right, use a pair of needle-nose pliers to straighten it back in line with the rest of its neighbors.

Bent pin

• Look for a menu. When a monitor doesn’t receive any signal from the PC, it splashes a message or menu on the screen. If you spot that message or menu, the monitor’s working fine. The culprit then lies with your video card (page 107), the video cable, or some of the video card’s settings (page 105). No menu? Keep suspecting the monitor. • Plug in a spare video cable. You’re lucky if this fix works; you may simply need to replace a bad cable. Pick one up for less than $20 at most stores selling computers or office supplies. • Plug in a spare monitor. Plugging in a spare monitor, either borrowed from another computer or a neighbor, provides a foolproof diagnosis. If the spare monitor works but your monitor doesn’t, it’s time to start shopping for a replacement monitor. 102

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Adjust a CRT monitor CRT monitors require much more adjusting than LCD monitors to keep their pictures looking pretty. Every time you change the monitor’s resolution (page 106), for instance, the sides of the screen creep away from the monitor’s margins.

Troubleshooting Your Monitor

CRT monitors rely on knobs for calibration, unlike the push-button controls of LCD monitors. The knobs usually hide inside a flip-down panel along the monitor’s front bottom edge. Before reaching for the knobs, though, be sure your monitor’s been turned on for at least 30 minutes so it’s warmed up. Little icons next to the knobs explain their purposes. The icons usually show a picture of the monitor and arrows showing how turning the knob affects the screen, either by condensing, widening, or shifting it to the left or right. Several free programs simplify adjusting a CRT monitor. Nokia’s freebie Nokia Test (www.freepctech.com/rode/004.shtml) places different patterns on the screen, each designed for a specific function. One pattern fills the entire screen with squares; turn your CRT monitor’s vertical and horizontal controls until the squares stop falling off the screen’s corners or edges. You can use the shades of grays on another pattern to adjust your brightness and contrast settings for optimum visibility without eyestrain. Johannes Wallroth’s Test Screens program (www.programming.de/download/ testscreens.zip) walks you through similar adjustments. Among other things, you can check its displays of tiny text so that you can judge your monitor’s focus, or even perform amateur eye exams. Adjust an LCD monitor Almost all LCD monitors come with built-in software for changing their settings, which you usually control by poking at four buttons along the monitor’s front. Pushing the buttons in the correct sequence adjusts the brightness and contrast, and neatly aligns the picture with the monitor’s edges. The terse and unfriendly menu quickly traps unsuspecting visitors with dead-end menus. (If you’re stuck and can’t figure out how to just get rid of the adjustment menu, ignore the monitor. Most automatically remove their menu 30 seconds after you stop pushing buttons.) To adjust the monitor’s settings when the display shakes, blurs, or doesn’t fit on the screen, try the adjustments listed in the order below. Tip: To control the menu system on most LCD monitors, press the Menu button to summon the monitor’s adjust menu and see its options. The Plus and Minus buttons move up or down the menu’s list of options, highlighting each one in turn. Press the Menu button again to select a highlighted option. And press the Exit button (or choose Exit from a menu) to leave the menus.

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• Auto button. Before spelunking through your monitor’s cavernous adjustment menus, look for its handy guide: the Auto button. Built into most modern monitors, the Auto button reads the incoming signal and automatically adjusts your monitor’s screen. By all means, press the Auto button if the image doesn’t fit the screen correctly, or if the color looks awful. • Adjustment menu. If the Auto adjustment button fails, start spelunking. Push the monitor’s Menu button—it often bears a little picture of the monitor—to see a list of options; press the adjacent Plus or Minus buttons to move between options. After highlighting an option you want to adjust—Brightness, for instance— press the Menu button again to enter the Brightness menu. Press the Plus or Minus buttons to increase or decrease the Brightness to your personal comfort level. Press the Menu button again to exit the Brightness settings and move onto another category. Tip: Adobe Photoshop and Photoshop Elements, a digital photo editor bundled with some digital cameras, places an Adobe Gamma icon in your Control Panel. Running Adobe’s Gamma utility walks you through adjusting your monitor’s brightness, contrast, and color settings with ease.

• Foreign language menus. Manufacturers sell your monitor on many continents, so most monitors let you switch the menu’s languages. If your monitor’s menu traps you in a foreign land, keep pressing the Plus or Minus buttons until you see the word “English” on a menu. Push Menu to enter the Language settings, and then push the Plus button until you highlight “English.” Finally, push the Exit menu to revert to English. • Factory Reset. If the monitor looks worse than when you started tinkering with its settings, look for the menu’s Factory Reset option and choose it by pushing Menu. Your monitor instantly looks the way it did when it left the factory, giving you a clean slate for starting over—or leaving well enough alone, should the screen suddenly look fantastic.

Video Card (aka Display Adapter) Windows XP calls it a “Display Adapter,” most people call it a “video card” or “graphics card,” but no matter what it’s called, your PC’s video circuitry translates your PC’s numbers into something visible, and then passes the images along to your monitor. Think of it as the projector for your monitor’s screen. To suit different people, from accountants to kids with joystick-calloused fingers, video circuitry comes in two main styles, described below. 1. Built-in chip. Most people simply need enough graphics power to display words, photos, and maybe a few games on the screen. To cut costs, the PC industry shrunk lowpower video circuitry onto a single chip and popped it onto your motherboard 104

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(page 16). Known as “onboard video,” this works fine for most people—except gamers, who want to explore computer-generated galaxies.

Video Card (aka Display Adapter)

2. Standalone card. Other people want more powerful video, often for editing video or playing games. This more elaborate video circuitry works like a minicomputer, calculating the geometry needed to update the screen instantly, whether you’re repositioning a window, or watching changing shadows on a mermaid as she undulates through rippling sea grass. With prices averaging $200 to $400, a high-performance video card could be the most expensive thing inside your computer. Whether your PC creates video through a chip or a standalone card, this section explains how to adjust its settings to work best with what you’re doing.

Adjust Video Settings in Windows XP Most video settings hail from early years when video cards rarely matched your PC’s power. Back then, people needed to dial back some settings in order to let the card focus on other areas. For example, they’d cut back on the number of colors displayed onscreen to squeeze higher resolutions from their video card. When first installed, Windows XP automatically squeezes your video card’s muscles and adjusts the video settings to showcase Windows XP at its best. With today’s cheap and powerful video cards, Windows XP usually sets everything to full strength. Occasionally, you need to tweak some settings, like increasing the resolution to view a large digital photo, for instance. To adjust any of your video card’s settings, head to Windows XP’s command central of video settings: Start ➝ Control Panel ➝ Display ➝ Settings tab (Figure 3-11). (If you don’t see the Display option inside the Control Panel, click “Switch to Classic View” in the Control Panel’s left-side pane.) Here’s the rundown of how these settings affect what you see on the screen. • Display. This area names your PC’s currently connected monitor—or at least the one Windows XP thinks is attached. If the name listed here matches the one on your monitor, everything’s fine. But when this says “Generic,” Windows XP has resorted to its own general purpose driver—a bare-bones driver that won’t correctly list all your monitor’s capabilities. To update the driver, visit the Web site of your monitor’s manufacturer, drop by its Customer Support section, and then download the driver for your specific model of monitor. Run its installation program, and Windows XP updates the items on this window to match your monitor’s specifications.

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If you’ve connected two or more monitors to your PC, Windows XP lists their names here in a drop-down list. Figure 3-11: The choices in this window let you adjust your screen resolution, so you can pack more or less information onto your screen, and choose the number of displayed colors. Most people leave both settings at their highest levels, since that produces the best image on most digital monitors. If the high resolution makes the text difficult to read, click the Advanced button and increase the “DPI” setting. That makes the letters larger, but preserves your screen’s crisp, detailed look.

• Screen resolution. This sliding control lets you choose your display’s resolution—the size of the pixel grid it uses to display images. LCD monitors come with a fixed number of pixels, so they work best when set to the highest resolution available. Choosing a lower setting still works, but looks awful, forcing the monitor to blur together adjacent pixels to mimic lower resolutions. (CRT monitors don’t have this problem, as they can change the size of the pixels to match lower resolutions.) Tip: If the highest resolution shrinks your LC monitor’s text beyond legibility, click the Advanced button (page 107) to increase the DPI (Dots Per Inch) setting. Your letters will be larger and clearer when you restart your computer.

• Color quality. Windows added this drop-down control several years ago to let people choose the number of colors displayed at one time. (Older video cards lacked the power to display many colors simultaneously.) Today’s video cards fixed that problem, so people usually leave this at its highest setting, usually “32-bit.” (That works out to 16,777,216 colors, enough for all but the most finicky graphic artists.) If Windows looks bloated and lacks its usual vivid colors when first started, Windows XP probably started in “Safe Mode,” a troubleshooting mode used when something’s wrong. The picture looks terrible, but it’s enough to let you

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control Windows while diagnosing the problem. (The video card’s often the culprit, usually because it can’t find the correct driver, which is usually available for download on the manufacturer’s Web site.

Video Card (aka Display Adapter)

• Troubleshoot. This button summons the Video Display Troubleshooter in Windows’ Help menu. Useful as a last resort (provided you can still see the monitor), it interviews you about your problem and offers suggestions. • Advanced. Click this button when you’re having serious trouble with the display; it grants quick access to the drivers (page 514) for your video adapter and monitor. The General Tab’s DPI setting is an often overlooked gem; it lets you beef up the size of your letters and menus should the high Screen Resolution shrink them beyond legibility. Owners of older, CRT monitors should check the Refresh Rate on the Monitor tab. Set it to the highest rate the monitor offers (usually 75 Hz or more) to avoid flickers. (LCD monitors work fine at 60 Hz.) GEM IN THE ROUGH

Making Letters Large Enough to Read Digital monitors offer crisp and clear displays only when set at their highest resolution. That high resolution also lets you squeeze more information onto the screen, which is handy for copying information from one window and pasting it into an adjacent email. But when set to a high-resolution, sometimes the display’s text becomes too tiny to read.

devote more pixels to its content, making everything bigger. To change your DPI settings, right-click the Start ➝ Control Panel ➝ Display ➝ Settings Tab ➝ Advanced ➝ DPI Setting.

To solve the problem with a CRT monitor, simply switch to a lower resolution, sacrificing desktop space for better legibility. But digital monitors blur when they’re not set at their highest resolution. What’s the solution to keeping everything crisp and legible?

Windows normally uses 96 pixels to create an onscreen inch, or 96 DPI. Choose Large size (120 DPI) from the DPI setting’s drop-down menu to increase the size of characters by 25 percent. To complete the process, Windows may need to install some fonts (occasionally asking you to insert your Windows XP CD), and then you may need to restart your computer before the change takes place.

The trick is the (Dots Per Inch) DPI setting, which keeps the display’s crisp, high resolution, but tells your monitor to

But when Windows reawakens, it sports a fresh new look: crisp and legible.

Upgrade Your PC’s Video Card Most people never upgrade their PC’s video card. When the video works, it works fine for years—usually for the life of the monitor. Still, you may want to upgrade the quality of your PC’s video for these reasons: • Speed. These days, two of the best ways to speed up an old PC come by adding memory (page 18) or adding a faster video card. Your PC may be plenty powerful, but if the video card can’t sling the information onto the screen quickly enough, your PC slows down.

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• Dual monitors. A second video card lets you attach a second monitor (page 89) to your PC for a wider desktop vista. • Television. Many new video cards come with a built-in TV tuner, letting you watch TV on your desktop. With a TV tuner, you can even keep your favorite channel running in a little window in your screen’s corner. • Upgrading your LCD monitor. If your current LCD monitor accepts digital video (page 87) but you’re plugging it in through a VGA port, you’re not seeing your display at its best. Replace that old video card with a digital one to put some dazzle in your monitor’s display. Follow these steps to upgrade your motherboard’s built-in video with a new video card, replace an existing video card, or add a second video card to your computer. 1. Identify your PC’s video slot. Powerful video cards demand lots of attention from your PC. Consequently, your PC’s motherboard—that flat plate holding all your PC’s circuitry—gives the card a special communications channel: a high-powered slot created just for the video card. But since video technology changes so quickly, engineers redesign that slot’s capabilities nearly every year. And that brings trouble: before you know what type of card to buy, you must figure out what type of video slot lives on your motherboard. You can open the PC’s case (page 12), look at the slot (page 27, and examine the fine print written next to the slot. Or, you can find your motherboard’s manual and look up its AGP Bus specifications. But it’s much less work to run SiSoftware’s free Sandra software (page 12). When the program starts, run the module named “PCI(e), AGP, CardBus Bus(es) Information.” Sandra examines your video slot and spits up the dirt, as shown in Figure 3-12. 2. Buy the right card for the slot. If your motherboard contains a PCI-Express slot, you’re in luck. Buy a card matching the speed of your slot (that’ll almost always be a 16X card) and count your blessings. PCI-Express is a newer standard that’s faster than AGP, and is well-supported by the latest video card manufacturers. But if your motherboard contains an AGP slot, fasten your seatbelt. The AGP slot evolved through six different specifications over the years, with each new breed using a perplexing variety of voltages, slot sizes, and holding latches. Sprinkling in more anguish for the consumer, AGP card manufacturers consistently mislabel their cards’ speeds, voltages, types, and capacities. The solution? First, don’t buy AGP cards from stores that don’t accept returns. Second, buy a card that’s the same speed as your slot: 2x, 4x, or 8x. (Each “x”

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shows how much faster the card is than the original AGP slot.) Cards with faster speeds are generally backward compatible—they still fit into slower-rated slots, but they’ll fall back to meet that slot’s slower speed. Buying a faster card than your PC’s slot supports is a waste of money.

This PC contains an AGP slot This slot supports AGP version 2.0 This slot supports a 1x (slow) and 2x (faster) transfer rate

Video Card (aka Display Adapter)

Figure 3-12: Top: The free program Sandra identifies the video slot on this 1999 PC as AGP (Accelerated Graphics Port) Version 1.0. The card supports speeds of 1x and 2x, meaning it’s compatible with the first released AGP cards, as well as that card’s twiceas-fast replacement. To buy a video card for this computer, buy an AGP card that supports both 1x and 2x transfer rates. (Look for the words “AGP 2x” somewhere on the new card’s box.) Bottom: Sandra identifies the video slot on this 2004 PC as PCIe (Peripheral Connect Interface Express) with a width of 16x—the longest and fastest of the PCIe slots. To upgrade this PC, buy a PCIExpress card with a width of 16x. The card’s box should say “PCI-Express 16x.”

This PC contains a PCIe (PCI Express) slot This slot supports a 16x card

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3. Insert the card into the slot. After identifying your slot and buying a card that works with it, the hard part’s over. Push the card into your motherboard’s video slot and secure it as described on page 30. If the card doesn’t fit, then you bought one that’s incompatible with your slot. Return it, and buy a different brand or model that’s the same speed as your AGP slot. When you turn your PC back on, Windows XP discovers the new card and shuffles around, looking for the card’s driver. To help Windows XP find it, run the Setup program on the CD that came with the new video card. If the driver gives you trouble or you need help installing it, page 514 contains a detailed guide to installing drivers. If your PC doesn’t start at all—it begins beeping at you or displays an error message—your new card isn’t compatible with your motherboard. Make sure you’ve identified your video slot correctly in step 1, and then exchange the card for a different, more compatible model.

Troubleshooting Video Card Problems When something’s wrong with the display—the colors don’t look right, a moving window leaves a trail across the screen, or you spot other video oddities—fingering the culprit often proves difficult. The monitor displays only what the video card sends it, so when something on the monitor looks off, the problem usually lies with the video card. Run through this list of fixes to solve the problem. • Update the driver. Video companies update their drivers more quickly than any other PC industry. Sometimes new drivers appear on a weekly basis. Before assuming something’s wrong with your monitor or video card, be sure to visit the Web site of the video card’s manufacturer. Visit the Customer Service or Support area and download the latest driver for your particular video card. That cures most problems. If the latest driver makes things worse, “roll back” to the old driver (see page 516). Then try a slightly older driver from the video card manufacturer’s Web site. Video card drivers are picky, and some people find that older drivers work better with their PC’s equipment than the newer ones. When you find one that works, make a note of its version (see Figure 16-7) and stick with it. • Check the card’s fan. Being tiny computers themselves, video cards generate enough heat to fry a finger. Today, most video cards include built-in fans. Remove your PC’s case (page 12), and make sure the card’s fan is still spinning. If it’s not, check to see if the fan’s power connectors are tightened. On the other hand, if your computer’s main fan isn’t working, you need a new power supply (page 47).

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• Verify the slot type. AGP slots and cards use a special notch and groove system to ensure that only compatible AGP cards and slots fit together. If a little notch in the slot keeps your card from fitting, be thankful: the card and slot use different voltages, and the little notch keeps you from frying both your new (but wrong voltage) video card and your motherboard.

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Video Card (aka Display Adapter)

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chapter

Chapter 4

4

Printers

Printers give you a sense of physical accomplishment—something otherwise lacking in your interactions with your PC. You can hold printed sheets in your hands or pass them out with a flourish at a meeting. To help with this transformation from digital to physical, this chapter guides you through the following tasks: • Selecting the right printer for your needs. • Connecting and setting up a printer (or several) to your PC or laptop. • Printing on the correct side of the paper, including printing long documents on both sides of the paper. • Printing envelopes, including return addresses. • Printing digital photos on your printer or at one of several professional developers. • Distinguishing between paper types, so you choose the right one for whatever you’re printing. • Replacing ink and toner cartridges, fixing paper jams, and buying replacement parts.

Printer Basics You’ll find three main kinds of printers on the market today: inkjets, laser printers, and all-in-one devices. Consumers gravitate toward inkjet and all-in-one printers; businesses lean toward laser printers. The following pages explain how

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Printer Basics

these printers work, which tasks they perform best, and which one you need for your work. FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTION

Printer Language: Bitmaps, Vectors, Postscript, and PDL and PCL While reading about printers, I read that some handle “vector” images, others print “bitmapped” images, and others print PCL and Postscript. What’s the difference, and why should I care? For most people, those terms boil down to buzzwords on a printer’s spec sheet. A test printout you can hold in your hand on the showroom floor vouches for a printer’s strengths much more accurately. For a lesson in printer lingo, however, read on. Early printers worked like typewriters, printing character by character. Computers merely sent character info and “line feed” commands to the printer: print the following words, numbers, and spaces, drop down a line, and then resume printing. Computer graphics changed that world forever, creating a bevy of print-related terms. • Bitmap. Also called “raster” images, bitmapped images contain a large grid of dots. The computer sends the grid—a map of bits—to the printer, which maps out the dots on paper. Most printers print 300 dots per inch, which requires a lot of bits. Storing those pages requires lots of space, either in the printer’s memory or on your PC’s hard drive. Also, you can’t enlarge grids very gracefully—enlarging a bitmapped corporate logo, for instance, often leads to jagged edges when you print it out. (Windows’ Paint program often stores files as bitmaps.) • Vector. Instead of storing maps of dots, vector graphic images contain instructions and equations. That works great for drawings. A picture of a square, for instance, needs only a description of the square’s four corner locations, plus instructions for connecting their outside edges. Storing instructions creates smaller files than bitmaps create. And since they’re based on equations, vector images are scalable—you

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can enlarge or reduce them without losing quality, something architects appreciate when quickly changing the house plans for a different sized lot. • PDL. A Page Description Language describes any method of printing a page more gracefully than plain ol’ bitmaps, including PostScript, described next. • PostScript. Computers rely on programming languages, so the Adobe company created one especially for printers. PostScript mixes bitmaps, vectors, and programming tricks to create a universal language for printers. Save your document as a PostScript file, and any PostScript-compatible printer can print it. PostScript revolutionized personal computing by turning a PC into a publishing house. A realtor could create a brochure on his PC, save it as a PostScript file, and then send it to a professional printer for professional publishing at a low cost. The graphics industry still thrives on PostScript. Want to print a PostScript document on a non-Postscript printer? Try printing it with Ghostscript (www. ghostscript.com), freebie software that converts PostScript files into simple bitmaps understandable by other printers. • PCL. Instead of paying Adobe’s PostScript licensing fees, some companies simply created their own PDLs. Hewlett Packard’s Printer Command (or Control) Language works like PostScript, but lets the printer’s driver (page 514) translate the language into something that a particular printer understands. Many companies adopted PCL rather than PostScript to cut costs, making desktop printers more affordable.

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Inkjet

Printer Basics

Inkjet printers (sometimes called “bubblejet” printers) bring quick and easy color printing to the masses. They’re versatile as well, printing everything from perforated business cards to glossy photos to novels. Figure 4-1 shows one inkjet printer, which, like most of its brethren nowadays, is compact, quiet, and easy to use. The real deal-clincher? Inkjets are cheap—$50 for a mediocre model; $200 for good one. Figure 4-1: Expensive replaceable cartridges inside inkjet printers spray ink onto paper to create photos, letters, or even iron-on Tshirt transfers. The printers come cheap— usually between $50 and $200—but their cartridges don’t; they usually cost between $10 and $30 apiece. Inkjet printers prove cost effective for people printing casually— say, a few times a week.

But although inkjet printers sell for a song, their ink cartridges don’t, much to the glee of manufacturers. Taking a tip from razor vendors, printer manufacturers sell printers at little or no profit, making up the difference by repeatedly selling you replacement ink cartridges. Inkjet printers work much like robotic airbrush artists. Tiny nozzles in the printer spray ink onto the paper, creating images in an elaborate game of point, switch colors, and spray. Surprisingly enough, the process works. Those crisp letters look haphazard only when examined under a magnifying glass. Most inkjet printers work their wonders with one black ink cartridge, and one filled with a handful of colors. Monitors can display 16.7 million colors—far too many to fit in a shopping cart, much less a printer cartridge. So printer manufacturers took a lesson from low-budget street painters—they fill the color cartridge with separate tubes of color: red (magenta), blue (cyan), and yellow. By mixing those three shades in different proportions (and sprinkling in a little black to darken the shade), the printer mixes custom colors on the fly.

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Printer Basics

Color cartridges also contain an unfortunate side effect, noticeable after printing lots of one color—a Web site with lots of blue ads, for instance. When the cartridge runs out of blue, it’s worthless for creating other colors—even though it may be two-thirds full of red and yellow. The manufacturer’s solution? Buy a new cartridge, of course. Alternatively, some more expensive printers let you install separate cartridges for the three main colors, reducing the waste somewhat. Photo printers add three more colors to the mix: light red, light blue, or some light gray or green. The extra colors help recreate the natural colors and skin tones shown in most photographs. Tip: Always turn off your inkjet printer after using it. The printer seals the cartridges before shutting down, thereby keeping the ink from drying up.

Laser Laser printers (Figure 4-2) cost much more than inkjet printers, with prices starting around $150 for a low-end model. Double or triple that price for color laser printers. So why bother at all? Because when you figure in the extra costs of inkjet paper and cartridges, lasers cost much less per page to print, which can be a deal clincher for people who print on a daily basis. Laser-printed pages also stand up better to water; inkjet-printed papers smudge when pelted by rain, while your laser-printed pages escape without a blemish. Figure 4-2: Laser printers toss their dots onto a page with a complex combination of laser beams, electric charges, heat, drums, and black plastic powder known as toner. Laser printers pack 600 dots per inch, and create very clear, detailed printouts. With laser printers, it costs much less to print per page than with inkjet printers, but only the most expensive models print color. Laser printers’ low per-page cost makes them attractive to people who print on a daily basis.

To decide between inkjet or laser, think how often you need to print in color. Most laser printers print only black—which is fine for letters, but dreary for photos. The

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newest color laser printers boost the starting price to around $500—10 times more than a low-end color inkjet, and way past most budgets. And if you want to print occasional photos, forget it. Color laser technology hasn’t yet reached the level of inkjets.

Printer Basics

Laser printers take their technology from the age-old copying machine. A printer’s laser projects the page’s image onto a revolving drum using a dotted pattern of electric charges. The drum passes over very fine plastic powder known as toner. Just as static electricity sometimes attracts bits of dust, the powder sticks to the charged electrical pattern on the drum. The revolving drum then drops the toner onto the paper, and the printer seals it in place with pressure and heat. (That’s why newly printed pages feel warm and cuddly right out of the laser printer.) The latest “laser” printers dump the laser in favor of LEDs (Light-Emitting Diodes), albeit much higher-powered LEDs than the red ones found in ugly clock radios. Instead of waving a laser at the drum, these printers send high-intensity light through a stationary row of LEDs, thus reducing mechanical breakdowns and requiring less maintenance than their old-school laser predecessors.

All-in-One Printers Many well-equipped modern desks resemble an island of beached electronics with one LCD monitor protruding from the pile. All-in-one (also called multifunction) printers (Figure 4-3) reclaim your lost elbow room by squeezing your desktop printer, scanner, and fax machine into one small unit. Combining the printer and scanner turns the unit into an on-the-fly copying machine, as well. Figure 4-3: All-in-one printers combine a desktop printer, scanner, and fax machine into one bulky but convenient package. When shopping, look for one with an ample-sized color screen (circled). You’ll be working on that screen when making minor, on-the-fly edits to remove red-eye or adjust the color values in your pictures.

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Printer Basics

Most all-in-one printers also offer media card readers to print photos on the fly. Remove your camera’s memory card, push it into the printer’s ever-so-convenient memory card slot, and select the pictures to print—all without firing up your computer. Of course, that also removes your chance to crop out those strangers standing by the fountain, tweak the orange in the sunset, or airbrush out an ex. All-in-one printers sell well for several reasons: • Size. Squeezing four machines into one attracts computer owners who work in small spaces. • Cheap. The components work together, so they’re cheaper than buying a separate printer, scanner, fax machine, and copying machine. The fax machine borrows the scanner and printer, for instance, reducing the fax machine’s components to one tiny chip. • Simplicity. One company built all the components, eliminating any compatibility problems. One menu guides you through controlling each part, saving you from learning four menus on four machines. • Standalone. With most all-in-one printers, you don’t even have to attach your computer to the printer. To print out your digital camera’s photos, just insert the camera’s flash card into the printer and push some buttons on the menu. Your computer can sleep while you and the printer are busy. Critics point out their flaws, as well: • Vulnerability. The interwoven parts rely on each other, so a drowning scanner also takes down the copy machine and the fax machine. A dead printer kills both the fax and copy machine. • Lower quality. All-in-one units work adequately, but never extraordinarily. Don’t count on advanced features like quick printing, high-resolutions prints or scans, or the ability to handle different-sized paper. • Limited upgrades. The intertwined components limit your upgrade ability. You can buy a higher resolution scanner to digitize your old family photos, for instance, but it won’t work well (possibly not at all) with the all-in-one’s printer, copying machine, or fax machine. • Limited functions. Manufacturers cut corners to reduce costs. Some models lack print trays for instance, chaining you to the computer to feed it, sheet-bysheet.

Garage Sale Models Older technology printers turn up for tempting prices at garage sales, estate sales, swap meets, and on eBay. Many still work well, and BuyPrinters (www.buyprinters. com) stocks thousands of printer ribbons and other supplies for niche models. These printers turn up most often in the bottom-feeder market:

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• Dot matrix. Largely forgotten in the consumer rush to color inkjet printers, dot matrix printers work much like a lowly typewriter. But instead of creating an imprint by pushing a single character against a ribbon, they push a grid of metal pins. The printer quickly changes the grid into different shapes to form different characters. The finer grid of a 24-pin dot matrix printer produces more refined characters than the coarse grids of the cheaper 9-pin models.

Installing a Printer

Dot matrix printers can’t handle color or fine graphics, but they’re extremely economical. They cost only a penny or two per printed page, and some frugal owners even go so far as to dip an aging ribbon in ink, rewind it, and pop it back into the printer to double or triple the ribbon’s life. Dot matrix printers work great for printing receipts, invoices, and creating other paper trails. Unlike most printers, dot matrix printers can print through carbon copies, which is helpful for filling out duplicate forms in offices. Used models sometimes cost less than a single inkjet cartridge—a bargain if you print lots of drafts. • Thermal. You see thermal printers in action every day: Receipts from your ATM, gas pump, and grocery store all crept out of them. Thermal printers pass heat over specially treated paper, darkening it into characters. Small and lightweight, they forged the way for the portable printer market. Thermal printers print only one shade, so forget about colors or letter quality. If that garage sale thermal printer uses fax machine paper, you may be in luck; POSPaper (www.pospaper.com) sells a wide variety of rolls. Otherwise, pass this one by. • Daisy wheel. Daisy wheel printers contain a revolving wheel; each spoke of the wheel contains a different keyboard character. The printer slaps characters against the ribbon, leaving imprints indistinguishable from a hand-typed manuscript. They’re loud, slow, and limited to the characters on their currently installed wheel—no graphics, unless you count the underline key. They’re fantastic for people wanting that vintage “hand-typed” look, but before tossing it in your trunk, search on Google for that particular model to see if anybody still sells ribbons or wheels. Some models remain compatible with electric typewriters, which means a ready supply of available parts is out there. Try Daisy (www. itsdaisy.com) for parts and supplies. (Log onto the site as Guest for a look-see.)

Installing a Printer Most printers today connect to a computer’s USB port (page 34) using a rectangular-shaped plug that pushes into a similarly rectangular-shaped hole. USB printers and their cousins, FireWire (page 38) printers, both embrace Windows’ “Plug and Play” technology. When you first plug in and turn on the printers, Windows morphs into a friendly receptionist, greeting your newly plugged-in printer by name. After the small talk, Windows looks up the printer’s model in its database, installs

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the appropriate driver from its built-in stash of more than 900 models, and leaves you ready to print. LAPTOP LIFE

Printing on the Road Only travelers who need a constant flow of printed copies pack a portable printer, which sells for around $200–$300. Weighing less than four pounds, many luggables now spit out photos as well as reports. (Some even grab their power from a car’s cigarette lighter.) But dangling that extra four pounds on your shoulder (plus the cable and paper) may convince you to pursue these other options. • Fax. The time-tested trick used for more than a decade by desperate road warriors, fax machines provide something to hand out in the conference room. Fax your document with your laptop’s fax modem to the nearest fax machine, grab it, and run. It’s not highquality or color, but at least it’s on paper. • FedEx Kinko’s. Lug your laptop to FedEx Kinko’s (www.kinkos.com) and print your file on one of their onsite printers. The Web site offers maps and directions to nearby locations and tells you which ones print digital camera photos. To save time, download FedEx Kinko’s software (fedexkinkos.com/fpjk) onto your laptop. This software lets you print over the Internet to the FedEx Kinko’s store of your choice for quick pickup. Printer options include color, black and white, choice of paper, and binding options. For extra convenience,

tell the software to FedEx your printout either back to you or to those eagerly awaiting board members across the continent. • Hotels. Most hotels offer business centers, complete with printer (and PC, should you need one). For quickest results, unplug the printer from the business center’s PC, plug the printer into your laptop, and use Windows XP’s Add Printer Wizard (page 123) to install a driver for the hotel printer. Fire up your document and start printing. • Photo kiosks. For quick photos, drop by one of the drug stores or megastores (Wal-Mart, Target, and so on) that offer photo kiosks for photos. Most accept the memory card right out of your camera; others also accept CDs and keychain drives. • Internet. PrinterOn (www.printeron.net) and PrintMe (www.printme.com) both let your laptop (and PocketPC, BlackBerry, or cell phone) print through the Internet. Vendors with waiting printers include hotels, Internet wireless hotspots, and some airports and colleges. Visit the Web sites to locate the closest printer in your area and calculate the costs. Another possible tactic: ask the front desk clerk if you can email a copy of your document to him for printout on the staff printer.

Windows XP’s built-in printer drivers work like a jack of all trades, but, as the saying goes, they’re master of none. They let your printer handle basic printing tasks, but leave out support for your printer’s fanciest features: shrinking documents to fit on a page, for example, or adding special colors to enhance photos, or advanced page previews. That’s why it’s often better to install the printer manufacturer’s own driver, found on the CD that’s usually packaged with the printer. Built specifically for your particular printer model, this driver lets you take advantage of features Windows XP doesn’t know about. You can install the manufacturer’s driver after seeing how you like Windows XP’s built-in driver, or you can install it before plugging in your printer.

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Tip: Instead of installing the manufacturer’s driver with its own installation software, install it through Windows XP’s Add Printer Wizard (see page 123), instead. The wizard plucks the driver neatly from the installation CD and installs it, leaving out all the extra trial software and other unnecessary software packaged with printers these days.

Installing a Printer

Figure 4-4 compares Microsoft’s built-in driver with the one installed by the printer’s manufacturer. To make sure you’re using the newest printer driver—one that fixes any bugs belatedly discovered on the version shipped with your printer, download the latest driver available: visit the manufacturer’s Web site and drop by the Downloads section, which you can usually find in the Technical Support area. Then download the newest driver listed, run its installation program, and Windows XP switches to it. Note: Windows XP may bug you when you plug a USB printer into your PC, saying “This USB device can perform faster if you connect it to a Hi-Speed USB 2.0 port.” That’s Windows XP’s way of saying your printer still works through your PC’s old USB 1.1 port, but sending it large files is like pouring a bucket of water through a straw. To send files more quickly, upgrade to a USB 2.0 port (page 34) and plug your printer into one of those newer ports.

Most people can plug their printer into their PC’s USB port, let Windows handle the messy installation chores, and consider the job done. But if your printer connects to your PC in a different way—through a network, Bluetooth, or a serial, parallel, or infrared port—the next two sections explain the process.

Network and Bluetooth Printers When you bring that second computer (or third, or fourth) into the house, you needn’t buy a new printer for each one. Instead, install one printer, and network the computers—connect them using one of several inexpensive methods covered in Chapter 14. Networking lets every computer to print to the same printer, as well as share the same Internet connection, and even share the same files. • Network. If you or somebody else has installed and “shared” a printer on your network (described on page 437), Windows can automatically locate the printer’s name and location. Unfortunately, Windows can’t tell you whether a networked printer’s turned on, out of paper, broken, or currently being used by Jerry to print 300 sheets for his origami society meeting that night, so you still may need to get out of your chair and ogle the printer’s status. • Bluetooth. The same holds true for printers using Bluetooth, a wireless technology that spans about 30 feet. After installing a Bluetooth adapter to your PC (see page 452), you can print to any Bluetooth printer within that range.

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To install either a networked printer or Bluetooth printer, head for the Add Printer Wizard (see page 123). Figure 4-4: Top: When you install a printer, Windows XP usually installs a driver that lets you print immediately—without installing any software that came with your printer. Windows XP’s driver, shown here, lets you access the printer’s most basic functions. Bottom: Printer manufacturers constantly update their drivers, so if you download your printer model’s latest driver from the manufacturer’s Web site, Windows XP lets you access more features.

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Parallel, Serial, and Infrared Printers

Installing a Printer

Some older printers cling to their old-school connectors. These three turn up most often. • Parallel. The oldest printing technology, parallel printers plug into the biggest port on your PC: A long, thin, 25-pin parallel port (page 46), usually with a printer icon stamped into the metal nearby. The gaping connector on the end of your printer’s cable pushes into the port (the connector only fits facing one direction). Once it’s inserted, push the two little clasper rings shut to hold it in place. • Serial. An oddball even in their time, serial printers plug into the smaller serial port (page 46). • Infrared. Yesterday’s vision of what Bluetooth’s now become, infrared devices talk by flashing beams of invisible light at each other, like a TV remote control. Many laptops come with infrared ports, usually resembling little translucent plastic ovals or rectangles on the laptop’s front or side. To connect with the printer, face the laptop’s infrared port toward the printer’s. Since infrared works only on clean desks, the ports need an uninterrupted line of sight to work. The line-of-sight problem and the lack of infrared ports on desktop PCs killed the development of infrared printers fairly quickly. Windows sometimes recognizes these types of printers automatically when they’re installed and turned on. If not, you’ll need to fire up Windows XP’s built-in Add Printer Wizard, described in the next section.

Add Printer Wizard Windows XP’s built-in Add Printer Wizard comes in handy on three occasions: • You plug a printer directly into your PC, but Windows XP says it can’t find a driver. • You want to add a printer connected through a network. • You want to add a printer connected via Bluetooth. The wizard automatically appears if Windows XP can’t find a driver for your newly plugged-in USB printer. But if Windows XP doesn’t automatically fetch the wizard, wake the wizard yourself: choose Start ➝ Control Panel ➝ Printers and Faxes ➝ File ➝ Add Printer. When the wizard arrives onscreen, click Next to put it to work and then follow these steps: 1. Tell the wizard what type of printer to set up, and then click Next. • To connect to a printer connected to your PC with a cable, choose “Local printer attached to this computer,” and then turn on “Automatically Detect and Install my Plug and Play Printer.” Chapter 4: Printers PCs: The Missing Manual, eMatter Edition Copyright © 2008 O’Reilly & Associates, Inc. All rights reserved.

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• To connect to a Bluetooth printer, choose “A Bluetooth printer.” The wizard probes any nearby radio waves for a nearby Bluetooth printer. (Make sure your Bluetooth printer’s turned on.) This option appears only if Windows XP recognizes your PC’s Bluetooth adapter. If you don’t see the option, add a Bluetooth adapter (see page 453) to your PC. • To connect to a network printer, choose “A network printer, or a printer attached to another computer.” When you click next, choose “Browse for a printer,” and then select your network printer from the list. You may need to double-click Microsoft Windows Network to see the printer. If the wizard’s magic works, Windows XP discovers your newly installed local or nearby Bluetooth printer and installs a driver (or asks you to insert the installation CD so it can grab a driver there). The wizard finishes by offering to print a test page to make sure everything’s kosher. Click Yes, especially if it’s the first time you’ve tried printing to the printer, just to make sure the printed page looks okay. If your printer somehow eludes the wizard’s grasp, head for the next step. 2. Select the port your printer uses to connect to your PC, and then click Next. Windows XP lists a handful of ports; choose the first one, dubbed “LPT1.” On the rare chance you plugged in a serial printer, choose “COM1” instead. 3. Choose your printer’s manufacturer and model, and then choose Next. Windows lists printer manufacturers from Agfa to Xerox. Choose your printer’s manufacturer from the left column, as shown in Figure 4-5, and then select the model from the right. Windows should automatically install the driver. If it doesn’t, Windows offers you these two suspender straps: • Have Disk. Have the installation software that came with the printer, or a driver you’ve downloaded from the Web site? Then insert the floppy or CD into your PC (or browse to the folder containing your downloaded driver), click the Have Disk button, and then let Windows install that driver. • Windows Update. Don’t have the software that came with the printer? Click the Windows Update button; now that you told Windows your printer’s manufacturer and model, Microsoft may be able to find the right driver online. 4. Name your printer and select it as the Default Printer, if desired. Choose a simple name for your printer. For instance, choose “Photo Printer” instead of “EpsonSty” or the awful name Windows XP suggests. An easily identifiable name not only helps any networked PCs find that printer, but lets you easily locate the printer on any software’s Print menu.

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The Default designation applies to only one of your printers, should you own several. Windows XP automatically routes all printing jobs to that printer, unless you tell it otherwise just before printing.

Installing a Printer

Figure 4-5: Click your printer’s manufacturer from the left column, and the printer’s model name from the right column. Or, if you have the printer’s installation CD or a newly downloaded driver, click Have Disk, instead. Then browse to the inserted CD or the folder containing the download. Windows displays only names of drivers in the Browse window, making it easy to spot a driver among a sea of file names. Click Next, and Windows installs your printer’s driver.

5. Print a test page. Printing a test page—a single sheet of paper with brief text and graphics—lets you prove that your printer works and Windows XP knows how to talk to it. Yes, it wastes ink and a sheet of paper, but you get the peace of mind knowing that your installation efforts succeeded. Tip: When Windows XP’s Test Page tests your printer’s capabilities, it doesn’t print meaningless Latin phrases. Instead, it prints your printer’s name, its connected port, and all its driver files, complete with their version numbers. This kind of stuff excites the printer manufacturer’s tech support staff, should you find yourself on the phone with them during installation.

If the printer still has trouble talking to your printer, the wizard doesn’t leave you stranded. It summons the Printer Troubleshooter program—a sort of high-school test where you select answers from a list while Windows XP runs tests and asks you if anything happened. Although it’s only a robot, like the wizard, the Printer Troubleshooter checks your settings, and then leads you through a thorough checklist of the most obvious fixes—an unplugged cord, for instance, or a missing driver. That bit of knowledge helps you nod your head more confidently when answering those same questions from the manufacturer’s tech support people over the phone. And sometimes the Troubleshooter unveils a simple yet overlooked fix—the printer’s out of paper, for instance, or has a paper jam or loose cable.

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Choosing Printer Paper

Setting Up a Printer’s Default Preferences When you click the Print button to send your work to the printer, Windows XP makes basic assumptions about how you want the job to look. Since most people print on cheap paper, for instance, Windows XP always assumes you want a single copy of your work printed on plain paper. If you always print duplicates, though, or always print on higher-quality paper, you can let Windows know. Doing so spares you valuable time changing your printer’s options whenever you print. To change your printer’s default preferences, choose Start ➝ Control Panel ➝ Printers and Faxes. Right-click your particular printer, choose Preferences, and then set it up exactly the way you want: change the paper quality, print quality, number of copies—anything that suits the way you work. When you choose OK, Windows XP remembers those preferences and chooses them automatically whenever you print something. That turns printing into a one-click operation rather than a three-, four-, or five-click chore. Tip: Having to change printer settings wastes time as well as paper—say, for example, when you accidentally print photos in “draft” mode. If you find that you’ve got more than one set of printer settings that you frequently use, you can create multiple printer icons—Photo Printer, Draft Printer, and so on. To do so, install your printer again, letting Windows create a second icon for it. Then set one printer’s options for photos, and name it “Photo Printer.” Change the other printer’s options and name it “Draft Printer.” Create others to match different needs. When it’s time to print, just select the printer with the appropriate settings, and spare yourself the trouble of changing settings yet again.

Choosing Printer Paper Laser printers aren’t very picky about their paper. Buy plain old copy machine paper, available at office supply and drug stores worldwide, and your printouts will look just fine. (If you’re one of the lucky few who own a color laser printer, buy paper specifically designed for color laser printers; the regular stuff won’t hold the color well, and inkjet paper won’t work.) Inkjet printers, on the other hand, are very picky about paper. They can’t use laser printer paper, as it lacks a polymer coating—a special chemical that lets the ink bind with the paper. Without the polymer, the ink smears, leading to blurring, dirty nozzles, and ink smears. Although they’re picky, inkjet printers still give you plenty of different paper types to choose from. In fact, manufacturers have flooded the market with different paper varieties. To help confused customers choose the right inkjet paper for their

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printer, Epson even offers the fairly useful Epson Paper Finder, which you can visit at www.epson.com (see Figure 4-6).

Choosing Printer Paper

Figure 4-6: Epson sells inkjet paper in hundreds of sizes and styles to please professionals as well as consumers. To find the right paper for your printer, select your printer model, desired paper size, and the paper’s finish. Epson quickly whittles its whopping list down to a handful of suitable choices.

When choosing paper for your inkjet printer, narrow down the pack by following these steps. 1. Choose paper that fits in your printer’s tray. Paper comes in a wide variety of sizes, so measuring the size of your printer’s paper tray rules out many contenders. Most inexpensive printers can’t handle paper wider than the standard eight and a half inches, although they still work with longer, legal sized (8.5 × 14 inch) paper. If the paper tray has a “slider” for adjusting its width, measure the tray with the slider at full width. Many printers choke on thick “heavy weight” papers, often used to print cards or special photos. To find out your printer’s paper-size and weight limitations, visit its manufacturer’s Web site. Head for the Customer Service area, and look up your printer model to see any limitations on paper size and weight. Tip: Does your printer specifically call itself a “photo printer”? If not, rule out photo paper. Photo printers contain special cartridges with extra colors to print realistic photographs; regular printers don’t contain enough colors to produce quality photos.

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2. Choose the paper listed on your printer’s Preferences menu. Your printer needs to know what type of paper you inserted in order to spray the right amount of ink. To see what paper your printer understands, visit the printer’s Preferences menu. Choose Start ➝ Control Panel ➝ Printers and Faxes. Right-click your printer, and choose Printing Preferences to see its favorite papers, as shown in Figure 4-7. Most office supply stores carry those particular paper types—either as created by your printer’s manufacturer or available in a generic brand. Figure 4-7: Printers need to know the type of paper you inserted so they can choose the right mixture of inks to match the paper. Before clicking the Print button, look in your printer’s Media Type or Paper Type pull-down menu and select the type of paper you placed in the feeder tray.

3. Choose the paper that matches what you’re printing. Don’t be surprised to see stores listing a paper’s “weight” on the package; to find standard copy machine paper, look for “20 pound” weight paper. A “24 pound” weight works better for formal letters, as it’s slightly heavier. (The heavier the weight, the thicker the paper.) Most office supply stores carry these types of paper for a variety of jobs. • Drafts. Quality doesn’t matter when printing the evening’s spaghetti sauce recipe or tomorrow’s shopping list. Although generic “plain” inkjet paper works fine for these sorts of tasks, remember to save your botched printouts, too; the reverse side works fine for printing drafts, maps, and test runs to make sure you correctly set the margins and alignment. • Office. For printouts you show to others, look for paper designated specifically as “inkjet paper.” If it doesn’t say inkjet, it lacks the coating that prevents blurring. • Photos. When printing photos, nothing beats glossy photo paper (page 138); plain paper looks lousy and won’t last long. • Matte. Thicker than standard paper, matte paper uses texture to keep the shine down, making it both durable and non-glare. Some people like the textured look for photographs, since this type of paper doesn’t reflect the sun as much as other paper types. 128

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• Specialty. Some inkjet paper isn’t really paper at all. Specialty paper (page 132) lets you print on iron-on transfers, labels, transparencies, and other plastic-based fibers.

Adjusting Printer Settings

Tip: Many digital cameras can shoot in “panoramic” mode, great for squeezing in an entire horizon during sunsets. To print these kinds of pictures out, order the longest photo paper that fits in your paper tray. Even if the paper’s too wide, you can cut it to the correct width and save the leftovers for printing smaller photos.

Adjusting Printer Settings Virtually every program ever created by computerkind lets you print out documents by choosing File ➝ Print. Instead of whisking your work straight to the printer, Windows responds by summoning the famous Print dialog box (Figure 4-8). Figure 4-8: Choose Print from any program’s File menu to see this window. The layout varies subtly in some programs, but these basic elements always appear. Click OK to simply send your work to the highlighted printer. The window preselects the most common choices: one copy and all of the pages. But feel free to change the options to meet your needs. Click Preferences to change specific aspects of your print job—choose black and white instead of color, for instance, or let the printer know you’re going to feed it higher-quality paper.

To send your work to the printer without further ado, just click OK. But when you want to tailor your printout, these options appear in the print dialog box of almost every program. • Select Printer. Windows XP lists every printer connected to your PC—whether physically attached or networked. Choose the printer for your job—perhaps Martin’s printer down the hall that’s so much nicer than yours—and Windows sends your work to it. PCs with fax modems also show the fax as an available

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Adjusting Printer Settings

printer; choose it to start the process of sending a fax, described in the online appendix, “Other Cool Things You Can Do Online,” available on the “Missing CD” page at www.missingmanuals.com. Tip: Want the Print dialog box to open with your favorite printer already highlighted for one-click printing? Then click Start ➝ Control Panel ➝ Printers and Faxes. Right-click your preferred printer from the list and then choose Set as Default Printer.

• Preferences or Properties. Although this button’s name varies in different programs, it always lets you change how your printer handles its incoming print job. (To change your printer’s settings permanently, flip to page 126.) Different printers offer different options; some let you print on both sides of the paper automatically, for instance, or switch to a different feeder tray for super-sized paper (handy for printing year-end spreadsheets). One neat trick among most Epson inkjet printers: they work like old-time gas station attendants, offering to check your ink levels to make sure the cartridge has enough juice left to handle the job. • Page Range. Most people leave this set to All, which tells the program to print every page of the document. To print only a certain section of your report—the 53rd page of your 103-page document, say—choose Pages and enter “53” into the surprisingly versatile Pages dialog box. For instance, enter “1–53” to print the first 53 pages, ignoring the rest. Or enter “1,5,7–10” to print pages 1 and 5, as well as pages 7, 8, 9, and 10. Choose Selection to print only the area you’ve highlighted—the “toppings” options from a Web site’s pizza menu, for instance. • Copies. Leave this set to “1” to print a single a copy. But if you need a copy for everybody at the meeting, increase the number accordingly. To save a little time when printing copies of multipage documents, turn on the adjacent Collate checkbox. That prints your pages in order—pages 1–6, then another set of 1–6— but it does take the computer a little longer to spit them all out. But rejoice: at least you’re wasting the computer’s time for change, and not the other way around. Some programs add other options to the Print window. Microsoft Word, for instance, offers a Zoom area, letting you squeeze 2, 4, 6, 8, or 16 pages onto a single sheet of paper. The print’s still legible when two pages squeeze onto a single sheet of paper; the other settings are useful mostly for graphics departments looking at a report’s overall design, making sure the charts and reports carry a similar look and feel throughout a document.

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Tip: You needn’t open a file to print it. If you’re comfortable with your default printer settings (page 126), try this for a timesaver: from any folder, select the file or files you want to print, right-click them, and then choose Print. Windows opens each file in the program that created it, prints the file, and then closes the program.

Printing Envelopes

WORKAROUND WORKSHOP

Printing on Both Sides of the Paper People who own expensive printers with a “duplexing” feature can simply click a button to print on both sides of the paper; the printer flips the paper automatically to fill the other side. The other 99 percent of the population employ the following trick to print on both sides of the paper; it’s particularly useful for printing long documents. 1. Insert one sheet of paper into your printer and take note of which side it prints on. (Sometimes penciling in an X on one side of the paper helps.) 2. When printing your document, fill out the Page Range section with the document’s odd numbers—1, 3, 5, 7, 9, 11, and so on. Or, if your software’s Print window allows the option, choose Print Odd Numbers.

3. When the document is through printing the odd numbers, reinsert the sheets of paper to print on the reverse side. (Depending on your printer model, you may need to reverse the pages and/or reverse their order to make sure page 2 prints right-side up on the back of page 1.) 4. Print the even numbered pages. Try printing a sample four-page document to experiment. You may waste a few sheets of paper until you figure out your printer’s sequencing. But that’s nothing compared to the amount of paper you’ll save in the future.

Printing Envelopes An envelope can slide into a printer in way-too-many ways, but only one way works. Naturally, everybody wastes a few envelopes when printing addresses. To waste the least amount, try these hints: • Some printers offer a special tray just for envelopes—look for an icon of an envelope on the tray, conveniently showing which way to insert the envelope. Match the icon’s fold with the one on your envelope. • Some courteous printer software shows you a helpful image demonstrating the proper way to insert an envelope into the feeder tray. To check your printer software’s courtesy level, choose Start ➝ Control Panel ➝ Printers and Faxes. Right-click your printer, and then choose Printing Preferences. Head for the Paper Size area, and then choose Envelope from the drop-down menu. • As a last resort, cut a piece of paper to the same size as your envelope, and then draw a flap on it. Run it through your printer to see whether it prints on the top or bottom side, and whether the flap should face to the right or left. When you find the direction that works, draw an arrow onto an envelope and tape it to your printer facing the correct direction.

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Figuring out the right way to insert an envelope is the hardest part. Once you’ve figured it out, you can do things like quickly print up a bunch of preaddressed envelopes for monthly bills that don’t include their own return envelopes. Microsoft Word offers a built-in envelope printer, shown in Figure 4-9. To print envelopes in Word 2003, choose Tools ➝ Letters and Mailings ➝ Envelopes and Labels. In Word 2000, choose Tools ➝ Envelopes and Labels. Figure 4-9: With its Face Up, Face Down, and Clockwise Rotation options, Microsoft Word shows an astonishing 18 different ways to feed an envelope into a printer. Only one method works, giving you a 94.5 percent chance of failure. When you figure out the correct way to feed an envelope into your particular printer with your particular software, draw a large arrow onto an envelope and tape it to your printer for future reference.

Some printers print only on standard “letter-sized” #10 envelopes designed for standard 8.5 × 11 inch paper. Smaller envelopes, like those made for greeting cards and invitations, may never come out of your printer without a pair of tweezers and a few expletives. Large envelopes with metal clasps, like those made by Kraft, won’t roll through a printer. Instead, print mailing labels and stick them on those envelopes. In fact, some people find it easier to simply print out mailing labels for all their envelopes, neatly bypassing the problem of lining up envelopes in the printer. Tip: Windows offers a wide range of decorative fonts. These fonts look great on greeting cards, but your “Al Capone” font will confuse the post office’s optical character recognition system. Stick with more traditional fonts like Times Roman when printing materials for the mail.

Printing Specialized Items Today’s printers handle more surfaces than just paper. Most office supply stores carry these types of inkjet paper in addition to office paper. • Stick-on labels. The premiere label maker, Avery, sells hundreds of differentsized labels and perforated cards, all on inkjet-printable sheets. Realizing the difficulty of aligning words with the varying size of the labels and cards, Avery

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created the free Avery Wizard software, shown in Figure 4-10, for Microsoft Word. Download the wizard from Avery’s Web site (www.avery.com) and run the software; when you’re done, an Avery icon appears in Microsoft Word’s toolbar. To print on a label, click the Avery icon, and the wizard guides you through choosing your particular type of Avery label—name tags, for instance. Type the names into the wizard’s onscreen blanks, and the Wizard shows you a print preview of your words, neatly lined up to print on the sheet of labels. Press Print, and the printer places your words inside each label.

Printing Specialized Items

Already used a few labels from a sheet? Click Cancel during the Print Preview (Figure 4-10, bottom), and Word displays an editable version of the Print Preview window. Delete the words from the cards that line up with your sheet’s missing labels, and then click Print. When the wizard prints your labels, it skips the empties. • CD labels. Most inkjet printers print directly onto round “peel-and-stick” CD labels, which look much nicer than scrawling on your CDs with a felt-tip pen. Unfortunately, the heat inside some CD and DVD players warps the labels, gumming up the drive. To avoid that problem, the latest printers from Epson (www.epson.com), Primera (www.primera.com), and Casio (www.casio.com) print directly onto the CD or DVD. Cheaper models costing less than $100 often print only text and simple graphics; professional quality models capable of full-color artwork cost more than $1,000, but they make your CDs look just as nice as the ones sold outside of subway stations. Note: If you’re in the market for a new CD drive, Hewlett Packard’s latest CD drives employ LightScribe technology (see page 299) to etch an image onto a CD while it’s still inside the drive.

• Transparencies. Transparencies—transparent plastic sheets that rest on an overhead projector for presentations—thrived at conferences for several decades. Today’s spiffy digital projectors keep pushing overhead projectors further back into the closets, but many people still use them, especially in schools. Inkjet printers easily print text and graphics on the transparent plastic sheets, making them a cheap alternative until your company finally puts that digital projector in the budget. • Greeting cards. Many people now send greeting cards through the Internet, but nothing beats the personal touch of a custom-made, hand-signed greeting card. Greeting card paper comes specially sized on colored paper, complete with fold lines and perforations. Embellish it with your message, add some artwork, and skip that last-minute trip to the greeting card aisle. • Iron-on paper. These let you print your image (a picture of your kid, clever slogans, or team numbers) onto the paper, and then iron it onto fabric or clothing. Peel off the cooled paper to leave a machine-washable image. Be sure to

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Printing Specialized Items

iron it on backwards, though. Applying it wrong side-up gives you a mirror image and a mucked-up iron. Figure 4-10: Top: Avery’s free Avery Wizard software makes quick work of printing labels and cards from within Microsoft Word. Choose the product number of your particular Avery labels from the first menu. Middle: Type the words that you want to appear into the template—perforated business cards, in this case. Bottom: The wizard shows a print preview of your neatly aligned work before sending it to the printer, which prints it onto the cards or labels.

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• iPod tattoos. The latest craze, this thin film wraps around your iPod, giving it a new look—faux ostrich skin perhaps—that also protects it from scratches. (Download templates on the Activity Center of Hewlett Packard’s Web site [www.hp.com]).

Printing Digital Photos Professionally

Printing Digital Photos Professionally Those old photos in the shoebox usually look pretty darn good fifty years later, letting you chuckle over your grandparent’s funny clothes. So consider this sobering fact before investing lots of money in photo paper and ink cartridges for your inkjet printer: the vast majority of pictures printed by today’s photo printers fade in less than a decade. If they’re exposed to direct sunlight, these photos may not last more than a few months. Some inkjets use water-soluble ink, which means that handling a photo with wet fingers does it in. The newest generation of inkjet printers, inks, and paper extends a printed photo’s life, but at a cost: these archival printers cost several hundred dollars extra, and require more expensive paper and ink. And the manufacturer’s longevity ratings for those prints applies only to photos kept under glass (or sealed in a protective sleeve), away from sunlight. That’s why more people now turn to professional photo developers, since they accept digital photos as easily as they do traditional film. Better yet, they’ve priced their services so low that, picture for picture, they’re often less expensive than printing at home. Professional photo developers accept digital photos in two ways, described in the next two sections.

In-Store Kiosks Much to the chagrin of the photo-developing industry, the vast majority of digital photos remain unprinted. To recapture that lost market, the big players want to make photo developing as easy as possible—and just as quick as using an inkjet printer. Their solution? The photo kiosks shown in Figure 4-11. Waiting for you in stores nationwide, kiosks print your digital files any way you bring them in, whether on a floppy disk, a CD, or still inside your camera. Although Kodak (www.kodak.com) and Sony (www.sony.com/picturestation) manufacture and sell the kiosks, each kiosk’s owner sets their own costs for printing; prices average from 30 to 60 cents for a 4 × 6 print.

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Printing Digital Photos Professionally

Tip: For extra savings, visit the Kodak or Sony Web site before visiting their kiosks. As of this writing, both companies offer print-out discount coupons to present when paying for the photos.

Figure 4-11: Left: Kodak (www.kodak. com) sprinkled more than 30,000 Picture Maker kiosks across the country in camera stores, drug stores, and shopping malls, making them the nation’s biggest player in the digital photo kiosk department. Kodak’s kiosks let you create prints from photos stored on digital camera memory cards, CDs, or floppy disks. The kiosks also accept photos beamed wirelessly from camera phones and PDAs, and they can even scan in existing photos and slides. The touchsensitive screen lets you zoom, crop, remove “redeye,” adjust colors, and add borders before printing. Right: Found in thousands of FedEx Kinko’s locations, Sony’s PictureStation kiosks (www.sony.com/ picturestation) accept digital camera memory cards, CDs, and floppy disks. Their kiosks offer the same zoom, crop, and red-eye repair tools as Kodak.

Photo Printing Web Sites Your grandparents mailed their film rolls to the developer, and then waited for the prints to arrive in the mail. Digital photography resurrected that old business model, but with a twist: you can upload your photos to the developer, either from your PC or camera phone. A few days later, your prints arrive in the mail. (Some sites even let you choose a particular frame; the photo arrives in the frame you chose online.) Some online developers also let you pick up your photos in person

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within a few hours. Online developers don’t offer a kiosk’s immediate gratification, but they’re usually less expensive.

Printing Digital Photos Professionally

Also, uploading from home or work lets you spend more time editing your photos. Cropping a photo may be easier when you use your favorite, familiar image editing program, rather than fiddling with a kiosk’s built-in editing tools while the line behind you grows. Windows XP lets you print photos directly from your My Pictures folder (Figure 4-12) to Web sites offered by Fujifilm, Shutterfly, and Kodak for about 25 cents per 4 × 6 print. Figure 4-12: Top left: To order professional quality prints directly from Windows XP, open your My Pictures folder and then choose “Order prints online.” Top right: Turn on the checkboxes of the pictures you want to print, or choose Select All. Bottom left: Windows XP connects to the Internet and lists available printing companies; select the one you want. Bottom right: Choose the number of prints you want for each size listed. (To compare prices, click the Back button and try the different companies.) To complete your order, choose a pickup location (or enter your address to receive the prints by mail), and then enter your credit card number.

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Digital Photos on an Inkjet Printer

Although ordering directly from Windows XP’s My Picture folder may be handy, you can do the same thing from any developer’s Web site, often for a better price. Here are a few major photo developers and their Web sites: • Snapfish (www.snapfish.com) • Wal-Mart (www.walmart.com) • Ritz/Wolf Camera & Image (www.ritzpix.com) Of course, an alternative to printing photos is sharing them online with friends (page 158). NOTE FROM THE LAWYERS

Copyright, Photos, and Your Photo Developer In 1999, the Professional Photographers of America sued Kmart, alleging the store violated federal copyright law by copying photos without the permission of the copyright owners. Kmart settled out of court by paying $100,000. Since then, photo developers and amateur photographers are left with an uncomfortable dilemma: there’s no easy way to tell who holds the copyright on a photo. In the past, amateurs submitted entire rolls of film, complete with the usual blunders of bad lighting and chopped heads. But negatives are a rarity, these days. And amateur digital photographers send in computer-enhanced digital photo files that look fantastic—so good, in fact, that some developers refuse to print them for fear of breaking copyright laws.

To keep from violating copyright law, some photo developers simply guess as to whether you snapped the photo yourself. If your work looks too professional, they may not print it. For instance, Wal-Mart’s Web site warns that it won’t develop “any photograph that appears to have been taken by a professional photographer or studio, even if it isn’t marked with any sort of copyright, unless we’re presented with a signed Copyright Release.” The moral? When submitting digital photos that look pretty darn good, be prepared to cough up your own copyright release form and convince the developer that you snapped those shots yourself. If the developer refuses, you may need to take your printing job elsewhere.

Digital Photos on an Inkjet Printer Printing decent photos on an inkjet printer boils down to three things:selecting the right paper type, choosing your photo’s resolution and size, and adjusting your printer’s settings. Make a mistake on any one of these three tasks, and it’s easy to muck up your photo. Here’s how to make the right choices when it’s time to print out your masterpieces.

Choosing Photo Paper When you want the best photos, buy paper from the same company that made your printer. Manufacturers create their printers, paper, and ink to work as a team. The coating on the paper binds with the ink to keep the colors from blurring. If quality really doesn’t matter—for children’s daily art projects, greeting cards, or refrigerator prints—buy the cheapest stuff you can get (and cheap ink, as well). But if you care about how your photos look, read on. 138

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Tip: Don’t leave photo paper sitting in the printer’s tray; the light and temperature fluctuations dull its look. Instead, store the paper in a cool, dark place and feed it to your printer, sheet by sheet, when needed.

Digital Photos on an Inkjet Printer

Manufacturers describe their photo paper using a wide variety of terms. • Premium. The most expensive option. This paper looks the best, feels the thickest, and lasts the longest. It’s for photos you really care about. To keep fading to a minimum, keep the picture framed under glass. • Glossy. Less expensive than premium paper, glossy photo paper shines like a “real” photograph, making the colors stand out. And, just like real photos, it magnifies fingerprints and reflects sunlight. • Semigloss. Semigloss isn’t quite as heavy or glossy as glossy paper, but it cuts down on the shiny colors for reduced price and better handling. • Matte. Matte paper adds texture to lessen the shine, making it both durable and non-glare. Some people prefer the textured look for portraits. • Plain. Don’t confuse this option with plain paper, which won’t work for photos. Plain photo paper works best for photos that aren’t priceless—when you want to let the kids play with the printer, for instance. Tip: Don’t print on the back of botched photo paper. The paper prints well on one side only—the shiny side. Printing on the other side bleeds the ink together into arty smears. To determine which side is the rear, look for writing on the backside; alternatively, some paper manufacturers put notches on one corner and direct you to insert the paper with the notch facing a certain direction.

Choosing Your Photo’s Size and Resolution The concept can be a bit tricky to understand at first, but the size of your photo onscreen doesn’t translate into its printed size. That’s because your monitor and printer work at different levels of resolution—the number of dots needed to create the image. Since people sit a foot or two from their screens, monitors create images by stringing together about 100 dots per inch—a fairly low resolution. Your eyes blur the dots together to create an even image. Printers require more dots than monitors because people (especially nearsighted ones) hold the paper much closer to their eyes. To fool the eye into seeing smooth, clean prints, most printers need to pack in at least 300 dots per inch—considerably higher resolution. That means your digital photo must be about three times the size of your monitor to print out at your monitor’s size. This isn’t a big problem for digital cameras that use three or more megapixels. Those photos can easily fill a full sheet of paper at full resolution. But smaller photos—or portions of photos—may lack the resolution needed to print at certain

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sizes. When printed too large, photos look grainy. Sometimes you can see bunches of dots instead of a smooth image. How do you know what size to choose? Some photo-editing programs (page 155) let you know when you’re trying to print a photo at too large a size. (Some even help you crop photos to a standard photo size.) As a rule of thumb, the more megapixels your digital camera shoots with, the larger sized prints you can make. Table 4-1 offers some guidelines as to how large a print you can make from your particular digital camera. Table 4-1. Choosing the right size for your printed digital photo

Megapixels

4x6

5x7

6x8

8x12

10x15

.5

Good

Low

Low

No

No

.8

Good

Good

Low

No

No

1

Best

Good

Low

No

No

2

Best

Best

Best

Low

No

3

Best

Best

Best

Good

Low

4

Best

Best

Best

Best

Good

5

Best

Best

Best

Best

Best

As shown above, cameras with three or more megapixels can fill a standard-sized piece of paper without much problem. Cameras with four or more megapixels give you the luxury of cropping (page 158)—trimming out all but a photo’s best portion—while still creating a decent-sized print. You’ll see similar charts elsewhere with slightly different numbers. That’s because a lot depends on the quality of your printer and your own definition of quality. The same photo can make professionals shudder and amateurs smile. Tip: To shoot the most detail with your digital camera, browse through its built-in menus and change your detail setting to Fine or Super Fine rather than Normal. The resulting files are larger, but they look better when you print them out.

Adjusting Your Printer Settings Once you decide on your photo’s size and paper type, be sure to tell your printer about your choices. If you skip this vital step, the printer chooses its default settings, which usually means printing your stunning photo onto plain paper at low quality. To see how your photo will appear on paper, choose File ➝ Print Preview, and then adjust the printer’s settings (page 129) to match your chosen paper selection and photo size. When both the preview and settings look correct, click Print to send your photo to the printer.

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Remember that sunlight, particularly ultraviolet rays within sunlight, fades photos quickly. For best preservation, request UV protected glass or plexiglass when framing your picture. That filters out the most harmful rays, giving your photos the best chance at long-term survival.

Printing Web Pages

Tip: After printing a photo, let it dry for 10 minutes on a clean flat surface. That gives the inks time to bond with the paper. If you handle it too quickly after printing, a fingerprint could smudge the ink.

Printing Web Pages Some Web pages look awful when printed. The page’s entire right side disappears beyond the edge, for instance, or the bottom half prints on a second page. Or you may just want to print a few paragraphs, but all the graphics, ads, and borders that come along for the ride drain your inkjet’s nozzles dry. Sometimes a simple border fits the entire first page, leaving the text to run down the second page. These Web pages don’t print well because the Web site’s creators don’t really care about your printing problem. They have enough trouble making sure the page looks good on different-sized monitors and different types of computers using different operating systems and different Web browsers. To see how a page will look when liberated from the screen, choose File ➝ Print Preview from your browser. If you’re lucky, and it looks perfect, click the Print button to send the page or pages to the printer. If the Web site doesn’t cooperate, try these tricks. • Printer format. A few Web designers feel your pain, so they design special versions of their Web pages that look nice on standard-sized sheets of paper. Look for the words “Text Only” or “Print Format”—usually near the page’s top, right corner. • Print only the part you want. Highlight the section you’re after—the text of a news article without all the surrounding ads, for example—and then choose File ➝ Print. When the Print dialog box appears, choose Selection from the Page Range section. • Print only the page you want. Some long Web pages extend six printed pages or more, but in many cases you want only one page—page three, for instance. To print only that page, choose File ➝ Print Preview. When your browser shows you how the site looks on paper, click the Page arrows along the top until you find the page with your coveted information. Then print only that page using your printer’s Page Range setting (page 130). • Print in Landscape format. When printed, the right edge of some Web pages disappears off the paper’s edge. To give the page more space, tell your printer to print in Landscape (horizontal) mode rather than in the vertical-oriented Portrait mode.

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• Don’t print the background. Some Web sites spruce up their pages with a patterned background. That golf course’s Web site may look nice in Burberry, but printing those colors sucks your ink cartridges dry. Turn off backgrounds in Internet Explorer by choosing Tools ➝ Options ➝ Advanced. Scroll down to the Printing section, and turn off the “Print Background Colors and Images” checkbox. (In Firefox, choose File ➝ Page Setup ➝ Print backgrounds.) • Reformat in a word processor. From your browser, choose Edit ➝ Select All ➝ Edit ➝ Copy to copy the entire Web page to Windows’ clipboard. Open a fullfeatured word processor like Microsoft Word and then choose Edit ➝ Paste. The Web page turns into a convoluted jumble of tables, ready for you to pick apart. Use this labor-intensive procedure as a last resort. Internet Explorer’s Print menu (File ➝ Print) offers an Options tab, letting you print frames—large banners of stationary menus or ads that cling to the site’s top or side as you move between pages. Few sites use frames these days, so this option doesn’t mean much. To select a particular frame for printing, hold down Ctrl and press Tab. When you’re inside the desired frame, choose File ➝ Print ➝ Options tab to send the page to the printer. If Ctrl+Tab merely jumps between the Web site’s address and the page itself, the site doesn’t use frames.

Printer Troubleshooting When something’s wrong with your printer, start running down the following list of fixes.

Paper Jams Most paper jams start right in the printer’s paper tray, so start your examination there. • Are you feeding the printer thicker paper than normal? If you recently switched to new paper, check your printer’s manual or drop by its manufacturer’s Web site to see if it can handle this new stock—some printers choke on anything thicker than office paper. • Feel the adjustable paper tray levers to make sure they’re not holding the paper too tightly—or not tightly enough. The paper should pull through easily, but not so easily that it slides in at an angle. • Grab the paper stack with both hands and flex it up and down before placing it in the tray. That loosens the sheets, letting air move between them, and releases any static electricity that could cause pages to cling. • Don’t fill the tray with more paper than the printer can handle. Try about 20 sheets, decreasing or increasing the number until you’re sure your printer handles the stack well.

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• If the paper’s still jamming, try feeding the paper one sheet at a time—the problem may be with the rollers, the rubbery “rolling pins” that push your paper through the printer. Remove the printer’s lid and use a credit card or cotton ball soaked in alcohol to scrape off any gunk from the rollers.

Printer Troubleshooting

• Is the paper slightly damp or moist? Be sure to seal unused paper in an airtight bag if you live in a damp environment.

Replacing Inkjet Cartridges When your inkjet printer’s cartridges begin to run low, your printer always tells you about it. Some flash lights, others send an alert to your screen, and others simply refuse to work until you fork out the money for the replacement. Since printer companies make so much money from cartridges, they go out of their way to make them as easy as possible to buy and replace. Don’t bother searching for a manual for instructions, just lift the lid of your printer; many printers include a well-placed sticker pointing out the cartridges’ location, model numbers, and step-by-step instructions for inserting the replacements. Although instructions vary between printer manufacturers and models, here’s the basic procedure. 1. Find some plastic baggies in which to dispose the old cartridges. Sometimes old cartridges leak ink. Keep a plastic sandwich bag or two on hand for quick disposal. 2. Lift the printer’s lid. Most lift along the front, like the hood of a car. 3. If necessary, push a button to slide the cartridges into view. Sometimes lifting the lid exposes the cartridges; if not, push the button revealed by the lid. The cartridges slide out of their hiding place and into view. (You may need to turn on your printer before the button works.) You should spot two or more cartridges: a small black one, and a thicker color one, and sometimes separate cartridges for each color. 4. Remove the old cartridges from the printer. Look for a little latch holding each cartridges in place, as shown in Figure 4-13. Release the latch, and the cartridge should pop up a bit. Grab the cartridge and lift it up and out of its chamber; then drop each one into the plastic bag.

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5. Remove the new ink cartridges from their wrappers. You may need to pull a little tape seal off the cartridges’ nozzles. Figure 4-13: Inkjet cartridges are easy to replace. Top left: Lift the lid to your printer and then unclasp the lever holding your cartridge in place. Top right: Lift the cartridge’s lever. Bottom left: After lifting the lever, grasp the cartridge and pull it up and out. Bottom right: Insert the new cartridge in the empty space; be sure to push down the lever to lock the new cartridge in place.

6. Install the cartridges into the printer. The black cartridge fits into a smaller chamber than the color one, keeping you from mixing them up. Once they’re in their chambers, fasten their latches to hold them in place. Push the same button that exposed the cartridges or close the lid to make the cartridges retreat to their hiding place. The printer grunts and groans a bit as it tests the nozzles. After a minute or two, the printer should be ready to begin printing again.

Replacing Toner Cartridges A laser printer’s toner cartridge lasts a long time, often printing more than a thousand pages before starting to lose steam. When they begin to fade, the results are 144

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quickly visible: the pages become lighter and lighter, giving you a heads up that it’s time to replace the cartridge. It’s an easy task that works something like this.

Printer Troubleshooting

1. Turn on the printer. 2. Open the printer. If you don’t spot the toner cartridge, look for a button to push to bring it into view. 3. Pull out the existing toner cartridge. Most pull straight out. 4. Take a new cartridge out of its box, read its instructions, and insert it into the printer. Most toner cartridges come wrapped in an airtight package. Remove the packaging and pull out a plastic tab that seals the toner in place. Gently shake the toner cartridge to distribute its toner evenly, and then slide it into the printer. Don’t force it; it should slide evenly with a small push to lock it in place. FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTION

Refilling Ink Cartridges My family goes through a lot of inkjet cartridges, and they’re costing us an arm and a leg. I’ve seen lots of Web sites selling refill kits. Are refilled cartridges okay to use with my printer? Some people convert their cars to run recycled oil from deep fryers in fast food restaurants. Sure, it’s a chore, but what a savings! Plus, it’s good for the environment, and it saves money. The same holds true for ink cartridges. Refilling them is a messy business, in which you slowly inject ink with a syringe directly into the cartridge, being careful not to ruin it by adding any bubbles or aiming at the wrong spot. Refilled cartridges certainly aren’t the best bet for people who need consistent, professional quality results. The ink

sold by third-parties doesn’t always match the ink in the originals, leading to slight color variations and rapid fading. But if you don’t always need the best quality—you just want the kids to be able to print out some day projects, for instance—cheap refill cartridges may keep you from cringing when the kids turn on the printer. Plenty of Web sites offer refill kits, tips on refilling, and even prefilled cartridges. Some printer models are a snap to refill; others require elaborate tricks, like running programs to disable a printer’s built-in sensors that prevent refilling. Only you can balance your desire for cheap ink with your need for consistent printouts. If you decide to buy new cartridges, some office supply stores and computer stores will recycle your old ones when you drop them off.

Tip: Some new laser printer models count the number of pages they’ve printed; when they reach a preset limit, they flash a light saying the cartridge needs replacing. If the printed pages still look good, you can squeeze more life out of the cartridge by removing it and then sliding it right back in. When the cartridge is really dead, replace it with a new one.

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Printer Troubleshooting

Cleaning Inkjet Nozzles Streak marks on your pages mean your printer’s nozzles need cleaning of the goo that’s rubbing against the page. Remove one or both of the cartridges and wipe their nozzles (found on the bottom) with a soft, lint-free cloth (a word translating to “tissue” in most households). Some printers offer a special “nozzle cleaning” procedure in their Properties menu (Start ➝ Control Panel ➝ Printers and Faxes; right-click your printer’s icon and then choose Properties). The cartridge blasts ink through the nozzle in an attempt to free the streaking culprit. Unfortunately, nozzle cleaning uses up lots of ink in the process.

Other Options If none of the previous tactics solve your problems, you have three options: take your printer in for repair, buy a new one, or fix it yourself. • Repair. Your printer’s work environment consists of paper, ink, and dust, leading to constant problems with dirt. Many shops can fix a problem by simply cleaning the printer. Ask for an estimate first, and compare it with the cost of a new printer. • Buy new. Since manufacturers make money from cartridges, and not printers, most new printers sell very inexpensively. The technology improves rapidly; color laser printers will soon sell for as much as inkjet printers. Depending on the cost of repair, it may be time for an upgrade. • Fix it yourself. Since most problems are caused by cleaning issues, you can try cleaning your printer yourself. When looking for tips on repairing your particular printer model—physically taking it apart—check out Sam’s Laser FAQ (www.repairfaq.org/sam). Samuel M. Goldwasser compiled a list of Frequently Asked Questions, organized by specific printer models, for repair technicians to share. Although laser printer repair consumes the bulk of Mr. Goldwasser’s site, inkjet printers receive plenty of coverage, as well. The Fix Your Own Printers Web site (www.fixyourownprinter.com) offers downloadable manuals and guides for most printers, as well as error code charts, cleaning products, and a forum for owners to share problems. Finally, Compass Micro, Inc. (www.compassmicro.com) sells parts online for Epson and Canon printers. Once you buy a part, the site also grants you access to its extensive library of closeup diagrams for Epson and Canon printers, helping you figure out where that leftover part really belongs.

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chapter

Chapter 5

5

Digital Cameras, Camcorders, and Webcams

Before Windows XP’s arrival, nobody but hard-core geeks enjoyed connecting digital cameras or video cameras to their PCs. The cameras came packaged with clumsy software, often thrown in as an afterthought. And most older PCs just couldn’t handle video’s obsessive, 15-pictures-per-second demands for attention. With Windows XP at the helm, today’s fast PCs work almost seamlessly with digital picture and video gear. Microsoft realized both these technologies were moving from geek to consumer, so they built Windows XP to recognize most digital cameras and camcorders as soon as you plug them into your PC. This chapter explains how to perform the following tasks on your PC: • Copy a digital camera’s photos onto your computer, where you can view and edit them. • Copy a flash card’s photos directly onto your computer, bypassing the camera’s cable to speed up transfers. • View photos on your computer, rotating or editing them, if necessary. • Email photos to friends, letting them see how they really behaved at last night’s party. • Share photos with friends by posting the pictures to a Web site. • Copy movie footage from your camcorder to your PC for viewing. • Edit camcorder footage into a complete movie. • Connect a Webcam to your PC for video chats or to enhance your Web site.

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Digital Camera Basics

Digital Camera Basics Digital cameras first outsold film cameras in 2003; now they’ve nearly pushed film cameras off the shelves entirely. Some people fondly recall pawing through the little envelopes at the developer; others recall the agony of being limited to only 24 shots during an entire day at Disneyland. Digital photos break both those barriers, freeing their owners to snap more pet pictures than ever, and view them instantly. The following sections explain how to move those photos off your camera and into your PC, be it through a cable or card reader. You can then edit them into shape and share them with friends via email or a photo-sharing Web site.

Moving Pictures from Camera to Computer Don’t bother installing the software packaged with your digital camera; it’s generally of mediocre quality, and you don’t need it to see your photos. But do hang onto that little cable that comes with your camera. That’s the tube for pouring your photos from your camera into your PC. Connect the cable between them, and Windows XP automatically welcomes your digital camera and shuttles your photos into your new digital shoebox: your PC’s My Pictures folder. Follow these steps to move the photos out of your camera and into your PC. Tip: Lost your camera’s connection cable? Most cameras use standard USB cables, available at any camera or computer store. Bring your camera when cable shopping; the camera may use any one of three different USB ports (page 34). For even faster photo transfers, buy a card reader instead; card readers are covered in the next section (page 152).

1. Connect the smaller connector on your camera’s cable to your camera and turn on your camera. Find a tiny port on your camera. Sometimes named “Digital” or “USB,” it’s occasionally hidden underneath a little cover, and it’s usually near the port that connects your camera to the TV for viewing photos. Plug the cable’s small end into your camera’s port. With some cameras, you need to set them to View or Cable Connection mode before they’ll start talking to your PC. Note: Some really old digital cameras connect through the serial port (page 46). These oldsters force you to wade through their own, original software. If this program somehow slipped from your grasp, visit the downloads area of the manufacturer’s Web site. Sometimes a special Archive area still offers original software for obsolete electronics.

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2. Plug the cable’s larger, rectangular end into your PC’s USB port. USB ports sprout from all but the oldest PCs (see page 36 for a quick visual reminder). Start looking for the little rectangular port on the case’s front, and then move to the backside of your PC if there’s nothing on the front. For added convenience, some keyboards and monitors offer little ports along their sides. Windows XP recognizes your camera and displays a brief “New Hardware Found” message in the lower-right corner of your screen.

Moving Pictures from Camera to Computer

3. Choose a program to move your photos onto your computer, and then click OK. Windows lists your PC’s photo editing software and lets you choose your favorite to handle the incoming photos (see Figure 5-1). Select one, and Windows assigns it the job of transferring your photos. If your PC doesn’t have any photo-editing software, Windows XP’s built-in Scanner and Camera Wizard automatically steps in to handle the job. Figure 5-1: Once you connect your camera to your PC, Windows XP lists all the software on your PC that can talk to cameras. To skip this menu in the future, turn on the checkbox marked “Always use this program for this action.” Then choose the program Windows XP should automatically summon the next time you plug in your camera.

4. Start the Scanner and Camera Wizard. Windows XP’s friendly wizard pops up with a greeting, ready to handle your photo-moving chores, step by step. Tip: If you’re already a whiz at moving files, dump the wizard. When the wizard opens, click Cancel and the wizard disappears. Then navigate directly to your camera (My Computer ➝ [Your camera’s name]), where you can drag, cut, or copy your files to other folders on your hard drive. This trick comes in especially handy when your camera holds several separate photo sessions, and you’d rather sort them into separate folders for each session.

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5. Choose the photos you want to copy to your PC. The wizard shows you a contact sheet of your camera’s photos (Figure 5-2); each photo has a checkmark in its upper-right corner. Click Next to move them all onto your PC. On the rare occasion you want to keep some photos on your camera—perhaps you want to move those to a different computer—remove the checkmarks from those photos. TROUBLESHOOTING MOMENT

When the Wizard Is Missing If the wizard doesn’t materialize when you plug in your camera, tighten the cables and make sure the camera’s turned on. Also, some cameras don’t attract the wizard until you flip their switch from Shoot Pictures to Review Pictures mode. If the wizard still hides, run down the following list. • Reactivate the USB port. Unplug the camera’s cord, wait 10 seconds, and plug it in again. That gives Windows XP another chance to recognize your camera at the USB port (page 34). • Check My Computer. See if the camera’s already waiting for you in My Computer (Start ➝ My Computer). The camera may appear as an icon nestled among the hard drives. If you spot it, double-click the icon to see a folder featuring all your camera’s pictures. You can then drag or copy the images into your PC’s My Pictures folder. • Install the camera’s drivers. Sometimes installing the camera’s drivers (the utility program that lets your PC talk to your camera) adds support

for Microsoft XP’s WIA (Windows Image Acquisition) system. WIA lets Windows XP recognize your camera when you plug it in. • Install the camera’s software. Installing the digital camera’s software—but not actually using it— sometimes installs WIA, letting Windows XP finally recognize the camera and grab its photos. • Give up and use the camera’s software. This isn’t the best option, as it bypasses Windows XP’s built-in transfer system, but it works in a pinch. • Buy a flash card reader. To upgrade to faster photo transfers, buy a flash card reader (page 152) for your PC. Available for less than $25, these handy gadgets add “mini-drives” that let you slip in your camera’s flash card just like slipping in a CD. When Windows XP recognizes the files, drag and drop them to an appropriate folder inside your My Pictures folder.

6. Choose a descriptive name for the photos and select a folder to store them in. The name DSC03612.JPG doesn’t help much when searching for your carnivorous plant photos next month. To help you relocate your pix, type a descriptive name in this dialog box (Figure 5-3), like “Venus Flytraps.” Windows creates a folder with that name inside your My Pictures folder, tosses your photos into the folder, and renames each photo in sequence: Venus Flytraps001, Venus Flytraps002, and so on. Click Next.

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7. Choose “Nothing. I’m finished working with these pictures” to exit the wizard. Although Windows XP offers three choices here, opt for the third choice— Nothing—because the other two are so abysmal:

Moving Pictures from Camera to Computer

Figure 5-2: Click Next to move all your photos off your camera quickly, freeing up room to take more shots. Don’t stop here and rotate your photos to “right side up.” The rotate feature works more quickly if you wait for the pictures to move onto your hard drive.

Figure 5-3: Windows XP creates a folder with the name you entered here, and then renames all the photos in sequence with that name, making it easy for you to find photos later. Be sure to turn on the “Delete pictures from my device after copying them” checkbox. Otherwise, Windows XP copies, rather than moves the camera’s photos, leaving them to hog precious storage space.

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• Publish photos to a Web site. This offer certainly sounds gracious, but the wizard isn’t offering to publish your photos to your blog, your own Web site, or even your choice of photo-sharing sites (page 160). This option simply sends your photos to Microsoft’s own MSN Groups—if you have an existing account or want to set one up. Competing sites (which you can learn about in the online appendix, “Other Cool Things You Can Do Online,” available on the “Missing CD” page at www.missingmanuals.com) allow more free photo storage space, easier photo transfers, and simpler menus. • Order Prints. This emails your photos to an online photo developer, which mails back your prints less than a week later. It’s convenient, but certainly not the fastest, best, or cheapest way to print photos (page 135 shows you some better options). • Nothing. The Wizard vanishes, but not before opening your newly created folder where you can ogle your new photos.

Moving Pictures from a Card Reader to a PC The Scanner and Camera Wizard leads you steadily through the camera-to-PC photo transfers, but all that hand-holding takes time. For quicker grabs, connect your camera to your PC as described above and then choose Start ➝ My Computer. Look for your digital camera’s icon nestled among your PC’s disks and drives. Double-click the camera icon to open it, like any folder. Select the camera’s photos and drag them to your My Pictures folder. Although that method speeds things up by bypassing the wizard, bypassing your camera’s cable altogether speeds up transfers even more. For the speediest transfers, buy a card reader, like the one shown in Figure 5-4. Available for around $20, the card reader plugs into your PC’s USB port and creates tiny disk drives for inserting your camera’s cards. Push your camera’s card into the reader and use Windows XP’s standard copy tools to move the photos to any other folder on your computer. Card readers hold several advantages over the wizard: • Battery life. With a card reader, your camera stays turned off during transfer sessions, keeping your battery alive longer for more picture taking. • Speed. Card readers give your PC direct access to the card, and they’re built for speed. Camera transfer circuitry isn’t nearly as quick. • Price. Card readers cost less than 20 dollars, usually much less than the cost of replacing the camera cable you left in the hotel room.

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• Versatility. Most card readers read every card format, including cards used by your friends, relatives, and strangers at coffee shops. (They’ll also work with your next camera, as well.)

Viewing and Editing Photos

Figure 5-4: Top: Card readers provide a handy alternative to replacing a camera’s lost cable. They also work up to 40 times faster than some cables, particularly those from older cameras. Card readers come with tiny drives that accept storage cards from your camera, cell phone, PDA, and other gadgets. Plug a USB 2-capable card reader into your PC’s USB 2.0 port for the fastest transfers. Bottom: When plugged in, a card reader adds several Removable Disk drive icons to My Computer, letting you insert a wide variety of card types. Unfortunately, the drives in My Computer rarely identify which removable drive contains your newly inserted card, forcing you to doubleclick them all until the correct one opens (you’ll know you’ve hit pay dirt when you see your images inside the drive).

Viewing and Editing Photos Once you move your photos from your camera onto your PC, Windows lets you play with them in several ways without adding smudges or finger prints. Windows

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XP’s built-in photo management tools handle a few minimal chores, but you need third-party programs to handle the rest. Here’s how to view, locate, rotate, edit, and share photos with your friends. Chapter 4 explains how to print digital photos (page 135). POWER USERS’ CLINIC

Forensic Photo Sleuthing with EXIF When guessing your age in your baby pictures, you probably glance at the photo developer’s date stamp along the photo’s side or bottom edge. That, and perhaps a jotted note, provide your only clues.

XP’s built-in tools to rotate or edit your photos. Instead, use only digital-editing software that supports EXIF like the free Picasa 2 (www.picasa.com), Adobe Photoshop Elements (www.adobe.com), or others.

The dating game will be much easier for your kids and grandkids, though: your digital camera stamps every photo with the date and time you snapped it. It also throws in your camera’s shutter speed, lens aperture, focal length, exposure time, flash, and much more. A few advanced digital cameras even stamp GPS (Global Positioning System) information on a photo, letting you pinpoint where you stood when taking the snap. To view a photo’s EXIF info, right-click the photo, choose Properties, and then click the Summary tab.

Until you pick up a good photo editor, copy your original photo files to CDs as soon as you transfer them onto your PC, and then store them in a safe place. If you have to make any changes using Windows XP, edit only the copies.

Although casual viewers appreciate the date stamps, EXIF (Exchangeable Image File Format) information offers other benefits: • Education. Examining the EXIF settings of your favorite shots helps you become a better photographer, letting you see how variations in exposure, flash usage, and depth-of-field affect your photos. • Better prints. Some photo printers examine the EXIF data and adjust the tonal values to enhance prints automatically. • Editing. Some photo-editing software reads EXIF data to enhance images. Although EXIF data proves quite useful, many older photo editors ignorantly erase it as soon as you start editing. Windows XP is no exception, often wiping out this valuable data when you rotate a photo. The cure? Avoid using Windows

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Viewing Photos Windows XP’s My Picture folder (Start ➝ My Pictures) displays your photos three different ways, each one designed to help you sort through a pile of photos, narrow down your search to a specific folder, or display the photo on your monitor.

Viewing and Editing Photos

• Thumbnail. When searching all the photos and folders in your My Pictures folder, turn on Thumbnail view (View ➝ Thumbnail), shown in Figure 5-5, top. To help you see each file and folder’s contents, each photo’s icon morphs into a miniaturized photo; each folder’s icon shows tiny views of the first four photos inside. • Filmstrip. For searching photos within a single folder, turn on that folder’s Filmstrip view (View ➝ Filmstrip). Windows XP lines the window’s bottom with a row of thumbnails (Figure 5-5, middle), and then displays the currently selected photo along the top. • Viewer. When you find the photo you want, confirm your suspicions by giving its thumbnail a double-click. Windows XP’s Picture and Fax viewer (Figure 5-5, bottom) hops to life, resizing your photo to fit the size of your current window. (Enlarge or resize the viewer like any other window in Windows XP.) In addition to letting you create a full-screen slideshow of every picture in a folder, Windows Picture and Fax Viewer comes in handiest when you need to whip through every photo in a hurry. To advance from one photo to the next, click the two blue left-and-right pointing arrows at the bottom of the viewer. Tip: The prospect of free snaps turn digital cameras into massive photo generators. Reduce clutter by immediately deleting the blurred and blechie ones with a click of the viewer’s red X button. The fewer photos you keep, the easier it is to manage the good ones. WORKAROUND WORKSHOP

Rotating Made Right Although Windows XP’s rotate feature proves quite handy for righting obvious wrongs, the tool makes professional photographers cringe. First, Windows XP’s rotation tampers with the camera’s settings information—its EXIF data (page 154)—stored inside your photo. Second, rotating photos slightly degrades their quality, although most eyes never

notice the difference. If you care about these things, burn copies of your camera’s photos to a CD (page 292) as soon as you remove them from your camera. Then keep copies on your hard drive, where accidents and edits won’t really matter.

Rotating and Editing Photos When your snapshots show people walking on walls, let Windows XP’s rotate feature set them gently back on earth. Right-click the incorrectly rotated photo, and then choose Clockwise or Counter Clockwise. Windows XP lets you access the rotate feature wherever you spot a turned photo, be it in thumbnail view, filmstrip

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view, or even within the Windows Picture and Fax Viewer (all shown in Figure 5-5). Figure 5-5: Top: Rather than using the Windows standard 4-photo grid, you can assign a single photo to represent what’s inside a folder: Right-click the folder and choose Properties ➝ Customize ➝ Choose Picture. Double-click a favorite photo for Windows to stick on your folder. Middle: Move back and forth quickly between photos by clicking the little round blue arrows (circled). You can use the adjacent two buttons to rotate pictures either clockwise or counterclockwise. Bottom: Double-click any photo to see it in Windows Picture and Fax Viewer. To start a full-screen slideshow of the photos inside that picture’s folder, press F11. (Press Esc to stop the show.) The buttons along the bottom reveal their purposes when you hover your mouse pointer over them.

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When it comes to editing photos, though, don’t look within Windows XP’s builtin tools. Windows XP offers nothing for fixing photos, changing their lighting, or even removing red-eye. Click the Editing button in Windows Picture and Fax Viewer, for instance, and Windows XP simply hauls out Paint—a decades-old drawing program for creating colored lines and circles.

Viewing and Editing Photos

To its credit, Windows XP resizes photos for emailing (page 158), but when you need more than that, pick up a free copy of Picasa 2 (www.picasa.com). The program offers basic fixes (Figure 5-6) like cropping photos to standard print sizes, straightening slanted horizons, removing red-eye, and automatically adjusting contrast and color.

2. Slide lever until straight

3. Click Apply to save straightened photo

Figure 5-6: Picasa, a free photoediting program distributed by Google, offers a wide variety of easy-to-use, one-button editing tools. When stuck with a slanting horizon, for instance, click the Straighten button, and then slide the lever to the left or right until the horizon becomes horizontal. Click the Apply button to save your changes.

1. Click straighten

Automatically enhance your photo’s contrast, lighting, and color by clicking the program’s I’m Feeling Lucky button. (If that phrase rings a bell from Google’s search menu, that’s because Google owns Picasa.) Picasa’s robotic eye ain’t perfect, but it’s a great starting point for further tweaks. Picasa’s photo management tools outshine Windows XP as well, letting you view your photos in a linear “timeline” of thumbnails. If you recall the general day, month, or year you snapped a missing photo, call up the Timeline and watch your photos “float” past in the order you took them.

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If you need more advanced editing than Picasa offers, check your digital camera’s box and packaging. Most manufacturers slip in a software CD or two, and you occasionally find Photoshop Elements, an easier-to-use version of Adobe’s Photoshop program for professional photographers. Although more difficult to figure out and use than Picasa, Elements’ advanced tools let you remove dust and scratches from scanned photos, merge photos to create panoramas, and airbrush away wrinkles, moles, and that little smear of BBQ sauce from your right cheek. Note: If you decide to invest in Photoshop Elements, check out Photoshop Elements 4: The Missing Manual for full coverage of how that program works.

Sharing Photos with Friends To go retro when sharing photos, just print them out (page 135) and pass them around in person. But digital photos cry out for a more immediate approach. Here’s how to share them through email or a file-sharing site.

Sending Photos Through Email Sending photos through email is like dropping a block of ice into a drinking glass: the photos’ immense size keeps them from fitting comfortably into an email message, which works best with text and small attachments. You may not have noticed your digital photos’ mammoth size because Windows XP hides it from you. To keep you from examining nose pores instead of portraits, Windows XP politely shrinks opened photos to make them suitable for onscreen viewing. For instance, Figure 5-7, top, shows a digital photo opened with Windows Picture and Fax Viewer—note the tiny fly on the railing. When viewed at actual size (see Figure 5-7, bottom), that tiny fly’s really a monster. Large digital photos (usually around 1 or 2 MB apiece) make for great prints but lousy email attachments. Even if your ISP lets you send the photo (and many won’t, because of size restrictions), the photo would probably bounce back when it overflowed your friend’s mail storage limit (usually 5 or 10 MB). The only answer is to shrink the photo, leaving you two options: • Resize. Windows shrinks your photos automatically if you email them. Rightclick a selected photo or photos and choose Send To ➝ Mail Recipient. When you take up Windows’ offer to “Make all my pictures smaller,” Windows shrinks them to 640 × 480 pixels—a comfortable viewing size for most displays. (If the recipient owns an extra large monitor, click “Show more options” and choose either 800 × 600 pixels or 1024 × 768 pixels.) • Crop. Resizing a photo doesn’t work well for shots where you need to preserve details. Those three cute deer grazing in the field, for instance, become three small brown dots in a sea of green. Cropping lets you trim away most of the

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field, yet save the deer at actual size. Windows XP doesn’t offer any cropping tools, but Picasa crops very easily, as shown in Figure 5-8.

Sharing Photos with Friends

Figure 5-7: Top: Windows XP automatically shrinks digital photos to fit into the Windows Picture and Fax Viewer. To see your photo’s true size, click the Actual Size button— the fourth button from the bottom left. Bottom: When Windows displays the actual-sized photo, most of it hangs beyond the window’s borders, leaving just a tiny portion visible. (To shrink the entire photo back into the window, click the Best Fit button— the third button over from the bottom left.) Although Windows XP lets you see portions of photos at their actual size, it doesn’t provide a way to save that portion separately from the photo. For that, you need photoediting software with a cropping feature (Figure 5-8).

When emailing photos, never dump a huge batch into email and mass-mail. No matter how great a time you had in Belize, few friends want to wade through a wad of vacation photos. Instead, choose a favorite or two to sum up the experience, and Chapter 5: Digital Cameras, Camcorders, and Webcams PCs: The Missing Manual, eMatter Edition Copyright © 2008 O’Reilly & Associates, Inc. All rights reserved.

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send those. Snap-happy people occasionally end up on “twit filters” (page 374), especially when they send photos to friends at work. For better etiquette, upload your photos to a photo-sharing site and send your friends the link to view your masterpieces on their own time. Figure 5-8: Top: Like Windows, Picasa can resize a photo for sending through email. But in this case, resizing the entire photo shrinks the deer into little specks, which makes for a pretty boring photo. Bottom: Unlike Windows, Picasa offers a crop tool, letting you place a resizable rectangle around the most important portion of your photo—then save just that portion. By cropping out all of the photo except for the deer, for instance, this photo becomes small enough to send through email, yet still shows the portion that matters: those cute deer and their big ears.

Posting Photos on a Sharing Site Instead of emailing digital photos to a few select friends, some folks share their pet, party, and parade photos with the world. Photo-sharing sites give you an easy-to160

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use Web page to display your photos, whether sent from a computer or a camera phone. Send friends the link, and they can drop by to see your photos in a slide show, complete with your captions or annotations.

Sharing Photos with Friends

Here are some of the most popular. Flickr Six hundred thousand people worldwide dump their photos at Flickr (www.flickr. com), but the site’s much more than an online picture frame. Sure, Flickr offers the usual photo-sharing tools: send friends a link to your Flickr “photostream” for browsing or viewing in a slide show. Flickr even lets you annotate parts of photos, showing friends exactly where in the river that big lunker took the lure yesterday. But Flickr takes sharing to the extreme, making it easy for not only you, but also the entire world, to retrieve your photos. It shares photos through the use of tags— simple, descriptive words like “Large Green Beetle Costa Rica” that you append to your uploaded photos. Your tagged photos become part of the collective photographic consciousness, letting you and Costa Rican entomologists and bug fetishists worldwide locate your photos quickly and easily. Should you choose, your photos can remain hidden to all but selected friends. But most uploaders enjoy Flickr’s groupthink spirit, granting strangers access to almost everything. Visitors can view where you caught your bass, and leave a comment pointing out where they got lucky. Of course, visitors could just as easily leave a note saying, “You stink,” revealing a potential problem: Flickr’s open philosophy could easily sink into a pit of spam and crude vandalism. But so far, it’s grown quickly into an easily searchable, eight-million-photo library that’s much more than the sum of its parts. Free account holders may upload up to 20 MB of photos (roughly 20 to 100 photos, depending on their size) every month. Professional account members ($24.95 a year) may upload 2 GB (10 times as many photos) each month, send larger sized photos, and enjoy other privileges. Flickr’s partnership with Qoop (www.qoop.com) allows members to print bound books of their photos starting at $8.95 or print a poster for $9.99. Calendars, postcards, coffee mugs, and single prints are also available. Kodak EasyShare Gallery Whereas Flickr lets anybody with a camera walk in the door, Kodak’s EasyShare Gallery (www.kodakgallery.com) prefers privacy. Drop-by visitors must create an account before viewing any photos. The online site brims with more than 20 million members and one billion photos, partly from Kodak’s 2001 purchase of Ofoto, a popular online photo-sharing site. Renamed to Kodak EasyShare Gallery in mid-2005, the site also collects visitors

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straight from Windows XP: your My Pictures folder shuttles you to Kodak’s site, among others, when you click the “Order Photos Online” link (page 152). Like most online photo-sharing sites, the EasyShare Gallery lets you store, view, and share photos with specified friends and family. But it’s no secret that Kodak caters primarily to people who want to print digital photos on Kodak paper. (Or on Kodak’s line of calendars, cards, mugs, mouse pads, aprons, frames, and other swag.) In addition to printing photos, the site offers simple online editing tools for removing red-eye, cropping and rotating, and adjusting color. Toss on a few borders and effects, send your work to Kodak, and wait a few days for your prints to arrive in the mail. Fotolog Fotolog (www.fotolog.com) bills itself as a photo blog—a sort of online diary based on images, rather than words. To reduce the deluge of photos, members may upload only a single photo each day. As the Web site puts it, “Fotolog is more the kind of place where you’d put up a different photo of your children each day or each week so your friends and family could check in to see how they’re growing up.” Even with a limit of one photo per day, the site boasts more than a million “Fotologgers,” who’ve swollen the database to more than 44 million photos. The site doesn’t offer searches, so you need the account holder’s name to ferret out their photos from the jumble. Fotolog offers neither printing services nor professional accounts. So, how does it pay the bills? Three hobbyists run Fotolog, and request donations of $5 a month to help pay their bills.

Troubleshooting Digital Cameras When your digital camera’s not working properly, make sure the batteries are charged and a digital card’s in the camera’s memory slot. Once you’ve ruled out those two main culprits, move on to these: • Small or lower quality photos. Most cameras offer three or four quality settings, giving owners a choice between fewer, better-quality photos or packing more, lower-quality photos onto the storage card. Lower settings create smaller pictures, lower quality, or both. To increase a photo’s size and/or quality, poke through your camera’s menus and bump the quality to Fine or Best. Then buy a larger memory card, pronto. • Battery life. When your camera battery’s fading fast, and you want to take some more snaps before heading back to the recharger in the hotel room, turn off the camera’s LCD display while taking your photos. In fact, some people double their battery life by never using the LCD display. After all, the lowly viewfinder worked fine for previous generations of photographers. Plus, you can always crop your photos (page 158) for that perfect frame when it’s on your computer.

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Tip: When buying a new digital camera, always buy a second battery, too. That battery stays in your camera while the other one’s recharging, letting you shoot photos for twice as long.

Troubleshooting Digital Cameras

BUYERS’ GUIDE

Choosing a Digital Camera Today, advertisers, retailers, and your neighbor Fred all tout cameras by their megapixel rating—the number of dots (pixels) the camera creates when taking a picture. The ads rarely tout statistics on lenses, durability, or clarity of focus. The term megapixels, it seems, means everything. Or does it? More pixels means larger files translating to larger, more expensive memory cards to hold those whopping images— and a chunky hard drive to hold them all, as well. Although they can drain an owner’s pocketbook, cameras with more megapixels hold three advantages over their cousins with fewer megapixels. First, all those dots let you create some mighty large prints—if you ever need a poster of Cynthia holding the garden snail, you’re safe. But perhaps more important than print size, large megapixel images increase your chances of better photos. Hauling in that huge canvas of dots lets you crop (page 158) out

the snail, should you wish, and still end up with a fantastic picture of Cynthia. Low-megapixel cameras rob you of that chance. Finally, mega-megapixel cameras let you document that special moment in the best technological method currently possible. A 2-megapixel image will look pretty grainy on tomorrow’s TV sets. But a 6-megapixel photo stands a better chance of looking better for a few more years. While megapixels definitely matter when choosing a camera, they’re not the only thing that determines picture quality or the camera’s ease of use. Before buying that sexy new camera on impulse, compare reviews of cameras—and view the images they’ve taken—at Steve’s Digital Camera Site (www.steves-digicams.com), Digital Camera Resource Page (www.dcresource.com), and Digital Photography Review (www.dpreview.com.)

• Flash problems. The flash wastes battery power and robs your photo of the subtlety found in natural lighting. Use a tripod, if you carry one, or make one: press one side of the camera against a wall or table and tilt until you’ve framed the photo. If your camera has a strap, hold it in between your teeth, extend the camera to straighten the cord, and take your snap—the cord’s tension keeps the camera steadier than your hand. • Complicated menus. Digital cameras contain more menu options than a Chinese restaurant. If you think you’ve changed a setting for the worse, but don’t know which one, look for the menu’s magic fix-all: Return to Default Settings. Some older cameras lack this setting, so remove their batteries and let the camera sit for 48 hours. That should reset everything to the way it was when it came out of the box. • Date and time. As soon as you take your new digital camera out of the box, head for the camera’s menu and set the camera’s date and time. That information’s embedded into every photo, making it easy for digital photo programs to sort them by shooting date. Without it, your folder of digital photos becomes a pile of numbered files, with no easy way for you to sort them. Keep an eye on the date when you recharge the batteries; some older cameras forget it and need resetting.

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Camcorder Basics Before PCs, editing video was so labor intensive that most people didn’t bother, much to the dismay of family members forced to watch these uncut, unedited, and generally unwatchable marathons. Editing required recording bits of camcorder footage to a VCR in exactly the right sequence, and then recording the VCR’s tape back to the camcorder—a process consuming more time than the two-week Hawaiian vacation the video was meant to capture. But just as word processors simplified writing, video-editing programs transform video editing into a simple matter of dragging and dropping clips into their playing order. Editing clips is as easy as editing paragraphs, neatly trimming out belches from family picnics. The following sections explain how to connect your camcorder to your PC, dump its video, and work in Windows XP’s built-in video editor, Movie Maker, to transform isolated clips that tell a poignant story. Or, at the very least, an order that leaves out those embarrassing blank stretches of footage where you left the camcorder turned on in the bag.

Connect the Camcorder to Your PC The first obstacle to editing your video stems from its location: it’s on a tape, not in your PC. Moving the movie from the tape to the PC is fairly easy if you own a digital video (DV) camcorder. Those camcorders ease the transfer by storing your insightful picnic footage in the same language your PC speaks: digitally, using long strings of numbers. Analog camcorders—often that older model that served you well before you got a DV camcorder—don’t understand NumberSpeak, making the PC connection much more difficult. Here’s how to connect both types of camcorders to your PC.

Digital Video (DV) Camcorder Among the many small holes in their cases, nearly every digital camcorder sports a FireWire port—a high-speed communications channel that spits data through a cable into your PC’s matching FireWire port (page 40). If your PC lacks a FireWire port, they’re easy enough to install (page 25), and nearly any computer, camera, or office-supply store sells FireWire cables. When connecting a digital camcorder to a PC, FireWire’s more than a mere conduit for flowing video. The cable also lets you control your camcorder with your PC: click an onscreen Play button, for instance, and the camcorder you’ve left on the floor, tethered to your PC, dutifully begins playing back the video. Placing the camera’s controls onscreen lets you concentrate on your editing, rather than having to fiddle with the camera’s tiny buttons.

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Follow these steps to connect your digital camcorder to your PC. 1. Connect the FireWire cable between the ports on your PC and the turned-off camcorder.

Connect the Camcorder to Your PC

Normally, FireWire devices are hot-swappable—you can leave them turned on when plugging and unplugging them. Some camcorders prove the exception, however, and generate small sparks that can burn out the circuitry. To be safe, keep your camcorder turned off when plugging it into a PC. 2. Turn on your camcorder and set it to VCR or Playback mode. Your PC immediately sends the welcome message shown in Figure 5-9, asking you which program should handle the chores of copying your footage to your PC. That message means the connection’s a success—definitely a good sign. If you’re already familiar with a video-editing program listed on the menu, click its name and then click OK to launch it. For instance, if you choose “Capture Video using Windows Movie Maker,” Windows XP automatically opens that program and leaves you at step 3 of the ““Capture Video” section (page 170). Otherwise, choose “Take no action.” That lets you choose a video-editing program at your leisure—either Movie Maker or something else—and use that program’s menus to import your video. Figure 5-9: When you connect a FireWire cable between the FireWire ports on your PC and your digital camcorder, Windows XP immediately notices, and offers to grab the video using one of the video-editing programs on your PC. If your PC came with a DVD burner, your PC may also include a video editor with more features than Windows XP’s bundled Movie Maker. Try them both to see which one you prefer, and then use that program to grab your video.

If Windows XP doesn’t greet your camcorder with enthusiasm (aka the Digital Video Device window shown in Figure 5-9), make sure you’ve connected the cables tightly, and the camcorder’s both turned on and set to play video—not record it. To make sure your camcorder didn’t fall asleep into Standby mode, turn it off and on again.

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If you still don’t see a greeting, open My Computer. If you spot your camcorder’s name listed as an icon, the connection’s fine. No icon? Then something’s wrong with your cable, the FireWire ports, or your camcorder itself. Now’s a good time to pull out your camcorder’s manual and start looking in the index under “PC connections.” You may need to tweak a menu setting.

Analog Camcorder Analog camcorders don’t store their images as numbers (that is, digitally), which means you need to hire a translator so the device can talk to your computer. Translators fall into three categories: • Third-party conversion services. Dropping off the tapes at a video-conversion service is your easiest, but most expensive, option. Found in the “Video Tape Duplication and Reproduction” section of nearly every city’s yellow pages, the technicians at these shops read comic books as your tapes play through a digital converter. A few days later, they hand you a few DVDs containing your unedited digital footage—along with a hefty bill for their Advanced Video Technician services. • Video capture devices. The second, less-expensive way, is to install some type of video capture device (page 25), costing between $50 and $100, to your PC. Some video capture devices install into your PC as cards; others plug into a USB port. Both types offer two ports: one for sound, and one for video. Connect a video cable between the video ports on the camcorder and the capture device, then connect an audio cable between the audio port on the camcorder and your PC’s line-in port (page 205). Run the capture software, play your tape, and read your own comic books while your PC saves the video to a file on your hard drive. • The digital camcorder solution. The third and easiest transfer method comes if you own a digital camcorder. Connect your analog camcorder to your digital camcorder and convert the footage yourself by following these steps: 1. Locate your analog camcorder’s Sound and Video Out ports. Ever watched your analog camcorder’s videos on your TV? Then you connected the camcorder to the TV using these same ports, which are usually called RCA or S-Video ports (both of them are discussed on page 96). 2. Find your digital camcorder’s Sound and Video In ports. Unless you’ve recorded TV shows or video tapes onto your digital camcorder, you may need to crack the camcorder’s manual to find these—especially on tiny camcorders where one port doubles as an In port and an Out port, depending on a menu setting.

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3. Connect the analog camcorder’s Sound and Video Out ports to your digital camcorder’s Sound and Video In ports.

Editing Video

Use the cables that came with either camcorder to connect their ports. If the two camcorders use different types of ports, buy some cable converters, which are available at Radio Shack and most stereo stores. 4. Connect a FireWire cable between the FireWire ports on your digital camcorder and your PC. 5. Set your PC’s video capture software to record a live video stream. Windows XP’s built-in Movie Maker software (Start ➝ All Programs ➝ Movie Maker) can handle the job: Choose File ➝ Capture Video, the same option you use when recording a digital camcorder’s own tape. 6. Push the analog camcorder’s Play button. Your analog camcorder plays the video into your digital camcorder, which quickly converts the incoming footage to digital and does one of two things:

• Sends the video to the PC. If you see your analog camcorder’s footage playing on your PC, you’re in great shape: your digital camcorder supports DV Passthrough mode, which passes the incoming video straight to your PC. You’re lucky, as that saves you considerable time. • Records it to tape. If your digital camcorder doesn’t support DV Passthrough, or you can’t find that mode on its menus, then forget about the PC connection for now. Just tell the digital camcorder to record the incoming video to a digital tape. When you finish recording the tape, play it back for the PC to grab, just as you would for any other digital tape. Once you move the analog video into your PC as digital video, fire up Movie Maker 2, described next, and convert your raw, newly digitized footage into that sensitive, artistic statement you’ve been yearning to share with the world.

Editing Video Windows XP’s free movie editor, the imaginatively named “Windows Movie Maker,” does an adequate job of stringing together movie clips. The latest version, “Windows Movie Maker 2,” includes a wide variety of editing tricks to spice up your footage. Some effects go overboard, but most audiences prefer even a corny edited video over a boring, unedited video. Windows XP’s Service Pack 2 (page 480) automatically upgrades Movie Maker to Movie Maker 2. To check the version on your PC, choose Start ➝ All Programs ➝ Movie Maker ➝ Help ➝ About. If you’re not using Service Pack 2, download Movie Maker 2 for free at Windows XP’s downloads area (http://www.microsoft. com/windowsxp/downloads). Chapter 5: Digital Cameras, Camcorders, and Webcams PCs: The Missing Manual, eMatter Edition Copyright © 2008 O’Reilly & Associates, Inc. All rights reserved.

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Windows Movie Maker 2 leads you through editing video in three separate phases: • Capture Video. Movie Maker scoops video from your camcorder or other video files on your PC. This step also lets you import sound files for background music, as well as digital photos, which come in handy as backdrops for opening and closing credits. • Edit Movie. The most labor-intensive part, here’s where you drag and drop your best clips onto a “storyboard”—a long strip representing your finished movie—rearranging the clips to create your actual movie. • Finish Movie. The easiest part—this one’s all up to Movie Maker itself. The program reads in your edited clips, creates smooth transitions between them, adds your soundtrack or sound effects, and saves it all into a movie. In fact, it lets you save the movie in several sizes: tiny files that fit on a camera phone or a huge ones aimed at a widescreen TV. Note: Movie Maker works best when you’ve adjusted your monitor’s “Screen resolution” setting (page 106) to 1024 × 768.

Here’s how to handle each of those three steps.

Capture Video Although Movie Maker’s Task Pane calls this step “Capture Video,” it’s really about collecting all your movie’s raw materials, including video, digital photos, and music. Everybody knows how much music enhances a movie, but photos add interest, as well. For instance, a photo of your vacation destination’s entrance sign, be it Motel 6 or Yosemite National Park, works well as an opener for a travel video. To import photos or sound files, choose File ➝ Import into Collections. Select the files you want, and Media Player tosses them into the Collections area along its right side. Gathering photos and sounds requires lots of pointing and clicking on your part, but Windows Movie Maker takes care of capturing the video on your camcorder. To tell Movie Maker to copy the video from your camcorder into your PC, follow these steps: 1. Open Movie Maker (Start ➝ All Programs ➝ Movie Maker) and choose File ➝ Capture Video. This tells Movie Maker to search your PC for any gadget that’s storing useable video. 2. Click the icon for the device containing your video, usually the camcorder, and then click Next. If your PC can capture video in several different ways—an attached Webcam, a video capture card, and a digital camcorder, for instance—Movie Maker stops

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to ask you which device has the goods (see Figure 5-10, top). Click the one containing your video—most likely your digital camcorder.

Editing Video

Figure 5-10: Top: Choose your digital camcorder icon on the Video Capturer Device screen. Or, if you’re capturing from a Webcam or video capture card, choose that icon instead, and Movie Maker immediately lets you adjust that device’s settings. Second from top: Choose a file name and location where you want to store your incoming video. Third from top: Choose the video quality settings for your movie. Bottom: When you tell Movie Maker to begin the capture process, the program automatically rewinds your digital camcorder and starts recording from the beginning of your footage. Be sure to turn on the “Create clips when wizard finishes” checkbox. That tells Movie Maker to break each shot into separate clips, which makes them much easier to edit.

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3. Enter a file name and folder for your incoming video, and then click Next. Type a file name for your incoming video, and a stashing spot on your hard disk (Figure 5-10, second from the top). Movie Maker normally stashes the footage in your My Videos folder, but click Browse to choose someplace else— perhaps a second, larger hard drive (page 255), if your PC has one. Captured video fills several gigabytes of space fairly quickly. 4. Choose Video Settings and then click Next. Naturally, you want the best quality video, but that can easily fill your entire hard drive with one video of Aunt Daisy’s visit. To keep your video to a manageable size, tailor its quality by choosing one of these three options: • Best quality for playback on my computer. This option offers a good compromise between quality and space and creates reasonably sized videos that play back well on a PC. The resulting file won’t be small enough to email or offer for download on a Web site, but it’ll look good when played on a PC. • Digital device format. The highest quality offered. Choose this for movies you want to burn to a DVD. Also choose this option even if you’re still saving your coins for a DVD burner; when you eventually buy the device, you’ll be able to burn your stored footage to DVDs. Finally, remember that Movie Maker can store your edited movie back onto your digital camcorder (using a different tape than the original, of course, since you don’t want to overwrite your raw footage). If you plan on performing that maneuver (see page 175 for details), you’ll want to pick this setting. • Other settings. Designed for serious video hounds, this option tailors the file size to fit more esoteric options—three different sizes of Pocket PC screen, for instance, or playing back on a computer network from a server, which is handy mostly for corporate settings. 5. Choose between capturing automatically or manually, and then click Next. If you have some time, choose to capture the entire tape automatically: Movie Maker rewinds to the tape’s beginning, if necessary, and begins collecting everything on the tape. (Want to collect only the first few minutes or so? When you reach that point, click the Stop Capture button, as explained in step 7.) To pick and choose a few selected tidbits from the tape, choose manually. Then, you start and stop the tape by clicking Movie Maker’s onscreen buttons, alternatively clicking the Start Capture and Stop Capture buttons to grab the good parts. 6. Turn on the “Create clips when wizard finishes” checkbox. This little checkmark makes all the difference. Turn on this checkbox for most hand-shot videos—family gatherings, sports games, trips, and other things you’ve filmed. That tells Movie Maker to keep track of when you filmed each shot and break each segment into a separate clip. Turn off this option only when you want your original recording left intact.

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Note: Although you see separate clips in your work area, Movie Maker still saves your imported video as one big file using the name and location you choose in step 1.

Editing with Movie Maker

7. Click Stop Capture when Movie Maker has captured all the video you need. When the ball game ends, click this button to stop Movie Maker before it begins capturing all that “Cat Playing with Yarn Ball” footage you used to pad the end of your tape. Movie Maker stops recording, and, if you chose the “Create clips” option in step 6, spends a few moments breaking your video into clips. GEM IN THE ROUGH

Creating a Slideshow in Movie Maker Although designed for video, Movie Maker works well with digital photos, too, letting you stick them between video clips for backgrounds or transitions.

Then drag the photos and music files onto the storyboard, stringing them together in the order you want them to play back.

Or, you may want to create a slideshow entirely of digital photos, complete with transitions, music, and your stunning narration.

To add narration, choose Tools ➝ Narrate Timeline. Speak into your PC’s microphone to record memories about each photo, saving each narrated photo as a separately named clip in your project.

Importing photos works much like importing video into Movie Maker. But instead of choosing File ➝ Import Video, choose File ➝ Add to Collections. Choose your best digital photos, whether taken with a digital camera or scanned in. Repeat the process to add music files, as well. Everything you import appears in your Collections area.

When you’re through, add some transitions (page 174) between your photos, and choose File ➝ Save Movie File to make Movie Maker compile your raw materials into a complete movie.

Editing with Movie Maker Editing a movie is like threading chunks of meat and vegetables onto a shish kabob. You cut each piece to the right size, position each one onto a long skewer so the flavors intermingle, and, hopefully, wind up with something tasty when you’re done cooking. Similarly, you take your movie’s raw materials (your imported video, digital photos, and music), cut each piece to the right size, and position each one in an order that enhances the rest. When you’re done, Movie Maker cooks your work into a finished movie. Movie Maker’s Collection area, shown in Figure 5-11, serves as the platter holding all your parts. The Storyboard along the bottom of Figure 5-11 serves as the skewer, where you thread the parts together. For a sneak preview of any clip or

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Task pane

sound in your Collection area, double-click it, and it plays in the Preview area along the right side of the window. Collection pane with video, sounds and photos

Monitor pane for previews

Contents pane (toggles between Timeline and Storyboard, shown here)

Figure 5-11: Movie Maker lets you work in three separate areas: the Collection area, the Storyboard, and the Preview window. All your imported clips, songs, and photos live in the Collection area. Weed out any awful clips from the Collection area by right-clicking them and choosing Delete. To view or hear a particular clip in the Collection area, double-click it; the Preview window to the right immediately begins playing it. In addition to the Preview window’s standard Stop and Play controls, the Next Frame and Previous Frame buttons let you find the best moment to start and stop each clip. When you familiarize yourself with the content in each of your clips, drag them onto the large squares in the Storyboard area, piecing them together into a movie. Rearrange clips on the Storyboard by dragging them to different spots as needed.

Follow these steps to assemble your clips into a movie. 1. Drag your clips onto the Storyboard in a rough order for your movie. The Collection area shows only the first frame of each clip. To remember how a particular clip looked, give it a double-click and watch the Preview pane. If it’s worth including in the movie, drag it onto the Storyboard below. Got a stinker? Right-click the clip and then choose Delete. Changed your mind about something you’ve just added to the Storyboard? Drag it back to the Collection area. Don’t worry if a clip needs a little editing; right now, just capture the movie’s general flow.

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2. Trim each clip. Most of your clips probably need a bit of editing. Your camcorder sometimes jiggles a bit when you press the Record button, for instance, or the pitcher takes too long before throwing the ball. Once you place a clip on the Storyboard, Movie Maker lets you trim away its boring sections.

Editing with Movie Maker

To apply the knife, switch from Storyboard to Timeline view: click Show Timeline (Figure 5-12, top), and Movie Maker displays your clips by their length. Longer clips consume more space on the Timeline than shorter ones. Figure 5-12: Top: The film strip along Movie Maker’s bottom edge toggles between two views, each designed for different work. The Storyboard view shows each clip as a single frame, which is handy when placing your clips into the correct playback sequence. To change where a clip appears in your movie, drag it to a different location on the strip. Bottom: The Timeline view shows your clips by their length, so you immediately see when one long clip needs trimming to keep the pacing even. Shorten a clip by clicking it, and then drag inward or outward on the little black triangle poking from each edge. Below the filmstrip lies your Audio/Music layer, waiting for you to add a soundtrack with a quick drop of an MP3 file.

Drag either of these triangles to adjust clip length

To trim a clip’s beginning or end, click it; the clip sprouts a “handle,” a little black triangle on each side of the clip. Drag the triangles inward to trim the beginning or end. For instance, to edit out the camcorder jigglies from your clip’s beginning, drag the black triangle inward from the clip’s left edge. As you drag, the Preview window updates to show the clip’s new opening frame. When you’ve removed the jiggles, stop dragging. Click the Preview window’s Play button to check your edit. Dragged too far? Drag it back, and Movie Maker restores the trimmed edge. Chapter 5: Digital Cameras, Camcorders, and Webcams PCs: The Missing Manual, eMatter Edition Copyright © 2008 O’Reilly & Associates, Inc. All rights reserved.

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Admittedly, the Timeline’s small size makes for clumsy edits. For more precise editing, spread out your view by choosing View ➝ Zoom In or pressing Page Down. The Timeline expands, letting that one little clip fill the entire screen. A drag on the black triangle then trims the clip one frame at a time. Tip: To edit a clip’s boring middle section, but keep the beginning and ending, play the clip in the Preview window until the boring stuff starts to appear. Click Pause, and then choose Clip ➝ Split (or press Ctrl+L). Movie Maker neatly breaks that clip into two sections. Edit the tail end of the first section, and the beginning of the second section, to remove that boring part.

3. Add Transitions between each clip. Transitions control how one clip moves to the next. As your movie stands now, one clip stops, and then another immediately starts. But just as new word processor fans immediately start decorating their letters with fancy fonts, new movie editor fans quickly add wild transitions between their clips: one clip shatters into pieces, for instance, revealing the next clip “beneath” it. To see Movie Maker’s frenzy of transitions, choose Video Transitions from the drop-down menu in the Collections area. Movie Maker temporarily replaces your collection of clips with transitions. Double-click any transition to view its effect in the Preview window. Add your favorite transitions by switching to Storyboard view, shown in Figure 5-12, top; then drag the transition to the small squares between the frames. Tip: To avoid making your video look like a TV commercial, stick with simple fades between major scene changes.

4. Add opening titles and credits. You’ve assembled your movie’s order, edited the clips, added the soundtrack, and sprinkled in a few transitions. To begin wrapping it up, add your opening title and ending credits by choosing Tools ➝ Titles and Credits. Movie Maker guides you through typing in your title and credits and inserting them anywhere in the movie—the beginning and end (if you want to go for the traditional look), or overlaid on certain clips (if you’re looking for something a bit more artsy). 5. Add the soundtrack. Unless you took careful pains both when filming and editing, your movie’s a jumble of cut-off sentences. Cover up the hubbub with a soundtrack: drag a music file from your Collections area onto the Timeline’s Audio/Music layer, which is located right below your movie.

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Drag the end of the soundtrack inward to match the ending of your movie. Then, with a deft flourish, give it a right-click and choose Fade Out so the music tapers off to coincide with your movie’s ending.

Editing with Movie Maker

6. Save your movie. Movie Maker offers several ways to save your movie, which you can get to by choosing File ➝ Save Movie File. Unfortunately, your movie’s probably too big for any of the listed choices but the first and last. • My Computer. This saves your edited movie onto your hard drive. (Your captured, unedited version remains on your hard drive, too.) Choose this option if your PC has a writable DVD drive, and then burn it with your DVD-burning software. (Windows XP requires third-party software to burn DVDs.) • Recordable CD. This option fits your movie onto a CD, cutting its quality, if necessary, to fit a CD’s 700-MB size limit. Microsoft stores the movie in its own High-MAT format, playable on Windows PCs and a tiny handful of Panasonic DVD players. • Email. Since most email accounts can barely send a high-quality digital photo (page 158), Windows shrinks your video to a postage stamp before popping it into an email. • The Web. Again, Windows saves it to a miniscule size, and then tries to get you to sign up with their partner, Neptune, to store your video on the Internet—for a fee, of course. • DV camera. Your best option by far if you don’t own a DVD burner, this setting saves your edited video to a fresh tape in your digital camcorder at the highest quality. When you finally buy your DVD burner, import the edited version from the tape and burn it to the DVD.

Troubleshooting Movie Maker PCs have enough trouble handling large digital photos. Movies pack anywhere from 15 to 30 photos into a single second of digital footage. To edit movies successfully, your PC needs a large drive, a fast video card, and something for you to do while waiting for your PC to process those fancy transitions between your stunning vacation clips. Movie Maker works best on a Pentium 4; the video may appear choppy on slower computers or take exceptionally long to save to a file. Movie Maker may make the following complaints while you’re working; here’s how to solve them. • FAT32 4 GB file size error. This message pops up when your captured video file has swollen larger than 4 GB—which is larger than the limit of your hard drive’s storage system, known affectionately as FAT32. The solution is to stop, close Movie Maker, and convert your hard drive to the more modern storage system known as NTFS (page 275). Then restart your PC, reload Movie Maker, and Chapter 5: Digital Cameras, Camcorders, and Webcams PCs: The Missing Manual, eMatter Edition Copyright © 2008 O’Reilly & Associates, Inc. All rights reserved.

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start over. Newer PCs with large hard drives rarely display this message, but it turns up on older PCs, laptops, or newer PCs with small hard drives (40 GB and less). GEM IN THE ROUGH

Passing the Director’s Job to the Robot Windows Movie Maker does a fairly good job of walking you through the process of editing a movie, but sometimes those controls, transitions, effects, and timing decisions can seem overwhelming. If you’ve imported your video but don’t know where to start with all the controls, let Movie Maker’s AutoMovie take over. Choosing Tools ➝ AutoMovie whittles down your decisions to one: what style of movie do you want? Movie Maker offers five choices: • Flip and Slide. Movie Maker links your clips with slick transitions. For instance, one clip curls out to reveal the new one beneath. The end result can be a little amateurish, but it gives you an idea of the effect transitions have on a project. • Highlights Movie. A good choice for starters. This option sticks with basic editing tricks: simple cuts, fades, a quick title, and your own credits.

• Old Movie. Special effects “age” the video to resemble 30s flicks. Good for costume parties, but not much more. • Sports Highlights. Here, Movie Maker trims everything but your quick zooms and fast pans, capturing only the moments when you went wild at the controls. Choose your style, as well as any background music and titles, and Media Player takes the chair, assembling your clips to create its own director’s cut. You’ll probably cringe at the results. But looking at the finished movie gives you an example of how the clips, transitions, and music all come together on the storyboard to create a video. Whether AutoMovie leaves you with a good starting place or a bad example, it’s a starting point.

• Music Video. This cuts your clips to the pace of your soundtrack. Fast-paced music creates quick cuts; slow music adds a relaxed touch with longer clips.

• Can’t capture video automatically. Movie Maker usually controls your digital camcorder with confidence when automatically capturing video. But if your digital camcorder brushes off its advances, switch to Manual capture mode (page 170). Rewind the camcorder yourself, push its Play button, and click Movie Maker’s Start Capture button. • Not enough disk space available. This message appears when your hard drive’s too stuffed to save your edited video. That leaves you three options: cut the movie’s length by snipping clips, choose a lower quality setting to save space, or buy an external hard drive (page 266) to hold your movie.

Webcams Attracting voyeurs worldwide, Webcams provide a Web site’s visitors with a regularly updated glimpse into another place. Thousands of free Webcams, viewable

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from Web sites worldwide compete for your attention, dishing up live-action ant farm excitement, sleeping cats, and even volcanic eruptions—if you happen to be watching at the right moment.

Webcams

Most Webcams just take snaps of the action every 30 seconds or so, automatically updating the Web site with the latest photo at regular intervals. The fanciest Web sites display a live video stream, just as if you were behind a camcorder’s lens. Posting a video stream is much more complicated than posting a single picture, so “live video” Webcams are still the exception, rather than the rule. Setting up your own Webcam takes considerable time and tweaking to make everything run correctly. Once you set the thing up, however, your work’s over. Your PC automatically grabs an updated picture from your video camera and posts it on your Web site to share with the world. The following sections take you through everything you need to add a Webcam to your PC, and then show you how to share your pictures with the world.

Video Camera Most Webcams are really just video cameras. They create video streams—live movies of whatever they may be aiming at, be it a waterfall, a massive swell, or a sleeping cat. When you attach these to your own PC, you can watch the entire video stream. Your PC extracts a single image from that video stream every 30 seconds, and then sends that particular picture to your Web site for the rest of the world to see. When installed, most Webcams place their icon in Windows XP’s My Computer program; open My Computer to see the camera’s icon. Double-click the camera’s icon to view the stream and adjust your camera’s position slightly should the cat move. Webcams fall into the following general categories; a few models are shown in Figure 5-13. • Desktop Webcam. At the lowest end of the scale, small, often ball-shaped video cameras (as shown in Figure 5-13, top) cost less than $50 at most computer or office supply stores. Once plugged into a USB port and taped to your monitor, the Webcam lets your friends watch you during instant messaging chats (see the online appendix, “Other Cool Things You Can Do Online,” available on the “Missing CD” page at www.missingmanuals.com). The small camera’s ease of use comes with some drawbacks, as they don’t allow much (or any) control over focus, brightness, or clarity. But, hey, at least some include their own doublesided sticky tape. • Digital camcorder. If you already own a digital camcorder, connect it to your PC’s FireWire port (page 40) to create a makeshift Webcam that’s a huge leap in quality from the desktop Webcam models. • Network Webcam. Most Webcams remain tethered to your PC with a short USB or video cable. Network Webcams come with a network port so you can plug them right into your network. Since network cables can extend for hundreds of feet, network Webcams can sit far from your PC, which can be handy

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for rooftop or front-door surveillance. These models are more expensive than desktop Webcams and include extra circuitry to convert the camera’s video into your PC’s network signals. Cheap models start around $200, with prices rising quickly for higher-quality cameras. Figure 5-13: Top: Logitech’s QuickCam Express ($50) doesn’t offer large, clear pictures or automatic focus. But it’s fine for close quarters or instant chat programs where the video looks a little grainy, anyway. Middle: The Linksys WVC54g wireless Webcam ($200) comes in handy when mounting the camera far away from the PC—on the rooftop, for instance, letting you view the front door or yard. Bottom: On the high-end, Axis Communications’ $1,669.99 roof-mounted, fully trackable Webcam sends streaming video accessible over the Internet. You can view many network Webcams, both wired and wireless, from any Internetconnected PC. Therefore it’s important to password-protect your network Webcam if you don’t want strangers peeking in.

• Wireless Webcams. Wireless Webcams remove the PC’s tether altogether, and convert the video to network signals, which the camera then transmits wirelessly to your PC. Wireless Webcams grant free movement, letting you move the camera to the room’s other bookshelf during the party, for instance, or you can attach it to the cat’s collar for a CatCrawlCam. • Viewer-controllable Webcams. The high-end of the scale. These cameras offer “point and zoom” controls to let site visitors watch all angles of the action, be it

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cars in the Plantation Pancake House parking lot or surfers zipping between the Ocean Beach Pier’s pillars. Logitech’s computer-controlled desktop model, QuickCam Orbit, sells for around $100. Axis Communications (www.axis.com) sells high-quality outdoor models costing more than $1,500.

Webcams

Video Capture Software Once you plug in your Webcam, Windows XP lets you view the camera’s images immediately—just double-click its icon inside My Computer. To share those images with others, you need extra software. Many Webcams come with their own software. Alternatively, instant messaging software automatically recognizes any Webcam installed on your PC and handles the chores of transmitting video to your friends during chats. But uploading photos to a Web site requires more work on your part, as well as Webcam software to periodically grab the camera’s images and upload them to the Internet. Luckily, Webcam software’s quite inexpensive, and some Webcams even toss free software into their boxes. If yours doesn’t have any, Microsoft offers the free but minimalist Timershot software (http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/ downloads/powertoys/xppowertoys.mspx). For a simple Webcam that uploads photos automatically to the Internet, Timershot may be all you need. The more advanced TinCam Webcam software (www.tincam.com) offers easier controls and more features, letting you grab images from two or more cameras simultaneously, send video streams, and send files to several Internet destinations. TinCam offers a free trial for 30 days, letting you toy with the settings before committing to the full $19 price.

Internet Connection, Web Site, and a Web Page Your Webcam and its software chug along as a team, letting you peek at your PC for a view of an exotic remote location, should your camera be pointing that way. But to place that view onto the Internet, you need Web space (see the online appendix, “Other Cool Things You Can Do Online,” available on the “Missing CD” page at www.missingmanuals.com)—a little storage area on the Internet for housing files, including a Web site. You may already have some but don’t know it: many ISPs offer their customers free Web space. Most limit that space to between 5 and 15 MB, which is more than enough for a photo. Setting up your Webcam software so that you can funnel images to a Web site works much like setting up a Web browser (page 375) or email program (page 352). The Webcam software demands these five all-important pieces of knowledge: Note: The following information serves as your “house key” for entering your Web space. Write it down and store it in a very safe place.

• Host address. Your Web site provider gives you this. It specifies your Web space’s parking place on the Internet. The address looks like ftp.myisp.com, members.isp.net, or something similar. Chapter 5: Digital Cameras, Camcorders, and Webcams PCs: The Missing Manual, eMatter Edition Copyright © 2008 O’Reilly & Associates, Inc. All rights reserved.

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• User name. Your Web site provider gives you your user name, too. You probably already use this same name to log onto the Internet, or perhaps to check your email. • Password. Your Web site provider also gives you your password. Just like the user name, this is often the same password you use to log onto the Internet or check your email. • Folder name. Web space lets you create folders, just like on your PC. You probably create this folder yourself when you create your Web site. • File name. Most Webcam software automatically supplies you with the name of the file that contains your snapped image. POWER USERS’ CLINIC

Digitizing Old Movies Think twice before volunteering to digitize those old reels of film sitting in Aunt Hannah’s closet. That quick-and-easy job you imagine may not be so simple in reality. The pros digitize old films with a telecine, a pricey, specialized movie scanner that digitizes each frame at a high quality, and then quickly stitches the frames back into a digital movie. Unfortunately, these pros charge upwards of $200 per hour. Cheaper film-to-DVD transfer services, dubbed “Transfer Mills” by the pros, simply point a digital camcorder at a wall and capture the movie as it plays back. You, too, can scan each frame and join them into a movie with Windows Movie Maker. But since old films contain 24 frames each second, you may not live long enough to finish the job. To speed things up, you can point your own digital camcorder at the wall and capture the projected movie. That gives you time to play with the settings until everything looks right, a luxury missing when you depend on the Transfer Mills. But before whipping out your wall cleaner, consider these obstacles: • Find a projector. Old films traditionally outlast their projectors. If Aunt Hannah’s projector died years ago, you can probably find an old one on eBay (www. ebay.com). But without a thorough cleaning, aging projectors can jam, incinerating your treasured film. Call a local camera repair shop for recommendations on projector cleaning and tune-ups.

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• Frame rate. Old movie cameras and today’s camcorders don’t capture video with the same number of frames per second, leading to flicker. To compensate, flip through your digital camcorder’s menus for its Shutter Speed setting. Then, while watching the projected movie through the digital camcorder’s LCD screen, try different shutter speed settings until the flicker disappears. • Focus. To keep the projected scenery from fooling your camcorder’s autofocus, switch the camcorder to Manual Focus. Then focus it on the projected image. • White balance. Change this setting from Automatic to Manual, or try the Daylight setting. You may want to experiment for best results. Point the projector directly at the wall, or at a piece of white matte paper on the wall. Set up the camcorder on a tripod directly above the projector, adjust its settings, and then film the projected movie. Practice a few times, tweaking the camcorder’s settings until everything looks good. When you capture everything, run your movie through Windows Movie Maker, and then burn it to DVD. The resulting movie certainly won’t look as good as those restored by specialists. But the price is right, and at least you can finally view your old movies’ content, rather than their containers.

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Enter all five items into your Webcam software so it knows where to send the image, and then tell it how often to send each new image. Once the image appears on your site—constantly updated courtesy of your Webcam software—you need one more thing: a page that displays the image. Most Webcam software, including TinCam, include sample Web pages. Place that Web page in your Web space and list that Web page on your Web site’s menu so visitors can choose to see it in their Web browsers.

Webcams

Troubleshooting Webcam Problems Windows XP makes setting up Webcams fairly easy. When Windows XP recognizes the camera, it automatically passes that information along to your Webcam software. But when Windows XP doesn’t recognize your camera, you’re in trouble. Fortunately, that rarely happens. Windows XP manages to stay on good terms with most USB devices (page 34), recognizing them as soon as you plug them in. If it doesn’t recognize your Webcam, you probably need to install its latest driver—the piece of software that lets Windows XP and your Webcam communicate on cheery terms. Download the driver from the Webcam manufacturer’s Web site and run the driver’s installation program.

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chapter

Chapter 6

6

Scanners

Printers let you move work from your monitor to paper. But when you need to move things in the other direction—from the printed page to your monitor— nothing beats a scanner. Scanners once lived only on the desktops of graphics professionals; today, they’re so inexpensive that they’re just as affordable as a printer. For a growing crowd of consumers, they’ve also become just as indispensable. And scanners come with one advantage that almost all other PC accessories lack: no lingering costs. Scanners don’t require periodic refreshing of paper, ink, batteries, or memory cards. They’re especially handy for people without digital cameras; a $75 scanner lets them email their photos to friends, just like the hip crowd does with their $200 digital cameras. Scanners also provide the missing link for your modem’s built-in fax, letting you fax printed letters and forms. (For tips on using your fax, check out the online appendix, “Other Cool Things You Can Do Online,” available on the “Missing CD” page at www.missingmanuals.com.) Plus, scanners turn your PC into a makeshift copy machine: scan an item, and then send it to your printer for quick copies. This chapter explains how to choose a scanner, set it up, and scan color and black and white photos, as well as line drawings, receipts, and pretty much anything else that fits on a scanner’s bed.

Choosing a Scanner You’ll find these three types of scanners on the shelves at most office supply and computer stores.

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Installing a Scanner

• Flatbed (price range: $50 to $200). Flatbed scanners hide a large plate of glass beneath a large lid. Lift the lid, place your photo or other item on the glass, and close the lid. When you tell Windows to scan, the scanner converts your photo or other item into an image file. Flatbed scanners are the most popular model for consumers because they work so well at the most common tasks: scanning in occasional photos, articles, receipts, and handwritten documents. Once you scan something, you can save it, reprint it, or send it to friends or coworkers. • Sheet-fed (price range: $400 to $1,000). Sheet-fed scanners are built for scanning lots of items quickly. Instead of standing by the scanner, constantly lifting and closing its lid for each scan, you simply insert your stack of pages into the scanner’s feeder tray. The scanner’s spinning rollers suck in each page, scan it, spit it back out, and grab the next. Built for speed, they carry a sports car price tag compared to flatbed models. Unless they come with a detachable document feeder, sheet-fed scanners are limited to scanning sheets of paper—ruling out quick scans of vintage album covers, bound books, cloth, flowers, or other items that end up on the flatbeds of the adventurous. • All-in-One (price range: $150 to $300). These scanners come as part of an allin-one printer (page 117), which places a scanner atop a printer, and then throws in the smarts of a copier and fax machine. All-in-one models pack four gadgets into something that costs much less than the sum of its parts. These devices are heavy, making them awkward to carry in the front door, as well as move from one room to another. And the individual components are never as versatile as the dedicated models. But if you’re shopping for both a scanner and printer, they’re certainly convenient, and you can’t beat the cost savings.

Installing a Scanner Installing a scanner works pretty much like installing a digital camera, but with one exception: Windows XP embraces most digital cameras as soon as they’re plugged in. Installing a scanner, by contrast, works better if you install the scanner’s bundled software before plugging in the scanner. Follow these steps to connect your scanner to your PC. Tip: Lost your scanner’s connection cable? Most scanners use USB or FireWire cables, which are available at any computer or office supply store.

1. Install the scanner’s installation software. Install the software before plugging in the scanner. That way Windows XP recognizes your new device as soon as you plug it in. 2. Unlock the scanner, if necessary. To keep the UPS man from banging around a scanner’s large and sensitive lenses, most scanners come with a built-in mechanical locking mechanism 184

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inside that clenches all the delicate parts together tightly. You need to unlock the scanner before using it, or you’ll hear frightening grinding sounds.

Installing a Scanner

Unlocking most models simply means turning a switch along one side of the scanner; on more advanced models, you need to unscrew a panel along one edge of the scanner to access the switch. Some locking switches hide beneath a strip of bright-plastic tape that says, “Unlock before use.” UP TO SPEED

Scanner Buzzwords Surprise, surprise. Scanner manufacturers tend to exaggerate on their specification sheets about as much as their digital camera brethren do. Many of the touted technical terms are simply buzzwords that look good to the marketing department. For real proof of a scanner’s merit when you’re shopping, bring along a photo, a printed page, and a page that combines both—a magazine page, for instance. Scan each one, and let your own eyes be the judge. You’ll see these words turn up most often on the sales sheet when you’re shopping for a scanner: • Resolution. Just as digital cameras and camcorders proudly advertise their “zoom” rating, resolution determines how closely the scanner looks at images. Unfortunately, there’s no way of knowing whether a scanner’s claimed resolution of 2400 dots per inch (dpi) will produce a clear close-up or a blurry one. That’s where your own eyes bear witness. Also, keep in mind that the vast majority of your scans will be from 75 to 300 dots per inch, a resolution that doesn’t come close to the 2400 dpi that many scanner companies brag about. • Attachments. Some scanners offer special attachments for scanning slides, film, and other oddly shaped items. The attachments hold the items

in place to avoid crooked images while scanning and help speed up the process. Some flatbed scanners come with detachable “document feeders” that turn them into sheet-fed scanners, handy for scanning long reports. • USB 2.0/FireWire. Look for a scanner that plugs into your PC’s FireWire or USB 2.0 ports rather than the older USB 1.1 ports. These scanners are about 40 times faster than the older, USB 1.1 scanners. If you own an older PC, you can easily install a USB 2.0 or FireWire port (see page 25). • Scanning area. This refers to the size of the glass bed upon which you place your document. Most people never need anything larger than the standard 8.5 × 11 inch space, which perfectly frames a sheet of office paper. But if you’ll be scanning legal documents, vintage album covers, artwork, or other large items, look for a model with an appropriately sized scanning area. • Color. Most scanners boast 48-bit color, another phrase that means little. Most monitors can display only 32-bit color, meaning you’ll never be able to see those extra colors. In other words, don’t give a scanner the nod simply because it offers 48-bit color.

Note: Always lock the scanner before boxing it up and shipping or moving it.

3. Plug the scanner into the wall, and turn on its power switch. The scanner’s light turns on, and the scanner makes some reassuring power-on test noises.

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Three Ways to Scan an Image

4. Connect the scanner’s cable to your PC. Most scanners plug into a computer’s USB 2.0 (page 34) or FireWire (page 40) port. Both ports let the scanner send large amounts of data to your PC as quickly as possible. Don’t have the right port on your PC? They’re easy enough to install (page 25). (A USB 2 scanner still works when plugged into an older USB port, but the connection’s pretty darn slow; see page 37 for instructions on how to figure out what flavor of USB port your computer has.) When you’re finished with the installation, your PC recognizes your scanner, automatically locates the software you installed in step 1, and adds its icon to your My Computer list of attached scanners and cameras (Start ➝ My Computer).

Three Ways to Scan an Image Chances are, your PC lets you control your scanner in three different ways: using Windows built-in scanning wizard; using your graphics program’s own menus; or using the scanner’s own software. Here’s the rundown on each method and when to select it. • Windows XP’s Scanner and Camera Wizard. This wizard works well for quick, on-the-fly scans: faxing documents, placing images on a Web site, emailing them to friends, or for treating your scanner like a simple copy machine. If you want to summon the wizard when using a graphics program, look for the menu choice labeled WIA, which stands for Windows Image Acquisition. Most programs stick their WIA choices in the File ➝ Import menu. Full details on how to use the scanner wizard start on page 188. The easy-to-use wizard offers another bonus: the wizard works the same way on every modern scanner. Once you learn the wizard’s controls, you can apply those skills to operate the scanner at work or a friend’s house, or even on your next scanner. • TWAIN. Whereas Windows XP’s wizard resembles the easy-to-operate, “Point and Shoot” setting on a camera, TWAIN is like switching the camera to “Manual. ” Here, you can adjust a scan’s size by tenth-of-an-inch increments, save “presets” of custom settings, tweak color values, and perform other adjustments valued by those who need them—but TWAIN’s not essential for most jobs. A nonprofit group created TWAIN in the early 90s as a way for software and scanners to talk to each other—quite a feat in those days. Most scanners and graphics software still support TWAIN. For instance, choosing TWAIN in Adobe Photoshop Elements brings up the advanced controls shown in Figure 6-1, which let you tweak settings that the wizard can’t—helpful when choosing specific settings requested by a friend, coworker, graphics shop, or a particular piece of software.

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Note: Unlike most juxtaposed uppercase letters in TechTalk, TWAIN isn’t an acronym. Rather, the words refer to a line in Rudyard Kipling’s “The Ballad of East and West:” “And never the twain shall meet.” The words summed up the frustration of connecting scanners and PCs in the early 90s.

Three Ways to Scan an Image

Figure 6-1: Top: The menus in popular graphics programs like Paint Shop Pro, CorelDraw, and Adobe Photoshop Elements (seen here) let you control your scanner directly in different ways. The Photoshop Elements menu here, for instance, lets you import the attached scanner’s images using either TWAIN or WIA (Windows’ built-in “wizard”). Bottom: Choosing TWAIN from the Photoshop Elements menu brings up this window, which lets you tweak your scan’s color, size, and exposure settings, much like a digital camera’s manual controls. If you spot TWAIN listed on your graphics software’s menus, select it for a few test scans; you may prefer its controls over Windows XP’s built-in scanner wizard.

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Using Windows Scanner and Camera

• Scanner’s bundled software. Although many scanner manufacturers stick with TWAIN controls, others feel they can do better than the Windows wizard or TWAIN’s admittedly technical approach. So they write their own set of controllers, usually trying to make things as simple as possible. The result is a program resembling the wizard, with the same ease of use, but adding choices tailored to your specific scanner model. For instance, one scanner’s built-in software may offer an option for using an automatic sheet feeder or a Kodachrome slide holder. If the Windows wizard doesn’t offer what you need and TWAIN looks too complicated, give the scanner’s bundled software a try. The bottom line? If you’re happy with Windows XP’s built-in wizard scanner controls, stick with it. But if you plan to spend a lot of time with your scanner, give each method a try; they each put a different steering wheel on your scanner. FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTION

Will OCR Recognize My Recipes? I have lots of recipes that I’d like to store on my computer, but I don’t want to type them all in. Will a scanner’s Optical Character Recognition feature do the job? That depends on lots of things, including the age of the documents you’re scanning, the type of paper they’re printed on, and any imperfections on the page (say, splattered sauce). Many scanners come bundled with specialized OCR software that examines the dots of a scanned page, locates individual letters, and attempts to save the results as text. The best OCR programs can slurp in a page of neatly printed text nearly flawlessly, only occasionally making a mistake (reading a word like “corn” as “com,” for example).

But since documents like recipes rarely come on neatly printed pages, expect problems. OCR stumbles over small print, wrinkled paper, and aged newspaper clippings. Since the software can’t recognize handwriting, it won’t catch your scribbled note reminding you to use less salt next time. Finally, OCR also has trouble with mathematical symbols, so it probably won’t understand measurements like “3 1⁄2 cups of flour.” Scan a few recipes, and time yourself while proofreading and correcting the errors. Weigh that time against your typing speed, and you have your answer.

Using Windows Scanner and Camera Wizard A scanner is simply an enormous digital camera that points in a fixed direction: up. And just like a camera, your scanner comes with scads of settings that most folks live a long and happy life without ever adjusting. That’s where Windows XP’s built-in Scanner and Camera Wizard comes in. It’s your ticket to a remarkably pain-free scanning experience. Follow these steps for quick, almost decision-free scanning. 1. Clean your scanner’s surface, and place the item you want to scan in the upper-right corner of the scanning bed. Before scanning, always wipe the scanner’s glass bed with a clean, lint-free cloth. Add a little rubbing alcohol to the cloth for the really nasty goo spots. You want

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to remove every dust speck before those fibers end up magnified 200 times on your scanned image. Place your image in the corner for one simple reason. Doing so squares the edges, so the image sits nice and straight in the scanned image you create.

Using Windows Scanner and Camera

2. Turn on your scanner, choose the Scanner and Camera Wizard (if necessary), and then click Next at the Welcome screen. As soon as you turn on your scanner or plug it into your computer, the wizard appears with a greeting. When you click Next, the wizard lists all the programs on your PC capable of handling scans (Figure 6-2); your first decision is choosing the program you want to handle the job. For the quickest and easiest scanning, choose Windows XP’s built-in Scanner and Camera Wizard, the same sorcerer who conjures pictures out of your digital camera. Don’t see the wizard? You can summon it manually with a double-click the scanner’s icon in My Computer. Don’t see the scanner’s icon? Then you’re probably limited to the software that came with the scanner, described in the “Installing a Scanner” section (page 184). Figure 6-2: Turn on your scanner, and Windows XP lists all the software on your PC capable of handling scans. Choose the Scanner and Camera Wizard for creating quick scans and saving them as files on your hard drive. If you select a graphics program like Photoshop, the wizard routes the scan into the software, letting you touch it up before saving it. That saves time when scanning old photographs, for instance, where you may need to repair tears and scratches.

3. Choose Custom. In an attempt to simplify matters, the wizard offers you four choices, shown in the top of Figure 6-3, each tailored to match the image you’re scanning: color photo, black and white photo, or text, each explained in step 5. However, those choices don’t take account what you’ll be doing with your image. For instance, if you choose “Color picture,” the wizard scans the photo in at a resolution of 150 dots per inch (dpi)—twice the size you need when sending

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Using Windows Scanner and Camera

through email. (See page 185 for a quick primer on resolution.) For best results, skip the wizard’s preset options and tailor your scans by choosing Custom. Figure 6-3: Top: Although the first three preset options sound tempting, they’re too basic. For instance, choosing “Color picture” makes the scan too large to email, but too small to reprint later. For better results, choose the setting called Custom. Bottom: When you click Custom, this Properties box lets you choose a resolution suitable for whatever you intend to do with your scanned image. The Resolution’s menu lists all the resolutions your scanner can handle, usually 50 to 2400 dpi or more, but you rarely want anything more than 300. As a general rule of thumb, choose 75 dpi for items you’re going to email, 150 when using your scanner as a copy machine, and 300 for photos you want to print out. Select the “Picture type” to match what you’re scanning, and leave the Brightness and Contrast controls set to 0; you can adjust these settings much more effectively using imageediting software like Photoshop Elements. If you don’t have an image-editing program, the best thing to do is play with these controls using the trial and error method; your changes aren’t fixed until you click OK.

4. Choose the Resolution setting for your scan. The wizard lets you choose any resolution your scanner offers. Resolution, measured in dots per inch (dpi), controls the amount of detail shown on your image, as well as its size. You want high resolution for printouts, for instance, but low

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resolution for items meant to be seen onscreen (email, for instance). If you’re feeling overwhelmed by the resolution options, use this table for guidance: Scanned Item or Destination

Its Resolution

Onscreen (images sent by email or posted on a Web site)

75 dpi

Miscellaneous letters, receipts, and text (for archiving)

150 dpi

Line drawings (for faxing or printing)

200 dpi

Photos (for printing), or an article (to be converted to text with an OCR program; [see page 188])

300 dpi

Using Windows Scanner and Camera

Scan only at resolutions higher than 300 dpi when you want to enlarge something tiny—a postage stamp, for instance—to view minute details. 5. Choose the type of picture you’re scanning. The choices listed in the “Picture type” drop-down menu let your scanner know how many colors to grab—there’s no sense making a color scan of Doonesbury unless it’s from Sunday’s paper, for instance. Limiting the colors is an easy way to keep the file size manageable. Choose your image from one of these options: • Color picture. The natural choice for color scans. Selecting this option takes a color snapshot of anything you place on the scanner’s bed. • Grayscale picture. When scanning a black and white photograph or a newspaper clipping, choose this option. Doing so means your scan will preserve up to 256 shades of gray, which is what most people consider to be “black and white.” • Black and white picture or text. Don’t choose this for black and white photos, since the wizard narrows down the colors to either “black” or “white,” thereby turning Dalmatians into groups of small black spots. Choose this option only when scanning line drawings, text, diagrams, flowcharts, and other monotone items. Tip: Choose “Black and white picture or text” when scanning in your signature. A scanned signature comes in handy for signing digital forms, like a rebate form downloaded from the Internet. Use Paint (Start ➝ All Programs ➝ Accessories ➝ Paint) or other graphics software to paste your digital signature onto the Signature Here line of any form.

When you’re finished making all your selections in the Properties box, click OK.

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Using Windows Scanner and Camera

6. Back in the Scanner and Camera Wizard main window, click the Preview button, “lasso” your image (if necessary), and then click Next. Don’t skip this important step: clicking the Preview button tells the scanner to make a quick scan, locate your image’s position, and “lasso” it—outline the image’s edges with a little square. By locating the image, the scanner then knows to scan only that portion of its bed. If you skip the preview, the scanner simply scans its entire bed, creating a huge file with your image floating somewhere inside. The wizard’s usually pretty good with its lasso, but if it’s a little off target, drag inward or outward on the lasso’s little corner squares, as shown in Figure 6-4, until it completely surrounds your image. Grab any of these corner squares to change the size of the scanned image

Figure 6-4: When you click the Preview button, the scanner locates where you placed your item on the scanner’s bed. The dotted outline indicates movable borders. The wizard generally identifies the perimeter of your item fairly accurately, but often leaves out the white border around printed photographs. If you want your scan to include the border, drag the corner squares out a bit. Similarly, when scanning a page to fax, the wizard sometimes lassos only the outlines of the text. To scan the entire page, drag the corner squares out until they reach the page’s edge.

7. Choose a file format that matches your scan’s contents. The “Picture Name and Destination” dialog box, shown in Figure 6-5, also appears when you retrieve photos from a digital camera (page 148), but with one major exception: the scanner lets you choose the format it uses to save your file. Here are your options.

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• BMP (Bitmap image). Avoid this one, as it creates files large enough to store blimps. Nevertheless, graphics programs always offer it because BMP’s been around for years, and nobody collects patent fees on the format.

Using Windows Scanner and Camera

• JPG (JPEG image). The best choice for photographs. JPG (Joint Photographic Experts Group) compresses photos by removing subtle nuances imperceptible to most mortal eyes. • TIF (TIF image). Choose TIF (Tagged Image File Format) when you can’t afford to lose any quality—when creating archives of family photos, for instance, or sending images to a print shop. The images are substantially larger than JPGs, but sometimes quality’s more important than saving on storage space. • PNG (PNG image). This works best for color images with smooth, defined edges—logos, for instance, color charts, or line drawings. Most Internet browsers support PNG (Portable Network Graphics), which is slowly replacing the old standard, GIF (Graphics Interchange Format). Figure 6-5: Choose JPG for photos and nearly all other scans. Although the wizard doesn’t let you choose an image’s compression level, most graphics software does. Open an image in Paint Shop Pro, for instance, and you can watch the file as you compress it, stopping the compression when you notice the image quality drop.

8. Choose a descriptive name for your scan, select a folder in which to store it, and then click Next. After choosing the file format, enter a descriptive name (in the “Type a name for this group of pictures” box) and select a storage folder for your scan. The wizard creates a folder with that name inside your My Pictures folder, and tosses in your scan using that same name. (Alternatively, you can click the Browse button if you want to select a folder on your PC that already exists.) Chapter 6: Scanners PCs: The Missing Manual, eMatter Edition Copyright © 2008 O’Reilly & Associates, Inc. All rights reserved.

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Digitizing Old Photos and Slides

9. Choose Nothing to exit the wizard. The wizard offers the same three choices as when you use it to transport digital photos to your PC (page 148). None really belong here—few people would order prints of something after they’ve just scanned the print version, for instance—so choose Nothing. The wizard closes, dropping you off in the folder that holds your newly created scanned image file. Once your document’s turned into a file, you can email it as an attachment (page 158), fax it (described in the online appendix, “Other Cool Things You Can Do Online,” available on the “Missing CD” page at www.missingmanuals.com), or print it (page 135). NOTE FROM THE LAWYERS

Scanning Money Think the record industry’s worried about unauthorized copies? The United States Treasury Department’s even more worried, and it has much more clout. In fact, the Feds talked major hardware and software companies into adding security measures that notice the distinctive watermarks embedded in their banknotes. Try scanning a Ben Franklin in Adobe PhotoShop Creative Suite Version 8 and above, for instance, and this message appears: “This application does not support the unauthorized processing of banknote images.” The message appears even if you stick to the Treasury Department’s rules for legally reproducing currency (www. ustreas.gov) by enlarging or reducing the image by certain proportions.

If you need scanned copies of cash for legitimate reasons— inserting giant dollar bills in advertising or promotional items, scanning rare currency for a Web site, or even using currency in artwork—you have two choices: • Use pre-2003 technology. Old scanners and software can still scan your cash. • Visit Rules For Use (www.rulesforuse.org). This site lists contact information for treasury departments worldwide. Needless to say, contacting the appropriate department and waiting for your sample bills to arrive will probably extend your printing deadline by a few weeks.

Digitizing Old Photos and Slides Scanners let you retrieve dusty photos and slides from the closet and place them inside your PC for easy sharing with another generation. (A CD full of old photos makes a great gift for parents.) However, scanners faithfully digitize everything about your photos, including their scratches, thumbprints, faded images, lost colors, and the wild lighting shifts that occurred when grandpa messed up the camera settings. Restoring a photo takes much more time than simply scanning it onto your computer. When it comes to digitally preserving your old photos and slides, you have two options. • Scan them yourself. Many scanners come with attachments for scanning in slides and photographs. It’s a slow process, since each slide must be cleaned meticulously, scanned, and then touched up in a graphics program. Don’t clean

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the photos, though, as they’re easily damaged. Instead, remove their blemishes with the photo-editing tools found in most graphics software.

Troubleshooting Scanners

• Scan them professionally. Some local camera stores offer photo restoration services; many companies offer the service through the Internet. Prices vary widely depending on the condition of the image. Some service providers charge a flat fee per photo; others charge an hourly rate. The U.S. National Archives and Records Administration (www.archives.gov/preservation/preservation/family_ archives/ offers tips on caring for old photos, as well as recommendations for finding professional restoration services in your area. Tip: If you choose to scan and restore old photos yourself, make sure you don’t do more harm than good. For instance, scan the photos directly from within the photo album you’re storing them in. Removing the photos, especially if they’re old and fragile, can easily cause damage. Don’t peel off any tape, either. The tape’s easier to remove using an image-editing program like Photoshop Elements.

Restoring damaged photos is an art, requiring detailed work using sometimes complex graphics software. If you’d like to take a stab at it, most graphics programs offer tools like a Clone Stamp that turns the mouse into a tool that blots out dust, scratches, and other blemishes, leaving the image relatively intact (see Figure 6-6). Expect to spend an hour or so correcting each photo’s blemishes. On the positive side, even if you accidentally blot out Uncle Pete’s face, you can always press Ctrl+Z or choose Edit ➝ Undo to put it back. And no matter what you do on the screen, the original photo stays safe.

Troubleshooting Scanners Eliminate the obvious culprits by making sure your scanner’s plugged in, turned on, and plugged into your computer. If the scanner’s plugged into a USB hub (page 39), try plugging it directly into a USB port. Also make sure you’ve installed the scanner’s latest drivers, which usually requires a trip to the Downloads or Support area of the scanner manufacturer’s Web site.

Cleaning the Scanner’s Glass Your digital camera’s lens usually focuses on the people in front of it, so a few pieces of dust on the lens don’t matter. Your scanner keeps its gaze fixed directly on the glass surface, so any dust not only shows up clearly, it gets magnified. To keep little specks off your scans, thoroughly clean your scanner with glass cleaner before starting any scans. Spray the glass cleaner on a cotton cloth, not on the scanner’s surface. Then wipe the glass free of any debris. Between each scanning session, wipe the cloth over the

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glass, being careful to remove any fingerprint smudges left from picking up the old item from the scanner surface. Figure 6-6: Left: Don’t try to remove tape or writing from a photo, as that almost always damages it in some way. Instead, scan the photo and make your changes using an image editing program. Right: Photoshop Element’s Clone Stamp tool lets you copy one area of the photo to another. In this case, the tool copied undamaged portions of the photo’s border over the written area, removing it. The tool also copied parts of the ceiling beam over the handwriting, to completely remove it.

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Common Scanning Issues

Troubleshooting Scanners

These problems surface most often when scanning: • Grinding noises. Many scanners lock down their scanning mechanism during shipping. A grinding noise often means your scanner’s trying to run while its carriage is locked in place. Find the scanner’s lock (page 184), switch it to off, and try again. • Lack of response from scanner or error messages. When the scanner stops responding, the problem usually boils down to a simple cause: you haven’t scanned anything in the last few minutes. After 5 to 10 minutes of inactivity, most scanners doze off into a power-saving mode. If you see an error window, click the Try Again button, repeatedly. After the seventh click or so, the scanner usually wakes up and scans your image. • The “one-touch” button doesn’t work. Some scanners offer “one-touch” scanning that lets you push a button on the scanner’s case for automatic scans using a preset resolution setting. Windows XP’s scanner wizard doesn’t support these types of buttons, which means that you need to install and use the scanner’s bundled software (page 188). • Not enough memory or space. Scanners can create monster-sized files. If your scanner complains about not having enough memory or hard drive space, you’re probably trying to scan at too high a resolution. Reduce the resolution (page 191) and try again.

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chapter

Chapter 7

7

Sound

Not content to have pushed aside typewriters, fax machines, and copy machines, computers now replace stereos in some homes. The most tricked-out PCs serve as home theaters, with speakers dangling from every wall. Even low-budget models play CDs, ready to provide a soundtrack as you work through your day. This chapter describes the sound-creation mechanisms inside your PC: its sound card, microphone, and speakers. You’ll learn how to set up all these devices and tweak their settings, so whether you’re playing games or hooking your PC up to a stereo, everything sounds crystal clear. Also included is a quick guide to help you wade through the types of music files found on the Internet, and advice on how to choose the right ones for your digital music player—be it an iPod, or one of the zillions of others. Musicians will learn the basics of setting up a small recording studio. Finally, record collectors will find out how to move all their vinyl out of the closet and into their PCs, so they can finally switch from dusty to digital.

Understanding Sound Adapters (Sound Cards) The circuitry dishing up sound and music within your PC is technically called a sound adapter, but most people and computer stores simply call it a sound card. That term comes straight from your PC’s history. Early PCs merely blurted out a single beep on startup, meant to reassure nervous owners that everything was working correctly. (More than two beeps, on the other hand, meant it was time to reach for the screwdriver.)

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Understanding Sound Adapters

The only way to improve a PC’s sound back then was to spend $300 or more on a drop-in sound card (page 202); most gamers gladly paid the premium. Today, all new PCs include stereo sound, but the circuitry lives in any of three different places—on the motherboard (page 16), on a separate sound card, or inside a box that plugs into a USB port. To see which type of sound adapter lives inside your own PC, take a look at where your speaker cable plugs in to the PC; that cable’s location shows you what type of sound circuitry your PC has. LAPTOP LIFE

Sound Advice for Laptops Built for portability over performance, most laptops usually squeak by with a pair of tinny speakers and, mercifully, a headphone jack. Some models toss in a microphone port, great for recording classroom lectures. That’s usually enough for people on the run, letting them plug in their iPod headphones while watching a DVD during a long flight. Because laptops now outsell desktop PCs, many laptops are working the swing shift, computing on the road and back at the desktop. To give your laptop the same sound as a desktop, Creative Labs (www.creative.com) squeezed the circuitry from their most powerful sound card into the creditcard sized Audigy 2 ZS Notebook PC card shown here. Slide the $100 card into your notebook’s PC card slot, and it’s ready to power your room’s stack of speakers while you watch DVDs or play computer games.

The card’s optical ports also come in handy for Digital Audio Tape and MiniDisc enthusiasts. If you’re one of these people, you can dump your bootlegged concert soundtracks directly onto a laptop’s hard drive in the car, burn quick CDs, and hand them out to friends in the parking lot. The card’s way too powerful for the average notebook owner, but if sound is important to you, this is your best option for portable music power.

The card’s designed to let your notebook take advantage of any sound situation you encounter, either at home or on the road. At a friend’s house, for instance, plug your laptop into her stereo while watching a DVD or playing a game to enjoy its five-speaker surround sound.

• If the speakers plug into a port living next to your mouse and keyboard ports (shown at the top of Figure 7-1), your PC has integrated audio. That means the sound circuits are built right into the motherboard itself, a cost-saving option for your PC’s manufacturer, but possibly a quality-cutting measure for you. • If the speakers plug into a port living on one of several parallel metal strips (shown at bottom in Figure 7-1), your PC has a sound card. Sound cards often provide higher quality sound than circuits built into the motherboard.

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• If the speakers plug into a box that connects to a USB port (page 34), the sound circuitry lives inside the plug-in box, which is handy for moving the sound capabilities from one PC to another.

Understanding Sound Adapters

Figure 7-1: All the ports contained in the rectangular area near the USB, mouse, and keyboard ports are built into the motherboard. If your speakers and microphone plug in up here, your sound circuitry is built into the motherboard, too. The ports on the parallel strips near the bottom of your PC are attached to add-on cards. If your speakers and microphone plug in down here, your PC has a sound card.

Built-in, motherboard features

Separate sound card

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Don’t have any speakers at all? Then you’re limited to headphones until you either plug your PC into your stereo (page 212) or buy and plug in a cheap set of speakers. If you’ve got a laptop, check out the “Sound Advice for Laptops” box.) Each of the three types of adapter serves slightly different needs, all of which are described in the following sections.

Integrated Audio All notebooks and most modern PCs rely on integrated audio. Listed on spec sheets and sales floors, the term simply means your PC’s sound circuitry lives tucked away inside one of the motherboard’s chips. Reducing the sound card’s circuitry to a single chip lowers the PC’s price, yet still lets your PC play stereo sound and record from a microphone or other gadget. A few years ago, the term “integrated audio” cried out “budget PC,” leading to derisive scowls at geek gatherings. Integrated sound’s come a long way since then, and some of today’s new motherboards even include 5.1 surround sound for the most realistic rumbling helicopter explosions. In a few years, integrated audio will handle all of a PC’s sounds, replacing everything but specialized cards aimed at musicians.

Sound Cards Gamers and music fans tend to drool over high-performance sound cards, which drop into a special slot (page 27) on your motherboard. A basic stereo card runs less than $20; a more elaborate one with higher-quality sound costs between $150 and $200. People upgrade to a sound card, shown in Figure 7-2, for several reasons. • Upgrades. If your older PC doesn’t even include integrated audio—or if its current sound card doesn’t power enough speakers for your latest game—a sound card upgrades your sound quickly and inexpensively. Also, the circuits on old or cheap motherboards sometimes fail. If your motherboard’s sound chip dies, dropping in a cheap sound card extends your PC’s life just a little longer. • Power. Passing the sound-creation chores to the sound card lets the computer concentrate on other tasks, like creating more realistic-looking graphics and faster games. • Quality. Being somewhat isolated from your PC’s main circuitry, sound cards provide a cleaner, more buzz-free sound than sound circuits built into the motherboard itself. • Software. The software bundled with most sound cards let you tweak the sound slightly for different conditions. Choose the Karaoke profile, for instance, and the card automatically filters out the singer’s voice and lets you record your own. Closet musicians can add effects to recorded sounds, and gamers can

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tailor sound profiles to match each game’s unique monster-howling attributes. (Some sound cards come with free games, as well.)

Sending Sound into and out of Your PC

Figure 7-2: Considered a high-end card, Creative Lab’s Audigy 2 ZS slips inside your PC, granting it 7.1 sound. It powers a wall of three speakers in front, two in back, and one on each side. (Toss in the bass-producing subwoofer for the “.1” part.)

Note: If you add a sound card to a PC, you may need to disable your PC’s integrated audio by flipping a switch in its BIOS (see page 525 for details).

Plug-in Box Some sound circuitry doesn’t live inside the PC at all. Instead, it resides in a separate box, as shown in Figure 7-3, that plugs into your computer’s USB port. These boxes cost about the same as a sound card and come in handy for people who want better sound but shudder at the thought of opening up their PC’s case. For instance, if your current sound card won’t play your DVDs in surround sound, plug a box into a USB port, plug the speakers into the box, and listen to the helicopters whirl overhead. When shopping for a plug-in box, make sure it plugs into a FireWire or USB 2.0 port rather than the older USB 1.1 ports. The USB 2.0 ports move information 10 times faster than the older versions, which is vital when moving lots of sound information between the box and your PC.

Sending Sound into and out of Your PC No matter how your PC houses its sound circuitry, you always end up with three main audio-related ports: • Microphone. Plug a microphone in here, usually to record your voice.

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• Speakers. This lets you hear your PC through headphones or a pair of stereo speakers. • Line In. The microphone port records natural sounds (voices, birds chirping, and so on), but this port records sounds emitted by another gadget. For instance, connect a cable here from your analog or digital camcorder to record its soundtrack (page 166). This port also lets you record sound from a VCR, TV, record player, or radio. Figure 7-3: External sound adapters make for easy, noscrewdriver-required installation. It’s also easy to move these adapters between several different computers, including a laptop. As an added bonus, these sound adapters sit directly on your desktop, where they’re easily accessible when you plug in accessories or want to quickly adjust the volume. Although they’re not very portable, plug-in boxes work with laptops as well as with PCs.

The rest of this section describes these ports in more detail, describing how to best use them.

Microphone Microphones offer a way for you to not only talk back to your PC, but have it record you as well. Few PCs come with a bundled microphone, but nearly all PCs—including laptops—include a spot where you can plug one in. Many people happily ignore this function; others find microphones indispensable, using them in a wide variety of programs: • Talking with friends in instant messaging programs • Talking to people spread across the globe using Voice Over Internet Protocol (VoIP) gear (described in the online appendix, “Other Cool Things You Can Do Online,” available on the “Missing CD” page at www.missingmanuals.com) like Skype (www.skype.com) • Adding narration to movies or slideshows in Movie Maker (page 167) • Recording comments with dictation software 204

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• Cackling to the opponent you’re blowing up in an online game • Singing along to MP3s with karaoke programs

Sending Sound into and out of Your PC

• Recording classroom lectures on a laptop POWER USERS’ CLINIC

Those Other Sound Connectors Most sound cards come with a tightly packed row of 1/8inch jacks (page 45) on their outside edges so that you can plug in front speakers, rear speakers, microphones, camcorders, and other doodads. But buried inside your computer, sitting along the sound card’s top edge, awaits another set of connectors for spelunkers to discover. Shown in the figure below, the connectors often bear these labels: • CD In (Compact Disc In). Years ago, a thin, fourwire cable carried sound here from a CD drive’s analog connector (page 310). Newer CD drives ignore this connector, piping sound straight through their main connector cables. • CD SPDIF (Sony-Philips Digital Interface). Yet another PC relic, this connected to a thin, two-wire cable that carried numbers from a CD drive’s digital connector (page 311). Newer CD drives ignore this connector, too. • TAD (Telephone Answering Device). Some fancier modems come with built-in answering machines. A connector runs between here and the PC’s built-in modem, letting the sound card play back and record messages.

• SB 1394. The “1394” moniker refers to the tech world’s awful official term for “FireWire” (page 40), a port used by digital camcorders and some iPods. If your PC offers a FireWire port along the front of its case, a wire from that port probably connects to this port on your sound card. • Aux In. Yet another leftover from days gone by, this let you grab sound from a second CD drive’s analog port; today, it’s rarely, if ever, used. • Rows of pins. When you see two long rows of little pins sticking up from the card, they’re probably meant for a daughterboard—a second circuit board containing all the stuff that wouldn’t fit onto the regular sound card. A cable plugs into the daughterboard; the cable’s other end holds a connector with two rows of holes that mesh with the card’s pins. Some daughterboards fit into a drive bay (page 13), placing the sound card’s ports along the front of the PC’s case—an idea greatly praised by the headphone contingent.

Very few people record anything but their own speaking voice on a PC, so the voice-recording circuitry rarely sounds better than a telephone. Feel free to buy a fairly cheap PC microphone, like the $10 model shown in the top of Figure 7-4. Tip: Microphones usually plug into the sound card’s pink port.

Many microphones bypass the microphone port altogether and plug into the everversatile USB port. People who use their microphones for communication rather than dictation sometimes prefer headset microphones with attached earphones (see

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Figure 7-4, bottom). Since the other person’s voice comes over the headphones, rather than out through your PC’s speakers, these headsets cut down on feedback. Figure 7-4: Top: PCs don’t record in stereo sound, so save your money and buy an inexpensive mono microphone. To meet different needs, some microphones come mounted on a stand for your desktop; others attach to your monitor (or come built into the monitor). A few even attach to your collar with a clip. Bottom: Combination microphone headsets, handy for talking to others during instant messaging and other conferencing programs, plug into a computer’s USB port or come with two cables, one for the microphone port and the other for the speaker port. They’re popular for folks working in offices and construction sites since they filter out outside noise.

Speakers Almost every PC offers the same type of headphone jack as your iPod—they both dish up stereo sound and neither jack’s powerful enough, by itself, to drive its sound out to a pair of speakers. To compensate, speaker manufacturers build power into the speakers that they make for PCs (that’s why they’re often called powered speakers). Some speakers also contain tiny battery-powered amplifiers, creating a battery gobbler with tinny sound. The better ones plug straight into the wall, just like a home stereo. Some cheap speakers bypass the PC’s headphone jack and plug straight into the PC’s USB port, drawing power straight from the USB port. That leaves them more susceptible to electrical interference, unfortunately, a phrase that, loosely translated, means a constant background whine. 206

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A big step up in quality and price gets you a large subwoofer—a box-like heavy speaker that dishes out desk-shaking bass tones. The subwoofer plugs into a wall outlet to power its built-in amplifier, which routes the sound to satellite speakers— smaller speakers you strategically place around you. Most subwoofers come with both analog and digital ports to connect with whatever signal your PC’s sound card dishes out.

Sending Sound into and out of Your PC

Tip: Unplug your PC’s speakers and plug them into the headphone jack of your iPod or other music player to fill the room with music.

A single pair of speakers works fine for most people’s needs, and all sound cards support them. Game players and movie watchers often invest in more expensive sound adapter and speaker combinations, placing different speakers around the room for “surround sound,” where the music emanates from all edges of the room. To make Windows XP start using your current speaker setup, choose Start ➝ Control Panel ➝ Sounds and Audio Devices, and choose Advanced in the Speaker’s Settings area. Windows XP lets you select your current speaker setup from a dropdown box, shown in Figure 7-5. Figure 7-5: Windows XP handles a wide variety of speaker settings, from those built into a laptop to those resembling a home theater. As you switch between settings, Windows XP displays a handy picture showing where to position each speaker. Some sound cards come with their own speaker selection programs that work much like the one shown here in Windows XP. If you select a speaker setup in your sound card’s bundled program, avoid potential problems by making sure that the program automatically updated Windows XP’s settings to match.

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Most people choose one of these common speaker configurations: • Pair. Place a pair of speakers on your desktop, one on each side of the monitor. (To keep from being shot at from an unexpected side, be sure to put the left speaker on your left and the right speaker on your right.) • 4.1 (surround sound). In addition to the pair of speakers at your monitor’s sides, place the second pair behind you, letting the ghostly voices move around the room. • 5.1 sound. If you watch DVDs on your PC, it makes sense to upgrade to 5.1 sound, the same as found in home theaters. This arrangement contains the same speakers as you get with 4.1 sound, but you mount an additional mono speaker above your monitor to represent sound coming directly in front of you—dialog in a movie or game, for instance. • 6.1 (also called 5.1 EX) sound. This works like 5.1 sound, but with an extra speaker between the two rear speakers. The spaceship fires directly from your monitor and the blaster ray beams directly over your head, shattering the wall behind you. • 7.1 sound. Found in a few games, this dizzying setup places three speakers along the front, a pair in the back, one speaker along each side, and tosses in a few navigation problems as you try to maneuver past all those speaker cables on your way to the PC. Note: The subwoofer, a chunky speaker that plays only low-frequency, desk-rumbling bass, counts as the “.1” in the 4.1, 5.1, 6.1, and 7.1 combinations. It’s sometimes called the LFE channel, as it plays Low Frequency Effects to simulate explosions. Place the subwoofer in a corner, up against the walls, for maximum rumbling.

It looks pretty cool when you have eight speakers surrounding your PC, but unless a sound technician designed your room, you probably won’t notice much difference between 5.1, 6.1, and 7.1 sound. Tip: When setting up 5.1 speakers, you usually need to connect a single digital cable between your sound card and your subwoofer.

Synthesizer Your PC includes a built-in synthesizer, but you needn’t join a 70s revival band to make use of it. Nearly every computer game creates its soundtrack by using the synthesizer. The more expensive the sound card, the more realistic the synthesized sounds are. Also, some annoying Web sites greet you with a burst of sound that leaves you reaching for your speaker’s volume knob; credit your PC’s synthesizer for that, as well.

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To give your PC’s built-in synthesizer a listen, fire up Windows XP’s Search program, find a file called onestop.mid on your C drive, and give it a double-click. Slipped into Windows XP as a test file for programmers, the song plays a wide range of instruments through your PC’s synthesizer.

Sending Sound into and out of Your PC

UP TO SPEED

Analog vs. Digital Your PC’s sound circuitry boils down to two converters: a Digital to Analog Converter (DAC) and an Analog to Digital Converter (ADC). Analog refers to natural things with constant motion: ocean waves, for instance, and waves of sound. Digital refers to numbers: static entities that never change, like the 1s and 0s that are encoded on your audio CDs. Since PCs understand only numbers, the sound card’s two converters constantly translate between the two formats. The better quality the converter, the better the recreation of the horn player’s solo in the studio. It works like this: the horn player sends sound waves through the air, and the engineer records the sound to tape using streams of magnetic waves. The CD factory’s Analog to Digital converter converts the tape’s waves into numbers and stores them on a CD.

Your PC’s Digital to Analog converter reads the numbers on the CD and converts the sound to waves of electricity, which it sends to your speakers. The speakers vibrate, recreating the horn player’s original sound waves. Your PC’s Analog to Digital converter lets you record through a microphone, or even from a radio or TV (page 204). And the point to all this? Most sound cards come with a digital port and an analog port, and they contain completely different types of information. Don’t try connecting a cable from a digital port to a speaker system’s analog port or vice versa; you only confuse the converter, and you won’t hear anything.

Tip: When choosing between two PC’s sound cards while shopping, play the onestop.mid file on both of them. The song’s wide range of instruments makes it easy to tell which PC recreates sounds more realistically.

Audio In Called Audio In, Aux In, or Line In, this port lets you record stereo sound from a wide variety of electronic gadgets, including TVs, camcorders, and radios. Most ports on your PC stay constantly connected to a particular device—either speakers or a microphone, for instance. Items that you plug into this port, by contrast, change according to what you want to record at any given time. Today, many people connect their record players to this port to convert their records to CDs, a chore described next.

Copy Records onto CDs and MP3s Many music fans still cling to their old record collections. Some can’t find CDs to replace their cherished Herb Alpert LPs. Others loathe paying twice for the same recordings. Fortunately, pretty much any PC nowadays lets you convert your old

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records into a variety of digital formats. You can hire a professional for the job, or do it yourself with your own sound card and CD burner. Both have their advantages. • Professional. Professionals charge around $20 per album, tacking on another $10 or so to remove the pops and clicks. Some charge yet more fees for “extra” services like separating the recording into individual tracks, scanning in the album cover for the CD’s case, or shipping the finished CD back to you. Check Magic Sound Restoration (www.lp2cd.com) or LightSound (www.lightsound. com) for price quotes. • Do it yourself. You can use your PC’s sound card and CD burner to record your LP and burn it to a CD. The big question is whether you have enough time. Converting LPs can take about 90 minutes per record, even longer for especially dirty vinyl. Some turntables require a preamp (a small amplifier), available for about $50, along with sound-editing software (between $50 and $100). Finally, you may need even a larger hard drive: sound recordings consume about 10 MB per minute, or almost a gigabyte for each Herb Alpert album. If you choose the do-it-yourself route, follow these steps: 1. Clean your records, and install a new needle in your record player. You’ll be hearing the version you play for a long time, so make it worth hearing by cleaning up the sound as much as possible. Kab Electro (www.kabusa.com) sells many record cleaners, ranging from a $25 brush/liquid combo to a $700 motorized model. Turntable Needles (www.turntableneedles.com) also sells cleaners, as well as a wide supply of needles. If you can’t find a replacement needle for your record player, buy a new cartridge—the box-like holder on the end of your record player’s arm—and a new needle to fit it. No record player? They’re still for sale at stereo stores, Amazon (www.amazon. com), and eBay (www.ebay.com). 2. Connect your record player to your PC. Most record players send sound through a cable that has a pair of RCA jacks on the end. Your PC, however, accepts sound only through a tiny, 1/8-inch port (page 204)—the same as an iPod headphone jack. Since the two can’t directly plug into each other, connect them with the Holy Grail of PC cable adapters: the RCA-jack-to-1/8-inch-stereo port cable, shown in Figure 7-6. After connecting the record player to the adapter, plug the

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adapter’s small end into your PC’s Audio In port. (That port’s sometimes lime green.)

Sending Sound into and out of Your PC

Figure 7-6: The Holy Grail of stereoto-PC adapters, Radio Shack’s little spaceshipshaped connector (Part #274-369) lets you connect VCRs, TVs, stereos, and record players to a PC. Connect your record player’s two RCA plugs to this little adapter’s two RCA ports. Be sure to match the colors; the red jack carries the stereo signal’s right channel. Then plug the adapter’s small end into your PC’s Line In port. (An icon next to the port [page 45] usually shows an icon of an arrow pointing inward.)

3. Run your recording software and record both sides of the vinyl, saving each side in its own file. Here’s where professional software saves you a lot of time. It automatically adjusts the recording levels, records your album, removes any pops and clicks, and separates the recording into individual tracks called “WAV files.” Check out LP Ripper (www.cfbsoftware.com), MAGIX Audio Cleaning Lab (www.magix.net), Diamond Cut (www.diamondcut.com), and BlazeAudio (www.blazeaudio.com). If your record player lacks the oomph to make the recording loud enough, you need a preamp to boost its signal. They’re available from Amazon (www. amazon.com) and most home stereo stores for around $50. (BlazeAudio sells a preamp software combination.) Connect the preamp between the record player and your PC.

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Tip: Tell your software to record at “16-bit file at 44.1 kHz,” which is the standard for CD audio. GEM IN THE ROUGH

A Makeshift Preamp Instead of buying a preamp for your record player, you may be able to borrow the one inside your stereo. Look on the back of your receiver for a pair of RCA jacks labeled Tape Out, shown at right in this photo.

Important: don’t ever connect your stereo’s speaker wires to your PC, or you’ll blow up your sound card.

Your tape recorder normally records from your stereo through the Tape Out jacks, so they’re perfect for sending sound to your PC as well. Leave your record player connected to your stereo’s Phono jacks, shown at left in the photo. Then connect a pair of RCA cables from the Tape Out jacks to the adapter shown in Figure 7-6.

4. Burn the individual WAV files to a CD. Windows Media Player handles this task (page 294), although CD burning software works much more easily. Once you’ve burned the CD, convert (rip) it to MP3 files, if desired, so you can groove to your old vinyl on your iPod. Once you burn the WAV files to CD or convert them to MP3 files, feel free to delete them, freeing up your hard drive for other projects. POWER USERS’ CLINIC

Connecting a PC to a Home Stereo If your PC is in the same room as your stereo equipment, nothing beats hearing a PC routed through your stereo’s big speakers—or even your surround sound–pumping home theater system. PCs connect with a stereo in either of two ways, depending on the sound card. • Digital. If your sound card offers digital output, connect it to your stereo’s digital input, the one normally used by your DVD player. Your PC will route its 5.1 sound through all your home stereo’s speakers, including the subwoofer.

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• Analog. Push the adapter shown in Figure 7-6 into your PC’s Line Out or Speaker port. Then connect a pair of RCA cables between the adapter’s RCA jacks and the RCA jacks on your stereo’s Aux, Line In, or Tape jacks. Doing so only sends sound to two speakers, but they probably sound lots better than your PC’s little speakers. Once you connect your PC to your stereo, turn its Input knob to the ports you’ve chosen, be they DVD, Aux, Line In, or Tape.

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Choosing Music File Formats

Choosing Music File Formats

When it comes to storing their pictures, digital photographers have it easy. They snap a picture, toss the resulting JPG files (page 193) onto their hard drive, and open the photo in any program. Sound files, by contrast, come stored in a dizzying array of formats: MP3, WMA, AAC, and on and on and on. Part of the problem comes from a music file’s bulk. With music files in raw form, a CD can hold only a dozen or so songs. And each of the different music file formats shrink these files down using a variety of different strategies. (You’ll occasionally see the terms lossy, which refers to compressed audio, and lossless, which means the file hasn’t been shrunk at all and contains the same fidelity as the file on the CD.) Another problem comes from copy protection. When you snap a photo, you’re creating a picture you want to share with your friends, so camera manufacturers make that task easy. Record companies, by contrast, want to stop you from sharing songs. So some formats feature built-in virtual locks that limit the number of times you can copy a file, or even restrict which devices you can play it on. Normally, dealing with several different audio formats wouldn’t be a big problem. Windows XP, for instance, can open a wide variety of files. But most portable digital music players like the iPod can open only two or three different formats. Here are the ones you encounter most frequently. Tip: Dubbed the “Swiss army knife of audio,” you can use the free dBpower MC (www.dbpoweramp. com) program to convert sound files from one format to another as well as to rip CDs. dBpower MC supports MP3, WMA, AAC, WAV, and many other music formats.

WAV (WAVeform audio file) You may not have heard of this format, but you’ve certainly heard the music. Musicians record their songs as immense WAV files, which do a yeoman’s work by preserving the full quality of the original music. The music then moves straight to CD without any compression, letting songs retain their full quality. When displaying a CD’s contents in My Computer and similar programs, Windows XP does something confusing. Instead of showing the CD’s WAV files and pleasantly offering to convert them into the more versatile MP3 files, Windows simply lists the uncompressed songs as shortcuts called CDA files: Track01.cda, Track02.cda, Track03.cda, and so on. Note: Macintosh computers refer to WAV files as AIFF (Audio Interchange File Format).

Unless you’re a musician recording with a home studio, you probably won’t be messing with WAV files. They’re much too big for most portable players, anyway. To pack as much music on a portable player as possible, people turn to the compressed file formats, discussed next.

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Note: Microsoft stores Windows XP’s logon and log off music as WAV files. These files are located in the Media folder of your C drive’s Windows folder.

MP3 (Moving Picture Experts Group Audio Stream, Layer III) Thankfully shortened to the acronym MP3, this sound format began life in the early 90s, survived the wrath of the recording industry and lives on as the world’s most popular music format. MP3 squishes a song’s size by nearly 90 percent (compared to the original WAV file), letting you cram hundreds of songs onto your PC, iPod, or other portable music player. Best of all, MP3 files work on nearly every portable music player sold. Windows Media Player plays MP3 files without a problem. But creating MP3 files in Media Player 9, the version included with Windows XP, costs money. Patentholder Fraunhofer (www.iis.fraunhofer.de/amm/) charges licensing fees of around $10 per computer for its MP3 codec—a small file holding the formula for stuffing music into an MP3 file. That leaves you two options for creating MP3 files: • Buy and install the MP3 codec for $10 (choose Start Player ➝ View ➝ Plugins ➝ Download Plugins).

➝

All Programs

➝

Media

• Upgrade to Media Player 10 (www.microsoft.com/windows/windowsmedia/ mp10). Available only for Windows XP owners, this newer version of Media Player tosses in the codec for free. Some people simply bypass Windows Media Player altogether: The LAME (Lame Ain’t an MP3 Encoder) MP3 codec works with several competing programs to create MP3-compatible files for free. Download and install the LAME MP3 codec (http://lame.sourceforge.net/), along with any of the recommended free MP3 encoding programs listed on the site.

WMA (Windows Media Audio) Instead of supporting MP3, Microsoft offers its competing WMA format for storing files. Windows Media Player plays and creates WMA files. Many newer music players (but not the iPod) also support WMA as well as MP3. Finding a WMA-compatible player has grown so complicated that Microsoft created PlaysForSure (www.playsforsure.com), a sales and marketing site disguised as a service for matching compatible players with download services and music formats. (A search for iPod on the site brings up only a competing player that handles WMA files; iTunes isn’t even mentioned.) Windows Media Player adds copy protection to every WMA file you create, stopping you (or anyone) from playing back that file on another computer—even on other computers you own. To disable the copy protection in Media Player, choose Tools ➝ Options and turn off the “Copy protect music” checkbox.

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AAC (Advanced Audio Coding) AAC became Apple’s soldier in the music format wars when Apple chose it as the format for the iPod, Apple’s wildly successful digital music player. Although a large group of companies—including Dolby, Fraunhofer (FhG), AT&T, Sony, and Nokia—created AAC, few competing music players play it, making it impractical for all but the legions of iPod faithful (more than 10 million at last count).

PC Music for Musicians

The iPod also plays MP3 files; to help sway PC customers with huge libraries of WMA files, iTunes for Windows converts non-copy-protected WMA files to AAC. Apple’s iTunes software sells only songs in the AAC format, and it adds copy protection to keep the file from moving to more than five PCs.

MID (Musical Instrument Digital Interface) Converting a music file from one format to another—a chore you encounter when moving music to a digital music player—usually takes a few clicks on a converter program like dBpower MC (www.dbpoweramp.com). Converting MIDI files isn’t nearly as easy, as the files don’t contain recorded music, but instructions for how a synthesizer should play back a piece of music. Depending on the synthesizer, a MIDI file can sound as cheesy as a children’s toy or as beautiful as a harp in the park. If you need to convert a MIDI file to MP3 for a ring tone, for instance, fire up Apple’s free iTunes program (www.apple.com). It converts MIDI to MP3 by playing it through your PC’s synthesizer, and then records the results as it plays. Consequently, the resulting MP3 file sounds only as good as the sound card on the computer you use to convert it. As for converting MP3 files to MIDI, forget it. Some programs offer a conversion feature, but the resulting file sounds pretty awful.

PC Music for Musicians Most PC sound cards concentrate their powers on playing music, usually through as many speakers as will fit into the room. Musicians, by contrast, want sound cards that specialize in recording music. The flimsy microphone circuitry in consumer-level sound cards can’t handle heavy-duty recording, so musicians skip the computer stores and head for the music shops. There, they find hundreds of cards and software combinations costing anywhere from $100 to nearly $10,000. Products range from the USB plug-in box shown in Figure 7-7 to drop-in sound cards with accompanying bunches of cables, all aimed at turning a PC into a recording studio. When comparing sound cards at the music store, be sure to try the bundled software before plunking down your money. The programs all do relatively the same thing, but each offers a “feel” that only you can measure. Some offer plug-in knobs

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for manually controlling the recording volumes, for instance, which is a nice touch compared to turning knobs with a mouse. Figure 7-7: One of the hundreds of cards and software packages aimed at musicians, the $300 Lexicon Omega Desktop Recording Studio ranks as one of the most affordable. The box plugs into your PC’s USB 2.0 port, and records up to four tracks simultaneously. The box contains built-in microphone preamps (you need to add your own microphones), connects with MIDI instruments, and includes Steinberg’s Cubase LE for editing and mixing up to 48 tracks. Like most gear aimed at musicians, this box contains 1/4-inch jacks for plugging in standard electric guitars and keyboards.

Most musician-level sound cards contain the following features: • Recording several simultaneous tracks. Instead of recording using just one cheap microphone, musicians want to record jams with four or more instruments simultaneously—each on its own separate track. After the jam, the musician sits down with editing software and mixes the tracks, changing their volume and timing, adding effects, and fixing off notes. • Jack size. Most musical instruments connect with 1/4-inch mono plugs rather than the PCs fragile 1/8-inch stereo plugs. Music stores sell adapters, but one swing of a guitar can leave the broken stub of an adapter’s jack stuck in your sound card. Look for a sound card that offers several sturdy 1/4-inch plugs, usually offered through a little box that connects to the card. • Preamp. Like record players, microphones aren’t loud enough to be recorded directly. You need a preamp to amplify the microphone’s sound before it enters the PC for recording. • Microphone. PC microphones don’t cut it. The popular Shure SM-57 microphones cost less than $100 apiece, and let you record stereo tracks.

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• Software. The hardest worker in a home studio, audio software lets you mix your tracks to the right volume levels, arrange snippets of music in the right order, edit out bad notes, edit MIDI information (described next), and add effects to recorded sounds.

PC Music for Musicians

Tip: Musicians’ recording gear comes with a steep learning curve. To keep from being overwhelmed and discouraged, start by buying something used or fairly simple. Once you’ve mastered it, move on to more advanced gear.

Understanding MIDI (Musical Instrument Digital Interface) The computerized version of an old player piano roll, a MIDI program faithfully writes down every note a musician plays during a performance, as well as each note’s duration and intensity. Play back the MIDI file on a synthesizer, and you hear the original performance. But MIDI’s much more powerful than a mere recording device. For instance, piano rolls only sound like, well, antique pianos, but synthesizers mimic any instrument. That lets a MIDI keyboard player frighten the neighbors with tuba or accordion solos. Layer more parts into the mix, toss in a string section, and you’ve created an entire orchestra. (Most thunderous orchestral scores you hear in the movie theater started with a single musician in front of a MIDI keyboard.) Most people hear only MIDI sounds on their PCs during computer games, but if you’re a musician, MIDI gives you a universal musical language for a wide range of tasks. • Backing tracks. MIDI files can contain complete band performances. Turn off the guitar or keyboard part, plug in your MIDI instrument, and jam along to create your own solo. Many musicians create a band in a box, playing a MIDI drum and bass track while they play guitar or piano—no arguments over the tip bucket. • Editing. MIDI editing software lets you edit performances as easily as editing words in a word processor. Hit an off note? Drag and drop it down a bit on the scale until it sounds just right. If something plays too quickly, just slow down the pacing a bit, while keeping everything in the same key. • Instrument variety. Just as keyboards can create orchestras, you can quickly switch an MIDI instrument to an oboe, clarinet, saxophone, or anything that fits the mood. • Sharing music. Google lists zillions of sites that offer free MIDI files. Jam Online (http://fjam.zapto.org/) adds a twist by letting musicians meet to create their own MIDI files, each adding a new layer in turn until finishing the composition (or giving up in frustration). The eJamming site (www.ejamming.com) charges a monthly fee for MIDI musicians to meet and jam together simultaneously over the Internet. Chapter 7: Sound PCs: The Missing Manual, eMatter Edition Copyright © 2008 O’Reilly & Associates, Inc. All rights reserved.

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• Printing sheet music. MIDI notation programs print out MIDI files as musical scores for passing around at the next jam. For an ironic twist on history, drop by the Roll Scanning (www.trachtman.org/ rollscans) Web site to hear old piano rolls scanned in and saved as MIDI files. If you find any old piano rolls in your attic, send them to Mr. Trachtman for scanning and conversion, helping to preserve our nation’s musical history.

Troubleshooting Sound The most common sound problem is hearing nothing. One speaker works, for instance, but the other stays mum. When faced with some missing sound, be it from one speaker or all of them, start off by playing music continuously on your PC—stick in a CD or play several repeating MP3 files, for instance. That gives you some background sounds to listen for as you fiddle with the settings, cables, connections, and programs. When you finally hear something coming from the previously dead speakers, you know you’ve found and fixed the problem. Start troubleshooting by making sure you’ve plugged everything into the correct port. Then check the mixer settings (explained on page 219) to make sure you turned on what you’re trying to hear or record. Finally, check the master volume level (page 221). If none of those work, a driver (page 514) may be the culprit. Here’s how to handle each step of sleuthing.

Finding the Right Port By far the biggest problem with PC sound comes from pushing the right plug into the wrong port of the sound card. It’s certainly easy to do, as most sound cards present a row of three or more identically shaped jacks, as shown in Figure 7-8. Confounding the problem further is their dark location in the back of your PC. Grab a flashlight, take a close look at the ports, and make sure you plugged your device into the correct jack. Figure 1-21 (page 45) and the table below it show the identifying symbols etched next to each jack. It’s usually hard to tell which cable belongs to which speaker. After tracing a cable to its destination, make note of it. Wrap a piece of tape around the cable near the plug and write down what’s on the other end of the cable: the front, rear, or middle pair of speakers; the microphone; or perhaps a camcorder or VCR. Pushing a plug into the wrong port won’t do any damage; it just won’t work. If you’re desperate, try the process of elimination: plug the thing into every port until you eventually hear your music.

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Tip: When testing your speaker setup, look in your sound card’s software for a Test or Calibration mode. The program shows a picture of your speaker setup onscreen, then sends a tone to each speaker, moving the tone slowly from speaker to speaker and showing you which one should be sending the sound. That helps you find speakers that aren’t playing sounds, as well as helping figure out if you’ve reversed any of the speakers. Windows XP doesn’t offer a built-in speaker test like this, unfortunately, so you need to rummage through your sound card’s bundled software.

Inward facing arrow means this jack accepts sound

Troubleshooting Sound

Figure 7-8: When plugging in a jack, look at the little symbol etched next to each jack—specifically, the little arrow on the symbol. If it points inward, the jack accepts sound, which means it’s for a microphone or other sound-producing item. If the arrow points outward, it’s a speaker jack. Some manufacturers put identifying colors next to each port on some newer cards; for example, Microphone = pink, Line In = blue, Speaker = green, and Digital = orange.

Outward facing arrow means these jacks produce sound

Adjusting the Mixer Settings Your PC contains nearly a dozen things that can make noise, including its synthesizer, CD player, and microphone. Since your PC can play all of them at the same time, which should play the loudest? Windows XP’s built-in mixer, shown in

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Troubleshooting Sound

Figure 7-9, answers that question. The mixer provides a scaled-down version of the multitrack console found in every recording studio. Figure 7-9: The mixer lists everything in your PC that’s capable of making sounds—a list that grows so large on some sound cards that half the mixer hangs outside your monitor’s view. To trim it, remove some of the devices you don’t use—the Telephone Answering Device, for instance, or the Line In and AUX ports. Choose Options ➝ Properties, and then turn off the checkboxes next to devices you don’t use. The mixer removes them from view, shrinking its size accordingly.

To call up the mixer, choose Start ➝ Control Panel ➝ Sounds and Audio Devices and choose Advanced in the Device Volume area. Windows XP’s mixer appears onscreen, showing you the current volume level of everything inside your PC that makes noise. To control the volume of each item in your PC, slide the mixer’s controls, shown in Figure 7-9. Slide them up to increase the volume and down to reduce the volume. Check these settings when you’re having trouble hearing or recording something: • If you spot an important item with the Mute checkbox turned on, Windows XP is keeping that sound out of the mix. If it’s important—your CD player, for instance—make sure the Mute box isn’t turned on. • Conversely, if one of the items gives an annoying hum—the Telephone Answering Device, for instance—feel free to turn on its Mute toggle. • When recording on your PC, usually through the microphone, choose Options ➝ Properties from the Mixer and turn on Recording. That makes the recording mixer appear, and it lists everything in your PC that is capable of recording. Since most PCs can record only one item at a time, be sure to turn on the checkbox for what you’re trying to record—usually the microphone.

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• If you hear sound from only one speaker, check the balance setting: the little sliding bars along the mixer’s top. Slide the balance control so it’s in the center to send the sound equally to the left and right speakers.

Troubleshooting Sound

Volume Level Your PC lets you change its volume levels through its mixer, described above. But you can change the mother of all volume controls, its Master volume, in three additional ways. • CD drive. The CD drives on some older PCs offered a built-in headphone jack and volume control—the rim of a little spinning wheel poking from the drive’s front. If you’re listening through the drive’s headphone jack, be sure to give the little volume wheel a spin to make sure the volume’s not turned down too far. Newer PCs don’t use that volume setting, and instead control everything through Windows XP’s mixer. • Master volume. The mixer settings let you adjust the proportional level of your PC’s sounds—handy for keeping your voice louder than your background music during a narrated slideshow, for instance. The master volume controls the loudness of the entire mix as a whole. To turn it off in a hurry, click the little speaker icon next to your taskbar’s clock, and either turn on the Mute checkbox or slide down the volume control. Tip: No speaker icon near your taskbar’s right end? Choose Start ➝ Control Panel ➝ Sounds and Audio Devices and turn on the “Place volume icon in the taskbar” checkbox.

• Speaker volume. Most speakers come with a built-in volume knob. If it’s turned down, you won’t hear anything, no matter how high you’ve cranked up your mixer. Look for the knob on your speaker and give it a turn to mid-volume. You need to inspect all three of these volume settings because if only one’s turned down, you won’t hear anything.

Drivers Once you rule out the main sound problem culprits—the mixer, the mute toggle, and the cable ports—the next step is to check your sound card’s drivers. They probably need to be updated or reinstalled (a process described on page 514). Before upgrading to a new driver, be sure to uninstall any software installed by your old adapter: choose Start ➝ Control Panel ➝ Add or Remove Programs to make Windows XP uninstall the unwanted goods.

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chapter

Chapter 8

8

Digital Music Players

Digital music players are the transistor radios of today’s generation. They store music in a cigarette pack–sized box, letting you stuff thousands of songs into your pocket. Plug a pair of headphones into the earphone jack, and you have enough music to ride the subway for, say, two days without repeating a tune. This chapter describes the Apple iPod (and its various subspecies) and competing players made by Creative Labs and other companies. You’ll learn how to connect the players to your PC using either iTunes or Windows Media Player—two of the most popular and easy-to-use music jukebox programs. Finally, you’ll find out how to copy music to your digital music player and, if it has the capacity, how to use it for taking your contacts, calendar, and notes on the road.

Choosing a Digital Music Player After nearly 10 years of evolution, digital music players now come in two basic types: the iPod, and everything else. Apple’s sold more than 20 million iPods, capturing more than 75 percent of the market, and leaving hundreds of competing players scrambling to woo the remaining music lovers. Industry analysts don’t see Apple’s monopoly disappearing anytime soon. Apple won the market because it simplified a few things that only seemed easy: buying a player, buying digital music, and copying that music to the player. For starters, Apple’s iPod comes in three easy-to-understand sizes: small, medium, and large. Creative Lab’s Web site makes visitors choose between 27 models with varying sizes and features.

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Choosing a Digital Music Player

To load an iPod with songs, you just plug it into your PC; iTunes stuffs it with all your PC’s songs automatically. Many competing music players balk at Windows Media Player’s automatic synchronization; some won’t talk to Media Player at all. Apple’s iTunes comes with a popular online store, a large music catalog, and a single pricing policy: 99 cents for almost any song, and $9.99 for most albums. Media Player offers more than a dozen online music stores, each with a different assortment of songs, prices, and copy protection schemes. Winning the market let the iPod grab the accessory and software market, too. Every iPod owner can choose between hundreds of different cases, plug-in attachments, and form-fitting speakers; nobody makes anything to fit an Audiovox SMP3-330 player. But no single player, not even an iPod, is perfect for everybody. Choosing a player is a constant balancing act between small size and more features; you can’t have both. That’s why all players cluster around these three sizes: • Small (256 MB to 4 GB memory). Most compact digital players use flash memory, the same kind found in a digital camera’s memory card (page 152). With no whirling hard drive, these tiny players conserve battery power and slip easily into a pocket. Their small size and capacity, usually just a handful of gigabytes, limits them to a few hundred songs—enough for a weekend, perhaps, but probably not enough to hold all your music. Apple’s iPod Shuffle, shown in Figure 8-1, weighs less than one ounce. Small players often come with small buttons, much to the detriment of fumblefingered folk. Also, they’re rarely big enough for large display screens, making it difficult to find that perfect “sunset song” before the sky grows dark. • Medium (2 to 6 GB memory). Medium-sized players feature either tiny hard drives or lots of flash memory. They easily hold 1,000 songs with room left over to lug a few large data files, a feature highly valued by people who carry work to or from home. Apple’s iPod Nano arrived in September 2005 and replaced the iPod Mini; both are shown in Figure 8-2. • Large (15 to 60 GB memory). Serious music fans feel naked without their entire music collection, or at least a decent chunk of it, sitting within reach. Large players fill that niche by holding at least 5,000 songs, increasing your chances of finding the perfect tune for the moment. Slightly heavier and bigger than medium players, large players still slip easily into a pocket, although their weight adds a serious droop to a shirt pocket (Figure 8-3). Some of these big boys even include a color screen, letting you display photos and videos, as well as song titles. As a result, people sometimes refer to them as “media players” rather than “audio players.” You can also plug most media players into TV sets for convenient slideshows with music backgrounds. Apple’s

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latest iPod also plays video; Creative and Archos make competing portable media players.

Choosing a Digital Music Player

Figure 8-1: Created to compete in the small-player market, Apple’s diminutive iPod Shuffle holds either 512 MB or 1 GB of flash memory, depending on your model. Apple markets the iPod Shuffle as a sort of personalized “radio station.” Plug the iPod Shuffle into your PC, and iTunes fills it with a random mix of songs—enough to last throughout your day. (You can turn off the random feature if you prefer hearing, say, your audio book’s chapters in order.) The Shuffle’s pop-off cap covers a standard USB port that plugs into any desktop PC or laptop for adding songs and recharging the battery.

To compete against the iPod, some larger players include extra features like FM radio tuners and voice recorders. (iPod owners can buy the voice recorders from third-party companies as plug-in accessories.) • Alternatives. Some USB plug-in keychain drives work double-duty as MP3 players, complete with a headphone jack. But even if you don’t have an MP3 player, any memory card or keychain drive will “sync” with Windows XP’s Media Player (page 244), letting you grab a quick load of fresh tunes to play on any PC with speakers: your home PC, work PC, or the PCs at your friends’ homes. When choosing a player, be sure it can play your music collection’s file format (page 213). If you buy music from the iTunes online music store, for example, you need an iPod—only iPods can play iTunes’ protected AAC file format. If you buy digital music from Napster, Wal-Mart, or other online music stores available from within Windows Media Player, don’t buy an iPod: iPods can’t handle Media

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Player’s protected WMA format (page 214), the format used by most online music stores except iTunes. Figure 8-2: Left: Apple’s colorful initial entry into the midsize market, the iPod Mini, weighed in at 3.6 ounces and came in five colors. Right: The pencil-thin iPod Nano weighs in at only 1.5 ounces, coming in either black or white. A testament to the rising popularity of flash memory, the Nano crams either 2 or 4 GB of flash memory into a case smaller than its Mini predecessor, which used a hard drive.

Tip: Every digital music player can play MP3 files, making that format a very safe bet when ripping CDs or stocking your music library.

Be sure to choose a player that connects with your PC through either a FireWire (page 40) or USB 2.0 port (page 34). You need a speedy connection to send those huge digital music files into your player without taking all night.

Your Digital Player and Your PC Some players strike up an easygoing relationship with your PC. Plug the player into your PC’s USB port, find the player listed as a drive in My Computer (Start ➝ My Computer), and drag songs onto it—just as you’d copy files into folders. But don’t be surprised if that doesn’t work. Because unfortunately, most players start their PC relationship with a rigorous set of rules. For instance, some players show up in My Computer as a drive, but let you delete their songs only, not add

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them. Some finicky players won’t let you add music if it’s stored in folders; they insist that you copy each song’s file directly into the device.

iPod and iTunes

Figure 8-3: Since its birth in 2001, the full-featured iPod has moved through five generations. Each added storage, usually an increase of 5 or 10 GB, and slightly different features. This photo shows the penultimate version, which comes with 20 or 60 GB of storage. The iPod introduced the scroll wheel design found on all future iPods. You navigate a list of menu items by moving your finger to the wheel’s left or right; press the wheel’s left or right side to move through side menus, and press the center button to choose your selection. You can also view photos on its color screen. And as you play music, the player displays the matching album cover. Apple’s iPod Camera Connector lets you dump photos directly from your digital camera to your iPod, ensuring you never run out of memory at Disneyland. The iPod imports photos from iTunes, as well as from Adobe Photoshop Elements and Adobe Album.

If your player won’t let you drag songs onto it from My Computer, you have three options: learn the player’s bundled software, if it came with any; use Windows XP’s Media Player; or, if you own an iPod, use Apple’s iTunes. The next two sections describe how to manage your digital player’s songs with either iTunes or Windows XP’s Media Player.

iPod and iTunes Coming from the Apple side of the country, iTunes and the iPod can feel strange to those living in PC Land. After all, don’t Apple and Microsoft represent opposing world views, a kind of red state vs. blue state technological battle? Not so much, as it happens, anymore. The truth is, Apple’s done a pretty decent job in its first major foray into Windows software. All you have to do now is sit back and enjoy the music.

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Warning: Resist the urge to plug your iPod into your PC the moment you liberate the player from its box. If you do so, Windows’ Media Player will greet your iPod; Media Player even copies music files to your iPod, if you choose. But since those tunes didn’t enter the iPod via iTunes, your iPod treats the songs as data, not songs. That’s a handy way to move song files from one PC to another, but you won’t be able to listen to them from your iPod. The simple solution: follow the instructions that came with your iPod and first install Apple’s free iTunes software (www.apple.com/itunes), as well as the software that controls your iPod, before plugging in your new toy.

The rest of this section gives you an overview of how to stock iTunes with your PC’s existing songs; add new songs by buying them from iTunes Music Store; copy songs from CDs or from your PC’s folders; and transfer data, contacts, appointments, and notes to your iPod. Note: If you’re interested in learning all the ins and outs of life as an iPod owner, pick up a copy of iPod & iTunes: The Missing Manual. TROUBLESHOOTING MOMENT

Clearing Your iPod’s Memory If you’re not happy with your iPod’s current status, you can wipe it clean and start over. The following situations may cause you to feel like clearing your iPod’s memory: • You bought a used iPod and want to refresh it to “new” status. • You finally figured out how to use iTunes and your new iPod, so you want to start from scratch, setting everything up perfectly this time. • Your iPod isn’t working correctly. To completely erase your iPod, download and install Apple’s iPod Updater software (www.apple.com/ipod/

download). The software installs iPod’s latest firmware—its own operating system—giving it the latest features. The iPod Updater can also wipe your iPod clean, christen it with a new name, and start loading it with tunes and customizing its menus. You may also want to uninstall iTunes (Start ➝ Control Panel ➝ Add or Remove Programs), and then download and install the newest version of iTunes (www.apple.com/ itunes). Let iTunes catalog your music anew and begin filling your iPod with music. The iPod Updater and the latest version of iTunes let you start from scratch, making sure everything goes right this time.

Adding Music to Your iTunes Library iTunes works as a sort of “mirror image” of your iPod’s songs. When you add or delete songs from iTunes, you’re automatically adding or deleting those same songs from your iPod: iTunes takes care of that the next time you plug in your iPod’s little white cable and connect the music player to your PC. So, the first step in stocking your iPod is to start filling iTunes’ digital shelves with your music. You add music to iTunes in two ways: by importing songs already on your PC or on your CDs—a natural first step for nearly every new iPod owner—and by buying music online from iTunes’ built-in music store. The next two sections explain each method. 228

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Importing your PC’s existing music

iPod and iTunes

Adding all your PC’s existing music to iTunes doesn’t entail making a copy of all your music. Instead, all you need to do is make iTunes aware of where you’ve stored your songs on your PC. That lets iTunes catalog the songs, list them, and send copies to your iPod. When you first install it, iTunes offers to find all the songs in your My Music folder and add them to its database; it’s a great way to stock iTunes quickly. If iTunes stumbles across any WMA files (page 214) while gathering your PC’s files, it automatically converts them to an iPod-friendly format—save any copy-protected WMA files you may have purchased from other online stores. After iTunes scoops up the music in your My Music folder, fill in any areas iTunes missed: • Add folders of music. If you store music in folders other than your My Music folder, tell iTunes about them: choose File ➝ Add Folder to Library, and then select a folder to add. iTunes adds every song inside that folder, no matter how deeply it’s buried in subsequent folders that categorize songs by album or artist. Don’t worry about accidentally adding the same folder twice: iTunes ignores the duplicates. • Add songs. To add only a few songs—handpicking the hits inside one folder, for instance—choose File ➝ Add File to Library. A standard Open File window appears, letting you select the songs you want to add. Lasso a bunch of MP3 files, or select just a few favorites by holding down Ctrl while clicking their names. When you click the Open File window’s Open button, iTunes adds your selected files. • Add CDs. iTunes will rip CDs—copy their songs to your PC as individual audio files so they’re ready for you to copy them your iPod. To rip a CD, insert it into your PC’s CD drive. When you push the drive’s tray closed, iTunes connects to the Internet, fetches the titles of the CD’s songs, and displays them on your screen within an iTunes window. Click the Import button, and iTunes quickly copies all the songs to your PC and adds them to iTunes library. (To fill in the song’s titles and similar ID tag information manually—necessary when iTunes can’t connect to the Internet.) Note: iTunes can rip CDs in several different file formats (page 213), including the most popular: MP3 and AAC. To see or change iTunes’ file-ripping format, choose Edit ➝ Preferences, click the Advanced tab, and then click the Importing tab. There, you can also control the files’ naming system. For instance, to make sure your songs play in the same order as the album, turn on that page’s “Create filenames with track number” option. That tells iTunes to names them “01 – Name,” “02 – Name,” and so on.

Buying music online Walking into the iTunes Music Store is as simple as clicking the Music Store icon in the iTunes Source list. Once the music store appears, as shown in Figure 8-4,

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you can start browsing immediately by artist, genre, or album title. Unlike traditional music stores, iTunes lets you purchase individual songs rather than entire albums. But if you want the entire album, that’s usually available as well. (In fact, some songs are available only when purchased as part of an album.) Figure 8-4: Top: To wander the aisles at the iTunes Music Store, choose your favorite genre from the main menu’s drop-down box. The store displays photos of featured items from that genre, a list of that genre’s classics and favorites, and lets you work down to albums or songs you find interesting. Middle: Click the Browse link on the front page to wipe away the flashy displays. Then you can simply click titles to dig into your selected genres, narrowing your search from Blues to Delta Blues, for example, and finally to songs by Robert Johnson. Bottom: Click the front page’s Power Search link, and search by key words that appear in the name of a song, artist, or composer. The store lists songs matching your search; double-click any song for more information about it.

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Although iTunes is very easy to navigate, fans of classical music or opera may feel left out of the digital age. The store carries only a dozen operas and classical CDs, for instance, and there’s no way to search by conductor or symphony unless they’re specifically listed in the album’s title.

iPod and iTunes

But when you do find a song you need, the rest is easy. Every song costs 99 cents, whether it’s a hit single or filler wedged between an album’s hits. Most albums cost $9.99; boxed sets usually sell by song only, and some albums sell for more than $9. 99. Some shorter albums, usually those with fewer than ten songs, cost less than $9. 99. When you buy music, iTunes immediately downloads your purchase and adds it to your library, ready for copying onto your iPod. Purchase songs by creating an account and entering your credit card number, just as you do when purchasing from any online store. If typing credit card info into your PC creeps you out, buy an iTunes gift card, sold by most music retailers. The cards are redeemable online. Apple’s online store lets you burn your purchased songs onto an unlimited number of CDs for your personal use, listen to them on any number of iPods, and play them on up to five PCs. Note: Although you may burn as many CDs as you want from tunes you bought online, there’s one catch: you can burn only seven CDs from the same playlist—a file containing an ordered list of songs. After seven, you must either recreate the playlist from scratch or alter it by switching the song’s order, or adding or deleting songs. This odd restriction keeps people from turning their PCs into unattended CDcopying labs. UP TO SPEED

Podcasts Only the rich can afford radio stations, but anybody with a microphone can create and distribute their own podcast: a regularly scheduled “talk-show” recording intended for playback on an iPod or other MP3 player. iTunes offers more than 15,000 free podcasts for downloading, ranging from CNN’s hourly news updates to “Matt’s Guitar Lick of the Week.” When you subscribe to a podcast, iTunes automatically places each subsequent edition onto your iPod for listening at your leisure. To subscribe to a podcast, head for the

iTunes Music Store and choose Podcasts from the “Inside the Music Store” section. The store lets you browse through the top 100 podcasts, browse podcast categories from Arts and Entertainment to Travel, or search for specific podcasts by title, subject, or author. The latest iPod software, available from Apple’s iPod Updater (www.apple.com/ipod/download) places Podcasts on your iPod’s menu.

Transferring Songs to an iPod Automatically iTunes sticks with Apple’s philosophy of trying to make everything foreheadsmackingly simple. When you first install it, iTunes automatically grabs all the

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music in your My Music folder and lists it in the iTunes library, as shown in Figure 8-5.

iPod and iTunes

Playback controls Volume Source window

Status display

Search box

Browse

Figure 8-5: iTunes’ left pane lists your music “sources”— places where music lives on your PC, including your hard drives, your iPod, online radio stations, playlists, and the iTunes Music Store. Here, the PC’s Library is selected as the Source, so iTunes lists music stored on your PC. To switch the view to your iPod’s music, in the Source list, click iPod. To view your files sorted by genre, artist, and album, click the Browse button; iTunes adds a Browse area above the display window.

Song display window Show/hide artwork Repeat Shuffle New playlist

After importing all your PC’s songs to its library, iTunes copies those songs to your iPod the next time you plug it in. That’s it. Any song you add to the iTunes library ends up on your iPod the next time you plug it in.

Transferring Songs to an iPod Manually Things become a little trickier if you sway from Apple’s simple Automatic Sync path and choose to add songs to your iPod manually, a dance step required in these situations: • Your music library’s grown too large to fit on your iPod. When all your songs won’t fit, iTunes automatically switches from Automatic to Manual mode, forcing you to decide which songs should live on your iPod and which should stay at home on the PC. • You’re not particularly attached to any music library. You want the freedom to copy some music from the libraries on your work PC, your home PC, and your friend’s PC—all without deleting your iPod’s existing stash of music.

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• You own several iPods (you lucky dog) and want to keep different songs on each. A jazz iPod for work, for instance, a Phish iPod for your car, and a general purpose iPod for everyday use.

iPod and iTunes

• You’re at a friend’s house and want to connect your iPod to his PC and play your iPod’s music through the PC’s speakers. To turn your iPod into a roving, free agent, letting you control when and where the songs move into it, switch your iPod to manual synchronization. Here’s how: connect it to iTunes, choose Edit ➝ Preferences, and click the iPod tab. Then turn on the “Manually manage songs and playlists” option. Note: When you set your iPod to Manual, iTunes cautions you that “Disabling automatic update requires manually unmounting the iPod before each disconnect.” This technospeak means that when you’re done copying music, you need to right-click your iPod in the iTunes Source area, and then choose Eject from the shortcut menu. That tells iTunes to let go, so you can safely disconnect your iPod.

You’ll notice one visual difference when you set your iPod to manual sync. When you click your iPod’s name in the iTunes source pane, the iPod’s list of songs are no longer “grayed out.” That lets you delete songs directly from your iPod by right-clicking them and choosing Clear, something you can’t do with autosync. Manually transferring songs to your iPod gives you more freedom over what lives on your iPod, but it also requires more work on your part. Specifically, copying songs to your iPod requires these three steps. 1. In iTunes, select the tunes you want to transfer to your iPod. The iTunes Library places a tiny checkbox next to each tune, as shown in Figure 8-5. To select a song for transfer, turn on its checkbox. Sometimes it’s easiest to turn off all the checkboxes, and then handpick the few songs you want by turning on their checkboxes; other times, you’ll want to do just the opposite, turning off checkboxes for the few songs you don’t want. Here are a few shortcuts for doing just that: • Grab all but a few tunes. Select every tune in the library by pressing Ctrl+A. Then right-click the library and choose Check Selection from the shortcut menu. That turns on the checkbox of every tune, letting you go through and turn off the boxes of those few tunes you don’t want to copy this time. • Grab just a few tunes. Select all your tunes (press Ctrl+A), right-click the selected tunes, and choose Uncheck Selection. That unchecks every song, letting you check the few you do want. iTunes comes with several premade playlists—lists of songs that play in a certain order. Feel free to turn any playlist’s checkbox on or off, as well as use any playlists you’ve created. (Create playlists by choosing File ➝ New Playlist.) Selecting a playlist tells iTunes to copy all that playlist’s tunes, as well as the playlist itself, adding its name to your iPod’s Playlists menu for quick access.

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2. Drag your selected songs from the iTunes window to the iPod icon in the Source list. When you drop the selected songs onto the iPod, iTunes dutifully copies them to the device—unless there’s no room left, in which case it stops cold, telling you your iPod just ran out of room. That leaves you with the unenviable problem of deciding which tunes to delete from your iPod. Of course, your tunes always stay safely ensconced on the PC that you copied them from; you’re just deciding which tunes will live on your iPod for that particular session. Tip: To delete items from your iPod, start by viewing its songs. Click your iPod’s icon in iTunes’ Source list. Then select any songs, albums, or artists you want to delete, right-click the selected items, and then choose Clear.

3. In the iTunes source list, click the Eject button next to the iPod. When you’re through copying files, click the Eject icon to remove the iPod’s “Do not disconnect” message, leaving you free to unplug your iPod.

Transferring Data to Your iPod Since your iPod contains a hard drive (or a capacious stick of flash memory), Windows XP treats it like any other portable storage device, albeit one with a more stylish case. That means you can use your iPod to transport any large stash of nonmusic files—PowerPoint presentations, your novel-in-progress, and so on—whenever you need a handy portable digital container. To copy data to your iPod, follow the steps desscribed next. Note: To make sure you’re able to use your iPod as a hard drive, open iTunes, choose Edit ➝ Preferences, and click the iPod tab. Click that page’s Music tab, and turn on “Enable disk use.” The tradeoff is that you now need to eject your iPod manually before disconnecting it; you can perform this manual procedure either from within iTunes (right-click the iPod and choose Eject) or from your taskbar (right-click the little hard drive icon and choose to “Safely eject” your iPod).

1. Open My Computer and double-click your iPod’s icon. Microsoft’s disdain for iPods shows through here, as My Computer identifies your iPod only by its drive letter and the first 11 letters of its name—usually your name. (Players compatible with Media Player, like the Dell Digital Jukebox shown in Figure 8-6, top, usually show their real name.) When you spot

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your iPod’s icon, double-click it to see your iPod’s contents, shown in Figure 8-6. iPod

Dell’s Digital Jukebox

iPod and iTunes

Figure 8-6: Top: Your iPod can do double-duty as a portable hard drive, letting you transport large files from one PC to another. To store your vacation photos on your iPod, for instance, double-click the iPod’s icon in My Computer. Bottom: When My Computer shows the folders inside your iPod, drag your vacation photos inside. While spelunking through your iPod via My Computer, you’ll notice your music files are noticeably absent. Actually, they’re living inside a hidden folder called iPod_ Control. Several programs can give you access to those music files (page 238) for backup purposes should your PC crash.

2. Drag the data files and/or folders that you want to move onto your iPod. When you drag the items, take care not to place them in the iPod’s existing Contacts, Calendar, or Notes folders. Your PC copies your data to the iPod’s hard drive or flash memory card, provided there’s enough room.

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If there’s not enough room for your data, delete some songs from your iPod. Head back to iTunes’ Library, and remove some of the checkmarks next to the songs. Right-click your iPod in the iTunes Source pane, choose Update, and iTunes then deletes the unchecked songs from your iPod, freeing up room for your incoming data. Note: If you’ve set your iPod to manual sync instead of automatic sync, described in the previous section, you’ll need to manually delete unwanted songs from your iPod. Click your iPod in the iTunes’ Source pane, right-click any of your iPod’s listed files, and then choose Clear.

3. When you and your iPod arrive at the other PC, plug it in, open My Computer, and then drag the iPod’s data folders onto the other PC.

Transferring Your Contacts and Calendar to Your iPod iTunes 5 adds a feature particularly welcome to the Windows camp: It automatically updates your iPod with your contact information and your social calendar. iTunes 5 syncs with the Address Book in both Outlook Express (see page 344) and Microsoft Outlook 2003 or later. Since Outlook Express lacks a calendar program, iTunes can transfer calendar information only from Outlook 2003 or later. Here’s how to transfer contacts and appointments from both programs: 1. Connect your iPod to your PC. 2. In iTunes, choose Edit page’s Contacts tab.

➝

Preferences, click the iPod tab, and then click that

3. Choose whether to synchronize Contacts with Outlook Express or Outlook. Turn on “Synchronize contacts from,” as shown in Figure 8-7, and then from the drop-down menu, choose your current email program: Outlook or Outlook Express. 4. Choose which contacts to transfer. To carry around your complete address book, choose “Synchronize all contacts” and move to the next step. You’re through. That works fine for a few hundred contacts, as your iPod can scroll through them fairly quickly. But your iPod slows to a crawl when opening more than a few hundred contacts. To speed things up in Outlook Express, the box on page 237 tells you how to create a special, whittled-down group containing your closest friends, the AAA towing number, and other must-haves. 5. Tell iTunes to transfer your appointments from Outlook, and then click OK. iTunes 5 supports only Outlook 2003 or newer. If you have that program, click the Calendars tab on the iTunes Preferences window, and then click

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“Synchronize calendars from Microsoft Outlook.” There’s no option to slim the information down to the current month or two, unfortunately.

iPod and iTunes

Figure 8-7: Your iPod can carry all of your Outlook Express contacts, or a specific group—a smaller list of contacts—which it can open much more quickly when you’re standing by the phone booth. Each contact lists the name, address, and phone number of the person or business, but leaves out any information you’ve added in the contact’s notes field or other fields. Although iTunes supports groups in Outlook Express, it doesn’t support Outlook’s “categories,” a more powerful grouping feature.

WORKAROUND WORKSHOP

Creating a Pint-sized Contact List You can transfer your whole address book to your iPod, but if it contains more than a few hundred contacts, it’s going to run verrrry sloooowly on your device. To create a subset of essential contacts that you want to carry around, open Outlook Express’ Address Book (choose Tools ➝ Address Book) and then choose File ➝ New Group. Choose a name for the new group like “iPod Group.”

Then click Select Members to add people, using the same box you use when sending an email to several people (page 356). Click OK to close the window, and then close your Address Book window. You newly created, iPod-sized group’s name is waiting in iTunes, just like in Figure 8-7.

Your iPod starts sending the information as soon as you click OK, although it may take a minute or two to transfer everything. To see the information on the road, press your iPod’s Menu button until you return to the main menu; choose Extras, and then choose Contacts or Calendar.

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Transferring Notes Your iPod’s Notes area lets you view text files on its tiny screen, which is a great way to save directions to a friend’s house, as long as you don’t try to read them while driving. Putting items in your iPod’s Notes section’s a no-brainer; just copy a text file to your iPod’s Notes folder in My Computer. The challenge comes when you have to start contending with the iPod’s restrictions in displaying your text files. • Formatting. The iPod displays text files without using any formatting whatsoever. This works fine for grocery lists, but not so well for metric conversion tables. Stick to copying plain text that doesn’t use bold, italics, underline, or fancy fonts. • Size limit. The iPod displays individual notes up to 4 KB in size. That’s about 700 words or 2 pages—plenty for poetry, but it makes for an awfully short, short story. If you drop a longer file into the folder, iPod simply displays its first 4 KB and ignores the rest. POWER USERS’ CLINIC

iPod Without iTunes Apple naturally wants to play the role of media gatekeeper, controlling everything that moves in and out of your iPod. But you can easily hire somebody else for the job. Several third-party programs offer a more Windows-flavored look for moving information in and out of your iPod. These programs also include features iTunes left out: a way to move your iPod’s tunes back onto your own PC—essential for backups in case your PC crashes and takes your music down with it. These are the most popular third-party programs for the iPod.

• AnaPod, $25 (www.redchairsoftware.com/anapod). This iTunes replacement puts a Windows Explorer interface on your iPod for dragging and dropping music to or from your iPod. It’s also a full-featured media player and backup tool. • ephPod, free (www.ephpod.com). This freebie supports playlists, music transfers, importing Outlook contacts, and it also downloads the latest news, weather, e-books, and movie listings to an iPod. • XPlay 2, $39.95 (www.mediafour.com/products). XPlay 2 places a browsable music folder on your PC that mirrors your iPod. Drag and drop music in or out of the folder to add or remove it from your iPod.

To break larger text files into something readable by your iPod, check out the online iPod eBooks Creator (www.ambience.sk/ipod-ebook-creator/ipod-book-notestext-conversion.php). Give the program your large text file—some Shakespeare, perhaps, or any other free classic from Project Gutenberg (www.gutenberg.org/ catalog). The program breaks the text into a string of sequentially numbered files for easy Notes browsing, and puts the files in a single zip file for you to download.

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Note: To extract any zip file’s contents, right-click the file and, from the shortcut menu, choose Extract All. Windows copies the files into an adjacent folder with the same name as the zip file.

Windows XP’s Media Player

Windows XP’s Media Player Windows XP’s Media Player does a decent job of shuttling music from your PC to your digital music player—as long as your player’s not an iPod. That requires iTunes, covered in the previous section. Note: If you’re not running Windows Media Player 10 (check your version number by choosing Help ➝ About Windows Media Player), download it by visiting Microsoft’s Media Player Web site (www.microsoft. com/mediaplayer). Version 10 adds compatibility with the many more music players than earlier versions of Media Player supported.

When you plug your digital player into the USB port of a PC running Media Player, the Device Setup wizard appears, as shown in Figure 8-8. Instead of offering a traditional greeting, the wizard hits you up with a blunt question: should Media Player load your player with songs automatically or manually? Figure 8-8: When you plug in a portable player (or a keychain drive, for that matter), Windows Media Player offers to synchronize it with your PC’s music either automatically or manually. If your entire music collection fits on your player, your choice is easy. Choose Automatic and, on the next screen, select All Music for your Sync playlist. (Playlists are ordered lists of songs; more details on syncing starts on page 244.) That tells Media Player to automatically load your player with any new songs you’ve added to Media Player’s library. But if your music collection exceeds your player’s storage capacity, you must select some songs to leave behind.

If all your PC’s songs fit on your player—or at least you think they will—choose Automatic. That tells Media Player to keep your player’s music synchronized with your PC’s music. If you already know your that library is swollen past your player’s capacity, choose Manual to handpick which songs stay behind and which live on

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Windows XP’s Media Player

your player. Don’t fret over making the wrong choice here, as your decision’s easily reversed as described in the box on page 247. TROUBLESHOOTING MOMENT

When the Automatic or Manual Wizard Doesn’t Show Up Media Player tries its best to work with a wide variety of digital music players (iPod excepted, of course). But some players—usually those made before 2004—can’t be synchronized automatically. To see if yours falls into that category, open Media Player and go to Tools ➝ Options ➝ Devices. If you double-click your device’s name, the Properties dialog box appears. If your player’s Settings button isn’t grayed out, click it to tell Media Player to synchronize automatically. If the Settings button is grayed out, as shown here, your portable player can’t be synchronized automatically when plugged in. You’re stuck with manual synchronization. That’s not too bad, though. Just create a playlist called My Player (page 244) and keep it filled with all the songs you want on your device. Whenever you plug your player into your computer, tell Media Player to synchronize it with your My Player playlist, and Media Player dutifully loads it up with those songs.

Adding Music to Media Player Borrowing a business model from Apple, Microsoft designed Media Player to be the gateway to your digital music player. Before anything moves to your player, it must first live on Media Player. Your first task is to stock Media Player with music, which will then help you copy the tunes to your portable player. You can add music to Media Player in three different ways: • Import music that’s already stored on your PC (explained below). • Buy music from Media Player’s mall of online stores (page 242). • Rip (copy) music files from your CDs; that procedure is described on page 286. Importing your PC’s music The first few times Media Player appears on your screen, it eagerly begs to track down all your PC’s music so it can list every song in its library. If Media Player has stopped begging, or if you want to make sure its list is up to date, tell it to search anew by pressing F3 or choosing Tools ➝ Search for Music Files. Media Player sends you to the window shown in Figure 8-9, which asks you where it should look for songs on your PC, and whether it should also update the newly 240

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added songs’ tags—the hidden text inside a song file that contains its identifying information: the title, artist, track number, and so on.

Windows XP’s Media Player

Figure 8-9: To add songs to Media Player, tell the player where to start looking. If you store your music in your My Music folder, save time by opening the drop-down menu of the “Search on” box shown here, and then choosing My Music Folder. Otherwise, ignore the “Search on” box and just click the Browse button to point and click your way to the folder containing your songs.

Here’s how to fill out the form to help Media Player find your songs: • Search on. In this box, Media Player wants you to choose a particular drive to scour for songs. If all your music lives in your My Music folder, choose that and be done with it. But if you store songs in other areas—perhaps on a networked computer or an external hard drive—choose that area instead. • Look in. Meant as a time saver, this option lets you limit Media Player’s search area to a specific folder on your selected drive. Simplify matters by clicking the Browse button and then navigating to the specific folder you need. • New files only (fast). If you choose this option, Media Player updates newly added songs’ tags so they display the correct artist names and titles. Media Player doesn’t bother updating tags for songs already in your library. • New files and existing files in library without media information. This option tells Media Player to update the tags of newly added songs, as well as untagged songs currently in your library. • New files and all existing files in the library (slow). An agonizingly slow option. Media Player updates the tags of your incoming songs and every song in your library. If you have thousands of songs, this could take an hour or so. • Advanced Options. This button adds two more options to the mix. “Add files previously deleted from library” tells Media Player to add every file it finds— even if you’ve previously deleted that file from your library. Choosing this option brings back any accidental deletions; if you’ve already spent time weeding out the stinkers, avoid it, or you’ll bring them back. The second option, “Add volume leveling values for all files” lets Media Player automatically turn up the volume for quiet songs and turn down the loud ones. If you choose this option, be prepared to wait hours for the process to complete, as Media Player must “listen” to each song and assign it a volume level so it knows which way to tweak the volume when you play the song. Chapter 8: Digital Music Players PCs: The Missing Manual, eMatter Edition Copyright © 2008 O’Reilly & Associates, Inc. All rights reserved.

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Tip: If you meticulously fill out your song’s tags and don’t want Media Player to touch them, ever, choose Tools ➝ Options and click the Privacy tab. Then turn off “Update music files by retrieving media info from the Internet.”

Buying music online Unlike iTunes, which offers you one simple digital music store, Windows Media Player presents a virtual shopping mall, which lets you shop at Wal-Mart, MSN, MusicNow, PassAlong, SongTouch (for Christian music), Napster, Download Zone, and more (see Figure 8-10). Just like any new shopping mall, old stores occasionally fade away, and new ones take their places. Figure 8-10: Media Player offers a wide variety of online stores, selling not only songs but audio books, TV shows, music videos, sports shows, and pay radio stations. Almost all of the digital content comes with restrictions on how long it lasts on your computer, how many PCs it plays on, and whether or not you can burn it to CD. Be sure to read the fine print in the site’s Legal or Customer Service areas before giving your credit card number so you know exactly what you’re buying.

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Each store carries a slightly different catalog, so you may need to pick and choose between stores to find exactly what you want. Unfortunately, most stores make browsing surprisingly difficult, forcing you to download and install their software before seeing the catalog.

Windows XP’s Media Player

Tip: If you visit the stores’ Web sites with Internet Explorer, you can often browse their songs before having to install any extra software.

Almost all digital music sold today comes with restrictions called Digital Rights Management—a techno term for copy protection. Media Player’s files come with licenses—little codes that keep track of what you do with the file—how many times you can burn it to a CD, copy it to another PC, and so on. Without a license, you’re locked out of your music. To keep your music safe, be sure to back up your licenses (Tools ➝ Manage Licenses ➝ Backup Now) to a CD you can store in a safe place. Reinstalling or upgrading Windows can damage your licenses, locking you out of your purchased music. And moving songs from one PC to another often requires proof of licenses as well.

Copying Songs to Your Portable Player Media Player can copy songs to your portable player automatically for quick “grab and run” transfers. Or, it lets you copy songs manually, a more time-consuming option in which you can fine-tune your song selection. Media Player asks you to choose your preferred method the first time you plug in your device, but you can change your mind at any time (page 244). This section describes how to transfer songs automatically and manually. Transferring songs automatically Automatic synchronization is a great timesaver for people on the run because it tells Media Player to dump the same playlist—an ordered list of songs—into your player whenever you plug it into your PC. This incredibly boring sounding option’s actually a gem in disguise if you select the right playlist. Media Player lists your available playlists in the Playlists category of its left-most pane. Try some of these for starters: • All music. Choose this playlist, and Media Player dumps all your music onto your player. If your player is big enough to hold your entire digital library, the All Music playlist keeps your player up-to-date with your PC, quickly and automatically. It’s an obvious choice for relatively small music libraries. • An automatically updated playlist. Media Player constantly monitors your listening habits, and creates a series of on-the-fly playlists to match them. One playlist, called “Favorites—4 and 5 star rated,” contains the songs you hear

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most often; another contains songs you haven’t heard for awhile (“Favorites— Have not heard recently”); yet another contains songs you listen to on weekdays (“Favorites—Listen to on Weekdays”). To keep your digital player automatically updated with your PC’s newest songs, for example, choose Media Player’s “Fresh tracks” playlist. Since Media Player creates these playlists automatically, using them is a quick and easy way to stock your player with a variety of songs. • Your own playlist. When your player can’t hold your entire music library, create a new My Player playlist—a list of songs created especially for your player. Click the Library tab along the top, and then drag all your favorite songs onto the Now Playing list—Media Player’s right-most pane. (Yes, this could take a long time for large playlists.) Then click the words Now Playing List at the pane’s top, choose “Save Playlist as,” and then name your new playlist “My Player.” When you acquire new music, add it to your My Player playlist the same way, removing a few stale tunes (right-click and choose Remove from List) to make room. Then tell Media Player to copy your My Player playlist onto your player automatically (page 243). Since you’ll have already done the prep work to keep this list up-to-date with your favorites, the synchronizing process goes much faster: Media Player simply trims and adds songs from your player to make it match your My Player list. Media Player remembers whether you choose Automatic or Manual and dubs your decision a “synchronization partnership.” It remembers the synchronization partnership you’ve chosen for up to 16 different players, always choosing the right synchronization method whenever you plug in that particular device. Changed your mind about Automatic or Manual? Choose Sync ➝ Sync Settings (or Set Up Sync) to flip flop. Transferring songs manually Manual synchronization’s your only option when your tune stash grows larger than your player’s capacity. But it’s also meant for people who like to hand-craft their Sync Lists—the songs Media Player transfers onto your device. When you choose manual synchronization, you’re instructing Media Player to fetch the Sync window (Figure 8-11) every time you plug your player into your PC. It’s up to you at that point to remove a few Miles Davis albums to make room for more Erykah Badu. To clear some space on your player, begin by selecting unwanted tunes from the right side of the Sync List; then right-click those selected songs and choose “Delete from device” to remove them from your portable player. You can add new songs by creating a Sync List in any of three ways:

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• From the Library. If you can make quick decisions, create your Sync List straight from Media Player’s Library. The Library lists all of your PC’s songs sorted by artist, album, genre, release year, and other categories. When you spot something you want copied to your device, whether it’s an artist, album, or any other category of music, right-click it and then choose “Add to Sync List.”

Windows XP’s Media Player

Figure 8-11: Media Player’s Sync window contains two sides. The left shows the Sync List: songs waiting to be copied to your device; the right lists your player’s current songs. Click Start Sync, and Media Player copies as many songs as it can fit onto your portable player. To squeeze in as many as possible, Media Player converts your player-bound MP3 files to WMA format. If you’d prefer that Media Player leave them as MP3 files, choose Tools ➝ Options ➝ Devices. Then doubleclick your device’s name, click the Quality tab, and turn off the “Convert files as required by this device” checkbox.

• From the Sync area. If you prefer crafting playlists from scratch, click the Sync tab along Media Player’s top or choose File ➝ CDs and Devices ➝ Synchronize to view the Sync window, as shown in Figure 8-11. Then click Edit Playlist and Media Player’s Playlist Editor appears, as shown in Figure 8-12. The Playlist Editor shows a stripped-down version of Media Player’s library, letting you add songs by clicking their names while sorting them by artist, album, or genre. • Drag and drop. This route is meant for people who find Media Player’s structure a bit awkward. Windows lets you drag any songs or folders directly onto the Sync List. For instance, you can open your My Music folder, and then drag its files or folders directly onto the Sync List, shown on the left side of Figure 8-11. Media Player adds them to your Sync List, ready for you to copy to your portable player. When you finish creating your Sync List, click Start Sync, as shown in Figure 8-11, to have Media Player copy all your Sync List’s files onto your device—providing there’s enough room, of course. If your player lacks the storage space, Media

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Player copies all the songs that fit, and then gives up. Instead of sending a message explaining the situation, Media Player simply breaks your Sync List into two categories: “Synchronized to Device” and “Did not fit on Device.” Figure 8-12: Media Player’s Edit Playlist window offers a quick way to create short playlists that you can listen to immediately, or save or copy to a portable player. The window’s left side shows your media library; the right side shows the playlist you’re making (or editing). To find your files quickly, choose different options from the “View library by” drop-down list. The list lets you view your library by Artist, Artist and Album, Album, Genre, Genre and Album, and so on. To add individual songs to the list, double-click them; to add entire albums, artists, or genres, right-click them and then choose “Add to Playlist.” Save the playlist by clicking OK.

To free up some room, prune your Sync List by selecting items, right-clicking them, and then choosing “Remove from List.” Once you’ve chopped your Sync List down to a manageable size, click the Start Sync button again; Media Player begins pouring more songs onto your player.

Transferring Data Some portable music players work double-duty as digital briefcases. Instead of limiting their stash to tunes, they let you toss in data—perhaps a few large Word files to bring to work. To see if your digital player is open to this idea, double-click its icon in My Computer, and then try to copy a folder to it. If the copying worked, your player works fine as a file ferry boat. But if your player protests at the incoming files, you’re out of luck. Your success depends entirely on your device’s software, its design, and the kindness of its programmers.

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Troubleshooting Digital Music Players

Troubleshooting Digital Music Players

Like any other consumer gadget, portable media players come with their own set of problems. This section tells you how to solve some of the most common ones. POWER USERS’ CLINIC

Fine-tuning Your Synchronization Windows Media Player makes several assumptions about the way you want your music transferred to your player. To start, it assumes you want to convert your MP3 files to Microsoft’s more compact WMA format—handy if you want to fit more songs onto your player, but hideous if you prefer keeping your player’s songs in the more portable MP3 format.

detailed specifications. Choose New ➝ Automatic Playlist and customize it to send, say, only Charles Mingus songs added to your library within the last three weeks.

To change Media Player’s conversion tactics and fine-tune other synchronization settings, choose Tools ➝ Options ➝ Devices and double-click your device’s name. The Properties dialog box appears, letting you change the following options:

• Quality tab. This area applies only to people who care about the mundane details of file formats. Specifically, it tells Media Player whether or not to convert your MP3 files to WMA, and how much compression to apply during the conversion. Choices include:

• Synchronize tab. The choices in this tab give you almost obsessive control over how Media Player copies songs to your digital player. Settings include:

• Details button. Don’t bother clicking this; it merely summons a Web page ad for MP3 players compatible with Media Player’s WMA file format.

• Device name. Personalize your device by giving it a name. If you and your spouse own the same model of player, make them easier to distinguish on menus by naming them “Tom’s Creative Zen” and “Katie’s More Creative Zen.”

• Convert files as required by this device. Media Player normally converts your MP3 files to Microsoft’s own WMA format when it sends them to your device. (Your PC’s original MP3 files stay safely in MP3 format.) If you want Media Player to keep your songs in their original MP3 format, turn off this checkbox.

• Create folder hierarchy on device. Meant to help out older players, this tells Media Player whether to copy entire folders of music. If your digital player can’t display items stored in folders, turn this off. That tells Media Player to extract the songs from the folders before dumping them onto your player. • Start sync when device connects. This setting tells Media Player to begin dumping music to your player the second you plug it into your PC. But if you want time to look things over before the synchronizing begins, turn off this checkbox. • Settings button. This lets you change your mind between synchronizing automatically or manually. But its real beauty comes when you create Automatic Playlists tailored to your own detailed

• Quality level. You can compress old mono jazz recordings and audio books slightly more than most music without losing quality. Media Player can also sync to palmtop computers, some of which have video screens, so you may want to lower the quality level of any stored TV shows so you can pack a whole season of South Park on your portable media player. Here’s where you choose your own balance between file size and quality. Your player may also offer an Advanced tab for playerspecific settings. Some players may let you change their equalizer settings here, for instance, or see the version of their firmware (page 533).

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iPod’s “Do Not Disconnect” Message You can plug and unplug most PC music players from a USB port without a problem, as long as you’re not currently injecting the player with a stream of files. The iPod, however, often serves up a frightening “Do Not Disconnect” message beneath a blinking “forbidden” icon. When you see that message and you’re late for the plane, calmly right-click your iPod’s name in iTunes and then choose Stop. iTunes “ejects” your iPod from your PC, the message disappears, and you can still catch your flight. Tip: Stopping an iPod in iTunes is the same as clicking Windows XP’s “Safely remove hardware” icon in your taskbar. (A little green arrow hovers over the icon.) If iTunes isn’t handy, click that taskbar icon and choose “Safely remove hardware” to prepare your iPod for its impending unplugging.

Making Your PC Notice Your Player Sometimes your PC won’t notice a player that’s plugged in and turned on. The most common fix is unplugging it, waiting a few seconds, and plugging it back in. That gives your PC time to recognize the gadget and announce its presence to your programs. If your PC still has trouble recognizing the device, try plugging it straight into a USB port, bypassing any USB hubs (page 39).

Reformatting Your Player’s Hard Disk When your player’s acting very strange, the urge to reformat the hard disk (page 278) and start over can be overwhelming. But before you do so, read your player’s documentation to make sure you don’t do any irreparable harm. Some manufacturers offer special utilities to reformat a player safely, and Apple is one of them. To reformat your iPod, download the iPod Updater program from Apple (www. apple.com/ipod/download) and run the Restore function. It wipes your iPod clean and reloads it with the latest firmware—special programming instructions hidden on the drive that tell the player how to behave. If your player stores songs on memory cards, like those used by digital cameras, it’s usually safe to reformat the cards within My Computer.

Sharing an iPod Between Two PCs Apple went out of its way to preserve the illusion that people aren’t downloading and illegally sharing music files. For instance, iTunes won’t let songs escape from your iPod back onto your PC—you need third-party software for that deed (page 238). Apple also complicated the act of connecting one iPod to two PCs—your home and work PCs, for example. What Apple has done is to tie each iPod to a single PC—the PC that sent it files through iTunes. If you connect your iPod to a second

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PC, the second PC’s copy of iTunes asks if you want to “replace all existing songs and playlists on this iPod with those from this library?” (see Figure 8-13).

Troubleshooting Digital Music Players

Figure 8-13: Apple doesn’t like you to connect your iPod to a second PC. If you try, iTunes threatens to delete everything on your iPod so it can synchronize with the new PC. The solution is to turn off automatic synchronization and switch to manual, instead. Your iPod no longer syncs automatically, but you can connect it to any PC you want without trouble.

Naturally, few people want to wipe their iPod’s precious library completely clean. But choosing No makes the iPod temporarily “gray out” all its tunes, so you can’t listen to them. When that scary message appears, jump through these hoops to calm it down, save your files, and dump more songs onto it from the second PC. 1. Click No. 2. In the iTunes Source list, right-click your iPod’s name, and then choose iPod Options. 3. Click the iPod tab, and on that page’s Music tab, turn on the checkbox marked “Manually manage songs and playlists.” iTunes throws you one last obstacle by saying “Disabling automatic update requires manually unmounting the iPod before each disconnect.” Click OK. The word “unmount” is Apple’s fancy way of saying “unplug from your PC.” Manually unmounting your iPod means right-clicking your iPod’s name in iTunes, and then choosing Eject. That tells your PC the iPod’s going to be removed, so it should finish moving or copying any files to it, pronto. Telling your iPod to “manually update songs” has one more implication: when you plug your iPod back into your home PC, it won’t sync automatically. To switch back to automatic syncs, repeat steps 2 and 3 above, but in step 3, choose “Automatically update all songs and playlists.” Note: If your music library exceeds your iPod’s storage tank, iTunes automatically kicks you into manual mode, so you won’t see this message.

Digital Rights Management Problems When your music library’s file format doesn’t work with your player, you have two choices.

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• Convert the files. You can use a converter program (page 213) to convert songs from one format to another, provided the files aren’t copy protected. • Burn the files to a CD and rerip them. Burning to a CD is computer slang for “copying files to a CD.” Ripping means copying a CD’s files onto a PC. Why bother burning a CD, and then copying it back to your PC? Because that not only strips the music’s copy protection, but it also lets you choose the MP3 format when you rip the CD back to your PC. You can play MP3 files on nearly every music player. Burning files to a CD is covered on page 296 (iTunes) and page 294 (Media Player). Be sure to store your burned CDs in a safe place, as some copy protection limits the number of CDs you can create. The acts of converting and re-ripping lowers your songs’ quality a little bit. Before converting your entire collection, listen to a few converted files to make sure they still sound good to your ears. Tip: Whenever you burn a CD in Media Player, Media Player copy-protects your own CD, keeping you from playing it on other PCs. Stop the copy-protection by choosing Tools ➝ Options ➝ Rip Music. Then turn off the checkmark in the “Copy protect music” box. WORKAROUND WORKSHOP

Saving Orphaned MP3 Players MP3 players date back to 1998, and their technological trail is littered with orphan models abandoned by their manufacturers. Many players came with proprietary software that no longer works in Windows XP. Some models released just a year ago still don’t synchronize fully with Windows XP’s Media Player. Luckily, many programmers bought some of the earliest MP3 players, and they’ve crafted free programs to keep their players playing. Even the Rio PMP300—the first portable MP3 player released in the United States—keeps going,

letting owners fill its 32 MB memory by means of the “Dreaming of Brazil” program (www.parkverbot.org/ harald/download). RioWorld (www.rioworld.com) offers manuals and software for more than a dozen Rio players released since 1998. When your portable player’s no longer supported, use Google to search for its exact model name. Chances are, somebody’s written a replacement program to keep it alive.

Problem Tags When Media Player lists an “Unknown Album” containing songs titled “Track 1,” “Track 2,” and so on, you’re either dealing with a John Cage composition, or you’ve spotted songs with problem tags. Tags, also called ID3 tags, are small labels tucked inside each MP3 file containing the song’s title, artist, album title, track number, genre, and recording year. Without accurate tags, your media player works like a librarian shelving coverless books: there’s no way to sort or list songs correctly, much less identify the one that’s playing. Most MP3 ripping programs like iTunes and Media Player fill in your song’s tags automatically by checking an Internet database, grabbing each song’s information, 250

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and embedding it inside the file. Digital songs purchased from online stores come with their tags filled out, as well. But since most music collections draw from a variety of sources—purchased, downloaded, ripped by friends, or transferred from other players—many song tags are missing or inaccurate. Some online databases contain inaccurate information, too, spreading the problem.

Troubleshooting Digital Music Players

To edit a song’s problematic tags from Media Player’s Library, right-click the song’s name, choose Advanced Tag Editor, and start filling out the labels, paying careful attention to the song’s title and album fields. To fill out the file’s tags in iTunes, right-click the file, choose Get Info, and click the Info tag. But when Media Player or iTunes can’t cure the problem, it’s time to call in a dedicated tagging program. Most let you strip the old tags and start over, as well as repair faulty tags. Once you fill out your song’s tags, tagging programs also let you rename the files any way you want, from “Nessum Dorma” to “Act III, Scene 1, Nessum Dorma–Puccini.” Hundreds of MP3 tag utilities flood the Internet; these are some of the most popular: • Mp3 Tag Tools (massid3lib.sourceforge.net). • MediaMonkey (www.mediamonkey.com). • Tag&Rename (www.softpointer.com). • ID3-TagIT (www.id3-tagit.de). Tip: Tags work well for popular music, but not for operas and classical music—there’s no space to add the conductor, lead singers, or symphony. Most classical music fans place that information in the tag’s Comment area. That information rarely shows up in digital music players, but it often shows up in musicplaying software.

PC Crashes If your PC’s hard drive crashes, your iPod may be the savior of your digital music library. (And your digital photo archive, if you own a photo-capable iPod.) Once your PC has a new hard drive, import the songs back onto your PC from your iPod by following these steps: 1. Tell Windows to show hidden files on your computer (Start ➝ All Programs ➝ Accessories ➝ Windows Explorer ➝ Tools ➝ Folder Options ➝ View ➝ Show hidden files and folders). 2. Connect your iPod to your PC and then use Windows Explorer (Figure 8-6) to locate the iPod as a hard drive.

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3. Copy the Music folder from the iPod_Control folder to your PC’s hard drive. 4. Open iTunes and import the folder into its library. iTunes reaches into the Music folder, grabs the music, and restocks its library. WORKSHOP WORKAROUND

Rocking Out in the Car Listening to headphones while driving is illegal in most states, although some let you pop an earbud into one ear. But the best listening experience comes from playing your digital player through your car’s stereo. Several car dealers, including BMW, Mercedes-Benz, and Volvo, offer interfaces for hooking up directly with an iPod. Meanwhile, the masses make do by using the following makeshift accessories. First, buy a dashboard mount that fits your player, keeping it from sliding off your seat. Most mounts, if not all, work only with iPods. If you’re not using an iPod, the old “Digital Player in the Cup Holder” trick works in a pinch. Next, you need a way to pipe the music from your player to your car radio. Both iPods and their imitators can use an FM transmitter, cassette adapter, or Aux In jack, as described below. • FM transmitter ($20 to $40). These small gadgets plug into your player’s headphone jack and broadcast your music to your FM radio. Tune your radio to one of several preset stations on the low end of the FM dial for average quality sound. • Cassette adapter ($10 to $20). A digital jackalope, this cassette tape comes with a headphone cable dangling from one corner. Insert the tape into your car stereo, plug the tape’s cable into your headphone jack, and listen to the tunes. The main drawback? A slightly muted treble range.

• Aux In (free). Some newer car radios come with an Aux In jack—a headphone-like jack that accepts sound. Plug a 1/8-inch stereo cable, commonly found at consumer electronics stores, between your player’s headphone jack and the car radio’s Aux In jack. Switch your car stereo from Radio to Line-In, and hear your music with the highest possible quality. • New stereo ($150 to $250). The latest car radios not only play traditional CDs, but CDs stuffed with MP3 files. Approximately 150 songs fit on an MP3 CD, letting you pack nearly 10 CDs into the space of 1. Unfortunately, buying and replacing a car stereo can cost as much as an iPod. But if you’re in the market for a new stereo, make sure it either plays MP3 CDs or offers an Aux In port. Can’t afford a new stereo with an Aux In port? If you’re handy with wires, pick one up online for less than $100 at Installer (www.installer.com/aux) and install it yourself. Most car stereo shops install them, but they’re pricey. Finally, you need a way to conserve battery power while on the road. Many accessories plug into your car’s cigarette lighter to draw power and send the juice to your digital player’s power supply jack. Unfortunately, digital players use different types of power jacks, and some don’t use any jacks at all (they draw their power from their USB connections). Power supplies abound for iPods, but check with your player’s manufacturer for recommendations. You can find all these gadgets at consumer electronics stores, on Amazon (www.amazon.com) or, for iPods, at Griffin Technology (www.griffintechnology.com).

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chapter

Chapter 9

9

Hard Drives and Floppy Drives

Many people use magnets to stick little notes onto their refrigerator doors. Your PC also uses magnets to store your information, but with a slightly different approach. Every time you save a file, your PC transforms your data into little magnetic codes, and then spits the magnetic charges onto flat platters that whirl more than 5,000 times every minute. Even more miraculously, your computer’s able to retrieve these codes on demand and turn them back into your words, pictures, and songs. This chapter—and the two that follow—don’t even try to explain how any of that happens. But these chapters do explain how to find all the drives connected to your PC, keep them running smoothly, clean them up when they get too full, and add new ones when you just plain need more space.

Your PC’s Drives: An Overview Today’s PCs stuff information onto a wide variety of drives, each designed to store information in different-sized helpings. To see the drives connected to your PC, open My Computer (Start ➝ My Computer). Figure 9-1 shows some samples of almost every kind of drive Windows can communicate with. The list below gives you an overview of the drives you’re likely to find on your computer. • Floppy drives (storage capacity: 1.44 MB). Standard on most PCs for the past 20 years, floppy drives (page 277) read information from little plastic squares known as floppy disks. Most new PCs no longer include floppy drives, because they’re so rarely used today. But almost every PC still comes with the required

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Your PC’s Drives: An Overview

connectors for you to install a floppy drive (page 278) if you really need to read some important old disks. Hard drives CD burner

USB flash drive

DVD burner

Mapped network drive

Figure 9-1: Windows XP’s My Computer lists all the working drives on your PC. The PC shown here contains two hard drives (top), a CD burner and DVD burner (second row), and a USB flash drive and a network drive (third row). Windows XP lists drives even if you haven’t yet slipped a disk inside them. That’s why My Computer still lists your CD and DVD drives, as well as any flash card readers plugged into your PC’s USB port. You may also spot icons for attached digital cameras or MP3 players; in Windows’ mind, these all count as drives too, since they’re capable of storing picture and audio files.

• Hard drives (20 GB to 500 GB). Your PC’s main storage tank, its hard drive, continues to stay popular because advances in hard drive technology constantly ups the storage capacity of these drives. Early hard drives held about 10 MB of data—enough for 1 or 2 MP3 files. Hard drives now commonly hold 100 GB or more—one thousand times more than their ancestors. Hard drives come in two main flavors. Internal drives fit inside your PC’s case; external drives come inside a box that plugs into your PC’s USB or FireWire port. Since they live outside your PC, external drives are much easier to install than internal drives. Note: If My Computer notices an attached iPod music player (page 235), it lists the iPod as an external hard drive, not a music player. My Computer can copy files, including MP3 files, onto the iPod as data, but the iPod won’t let you listen these songs until you remove them and then reimport them using iTunes.

• CD drives (650 MB). What floppy drives lost in popularity, CD burners quickly grabbed. Today, every new PC comes with a CD burner (page 292) for creating music CDs, data CDs, or a combination of both.

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• DVD drives (4.3 GB). DVD drives (page 300) first caught on with movie buffs, who liked to watch flicks on their PCs and laptops. PC engineers have since figured out how to let common folk save data on DVDs. The result? DVD burners look to replace CD burners as the drive of choice. Unfortunately, until Microsoft figures out how to make Windows XP easily save info on DVDs, you must buy a DVD burner program (page 305) from another company.

Hard Drives: An Introduction

• Flash drives (64 MB to 4 GB). A curious engineer connected a USB port to a flash memory card, and gave birth to the flash drive. The modern equivalent of a floppy drive, these go by many names: keychain drives, thumb drives, USB drives, and jump drives. They’re lightweight, portable, and durable, with no moving parts. Being the technological newcomers, they’re more expensive than other drives, but prices are dropping. • Zip drives (100, 250, and 750 MB). Created in the day when people needed more storage than a floppy could offer, Zip disks resembled fat floppies and offered 100 times more storage space. Stiff competition from cheaper storage disks like flash drives, burnable CDs, and DVDs—combined with qualitycontrol problems—severely diminished their popularity. • Network drives (any size). When two or more PCs share information through a network (page 404), clicking your way to a game folder buried on another PC can wear out your fingers before the game loads. To speed things up, Windows XP lets you assign a drive letter to a frequently-used-but-far-away folder, and call it a network drive (page 446). That lets you click your kitchen PC’s “R” drive to see the files stored in another PC’s “recipes” folder. (The letters you see after these drive names—Network Stuff (W:), Kitchen Goodies (K:), and so on— don’t mean anything. Except for a few reserved letters, you get to pick out which letter to assign to a network drive.)

Hard Drives: An Introduction Windows XP insists on a hard drive for living quarters, as do most large programs. Every PC sold today comes with one hard drive, and sometimes two, three, or even a stack about a mile high if it’s being shipped to Google. The majority of consumer PCs come with only one hard drive, dubbed “Local Disk (C:)” when you view it in My Computer. For most people, one drive is plenty— until it starts filling up with information. After you’ve owned your PC for awhile, that once huge drive starts feeling a little crowded, what with all those digital photos and new programs. Windows XP starts complaining; it sends “Insufficient Disk Space” messages as you work, and large programs take longer to load. The following sections describe Windows XP’s builtin data pruning shears, which can help you clear away the brush.

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Your Hard Drive’s Available Space It’s easy to take a large hard drive for granted, until you begin to read the fine print on most software boxes. Some software needs less than a megabyte of hard disk space; other programs, like Adobe Photoshop and Microsoft Word, require several hundred megabytes. Some computer games consume two gigabytes all by themselves. Before buying a new program, take a look at how much disk space your hard drive holds, as well as how much free space it has left for new files and programs. Windows XP shows a running tally when you right-click your drive’s icon in My Computer and choose Properties. A nifty pie chart appears (Figure 9-2), displaying how many slices of hard drive your data currently consumes and how much is left over for new arrivals.

Used space Free space

Figure 9-2: You can use the two checkboxes along the bottom of this window to compress and/or index your files. If you’re running short on disk space, turn on “Compress drive to save disk space”; Windows XP packs your files more tightly to make extra room. Compressing your entire drive consumes several hours, however, so choose this option when you’ll be away from your PC. The Indexing Service eats up a lot of your hard drive space; it’s listed here so you can turn it off. Windows XP’s Search feature still runs without it. Turning the indexer on only speeds up searches for words stored inside of files, a task you’d probably do better assigning to Google’s Desktop Search utility (www.google.com/downloads).

Removing Unused Programs and Files The first stop on your “free up some space” campaign should be Windows XP’s built-in Disk Cleanup program; it lets you dump garbage left behind by your programs, as well as any mess you may have scattered yourself. Fire up the program by choosing Start ➝ All Programs ➝ Accessories ➝ System Tools ➝ Disk Cleanup. Disk Cleanup lets you pick and choose which of your PC’s various trash bins to empty (see Figure 9-3). Here’s a rundown of what each bin holds:

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• Downloaded Program Files. You may not notice, but some Web sites dump little programs known as “ActiveX controls” and “Java applets” onto your PC. They’re not (necessarily) anything evil, just small programs that let you access certain features: controlling the view of an online Webcam, for instance, or playing an online game. All these are fair game for deletion; the Web site will send you the latest version on your next visit.

Removing Unused Programs and Files

Figure 9-3: Although Windows XP refers to it as one program, Disk Cleanup actually brings together a suite of tools for freeing up space on your hard drive. With a few clicks, it lets you quickly empty the Recycle Bin, delete unused programs, and remove parts of Windows XP you never use. Depending on your hard drive’s size, Disk Cleanup can free up anywhere from a few megabytes to several gigabytes of space.

• Temporary Internet Files. To speed up your browsing, Internet Explorer places every Web page you view into a folder and hangs onto it for a week or so. (Google’s downloadable Desktop Search program [www.google.com/downloads] indexes these pages, letting you retrieve important ones.) Feel free to delete these archives if you need the space. If you think Internet Explorer hangs onto too much of this information, reduce the amount it saves by choosing Internet Explorer ➝ Tools ➝ Internet Options ➝ Settings, and then adjust the “Amount of disk space to use” value. Note: Adjusting this disk space setting in Internet Explorer doesn’t remove temporary Internet files from FireFox (page 380). Nor does it delete Internet Explorer’s History of all the Web sites you’ve visited for the past few weeks. To do that, choose Tools ➝ Options ➝ General ➝ Clear History.

• Offline Web Pages. Internet Explorer lets you create an automated schedule for saving a Web site or some its pages onto your PC for reading when you’re not online (page 393). Called “Synchronize,” this feature lets people read favorite sites on their laptops on the subway. Internet Explorer saves those pages in a special folder, and this is your chance to clear out anything that’s grown stale. Chapter 9: Hard Drives and Floppy Drives PCs: The Missing Manual, eMatter Edition Copyright © 2008 O’Reilly & Associates, Inc. All rights reserved.

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To make sure you’re not deleting something important, click the Offline Web Pages line and choose View Pages to see the saved page’s icons. Double-click any icon to view the site in your browser. If everything looks disposable, turn on the Offline Web Pages checkbox to have Disk Cleanup delete them. Note: If you discover that your PC’s automatically been stashing something you no longer want, turn off the feature. Go to Start ➝ Internet Explorer ➝ Tools ➝ Synchronize, and then turn off the checkbox of the unwanted site.

• Recycle Bin. Turning on this checkbox is typically the best way to free up space, but it also defeats the purpose of a Recycling Bin: being able to retrieve files that you thought you no longer needed. If your Recycling Bin’s consuming too much space, lower its size instead. To do so, right-click the Recycle Bin, choose Properties, and then slide the bar toward the right so the bin doesn’t consume quite as much as its normal 10 percent of your hard drive. • Setup Log Files. When programs install themselves on your PC, they take notes on their progress and save those notes in a file. When something goes wrong during installation, tech support people like to examine the notes—they’re the only people who can understand them. If you’re not having problems with recently installed programs, get rid of these files by turning on this checkbox. • Temporary files. Windows offers programs some hard drive space to use as a makeshift scratch pad when working. The programs are supposed to wipe it clean when they’re through, but they rarely do. Turn Temporary files on, and Disk Cleanup removes leftover files that are older than a week. • WebClient/Publisher Temporary Files. Only a few kinds of relatively uncommon corporate networks make use of these files. If you have any doubt, leave them alone, or check with your tech support department if your PC’s part of a corporate network. If that’s not the case, feel free to delete these files. (And don’t be alarmed when Disk Cleanup can’t seem to delete the last 32K of files; you can safely ignore those tiny remnants.) • Compress old files. A relic from the days of small hard drives, Microsoft intended this setting to be a handy tool for compressing files you haven’t used for awhile. In reality, many people find that the compression calculator makes Disk Cleanup freeze in action. If your Disk Cleanup freezes, download Kelly Theriot’s program from this book’s “Missing CD” page (www.missingmanuals. com) for a quick fix. • Catalog files for the Content Indexer. Windows XP creates an index to speed up some file searches. The index not only hogs file space, but leaves behind these catalog file leftovers as slop. Delete them. (If you rarely search for words inside of your files, you can save additional disk space by turning off the indexer; to do so, right-click your hard drive’s icon in My Computer, choose Properties, and then turn off the checkbox that mentions “Index Services.”)

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You may spot checkboxes from other programs, like Microsoft Office 2003, listed in Disk Cleanup. Feel free to turn them on as well. Finally, click OK to delete all the items you selected.

Removing Unused Programs and Files

When Windows XP finishes emptying the trash, return to Disk Cleanup and then click the More Options tab, shown in Figure 9-4. That page lists several more ways to prune your hard drive of unwanted growths. Clicking a section’s “Clean up” button usually lets you handpick that section’s unneeded items. All three categories are described below. • Windows Components. The overzealous Windows Installer places plenty of software onto your PC that you’ll never need. Click this section’s “Clean up…” button to see that software, sorted into categories, and start weeding it out. As you click each category in the Windows Components window, shown in the bottom of Figure 9-4, Windows lists a description beneath it. Keep an eye out for the Details button. It’s normally “grayed out,” but it becomes available when you select a category that contains more than one item; at that point, clicking the Details button lets you pick and choose individual items to delete within that category. For instance, click Details after selecting “Accessories and Utilities” to delete those Internet Games that keep the kids up all night playing online checkers. Tip: You can also install programs Windows left out. Turn on the checkbox next to Fax Services, for instance, and Windows XP Home Edition installs a fax program for sending faxes through your dial-up modem (covered in the online appendix, ““Other Cool Things You Can Do Online,” available on the “Missing CD” page at www.missingmanuals.com).

• Installed Programs. This calls up the Control Panel’s Add or Remove Programs wizard. Windows lists all your installed programs, including those trial programs you tried but never liked. Here’s your chance to delete them. Tip: In the wizard’s “Sort by” box, choose “Frequency of Use” to see your least-used programs at the top of the list for easy pruning. Also, sort by size to see your biggest space hogs at the top of the list, next to how much file space they consume.

• System Restore. System Restore (page 497) saves copies of your PC’s most important settings for several weeks, which is a great thing to discover when your PC’s gone haywire. It stakes out 12 percent of your hard drive for storing all that data, however. If your PC’s been running smoothly, this area lets you remove all but your most recent Restore Points, those delightful Windows safety nets that let you return your system to an earlier point in time. (To give System

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Restore a little less than its whopping 12 percent of real estate, right-click My Computer ➝ System Restore tab ➝ Settings. Figure 9-4: Top: After choosing Disk Cleanup and deleting your files, be sure to click its More Options tab to find these extra disk cleaners. Here, you can delete unwanted programs, and even unwanted parts of Windows itself by clicking the “Clean up” button next to “Windows components.” Bottom: The Windows Components window lets you handpick unused Windows XP items you never use. (MSN Explorer, for instance, is a prime candidate, hogging 20 MB.) However, Windows XP pulls a fast one when listing Internet Explorer, Windows Messenger, and Media Player as removable items. If you tell Windows XP to delete them, Microsoft deletes only the programs’ names from the menus; the programs still hog space on your hard drive.

Speeding Up a Hard Drive Your PC treats its hard drive like a shelf in the garage. Just as you store all your paint cans on one shelf, your computer saves all its data using the electronic

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equivalent of one long strip of magnetic space. And just as things can quickly get messy on your garage shelf, your PC’s hard drive can easily get cluttered.

Speeding Up a Hard Drive

FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTION

The Mysterious Missing Bytes My drive is supposed to be 60 GB. But Windows XP says it’s only 55.8 GB. Was I ripped off?

GB drive’s capacity as 60,011,610,112 bytes using the metric system, or 55.8 GB using Windows’ binary system.

You’re experiencing a historical oddity that worked out in favor of the drive’s marketing department. Hard drive manufacturers measure their drive’s size using the metric system. Indeed, your drive probably holds 60 GB of data.

A rule of thumb is to remember that a hard drive advertised as 10 GB holds only 9.31 GB of data; a 100 GB drive holds about 93.13 GB of data.

Windows XP however, measures storage using the binary system—powers of 2. That means Windows XP considers a kilobyte to be 1024, or 2 to the 10th power. So although the hard drive manufacturers measure their drive’s byte capacity in terms of 1,000, Windows XP needs to pack 1024 bytes of data into that same space. Now that drive storage has reached the gigabytes, the slight difference between 1,000 and 1,024 is no longer “close enough” and some people feel they’re being ripped off.

Hoping to clear up the confusion, the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) decreed in 1998 that drives should be measured in, get this: kibibytes, mebibytes, and gibibytes. Nobody wants to stutter when shopping for drives, so the old terms remain.

You can see how both parties are technically correct by right-clicking a drive in My Computer and choosing Properties. As you can see in this figure, Windows XP shows a 60

As you begin working with files, deleting some and moving others, Windows XP begins leaving gaps in that once-smooth strip of data. As your PC looks for available storage space, it breaks files apart, stuffing pieces wherever they’ll fit. After a few months, the files on your hard drive look more like your messy garage shelf. Rest assured that, unlike you, your PC keeps track of everything and nothing gets lost. But the drive has to work harder as it fetches all those scattered pieces. That slows everything down. Enter Windows XP’s built-in Disk Defragmenter, shown in Figure 9-5. The program picks up all the scattered pieces of your files and inscribes them back on the hard drive in long, contiguous, and easily accessible strips. That speeds up retrieval, letting your hard drive pick up a file in one pass. To begin organizing your drive’s virtual paint cans, run the Disk Defragmenter: go to Start ➝ All Programs ➝ Accessories ➝ System Tools ➝ Disk Defragmenter. The program takes several hours to run, and works best undisturbed. So run it in the evenings, when you’re away from your computer.

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Start by shutting down any programs to release any data they’re clutching. Then click the Analyze button to make sure your drive is fragmented enough to be worth the effort. If Windows says “You should defragment this volume,” then click the Defragment button and let it run all night. (It may take several hours to finish.) Figure 9-5: Before running Disk Defragmenter, run Disk Cleanup (page 256) so you’re not spending time defragmenting all your trash. Then let the Defragmenter run all night, especially if you haven’t run it for awhile. If you’re working in the background, your PC won’t be able to defragment files belonging to the program you’re using.

Your PC should run a bit faster the next morning, making you wish your messy garage came with such a handy one-click organizer.

Installing a Hard Drive Installing a new hard drive inside your PC is fairly easy; it’s almost like sliding a shoebox into a hall closet. That’s because hard drives slide into standard-sized parking places called docking bays that live inside your PC. Plug two cables into the drive, and when you turn on your PC, it immediately recognizes the new drive. Even easier is attaching an external hard drive. The only real difficulties arise when you’re replacing a drive that has data you want to save. Then the job becomes extraordinarily difficult, expensive, and time consuming. Here’s how to distinguish between the easy jobs and the ugly ones. • Adding an external hard drive. Astonishingly easy, since this contraption is nothing more than a hard drive inside a box. Connect the drive’s cable to a port on your PC—usually USB or FireWire—and you’re done. Windows XP automatically recognizes the drive and assigns it a letter, letting the drive appear in My Computer. From there, you’re ready to fill it with your photos, movies, or any other digital spillovers that no longer fit on your C drive. Page 266 shows you how to add an external drive. 262

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Note: External hard drives connect with one of two fairly new ports, USB 2.0 or FireWire. Before shopping, check to see which of these ports your PC offers (page 34). If necessary, you can add the port to your PC by installing a card (page 25).

Installing a Hard Drive

• Adding a second internal hard drive. Several steps up the difficulty ladder, this procedure requires buying a drive that uses the right interface, or connector. You must open your PC’s case; insert and screw down the drive; connect the drive’s cables; and, depending on the drive, move a little jumper to bridge two rows of pins. It’s fairly easy, but requires about a half hour’s time. Full details start in the next section. • Replacing a PC’s dead C drive. On the sweat scale, this operation rates much like adding a second internal hard drive, described above, but it’s a little easier because it removes much of the guesswork. Your replacement drive uses the same settings, cables, and screws as your old one. The time-intensive part is reinstalling Windows and your data, but that’s unavoidable whenever your C drive dies. • Upgrading your Windows drive to a larger drive. This one’s best left to professionals. Physically installing the replacement drive is easy enough. The hard part is moving all your data—including Windows XP—from the old drive to the new. Sometimes third-party software can make the move seamless. If not, you must reinstall Windows XP, reinstall and customize all your programs, and move all your data (if you know exactly where it’s stored) from the old drive to the new. The job can easily consume two or three days.

Identifying Your Internal Drive’s Interface Hard drives come with one of two different types of interfaces—the connector that attaches it to your PC’s motherboard (page 16). If the interfaces don’t match, you’ll end up like an American trying to plug an electric toothbrush into a European power outlet. Today’s drives come with one of two interfaces: IDE/ATA (Integrated Drive Electronics/Advanced Technology Attachment) and S-ATA (Serial Advanced Technology Attachment). Before shopping for a new drive, you need to know whether to buy an ATA or SATA drive so it can connect with your PC’s motherboard. You can figure out which type of connector your PC uses by either of these two methods. • Visual inspection. Since you need to open your PC’s case anyway, open it now, and look for the two cables that connect to the current hard drive in your PC. One cable weaves its way up from the drive to the power supply. The other cable meanders down from the drive to a connection on the motherboard. If the motherboard’s cable looks like a two-inch-wide flat ribbon, as shown in

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Figure 9-6, top, your drive uses an IDE/ATA interface. If it’s a thin cable (Figure 9-6, bottom), your drive uses an S-ATA interface. Figure 9-6: Top: The thick, 2-inch ribbon cable on this hard drive gives it away as an IDE/ATA drive—by far the most common interface found in PCs for the past 20 years. The four-wire cable to the drive’s right supplies electricity from the PC’s power supply. Bottom: The thinner cable on this drive identifies it as an S-ATA drive. S-ATA drives began appearing on more expensive PCs around 2003. The fourwire cable to the drive’s left supplies electricity from the power supply.

• Research existing drives. Find the manufacturer and model number of your existing drive. (Start ➝ Control Panel ➝ System ➝ Hardware tab ➝ Device Manager. Double-click “Disk drives” and double-click the name of your drive.) If you’re lucky, you see both the drive’s manufacturer and the model number. If you just see a model number, search on Google for the manufacturer’s name and Web site. Visit the site, look up the model number in its Downloads section, and read that drive’s specifications. Note: You may hear IDE/ATA drives referred to by a wide variety of names, including EIDE, UDMA, ATA/66, ATA/133, ATA/166, and others. Those terms relate to how the drive fetches information and the speed the drive grabs it, not the connector it uses. Treat these drives as more or less synonymous with a plain IDE/ATA drive. Most fairly new PCs shouldn’t have a problem with them.

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Shopping for a New Drive Once you know what type of drive to shop for, either IDE/ATA or S-ATA, you must weed through all the specifications listed on the sales sheets to choose a drive that meets your needs.

Installing a Hard Drive

• Capacity. Hard drives come measured in gigabytes, with 40 GB being the low end of the scale and 400 GB being on the high end. If you’re doing mostly word processing, a fairly small drive’s fine. But if you’re editing video or graphics, or storing lots of digital music or photographs, aim toward the larger end of the spectrum. (An hour of digital camcorder footage eats up 13 GB all by itself, and editing it usually requires making a copy.) Tip: Just as the newest cars at the dealer cost much more than the slightly used ones, the largest hard drives command a premium price over last month’s slightly smaller drives. You can often save quite a bit by choosing a 200-GB drive instead of a 250-GB drive.

• Speed. Most drives spin at 5,400, 7,200, or 10,000 RPM (Revolutions Per Minute). The faster the drive, the less time you’ll wait when loading large files. But you rarely need much speed unless you’re editing video or doing high-end graphics work—chores that constantly pour information on and off of your hard drive. If your work centers around Web browsing, word processing, and other less-disk-intensive chores, pick up a slower drive and pocket the price difference. (Backup drives, since they usually run unattended in the evenings, are perfect candidates for slower speeds.) • Average seek time. Measured in milliseconds, this rating determines how quickly your drive can locate a particular piece of information. Yes, it’s measured in milliseconds, so it’s rarely noticeable until you grab lots of small pieces of information, like when moving a huge folder of small files from one place to another. You can still work while your PC fetches files in the background, so don’t give seek time much weight. • Buffer. Your drive examines the files it grabs for your PC, and then grabs a few extra files it thinks your PC may want next. It sticks the extra files into its own speedy memory—a buffer—in the hopes the PC will return for it. If the PC returns for it, the buffer dishes up it up, about five times faster than normal. A buffer of about 2 MB works fine for most tasks. • Warranty. Most drives come with warranties from one to five years, but don’t wrinkle your brow much over warranties. If a drive works fine for its first week, it usually lasts more than six or eight years—which is probably longer than the life of your PC.

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• Cylinders, heads, and sectors. A decade ago, hard drive installers needed to tell this information about the drive’s inner workings to their PCs. Today, the PC’s BIOS (page 525) figures it out automatically. Don’t bother evaluating your potential new drive based on any of these specifications. LAPTOP LIFE

Upgrading Your Laptop’s Hard Drive Not a task for the timid, upgrading a laptop’s hard drive involves working with tiny screws, fragile connectors, and cramped spaces. Plus, upgraders face the problem of moving both Windows and their data off the old drive and onto the new one. Most owners bite the bullet and let a shop handle the job. As an alternative, consider a small portable hard drive. Western Digital’s Passport series shown here, for instance, packs 80 GB of space into a rugged palm-sized drive. The little beggar draws power from your laptop’s USB port, saving you from adding yet another power supply to your laptop bag. An external hard drive also provides an easier-tocarry solution if you’re using only your laptop to transport its files. Instead of lugging the laptop, copy the files to the portable hard drive. Then bring the drive and leave the laptop back at your desk. The drive fetches a premium price, since you’re paying for both the metal box and the extra electronics stuffed inside. But compare its price to the estimate the shop gives you for installing a new drive and copying all your data from your old drive to your new one.

Installing an External Hard Drive It’s much easier to add extra storage to your PC by plugging in an external hard drive. By enclosing a drive and its electronics in a box with a USB or FireWire port, manufacturers have made installation as easy as a plugging in a mouse. You don’t need to open the PC’s case, find the right connectors, and hope you bought the right drive for your PC. External drives cost a little more than an internal hard drive, but by plugging it in yourself, you save the cost of a trip to the repair shop. Some people prefer external hard drives for several other reasons, as well. • Backups. External hard drives make it so easy to back up your PC that you may be cursing yourself down the road if you don’t install one. You don’t want to lose your digital shoebox full of family photos. Backing up information to a portable external drive has the added advantage of letting you keep the backups in a

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separate location (like the office), away from your PC. If your house burns down, you may lose your family heirlooms, but at least your MP3 collection stays safe. Some external hard drives come with backup software included.

Installing a Hard Drive

• Transporting information. External hard drives are almost as portable as CDs, but give you a hundred times the storage. With an external hard drive, you can easily move large files from one PC to another. These data suitcases let you move digital video from your home office PC to the PC connected to your TV for quick viewing. An easily detachable hard drive also lets you grab your data and run during an emergency, preserving all your records. POWER USERS’ CLINIC

Booting From an External Drive Although external drives work best for storage, some PCs let you boot from one, too. (Booting, as you probably know, means to let a PC load an operating system. Insert a Windows XP CD into your PC, for instance, and the PC loads Windows XP (it boots) from the CD itself, and not your hard drive.) Before you start thinking about creating a portable PC—storing Windows and your data on a pocket-sized drive and booting from any PC you visit—consider these things: • Microsoft forbids Windows XP from being installed onto an external drive, which limits your choice of operating systems to older Windows versions, or another operating system like Linux. • Should Windows XP somehow wake up on a strange and unfamiliar PC, it won’t know what parts it is attached to, nor will it remember that it’s been

activated. That forces you to call Microsoft and explain why you’re installing your copy of Windows XP on a second PC. • When most PCs start up, they look for an operating system on a floppy drive, a CD drive, and the internal hard drive—in that exact order. The PC grabs the first operating system it finds, and begins loading. To make a PC boot from an external USB drive, you must change the “boot order” in the PC’s BIOS (page 525). That’s fairly easy to do for one PC, but time-consuming and sometimes impossible on other PCs. If you’re looking for a portable operating system, download Knoppix (www.knoppix.org). The Swiss-Army Knife of computing, it’s a complete Linux operating system and a suite of programs that fits on a single bootable CD.

• Stashing information. External drives give you the luxury of storing large files you’re not quite ready to delete: downloaded movies, music, games, programs, or even that little flash animation cartoon you saved for your friends to see. Some people store backup copies of their music CDs, so they can create a new CD if their car’s CD player eats the original. • Security. For the ultimate in security, keep your personal data on an external hard drive and stash it in a safe or security deposit box while you’re on vacation. To keep your personal data absolutely safe from hackers who have found the latest unpatched browser exploit, unplug the hard drive when you’re online. If you share computers with roommates, your own removable hard drive lets you keep your data away from the PC unless you’re the one at the keyboard. Follow these steps to install an external hard drive on your PC.

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1. Plug the drive’s power adapter into the wall. All drives need power, and most draw it from the wall itself. Some small portable drives aimed at the laptop market draw the power straight from the USB port; those drives will work on a PC, as well. 2. Connect the drive to your PC’s USB or FireWire port. Most drives come with their own cable that uses either USB or FireWire. Connect the cable between the port on your drive and the USB 2.0 or FireWire port on your PC. If your PC doesn’t include the USB or FireWire port you need, install one by installing a card (page 25) into your PC. Windows XP doesn’t need drivers for most external hard drives, and it recognizes them as soon as you plug them in. Make sure you’ve installed Windows XP’s Service Pack 1 or 2, however, or your PC won’t be able to use its USB 2.0 ports at full speed. It’s easy to check your PC’s USB 2.0 friendliness level (page 37). 3. Test the drive. When you plug in the drive, Windows XP’s My Computer recognizes it, assigns it a drive letter, and lists it in My Computer. Double-click the new drive letter in My Computer to open it up, and then copy a few files onto it to make sure it works. Warning: To keep from losing any data, let Windows XP know before you unplug a drive from your PC. Click the drive’s icon on the taskbar, choose Safely Remove USB Mass Storage Device, and wait until Windows XP says the drive’s been disconnected. That gives Windows XP time to save any last bits of data to the drive before you unplug it.

Installing an Internal Hard Drive Installing a second hard drive into your PC takes a lot more effort than plugging in an external hard drive. However, an internal drive’s cheaper, faster, and doesn’t take up desk space or wall outlets. Here’s how to add a one to your PC: 1. Buy a drive. Be sure to buy the drive that supports your PC’s interface, either S-ATA or IDE/ ATA. Page 263 shows you how to determine which format’s suitable for your PC. 2. Turn off the PC and remove its case. This procedure’s covered on page 12. 3. Set the drive’s jumper settings, if necessary. Skip this section if you’re fortunate enough to be installing an S-ATA drive. If you’re installing an IDE/ATA drive, on the other hand, here’s the problem. Two of these drives (that is, your original hard drive, and the new one you’re adding) connect to the same cable. Since your PC needs to know which drive

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it’s talking to, it gives the drives these unfortunate names: “Master” and “Slave.” You need to tell each drive whether it should respond to “Master” or “Slave.”

Installing a Hard Drive

PC engineers decided that flipping a drive’s switch to either Master or Slave would be too easy. Instead, they make you snap a tiny plastic cover, called a jumper, over certain rows of pins, as shown in Figure 9-7. Figure 9-7: Every drive’s label includes a little diagram that shows its two rows of pins, and which pairs of those pins you should cover with a jumper to designate the drive as either “Master” or “Slave.” Take a look the diagram on your drive to see which pair of pins you need to cover. Then grab the jumper with a pair of tweezers and push it onto the pair of pins that matches the setting you want for that drive.

If you’re replacing your existing (and presumably dead) C: drive, set your new drive to Master. If you’re adding a second drive, set its jumper settings to Slave. Note: Some drives use a newer setting called Cable Select. To see if yours does, look at the connectors on the drive’s ribbon cable. If one connector is marked “Master,” and the other connector’s marked “Slave,” then set the jumpers on both drives to “Cable Select.” The PC then names the drives according to what cable connector they’re plugged into, either Master or Slave.

4. Insert the new drive into the docking bay. If you’re replacing an existing drive, slide the old drive out of its bay (Figure 1-2) and slide the new drive in to replace it. Fasten the new drive in place using the old drive’s screws or latches. If you’re adding a second drive, slide it into the bay adjacent to the existing drive. Then fasten it in place with screws and/or latches. Most computer stores sell mounting screws or latches; if they don’t, your PC manufacturer probably sells them.

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5. Attach the two cables, one for power and the other for the motherboard. One cable connects from the motherboard to the drive; the other cable sprouts from a bundle of cables connected to the power supply. The cables fit onto their connectors in only one way, keeping you from accidentally pushing one into the wrong place or upside down. Push them into their drive’s connectors as shown in Figure 9-8. Figure 9-8: Top left: The ATA drive’s power cable connector, known as a “Molex” connector, requires quite a bit of force to push into the drive’s four-pin connector. Top right: The ATA drive’s wide ribbon cable fits into the drive’s connector one way; make sure the little notch on the cable’s connector meshes with the little groove on the drive’s connector. Bottom left: The S-ATA drive’s power connector is the larger of the two cables. Bottom right: The S-ATA drive’s small motherboard cable pushes onto the drive’s small connector.

6. Turn on your PC. Don’t bother putting your PC’s case back on until Windows starts up; you may need to tweak the jumper settings. If Windows doesn’t load or the PC doesn’t recognize the drive, make sure you set the drive’s jumpers to the correct setting. Also make sure you pushed in the connectors all the way. 7. Partition the drive with Windows XP. Windows refers to all the space on a new drive as “unallocated” and won’t touch the new drive until you stake out a partition—a designated spot on the drive—and tell Windows XP it can start playing with it. Windows XP’s Disk Manager (Start ➝ right-click My Computer ➝ Manage ➝ Disk Management) is your control center for making these changes.

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Disk Manager lists all your attached drives, including hard drives, CD and DVD drives, and even drives attached through USB ports. The drives with blue bars across their tops are partitioned, and ready to work. Drives with black bars receive the name “unallocated,” which means they need a partition.

Installing a Hard Drive

To partition your newly installed drive, right-click it in Disk Manager and then choose New Partition. The New Partition Wizard wakes from its slumber and leads you through creating a partition (see Figure 9-9). Choose Primary, select the Wizard’s suggested size, drive letter, and formatting values, and Windows XP begins preparing the drive—which could take longer than it took you to install the thing. Formatting a large drive can take more than an hour.

Changing a Drive Letter When you plug an external hard drive or card reader (page 152) into your PC, Windows XP handles the background chores automatically so you can concentrate on more pressing matters, like checking your new digital photos to see that awesome close-up of the bumblebee landing on the flower. Those background chores include assigning the drive a letter, so it shows up in My Computer as a bona fide destination. Windows XP normally assigns new drives the first unclaimed letter of the alphabet. For instance, if your hard drive owns “C” and your CD drive grabs “D,” your new hard drive ends up with “E.” My Computer lists drives alphabetically, so your two drives won’t be next to each other. If that bothers you, Windows XP lets you change a drive’s letter, giving your new drive the “D” and bumping the CD drive to “E.” Although this all looks better cosmetically, changing drive letters often confuses your PC in several ways: • Programs. Programs remember the drive letter that gave them birth, not the drive itself. The next time you try to install a new feature in Word, for instance, the program will protest with an error message, saying it didn’t find its installation CD in the correct drive. CD burners will continue to look for CDs using the wrong letter as well. Eventually some programs catch on to your switch, but prepare yourself for many error messages early on. • Playlists. Some playlists (page 244) from Media Player, iTunes, and other programs remember file locations by using the drive letter. If you move your songs to a drive with a new letter—placing them on a portable hard drive, for instance—you may need to recreate any playlists containing those songs. Note: If you keep all your iTunes music on a drive with a letter that you’ve changed, let iTunes know: choose Edit ➝ Preferences ➝ Advanced ➝ Change. Navigate to the new drive’s folder containing all your music, and then click OK. iTunes updates all your playlists with the music’s new location.

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• Networks. Be prepared to recreate any shortcuts pointing to drives with newly changed letters. Figure 9-9: Windows XP’s New Partition Wizard walks you through the process of introducing a new drive to Windows XP by partitioning, formatting, and assigning the new drive a letter. Most people keep things simple by creating one large partition from the entire drive, and then accept all the wizard’s suggested values. Other people break the drive into several partitions, using the different partitions to run other operating systems like Linux or older versions of Windows versions (so they can run software Windows XP has trouble handling). To save time when formatting previously used drives, turn on the “Perform a quick format” checkbox (second figure from the bottom). Using the quick format option tells the wizard not to bother scanning the disk for bad sectors, saving oodles of time.

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But if you’d rather annoy your programs than live with a letter scheme that annoys you, change a drive’s letter by opening Windows XP’s Disk Management program (Start ➝ right-click My Computer ➝ Manage ➝ Disk Management). By rightclicking a listed drive’s name, you can change or remove its currently assigned letter. Figure 9-10 demonstrates the procedure.

Installing a Hard Drive

Figure 9-10: Top: Right-click the name of the drive you want to change, and choose Change Drive Letter and Paths. Bottom: Click the Change button to change the drive’s letter, and then select the drive’s new letter assignment. If you want to swap two drive’s letters, don’t choose Change. Instead, click each drive and choose Remove to remove their assigned letters. Once you strip the drives of their letters, reassign different letters by clicking them and then choosing Change.

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Windows XP won’t let you change letters assigned to your floppy drives (they always snap up A and B). Nor does it let you change your C drive—Windows XP insists on living on the C drive. But any other drives are fair game. New drive letters can make networked drives (page 446) easier to remember as well. If all your digital music lives buried on a folder inside another computer, for instance, create a Mapped Network Drive with the letter “M.” To go really wild, create a “J” folder that leads straight to your Jimi Hendrix files.

Troubleshooting Hard Drives Hard drives are pretty dependable. But if you ever notice your drive making any unusual noises, like clicking, buzzing, or scraping sounds, stop working and back up your information as quickly as you can, preferably to a portable hard drive or a networked PC. Those noises usually mean that the drive’s readers are scraping the platters that contain data. Performing a backup (page 463) may be your last chance to save your data. When you’re done with the backup, turn off your PC, and check the backup on another PC. If it’s good, breathe a sign of relief. If some of the data remains missing, take your drive to a data recovery specialist and ask for a retrieval estimate. Compare the cost to the value of your data and make your decision.

Disk Testers If you suspect that your hard drive is on the blink, confirm or alleviate your fears by giving it a checkup. Windows XP offers a small error-checking clinic (right-click the drive and then select Properties ➝ Tools ➝ Check Now). But for a real thorough diagnosis, download the error-checking program offered by the drive’s manufacturer. (Page 265 explains how to find the drive’s model and manufacturer.) Visit the manufacturer’s Web site and download their diagnostic program from their Customer Support or Downloads area. Since Windows XP clings so tightly to your drive as it runs, some of these diagnostic programs come in the form of ISO files—images of a CD that you need to first burn to a CD using your CD burner program (page 301). When you’ve done that, insert the burned CD, and then restart your PC; your PC loads the program from the CD, before Windows XP gets its grip on the drive. That lets the program examine all of your drive, giving you the most thorough analysis possible. Here are some of the more popular tools for different hard drive brands: • Seagate’s SeaTools Diagnostic Suite (www.seagate.com) • Maxtor/Quantum’s PowerMax (www.maxtor.com) • Western Digital’s Data Lifeguard Diagnostic for Windows (www.wdc.com) • Fujitsu’s ATA Diagnostic Tool (www.fujitsu.com) • IBM/Hitachi Drive Fitness Test (www.hitachigst.com) 274

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You can search for these programs on their manufacturer’s site or download them from this book’s “Missing CD” page (www.missingmanuals.com). These custommade programs are designed by manufacturers to work on their own drives; sometimes they even perform repairs.

Troubleshooting Hard Drives

Checking Your Hard Drive’s Health Today’s cars constantly monitor their health. When you take a car to the shop for repairs, the mechanic doesn’t lift the hood as much as he plugs his PC into the car’s diagnostic center. It feeds him the codes explaining what’s going wrong, letting the mechanic replace the right part. Since hard drives inscribe data onto disks sealed inside a metal box, you can’t inspect them for any damage. To keep an eye on them, hard drive manufactures invented Self-Monitoring, Analysis, and Reporting Technology, creating an acronym you know they were proud of: S.M.A.R.T. The S.M.A.R.T.-enabled hard drives take notes on their temperature, missed readings, errors, and other information. Then they send the information to you. How? Unfortunately, not very well. Some motherboards read the drive’s S.M.A.R.T. signals each time you turn on your PC. If the drives send out any warnings, the PC displays it on the screen, leaving it for you to read before Windows takes the helm. But if you suspect your drive’s having problems, visit the drive manufacturer’s Web site and download the S.M.A.R.T. utility. At Seagate’s Web site, for instance, a program probes your drive while you’re connected over the Internet, and it feeds you notice of any oddities that may signal impending doom (Figure 9-11).

Converting from FAT32 to NTFS Just as you must put shelves on a wall before storing your books, you must format a hard drive before Windows can store any files on it. Several formats exist, but Windows XP runs best on a hard drive formatted in NTFS (New Technology File System). It’s more secure and better suited to today’s larger hard drives—especially if you need to dump digital camera footage onto your hard drive. Some PCs still run Windows XP on an earlier format system called FAT or FAT32 (File Allocation Table), but converting these drives to NTFS is easy. Microsoft even offers to perform the transformation as an option if you’re upgrading your PC to Windows XP. Note: You don’t lose any data when converting a FAT32 drive to NTFS. The data stays safe. The only caveat to keep in mind is that the procedure isn’t reversible. Once you convert a drive from FAT32 to NTFS, you’re stuck with NTFS. Since most people don’t have any reason to switch back, that doesn’t usually present a problem. If for some reason you do need to convert back to FAT32 from NTFS, make sure to first back up the NTFS drive’s data. Then reformat the drive using FAT32. When you’re finished formatting the drive, copy everything back over to the drive from wherever you backed up your data.

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To see how your PC’s hard drives are currently formatted, choose Start ➝ My Computer. Then right-click your hard drive icon, choose Properties, and look for the File system entry. If you spot the word NTFS, your hard drive’s already running NTFS. If you see FAT or FAT32, it’s time to convert your drive. It’s an easy process. Figure 9-11: If you suspect your hard drive may be on its last legs, drop by the manufacturer’s Web site and download its S.M.A.R.T checkup utility. Seagate’s program checks your hard drive’s S.M.A.R.T. readings while you’re online, letting you know if the drive’s showing any signs of stress that signal it may soon fail.

1. Open a command prompt. Click Start ➝ All Programs ➝ Accessories ➝ Command Prompt. 2. Type: convert drive_letter: /fs:ntfs Insert the letter of the drive you want to convert. For instance, to convert your D drive, you’d type convert D: /fs:ntfs and press Enter. Windows XP takes over from there, converting the drive immediately—unless you’re asking to convert the C drive, which is where Windows XP lives, that is. In that case, the utility converts the drive the next time you start your PC.

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Floppy Drives: An Introduction

Floppy Drives: An Introduction

Floppy drives have gone the way of punch cards. Many PC makers no longer include floppy drives on new computers, and few people miss them. Before writing them off as horse-and-buggy relics, though, think about these reasons to keep a floppy drive in your PC. FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTION

Hosing Down a Hard Drive I’m donating my old PC to charity. How can I wipe off all my old data, including any credit card numbers, tax information, and household budgets? Deleting everything on your hard drive, or reformatting your hard drive, doesn’t truly eliminate your information. Many data recovery specialists can still recover the files (which is a handy fact to know if you’ve just wiped out your entire hard drive by accident). To really erase your information, you need to save some new data on top of it. In today’s world of exponentially increasing identify theft, many free programs on the Internet offer to overwrite your data with zeroes or random numbers. Some even overwrite it several times, truly smashing it into the dirt. The Department of Defense 5220.22-M specifications call for data to be overwritten three times with different characters each time. The best data killers write over

your data seven times, but that’s probably overkill unless you work in the spy biz. Darik’s Boot and Nuke (DBAN) (http://dban.sourceforge. net) does a fantastic job of detecting hard drives from a wide variety of manufacturers and scrubbing them completely clean of data. DBAN works by having you create either a floppy or CD that you place in your PC’s drive. When you restart your PC, the machine starts up from the disk, not the hard drive, letting DBAN render your data useless, both to you and the vast majority of data recovery specialists. Once you wipe the drive clean, reinstall your copy of Windows, place your original Windows CD into the box with your PC, and ship them both to a charity, knowing your TurboTax files won’t fall into the hands of strangers.

• Boot disk. When Windows XP acts up and doesn’t kick in when you turn on your PC, you may need another operating system to take over for troubleshooting. For years, floppy disks provided that operating system on what’s called a boot disk. Insert the floppy, turn on your PC, and the PC loads the operating system from the floppy. Today most people boot directly from their Windows XP CD when their PC won’t load, but floppies still come in handy for older PCs that don’t know how to boot from a CD. Tip: The Web site BootDisk (www.bootdisk.com) offers a wide variety of boot disks for troubleshooting PCs from DOS, an older operating system that rarely fails to load, as well as for loading older versions of Windows for troubleshooting purposes. When a PC won’t load, a boot disk’s skeletal frame provides enough structure for you to navigate to your My Documents folder and retrieve important files.

• Password Recovery Disk. Windows XP turns a floppy disk into a key that lets you back into your User Account, should you forget your password. To create a

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Password Recovery Disk, choose Start ➝ Control Panel ➝ User Accounts. Click your User Account, and then click “Prevent forgotten password” in the upper left-hand corner. Windows XP guides you through creating your own Password Recovery Disk. (This procedure works only for your User Account.) Keep the floppy in a safe but handy place should a forgotten password ever lock you out of your own computer. • Flashing firmware. Your PC’s motherboard and other parts come with tiny morsels of software written directly onto their circuits. Known as firmware rather than software, this data occasionally needs updating, usually by booting from a floppy that contains an automatic firmware installation program. • Utilities. Some utility programs need to boot from a floppy, which lets them control your PC before Windows XP gets its hands on your machine. That lets the programs do things like wipe the hard drive clean before you sell it or give it to a friend. • Backup. Microsoft’s built-in Backup program won’t save data to CDs, but it does work with floppies. Sure, you need a stack taller than a stalagmite to back up your hard drive, but for small jobs, they’ll do the trick. Floppy drives offer one other peculiarity compared to hard drives: when you delete files from a floppy disk, Windows XP deletes them; it doesn’t send them to the Recycle Bin for possible retrieval. If you really need to recover the deleted files, use an undelete program provided by many security programs or download Brian Kato’s Restoration (www.geocities.jp/br_kato).

Formatting a Floppy Disk Most floppies sold in stores today are preformatted, meaning they’re ready for Windows XP to save data to them. (If your local stores no longer carry floppies, Amazon [www.amazon.com] still offers them for sale.) But if your PC can’t read a floppy, formatting it may give it a second life. Formatting deletes anything stored on the floppy, but if you can’t read anything from it, you don’t have much to lose. To format a floppy, insert it (label side-up) into your floppy drive, and then rightclick it in My Computer. Choose Format, and then click the Start button. If Windows XP has trouble formatting the floppy, throw it away and start with a fresh one. If a floppy can’t be formatted, it’s not worth saving.

Installing a Floppy Drive Chances are slim that you still need a floppy drive. But if you find yourself in need of a new or replacement floppy drive, think about buying an external drive that simply plugs into your USB port. That lets you plug it into any PC you want, including your laptop.

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If one of the PCs on your network has a floppy drive, share the drive via the network (page 446). You can’t boot from a shared floppy drive, but you can read and write files to it.

Installing a Floppy Drive

If you still want to install an internal floppy drive, look for one that combines a floppy drive with a card reader or some easily accessible USB ports. You may end up using those features more than the floppy drive itself. Whether you’re replacing an existing floppy drive or adding one to a PC, follow these steps. 1. Choose a drive bay, remove the drive’s face plate, if necessary, and then slide in the floppy drive. Like space ships, floppy drives slide into a docking bay. Those rectangles along the front of your computer are actually face plates for your PC’s docking bays. (Your CD drive lives inside a docking bay, as well.) Pry off the plastic face plate, if necessary, usually working from the inside out. If you’re installing a 3 1⁄2" drive into a 5 1⁄4" bay, you need a special front panel to fit; most floppy drives come with one. Slide the floppy drive into the bay, ugly end first, so the slot for feeding floppies lives in front. 2. Connect the ribbon and power cables to the floppy drive. Just like hard drives, floppy drives need two cables. The ribbon cable connects between the drive and the motherboard, and the four-wire cable comes from the power supply. • Ribbon cable. This flat ribbon cable pushes into the drive’s long connector, which looks just like the one in Figure 9-8, top right. The ribbon cable’s other end pushes into a similarly shaped connector on the motherboard, right next to where the hard drive plugs in. (The motherboard’s floppy connector’s marked “Floppy” to distinguish it from the hard drive connector, usually called “IDE 0,” “IDE 1,” or “IDE Pri.” A little notch on the ribbon’s connector meshes with a little groove on the motherboard’s connector to keep you from pushing it in the wrong way. • Power cable. Many strands of cables dangle from the back of your power supply. Most connect to the other drives, but the one that fits into the floppy drive should be hanging unused. Pull off its plastic cap, if necessary, and push it into the drive. • Other cables. If your new floppy drive came with other goodies—USB ports, for instance, or card readers—connect their cables to the USB jacks on your motherboard. (If you can’t find one, look at the cables from your PC’s existing USB ports. You may need to steal one of their cables to connect it to your new, more easily accessible port.)

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3. Tighten the drive in place. See how the little screws hold your hard drives and CD drives to the side of the metal docking bay? Screws hold the floppy drive in place the same way. If your floppy drive didn’t come with screws, they’re sold at any computer store. 4. Turn on your computer. Your computer notices the newly installed floppy drive as soon as it starts up, tells Windows XP about it, and lets you begin using it immediately. If your PC doesn’t notice your new floppy drive, however, it’s time to head for your PC’s BIOS (page 525), that mysterious area in charge of telling your PC what’s connected to your motherboard’s ports.

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chapter

Chapter 10

10

CD and DVD Drives

PCs treat compact discs and DVDs as data suitcases, letting you store and transport mammoth amounts of large files: digital camera photos, audio books, home movies, and digital music, to name a few. Yet compact discs and DVDs also let your PC pull extra shifts as both a stereo and home theater, which presents new problems: PCs, CD players, and DVD players all speak slightly different languages. That forces you to create the discs slightly differently depending on their ultimate destination: PC, CD player, or DVD player. This chapter explains how to create data CDs for your computer, music CDs for your CD player, and video CDs for your DVD player. You’ll also learn how to create DVDs for your PC and DVD player, should your PC be lucky enough to have a DVD burner (recorder). And to start you on the right path, you’ll find out how to choose the right type of blank discs for your particular need. Finally, you’ll get detailed instructions on buying and installing a new or replacement CD or DVD burner for your PC.

CDs: An Introduction CDs, the miraculous shiny discs that migrated from the stereo to the PC (to the everlasting dismay of the record industry), hold about 700 MB of information, which translates to about 80 minutes of music—plenty of room for In-A-GaddaDa-Vida and the extended live version. Every PC sold in the last decade includes a CD drive for playing CDs; PCs sold in the last five years include CD burners that let you save files to a CD as well. DVD burners, now appearing on many new PCs, let you burn DVDs and CDs.

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Playing CDs

The following sections explain how to play CDs, how to buy the right blank CDs for your CD burner, and how to copy a CD’s contents to your PC (also known as ripping). You’ll also learn about saving files on blank CDs (aka burning), duplicating CDs, and erasing them. Tip: Always buy your blank CDs in bulk—they’re cheaper that way. You inevitably need more than planned, and PCs occasionally turn some into coasters when they botch things up during the burning process.

Playing CDs Windows XP goes out of its way to simplify playing CDs no matter what kind of files they contain: data, music, or digital photos. To play any CD in Windows XP, follow these steps: 1. Place the CD into the drive, printed side up. Close the drive. That’s it. Windows XP peeks at your CD’s contents, checks to see which application’s assigned to play that CD’s files, and deploys the right program for the job. This bit of intuitiveness, known as AutoPlay, takes care of your CD-playing needs in pretty much every situation. Just inserted a music CD? Enter Windows Media Player to start playing your tunes. Got yourself a program’s setup disc? Windows XP automatically launches the installation program. Popped in a CD with digital photos? Windows XP is at your service, offering to play the pictures in a slideshow. AutoPlay’s eagerness to please sometimes causes problems, though. For instance, you may want to copy a CD’s music to your PC, not listen to it. And some sneaky record companies pull a fast one with AutoPlay by slipping a small program onto their music CDs. Instead of automatically playing the CD’s music, Windows XP launches the program, which just happens to be a copy-protection utility that stops you from copying the CD. Even worse, some viruses and worms live on CDs, ready for AutoPlay to install them as soon as you insert the CD into your drive. To turn AutoPlay back into a helper rather than a hindrance, you can adjust its settings yourself: choose Start ➝ My Computer, right-click your CD drive, and then choose Properties ➝ AutoPlay tab, as shown in Figure 10-1. There, Windows lets you specify which program should jump to attention, depending on what’s on your CD. Choose one type of content—Music CD, for instance—from the drop-down menu. Then choose how Windows XP should automatically handle that content.

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Or, disable AutoPlay completely—the best idea, if you trade a lot of CDs with friends—by choosing “Take no action.”

Buying the Right Type of Blank CD

Figure 10-1: AutoPlay determines how Windows XP responds when you insert a CD, or any other type of storage device (a DVD, memory card, or USB drive). If AutoPlay is launching the wrong program, feel free to change it. Run down the list of file types, and select the action Windows XP should take for each one. Or, to avoid picking up CD-based viruses, choose “Take no action” for each file type. That lets you open the CD or other device manually and choose which program to run every time you insert a CD.

Tip: You can temporarily disable AutoPlay any time by holding down the Shift key as you push your CD into the drive. That tells Windows XP to call off its AutoPlay hounds and let the CD simply sit in the drive. You can then manually call a program into action, conveniently stopping any viruses, defeating any copy protection, or letting you rip the CD to your hard drive.

Buying the Right Type of Blank CD Blank CDs come in two main formats: the vastly popular CD-R (CD-Recordable) shown in Figure 10-2, and the less common CD-RW (CD-Read/Write). Both types of CDs look identical, but they have some important differences: • CD-R (Compact Disc–Recordable). The mainstay of the blank CD business, CDRs are designed for permanent storage. You save information to them until they’re full, and then store them away for reference (or enjoyment, if you’re recording tunes on your CD). Since each CD costs less than a quarter and holds 650 MB or more, they’re perfect for making backup copies of files for safekeeping, creating music CDs for your stereo, or duplicating CDs to give copies to others. • CD-RW (Compact Disc–ReWritable). Less common (and more expensive), you can write to CD-RW discs, completely erase them, and then write to them again. These discs are designed for temporary storage rather than permanent backups. They work best for backing up files each evening, letting you replace Chapter 10: CD and DVD Drives PCs: The Missing Manual, eMatter Edition Copyright © 2008 O’Reilly & Associates, Inc. All rights reserved.

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the previous day’s files with your new ones. They’re also a handy way to shuttle files between two PCs, erasing each time to start over. Since CD-RW discs are reusable, don’t buy very many. Just keep a handful around for specific projects. CD-RW discs work with PCs, not CD players. Don’t burn music to them, as most CD players and boom boxes can’t handle them. Figure 10-2: You can record to a blank CD-R one time only. Buying them in a bulk pack keeps down the cost, supplies you with a bunch for impromptu backups, and lets you give copies to friends. Bulk packs of CD-Rs are sold at office supply stores, drug stores, and computer shops, but you can usually find the best prices online. Different brands work best with different burners, so experiment until you find the right combination that produces the most successful burns.

Some CD burners work fine with blank CDs made by any manufacturer; other drives are pickier, working only with certain brands of discs. When in doubt, buy blank CDs created by your CD drive’s manufacturer, which is often printed along the drive’s front, next to the CD tray. If you don’t spot the name there, right-click the drive’s icon in My Computer, choose Properties ➝ Hardware tab, and look for the name next to the drive’s model number. If you still don’t spot the manufacturer’s name, remove the PC’s case and peek at the drive’s label (Figure 9-7). Once you decide on the disc you need, either CD-R or CD-RW, it helps to decipher the letters and numbers on the packaging. The following two factors have the most influence on whether your PC can burn to a CD: • Writing speed. This number, usually followed by an “x,” (like 12x, 24x, 48x, or 52x), refers to how quickly the CD can burn files. Bigger “x” numbers means it accepts data more quickly. Feel free to buy CDs with a writing speed that’s faster than your CD drive, but don’t buy CDs with a slower write speed; they may not burn reliably. To find out your drive’s writing speed, right-click its icon in My Computer (Start ➝ My Computer), and then choose Properties ➝ Recording tab. The bottom drop-down menu, shown in Figure 10-4, lists the write speeds your drive can handle. (This menu also lets you slow down your drive’s speed to match 284

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that old box of 12x CDs your neighbor gave you; you may be able to still use them.)

Buying the Right Type of Blank CD

WORKAROUND WORKSHOP

Taming the Bickering Media Players When you insert a music CD into your PC, Windows XP’s Media Player normally jumps in and starts playing. But if you’ve installed other media players, like iTunes, MusicMatch Jukebox, Winamp, or Real Player, the players often bicker over the right to play your tunes and other types of media. Music comes stored in a wide variety of file formats, and every media player wants to “associate” itself with every music format stored on your PC. That aggravates people who want Media Player to handle their CDs, but like Winamp playing their Internet radio stations, or vice versa. When the wrong player constantly jumps in to play your files, fix the problem by dishing out the playing rights to your player of choice. 1. From My Computer, right-click a certain type of file— an MP3 file, for instance—and then choose Open With ➝ Choose Program. 2. Select the program you want to open that type of file.

• iTunes. Edit ➝ Preferences and turn off the checkbox called, “Use iTunes as the default player for audio files.” • Windows Media Player. Tools ➝ Options and click the File Types tab. Turn on the checkboxes for the file types you want Media Player to open, leaving the rest turned off. (CDA files are tracks on music CDs.) • Winamp. Options ➝ Preferences. Remove checkmarks from “Restore file associations at Winamp startup” and “Enable Winamp agent.” • RealPlayer. Tools ➝ Preferences ➝ File Types tab. Turn off checkbox next to CDs. As these programs frequently release new versions, and they sometimes change the wording slightly; if you can’t find the exact option, look for something similar.

If you don’t spot your favorite MP3 playing program on the list, as shown in the illustration, click the Browse button, navigate to your favorite program’s folder, and click the program’s name. 3. Turn on the checkbox called, “Always use the selected program to open this kind of file” and click OK. This trick works with more than media players, by the way. Any time the wrong program jumps in when you doubleclick a file, this trick lets you assign your preferred program to that type of file. Unfortunately, some possessive media players sabotage your efforts. The next time you run them, they check to see if they’re still the assigned player for all your files. And if they’re not, they yank back control. That leaves you with one solution: Track down and turn off the menu option that authorizes that particular program’s renegade activities. Here’s what you need to do:

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• Minutes/capacity. CDs come in two main sizes. Some offer 74 minutes of music, which is about 650 MB of storage, while the most common CDs hold 80 minutes, which is about 700 MB of data. Although some CDs claim to offer even more storage space, not all CD burners handle them reliably. If you’re that pressed for storage, it’s time to buy a DVD burner (page 307). Note: Some blank CDs bill themselves as “LightScribe” compatible. This means they work with LightScribe-compatible CD burners that etch a picture onto the CD to serve as a label. If you own a LightScribe CD or DVD player, be sure to buy the LightScribe blank CDs. Regular ones won’t work. FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTION

Translating a CD’s “x” Speed into Minutes How many minutes will it take to burn my 24x CDs?

• 8x = 9 minutes

The unwieldy “x” terms that describe writing speed came about because the first CD burners all read and wrote to CDs at the same speed. Back then, filling a CD to the brim consumed about 74 minutes. The next breed of burners were twice as fast. The marketing department preferred the catchy phrase “2x” over “37-minute burn speed” and the “x” has multiplied ever since.

• 24x = 3 minutes

Each progressive speed increase represents a division of that original 74 minutes, so divide 74 by your disc’s “x” number to arrive at its approximate burning time.

• 48x = 90 seconds These are rough estimates, though. Add an extra minute or two for prep work while your PC gathers the information to send to the CD burner. If you’re burning the same content to several CDs in a row, the speed increases; once your PC has finished its prep work, it can feed the information to the next disc as quickly as the drive can write it.

Ripping CDs Early hackers used the term “ripping” to describe the process of snagging music, graphics, and digital grunts from their old video games. Twenty years later, a new generation defines “ripping” as copying a CD’s songs onto a hard drive. From there, you can copy the songs to a portable music player, save them onto a customized “Greatest Hits” CD, or convert them to other sound formats (page 213) to work with different portable players. Some people even use the term “ripping” to describe copying sound from a phonograph record (page 209) or VHS tape onto a hard drive. (iTunes dignifies the term by labeling the process, “importing.”) This section explains ripping with both Windows Media Player and iTunes.

Ripping CDs with Windows XP’s Media Player Windows XP’s Media Player can rip CDs, but with two pretty important caveats:

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• Digital Rights Management. When Windows Media Player rips a CD to your hard drive, it wants to compress the songs into copy-protected WMA files, Microsoft’s early attempt to rule the digital recording industry. But most digital music players play MP3 files, not WMA files. And some WMA players can’t handle copy-protected files. To keep Media Player from adding copy protection to your ripped WMA files, head to Tools ➝ Options ➝ Rip Music tab and turn off the checkbox marked, “Copy protect music.” Even better, bypass WMA completely and rip your CDs to MP3 files, as described in this section.

Ripping CDs

Tip: If you’ve already ripped music into copy-protected WMA files that won’t play on your iPod or other MP3 player, burn the WMA files onto a CD (page 294), and then rerip that CD to create unprotected files. You still need a valid license (page 243) to burn the songs to a CD, though. And should you ever lose your licenses, you’ll also lose access to your songs.

• Lower quality. Media Player rips songs and leaves you with either MP3 or WMA files, both of which are compressed formats that remove some of the song’s quality to reduce its file size. That’s great for packing more files onto an MP3 player; few people notice the quality difference on tiny earbuds. But it’s not so good if you’re looking to create a “Greatest Hits” CD. Songs never sound as good when they’re ripped to the MP3 format and then burned back to an audio CD. To avoid that kind of sound degradation, skip Media Player and create your CDs with a third-party program like Roxio’s RecordNow (www.roxio.com). It copies songs from several CDs onto your hard drive, but doesn’t compress them into MP3s, thereby preserving their fidelity. Then the program copies those decompressed songs back onto a blank CD in the order you choose. You need nearly 1 GB of free hard drive space to serve as a temporary holding tank during the process—but in exchange, you get a copy of your songs in all their high-fidelity glory. Before ripping, be sure you’re using Windows Media Player 10. (To see your version, choose Start ➝ All Programs ➝ Media Player ➝ Help ➝ About Windows Media Player.) As opposed to all earlier versions, Media Player 10 lets you rip MP3 files for free rather than paying $10 for the privilege. If you need the new version, download it (www.microsoft.com/mediaplayer) before ripping your CDs. Once you’ve installed Media Player 10, follow these steps to rip a CD to an MP3 file. 1. Open Media Player and tell it to rip your CD using the MP3 format rather than WMA. Choose Start ➝ All Programs ➝ Media Player ➝ Tools ➝ Options ➝ Rip Music and choose MP3 under the Rip settings, as shown in Figure 10-3. If Media

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Player’s hiding its menus, right-click anywhere near its top border to bring them to life. Figure 10-3: The Rip Music tab lets you tailor how Media Player rips your CDs. Leave your stored songs in your My Music folder, as Windows adds special music-related menus to that particular folder. In the “Rip settings” section, choose MP3 to stay compatible with the widest variety of MP3 players. (If you choose WMA, be sure to turn off the “Copy protect music” checkbox to spare yourself the bother of dealing with licenses.) Move the Audio Quality slider to 192 to strike a fair balance between file size and quality. Feel free to slide it either way to suit your own ears and available hard drive space.

2. Insert your CD label-side up into the CD drive’s tray, close the tray, and choose File ➝ CDs and Devices ➝ Rip Audio CD. Or, start ripping by clicking the Rip button at the top of the Media Player window. If your PC has two drives, you also need to choose the drive containing your CD. 3. Choose which songs to copy to your hard drive. Media Player normally selects all your CD’s songs, skipping any that you previously copied. Turn off the checkboxes next to any awful songs to keep them off your PC. 4. Click Rip Music. Media Player begins copying your selected songs from the CD, converting them to MP3 files, and placing them inside your My Music folder (Start ➝ My Music). For example, if you’re ripping a copy of Ravi Shankar’s “Ragas,” for instance, Media Player creates a folder named Ravi Shankar, and then puts your songs in the Ragas folder inside that folder. If Media Player creates a folder named “Unknown” instead of “Ravi Shankar,” make sure you’ve allowed Media Player to connect to the Internet (Tools ➝

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Options ➝ Privacy ➝ “Update music files by retrieving media info from the Internet”). That lets Media Player grab the information from an online database. If you’re ripping CDs while offline (say, on an airplane), or the names are wrong, you need to fill out the tags manually (page 250).

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Ripping CDs with iTunes Compared to Media Player’s minimal ripping options, iTunes (page 227) offers a vast array of options for transferring a CD’s songs onto a hard drive. That lets the experts fiddle around, and the impatient beginners whip through using the factory-set options. iTunes takes three basic steps to rip a CD. 1. Choose an audio format. Open iTunes (Start ➝ All Programs ➝ iTunes ➝ iTunes) and choose Edit ➝ Preferences ➝ Advanced tab ➝ Importing tab. There, you can choose between several file formats, including the most common: MP3 and AAC. AAC creates slightly smaller files than MP3, but limits your playback choices to an iPod. If you want to play your files on other players, now or in the future, choose MP3. 2. Insert your CD into the tray, label side up, and let iTunes download song names and track information. Like Media Player, iTunes reads the sequence and lengths of the CD’s songs, searches an online database for the match, and then automatically fills out the titles for the CD and its songs. If iTunes comes up blank, the laborious task of naming your songs falls into your own lap: To fill out the information quickly, right-click Audio CD in iTunes Source pane, and then choose Get Info. When the CD Info window arrives, fill in the Artist, Album, Genre, and Year entries. Click OK, and iTunes applies that information to every song. That leaves you one final chore: fill in each song’s title. Right-click the first song, choose Get Info, type in that song’s name and click OK, and then repeat until you’ve named them all. 3. Rip the CD. Once iTunes has identified your CD’s title and song names, weed out the mood killers by turning off the checkboxes next to their names, then click Import in the screen’s upper-right corner. iTunes rips the songs from the CD and stuffs them into its library. For more information about iTunes and iPods, check out page 227; for a full reference, pick up a copy of iPod & iTunes: The Missing Manual.

Burning CDs Unlike the word “ripping,” the term “burning” describes what’s actually happening when you save data to a CD. A tiny laser inside your PC’s CD (and DVD) drive burns tiny pits into the spinning disc’s surface, all without creating an awful smell.

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An optical reader inside the drive reads the pits to convert what it finds there back into data. FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTION

CD Rainbow Books I sometimes hear the words “Red Book” and “Yellow Book” applied to CDs. What’s that all about?

• Yellow Book (CD-ROM and CD-ROM XA). CDs designed for a PC to read.

When engineers set a technology standard for all PCs to follow, they usually choose a bizarre string of numbers or acronyms; “IEEE-1394” comes to mind, for example. When the engineers bound a bunch of books describing different ways to store information on CDs, they named each standard after the color of the book’s cover.

• Orange Book (CD-R and CD-RW). CDs recordable by a PC.

The “Red Book” standard, for instance, describes the proper way to write information onto a music CD so every CD player can read it. So, when technoweenies say that a CD subscribes to the “Red Book” standard, they mean it’s a plain old music CD. “Orange Book” refers to a CD-R—those blank discs your PC can write on. If a company swerves from a standard—adding copy protection to a music CD, for instance, or tossing in some videos— that CD’s no longer considered a “Red Book” CD, so it doesn’t qualify for the official “Compact Disc Digital Audio” logo shown below. Worse than that, it may no longer be compatible with the CD players in your computer, stereo, and car.

• White Book (Video CD). CDs with video content that plays in most DVD players. • Blue Book (Enhanced CD, CD+G, and CDPlus). Music CDs with extra features like videos or photos. • Beige Book (Photo CD). Kodak’s format for storing photos on a CD. • Green Book (CD-i). Rarely used. CD-Interactive contains educational material and games. • Purple Book (DDCD). Eclipsed by the DVD market, Double-Density CDs hold more storage than CDs and require a special reader. • Scarlet Book (SACD). Super Audio CDs carry high-fi audio that’s playable on fancy SACD players, but not on PCs, CD players, or DVD players.

To avoid arousing consumer suspicion over their copyprotected products, many record companies dropped the “Compact Disc Digital Audio” logo from all their CDs, even the ones that follow Red Book standards to the letter. Here are the standards, and the type of discs they describe. Most start by following the Red Book standard, and then toss in some extra features. • Red Book (CD Digital Audio). The basic standard for all CDs, including, of course, music CDs.

Not all CD drives can write to CDs, though; some old drives only read CDs, and some early CD burners aren’t compatible with Windows XP. To see if your CD drive can write to CDs, open My Computer, right-click your CD drive, and then

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choose Properties. If the Properties window shows a tab named Recording, shown in Figure 10-4, Windows XP knows how to write to your CD.

Burning CDs

Figure 10-4: A Recording tab on the Properties box means Windows XP recognizes the drive as a CD burner. Note the checkbox marked, “Enable CD recording on this drive.” If your PC has two CD burners (or a CD burner and a DVD burner), turn on that checkbox for your fastest drive and use that drive for burning CDs. Oddly enough, Windows XP’s built-in burning tools let you designate only one drive as the burner. (Most third-party burning programs ignore this setting, letting you burn to the drive you choose.)

No Recording tab? Then Windows XP doesn’t recognize your CD as a recordable drive—it’s a regular old CD drive that’s still fine for playing music or installing programs. On the other hand, if your drive burned CDs in the past—perhaps before you upgraded to Windows XP—reach for the usual bag of fixes: hunt down a Windows XP compatible driver (page 514) for your drive model, install the driver, and see if Windows XP recognizes the drive. If that doesn’t work—and you need to burn CDs—your only solution is to buy a newer burner, particularly if your drive is more than five years old (a date of manufacture often appears on CD drives.) Some CD- and DVD-recording software removes the Recording tab from a burner’s Properties page, forcing you to abandon Windows XP’s built-in tools and use their software, instead. That’s no sacrifice, though, as most third-party CD burning software works much better than Windows XP’s burning program. But whether you’re using third-party software or Windows XP’s built-in tools, CD burners can write information to a CD in three different formats: data, music, or video. Each burns the files using a slightly different format designed for the appliance that will be reading them: a PC, a CD player, or a DVD player. • Data. This format creates CDs with files intended for your PC. This includes any backups you’re making of digital photos, MP3 files, documents, programs, and other PC-related files.

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• Music. This format creates a music CD for playing back on a CD player. This includes CD players on your home stereo, PC, car, or private helicopter. Also choose this format to convert compressed music files—MP3, WMA, or AAC files—to a music CD. • Video. This rather obscure format saves video and slideshows onto a CD in the VCD format, letting you play them back on a DVD player to watch on your television. (See page 298 for more on this format.) The next sections explain how to burn a CD with data, music, or video, ensuring that the CDs play back on your player of choice. Tip: To avoid any stutters or gaps in the CDs you burn, defragment your hard drive (page 261) before starting the burn process.

Burning Data to a CD If you’ll be reading your newly burned CD on your PC, save the files as data. Your PC treats the CD just like a thin, portable folder, letting you store files on it for later reference or moving to another PC. When storing data files on a CD, burning the files works just like copying the files to a folder, USB drive, or other storage device, but with one hitch: Windows XP burns the data to a CD in a two-step process. 1. Select the files you want, and tell Windows XP you want them copied to the CD. You can do this several ways. • Drag and drop. Drag the data directly onto the drive’s icon in My Computer, or, if you’ve double-clicked the drive’s icon, directly into the drive’s window. • Right-click. Right-click any data files you’ve selected, choose Send To, and then choose your drive from the pop-up menu, as shown in Figure 10-5, top. • My Pictures. Select any pictures in the My Pictures folder, and then choose Copy to CD from the Picture Tasks menu along the folder’s left side. Once you tell Windows which files you want copied, the CD drive’s window looks like Figure 10-5, bottom. 2. Insert a blank CD into your drive, label side up, and tell Windows to burn the files to the CD. Windows XP doesn’t immediately copy the files straight to the CD, however. Instead, it copies the files to a temporary holding tank called a “staging area” on your hard drive. There, Windows arranges the files into one big, streamlined batch for smooth writing to the CD. If you’re copying lots of information, this can consume 650 MB or more of space.

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Finally, tell Windows XP to begin burning by using either of the following methods.

Burning CDs

Figure 10-5: Top: Windows XP offers several ways to save files or folders to a CD. Perhaps the easiest method is to select them, right-click them, choose Send To, and select your CD burner from the pop-up menu as shown here. (DVD burners can write to CDs, too.) Bottom: You can see the waiting files when you double-click the CD’s drive; the icons appear as shortcuts. Click “Write these files to CD” from the window’s CD Writing Tasks pane, and Windows burns the files to your inserted CD. Although this method works fine for creating a data CD for your PC, don’t try to create a music CD this way. CD players won’t recognize the disc.

• Right-click the drive’s icon in My Computer and choose “Write these files to CD” from the pop-up menu. • Double-click the drive and choose “Write these files to CD” from the pane along the left side (see Figure 10-5, bottom).

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Choose one of those options, and Windows XP’s CD Writing Wizard takes over, walking you through naming the CD and writing the files. Most CD-burning drives support multisession recording, meaning you can write information to a CD-R, use it for awhile, and then stick the CD back in and add more information to it. Each time you add more information, you save it as a “session.” Once the disk is “finalized,” or there’s no more room left on the CD, you can’t record anything else onto the CD. Note: Many newer CD and DVD players can play MP3 files from a CD, letting you store more than 10 hours of music on a single CD. These players can still play your regular music CDs, too, if you burn them to their own discs; don’t try to mix the two formats on one CD. If your player can handle MP3 files, burn the MP3 files to the CD as data, just as described in this section. Don’t burn them as music CDs, described in the next section, or you’ll get only about an hour of sound.

Burning Music to a CD Your PC can create music CDs for your stereo or car CD player, but only if you specifically tell your PC what type of CD to create. That means you can’t simply drag and drop files onto a CD drive’s icon, as you do when creating data CDs. Instead, you need a media player like Windows Media Player or iTunes, or a thirdparty CD burning program. Those programs decompress your MP3s into WAV files—the format used by music CDs—before writing them to disc. This section explains how to create music CDs with both Media Player and iTunes. Burning a music CD with Windows Media Player Media Player lets you create music CDs, but, as with some of this program’s other music-saving functions, this feature comes with a twist that serious music lovers may find annoying. Media Player creates music CDs only from compressed files stored in either the MP3 or WMA format (page 214). (Files on a commercial CD you buy in a music store are always in the higher quality WAV format.) Since the MP3 and WMA formats leave out some of the WAV format’s audio fidelity, your music CD won’t sound nearly as good as the original. Dedicated CD-burning software like Nero Ultra Edition (www.nero.com) and Roxio Easy CD and DVD Burning (www.roxio.com) do a much better job. But if this limitation doesn’t bother you, here’s how to turn your MP3s or WMA files into a music CD. 1. Open Media Player’s Library. Click Media Player’s Library button along its top to see the program’s library, an organized list of all your music files arranged by artist, album, genre, and release year. The Library also lists any playlists you created, as well as playlists that Media Player automatically created based on your listening habits (page 243).

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When you view the Library, Media Player displays the three columns shown in Figure 10-6.

Burning CDs

Figure 10-6: To burn songs onto a music CD, start by choosing a category from your Library, shown in the left pane; that category’s songs show up in the middle pane. When you spot songs you want to burn to the CD, drag them to the Burn List on the right pane. The higher a file’s bit rate number, the better it sounds when burned to a CD. (To see any song’s bit rate, right-click its name in Media Player’s Library and choose Properties.) For best results, try to burn songs with a bit rate of 256 Kbps or higher.

• The first column lists all your music, organized by artist, album, genre, categories, and more. • The middle column shows items you’ve selected from the first pane. If you clicked on Zydeco, for instance, the middle pane shows all your Zydeco songs. • The third column shows the list you’re assembling, which is usually your Now Playing List—the list of the music you’re currently listening to. It can also show the list of music you’re burning (Burn List) or the list of tracks you’re copying to your portable music player (Sync List); see page 243. 2. Create a Burn List, if needed. If you want to burn an existing playlist from your library, right-click the playlist’s name in the left column, and, from the shortcut menu, choose “Add to Burn List.” Simple. You’re through. To create a Burn List from scratch, click the drop-down menu atop the right column—the menu usually says Now Playing List—and then choose Burn List. When the Burn List appears, remove any leftover songs from previous burning sessions by choosing Clear List from that same drop-down menu.

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Create your Burn List by dragging songs from the middle pane to the Burn List in the right pane, as shown in Figure 10-6. Keep dragging until you’ve created your Desert Island Disc for the day. 3. Weed out songs from your Burn List that won’t fit on the CD. Keep a measured eye on the Total Time numbers along the Burn List’s bottom edge. Your CD holds only 80 minutes (see page 286 for more on disc length), so if your Burn List’s Total Time shows more than 80 minutes, your songs won’t all fit. (If you’re cutting it close, remember that Media Player sticks two seconds between each song, which could add another 20–30 seconds to your total.) 4. Insert a blank CD-R disc in the CD drive and then click Start Burn. The Start Burn button is the tiny icon just beneath the Burn List. As the CD burns, Media Player shows you approximately how much time it’s taking. When you finish burning your CD, be sure to label it with a permanent marker. Blank CDs and written CDs look identical; now’s your best chance to add a distinguishing feature. POWER USERS’ CLINIC

Burning High Quality Compilation CDs Compressing a CD’s music file into a tiny MP3 file removes about 90 percent of the file’s original data. To its credit, the compression mechanism craftily cuts away portions that the human ear rarely misses. But still, it’s like turning a brick into a sponge. At first glance, they’re both look like rectangular blocks. But look close and you see the difference. Similarly, burning MP3 files into CDs creates songs with 90 percent of the information missing. That’s why MP3s that are burned back into CDs never quite sound as good as real CDs. And that’s why iTunes offers better quality than Media Player when burning CDs. Unlike Media Player, iTunes lets you rip songs from CDs straight to decompressed WAV

files. When you burn those WAV files back to a CD, you don’t lose any sound. Those WAV files consume a huge amount of hard drive space—10 times as much as MP3 files—so they’re impractical to leave sitting around on your hard drive. But for getting the best quality on your compilation CDs, rip a handful of your favorite songs as WAV files using iTunes and then burn them to CD immediately afterwards. Then delete the WAV files when you’re sure the burn worked. Yes, this is bothersome extra work. But that’s what it takes to create complication CDs that sound just as good as the ones sold in the stores.

Burning a music CD with iTunes Just like Windows Media Player, iTunes can burn any file in its library to a music CD that you can listen to in a CD player. Just follow these steps: 1. Select an existing playlist you want to burn, or create one from scratch. If you already have a playlist—a file containing an ordered list of songs—in mind, right-click its name, choose Burn Playlist to Disc, and then leap ahead to step 3.

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If you don’t have suitable playlist yet, create one by choosing File ➝ New Playlist. (Feel free to leave the list with the default name of “Unnamed Playlist,” as you’ll probably delete it right after burning your CD.) When your newly created blank playlist appears in iTunes’ Source list, double-click its name to open it, as shown in Figure 10-7. Then populate your playlist by dragging favorite tunes onto it from iTunes library.

Burning CDs

Figure 10-7: An untitled playlist in iTunes. If you drag more tunes onto your playlist window than will fit onto a CD, iTunes burns only as many as will fit. When the CD fills up, iTunes ejects it and asks you to insert another blank CD to fill with the rest. Remember that you can burn only seven CDs from a particular playlist. After seven, you must either recreate that playlist from scratch, or alter it by switching the song’s order or adding/ deleting songs. It’s an inconvenience, but it keeps the record companies happy.

Alternatively, you can drag and drop files onto the playlist’s name on iTunes Source list, but the name’s a pretty small target for dropping. Just as with Windows Media Player, the bottom of iTunes lists the amount of time your selected songs consume; keep it under 80 minutes to fit onto a CD. 2. Click the Burn Disc button in iTunes’ top-right corner. The Burn Disc button turns into a black and yellow nuclear fallout shelter symbol, and iTunes sits there, waiting for you to realize you need to insert a blank CD into your PC’s newly opened drive tray. 3. Insert a blank CD, printed side up, and click the Burn Disc button again. The Burn Disc button begins whirling as iTunes starts converting the files to the format used by music CDs and writing them onto the CD. Remember to label your new CD with a Sharpie or other permanent marker before you lose track of which CD is which.

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Burning a VCD (Video CD) A VCD is a CD containing up to 74 minutes of video and stereo sound. Although it plays fine on most DVD players, the quality’s closer to video tape than a DVD. That’s fine for many people, including those in many Asian countries, where movie studios release hundreds of movies in VCD format. Although Windows XP can’t create VCDs, many third-party programs (including most CD- and DVD-burning programs) create them without a hitch. This odd format comes in handy for several reasons. • Showing digital photos on TV. Most cameras can connect directly to a TV for showing photos to a group. But once you’ve transferred your photos from your camera to your PC, that’s no longer an option. You can show everybody your photos on your PC’s monitor, but a better crowd pleaser is to create a VCD with the photos in a slideshow. Put the VCD into your DVD player and let everybody watch the show on TV. Most VCD-creation software lets you juice up the photos by adding soundtracks, as well. • Showing videos on TV. Not everybody shoots hour-long videos with a highquality DV camcorder. Most digital cameras, as well as some less expensive camcorders, shoot short, low-quality videos. Many people download short, lo-fi videos from the Internet, as well, showing everything from movie trailers to demos of self-built robots. You can watch those short videos on your TV by lugging over your PC and connecting the right cables (page 95). But burning them to a VCD is faster and easier. Plus, if your PC doesn’t have a DVD burner, VCDs are the best way to store your short videos for easy access right beside your TV set. A standard-but-obscure format for more than a decade, VCDs play on PCs, Macs, most DVD players, standalone VCD players, and even some game consoles. Mail a VCD slideshow to your friends, and they probably own something to play it on, whether they know it or not. (Be sure to tell them to insert it into their DVD player.) Note: Some software and DVD players also support SVCD (Super VCD) format, which offers a step up in video quality. That extra quality comes with a price, though, as it limits the amount of video on the CD from 74 minutes to about a half hour. Before burning a lot of SVCDs, create a test disc to make sure your DVD player handles the format.

Duplicating CDs Neither Windows Media Player nor iTunes will help you quickly duplicate a CD. (You can, of course, go through the whole rigmarole of ripping any commercial CDs you own, creating a playlist, and then burning a CD from that playlist, as explained earlier, but where’s the fun in that?) So when it comes to making quick copies of your CDs, push Media Player and iTunes aside. Plenty of third-party

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programs like Nero Burning ROM (www.nero.com) and RecordNow (www.roxio. com) will duplicate CDs for you, quickly, easily, and legally.

Erasing CDs

GEM IN THE ROUGH

Burning Labels onto CDs A fairly new technology called LightScribe helps solve the problem of identifying burned CDs and DVDs. Previously, you had two solutions: write the album’s name onto the CD with a magic marker, perhaps adding an artistic rendition of Jimi Hendrix above it; print a label, apply it to the CD, and hope it doesn’t gum up your $200 car stereo. LightScribe solves that by adding a third solution: Reinserting your disk upside down and telling your CD or DVD burner to fire up its laser, etching a digital picture or title onto the disk. The results, shown here, don’t look half bad.

• Media. You need special LightScribe blank discs. Regular discs lack the special coating needed for the laser to burn. Unfortunately, blank LightScribe discs command a premium price, costing up to 10 times as much as regular discs. As more drives incorporate the technology, the price should drop quickly.

It’s not color, but it’s smudge-proof, won’t peel off, and it’s certain to boost your status among your CD-burning peers. You need three things before etching Jimi Hendrix photos onto your discs: • LightScribe burner. Your CD or DVD drive must come with LightScribe technology. You can’t add it to an existing burner. Many companies have added LightScribe technology to their CD and DVD burner’s arsenal of tricks. (Hewlett Packard’s an early adopter.) • Software. LightScribe must be written with LightScribe software, which is usually tossed in with the drive.

You don’t even need to own two CD drives to make copies. Most third-party CD burning programs can copy the CD to your hard drive; when you remove the original CD and insert a blank CD-R, the program copies it from your hard drive to the CD-R, and then erases the hard drive copy.

Erasing CDs Here’s where the difference between CD-Rs and CD-RW really becomes noticeable (see page 283 for a refresher on the difference between these two formats). Windows XP treats a CD-RW disc just like a folder or hard drive. When you delete files from it, the files disappear, and you can add more files to fill up that freshly revealed space.

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DVDs: An Introduction

When it comes to CD-Rs, however, you can’t erase them, at least not in the normal sense. When you right-click a CD-R and choose Delete, Windows tells you it contains Read-Only files that can’t be deleted. The confusing part is that Windows XP says you can replace any of the files by writing another identically named file to the CD. That sounds handy, as you could update a file by writing it to the same CD, constantly overwriting the older version. In actuality, though, Windows doesn’t erase the earlier files; their carcasses remain on the CD, taking up space. Therefore, if you want a CD you can write to and repeatedly erase, a CD-RW is the only way to go. If your PC is less than five years old, it can probably handle CDRW discs. Look for the word “Rewritable” on the drive’s front panel for a sure clue. But sometimes the only way to verify that your drive can handle CD-RW discs is to test it: save some files to a CD-RW disc, and then try to delete them. Follow these steps to delete files from a CD-RW disc: 1. Open My Computer (Start ➝ My Computer), right-click your CD burner, and then choose Open. Windows lists any files waiting to be written to that CD, as well as the contents of any CD in the drive. 2. Choose “Erase this CD-RW” from the CD Writing Tasks pane, shown earlier in Figure 10-5, bottom. The Welcome to the CD Writing Wizard appears, walking you through the process of erasing the CD’s existing contents. That empties the CD-RW disc, letting you fill it up with more goodies. If you don’t see the words “Erase this CD-RW” in the Writing Tasks pane, though, your drive can’t handle the CD-RW format.

DVDs: An Introduction Depending on who you ask, DVD stands for either “Digital Video Disc” or “Digital Versatile Disc.” The dozen corporations on the DVD creation committee never agreed upon an official name. Whatever they’re called, DVDs hold either 4.7 GB or 8.5 GB of information, making them especially suited for digital video and other whopper files. CD drives and DVD drives look almost identical in a PC. But DVD drives are always stamped with the letters “DVD” on the front. For a sure-fire test, insert a DVD into the drive, and see if you can see any files on it. Open My Computer (Start ➝ My Computer), right-click your DVD drive, and from the shortcut menu, choose Explore. A DVD drive lets you see the disc’s files; a CD drive won’t even be able to tell you’ve inserted a disc. Unfortunately, DVDs somehow slipped in under Microsoft’s radar. Windows XP doesn’t contain any built-in tools for saving files to DVDs, or even for watching

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the movies stored on them. The following sections explain how to do both on your PC with a little help from some additional programs.

Playing DVD Movies

POWER USERS’ CLINIC

Burning an ISO Image An ISO image is a single file containing an exact copy of an entire CD: its files, folder structure, and even any hidden files the CD may need to function properly. Burning the ISO image file onto a blank CD recreates the original CD and is a handy way to store an entire CD’s contents as a backup or for downloading from the Internet. Most ISO images contain “bootable” CDs—CDs that contain an operating system. For instance, when you stick a bootable CD into your CD drive and restart your PC, the PC loads the operating system from the CD, not the hard drive, neatly bypassing Windows XP. That comes in handy for several reasons. • Testing. Some hard drive testing programs (page 274) need full control of the hard drive, something they’ll never have when Windows XP’s already running. To bypass Windows XP, troubleshooters download an ISO image of the testing program, burn it to a CD, and restart their PC from that CD. That lets them check the drive’s mechanics without interference from Windows XP. • Updating BIOS and other firmware. If your PC’s BIOS—the tiny software living inside its chips that hands control over to Windows—needs a new version, most PCs boot off a floppy. But since notebooks (and many PCs) no longer have floppy drives, owners can download an ISO image, burn a CD, and boot their computer from that CD to update the firmware. Sometimes the CD or DVD drive in a

home stereo needs a firmware update to fix a problem; the manufacturer places an ISO image on their Web site for customers to download, burn, and play in their afflicted player. • Distributing operating systems. The retail version of Windows XP comes on a “bootable” CD; so do other operating systems. The Knoppix CD (www. knoppix.org), a version of the Linux operating system, also comes as a downloadable ISO image. Start your PC with the Knoppix CD in the drive, and your PC wakes up running Linux instead of Windows XP, which is handy should you want to see what Linux looks like. (Or use it to salvage your data should Windows XP crash.) • Storing software. The hard drives of some new PCs contain ISO images of the PC’s original installation CDs. If a PC owner wants to erase Windows XP and start over from scratch, she can burn CDs from those ISO images, recreate her PC’s installation CDs, and use them to restore her PC to its “as purchased” condition. Granted, very few people burn ISO images on a typical day. That’s what Microsoft figured, so it didn’t add ISO creation to Windows XP’s small bag of CD burning tools. To burn an ISO image, you need third-party software like Nero (www. nero.com) or the free ISO Recorder (http://isorecorder. alexfeinman.com/isorecorder.htm).

Playing DVD Movies Windows XP lets you see the files and folders stored on a data DVD, which it treats just like any CD or hard drive folder. But Windows lets you open only files that it recognizes. And unfortunately, Windows XP doesn’t recognize the most common file found on a DVD: a DVD movie.

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Buying the Right Type of Blank DVD

That’s because Microsoft left out one key component required to play DVD movies: a codec file. Short for COmpress DECompress, a codec contains the formula used to compress sound and video when stuffing them into a file, as well as decompressing them upon playback. Since Windows XP lacks DVD’s essential “MPEG-2” codec, your movies stay locked onto the DVD—at least initially. To avoid fielding angry consumer phone calls, most PC manufacturers install third-party DVD software like “PowerDVD” when they sell a PC with a DVD drive. Once you or the PC’s manufacturer install DVD player software, Windows Media Player sneaks over and borrows that program’s codec, letting you watch DVD movies with Media Player, as well. If your PC doesn’t let you watch DVD movies, you have two options: • Buy a codec. You can buy the codec that lets you watch DVDs in Media Player. They’re available for $15 to $20 from DVD XPack (www.intervideo.com), NVidia DVD Decoder (www.nvidia.com), PowerDVD (www.gocyberlink.com), or Cineplay DVD Decoder (www.sonic.com). • Buy DVD burner/player software. All of the companies listed above except NVidia sell DVD software for watching and burning DVDs. Since you need to buy DVD-burning software anyway (if you’ve got DVD burner), buying the two together may save you a few bucks.

Buying the Right Type of Blank DVD Like blank CDs, blank DVDs come sold in bundle packs, helping most people solve their never-ending disc shortage problem. Unlike CDs, however, blank DVDs come in way too many formats. That’s because two large groups bickered over control of the official DVD format. The groups parted just before resorting to fisticuffs, and each released its own version of blank DVD to let the consumer decide which is best. The two formats are known as DVD-R and DVD+R. Many consumers, fearful of being stuck with the loser format, responded by not buying DVD burners. That upset the DVD burner manufacturers, so they wised up and decided to support both formats. To see which formats your DVD burner supports, right-click its drive icon in My Computer, and click the Hardware tab, shown in Figure 10-8. The formats usually appear as part of the model name. Here are the DVD drives on the market, and the type of discs they create: • DVD-R, DVD+R (Read). The DVD equivalent of a CD-R, these blank DVDs record up to 4.7 GB, and most standard DVD players can play back their videos. These discs are intended for permanent storage, usually for movies, but also for stashing a backup of your digital photo library or other large files in a safe place. The DVD-R format is compatible with slightly more players than DVD+R.

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• DVD-RW, DVD+RW (Read Write). The DVD equivalent of a CD-RW, these blank DVDs also record up to 4.7 GB, and you can write to them, erase them, and write to them again. They’re intended for temporary backups that you write over with the next backup.

Buying the Right Type of Blank DVD

Figure 10-8: Before buying blank discs, look at the model number of your DVD burner to see what DVD formats it supports: DVD-R, DVD+R, or both (DVD+/-R). The Philips drive shown here supports both DVD formats; you can tell because it lists DVD+/-R in its model number. If your drive shows only a “+” or a “-”, buy blank disks that match that particular format.

• DVD-RAM (Random Access Memory). The oddball format. These don’t require DVD-burning software because your PC writes to them just like a floppy or hard drive. Sold mostly for dedicated PC backups, the discs usually come enclosed in a little case that requires a special drive. You may never see one of these, but if you do, don’t mistake it for a DVD-R. These discs won’t play in most standard DVD drives, and they certainly won’t play in DVD players, even if you copy a movie to them. • DVD+R DL (Double Layer). The speedy new discs. These slip in an extra layer of recording material to store up to 8.5 GB—if your DVD burner can write in the DVD+R DL format, that is. They began appearing in the middle of 2005. Remember, most DVD burners can also burn CDs (page 289); when you slip a blank CD inside them, DVD burners pretend they’re CD burners, letting you create music CDs as well as data CDs. Buy blank DVDs with a writing speed that’s faster than your DVD drive, just as with CD burners (page 283). Blank DVDs with a slower write speed may not burn reliably. To see how quickly your DVD burner can burn CDs, right-click its icon in My Computer (Start ➝ My Computer) and then choose Properties ➝ Recording tab. The bottom drop-down menu, seen earlier in Figure 10-4, lists the CD writing speeds your drive can handle. Unfortunately, Windows XP doesn’t list the drive’s speed for burning DVDs because Windows XP doesn’t even acknowledge that burnable DVDs exist.

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Specialty Disc Formats

Note: If your DVD burner supports LightScribe (page 299) for etching titles and images onto the disc, be sure to buy LightScribe-capable blank DVDs. FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTION

Translating a DVD’s “x” Speed into Minutes How many minutes will it take to burn my 8x DVD?

• 5x = 11 minutes

DVDs, like CDs, use the “x” terms to describe writing speed. The first generation of DVD burners took about 53 minutes to fill a DVD to the brim, so divide 53 by the “x” number to arrive at the approximate burning time in minutes.

• 8x = 7 minutes

• 1x = 53 minutes

• 10x = 6 minutes • 16x = 4 minutes DVDs seem to have topped out at a 16x writing speed, so if you buy a 16x DVD burner now, you’ll most likely be spared the humiliation of seeing a cheaper 32x drive for sale two weeks from now.

• 2x = 27 minutes • 4x = 14 minutes

Specialty Disc Formats Several other odd disc formats appear in record stores: DualDisc, DVD-Audio, and Hybrid SACD. All three contain better sound than regular CDs or DVDs. PCs can’t create any of them easily, and can play only one of the three formats. And although they’re market failures so far, the industry still pushes the discs for several reasons. Most of these specialty discs contain releases of older, classic material, making the serious fan part with his money a second (or third) time. To play them at their highest fidelity, most specialty discs require their own players, making more money for player manufacturers. Perhaps most important of all, the discs are much more difficult to copy. • DualDisc. The friendliest of the bunch, DualDiscs have a regular DVD on one side, and a normal CD glued to the other. They work just like a regular CD or DVD; simply flip it over to play the other side. (Each side is labeled.) Most PCs can handle both sides, although a few drives can’t handle the extra thickness. • Hybrid SACD (Super Audio CD). These work much like a DualDisc, but instead of gluing two discs together, SACDs place both layers on one side. A CD player (or a PC’s CD drive) can read the first layer to play back CD sound. But it takes a dedicated SACD player to read the extra, hi-fidelity layer hidden underneath the first. • DVD Audio. These work in most (but not all) DVD players, but not on CD players or PCs. But to hear the extra, high-fidelity sound, you need a dedicated DVD Audio player. (Or, if you can find one, a player that supports both Hybrid SACD and DVD Audio.) 304

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Many new DVD players now support both SACD and DVD Audio, but PC drive manufacturers have been slow to support them. (Besides, you’d need some pretty expensive speakers to be able to hear the difference.)

Burning DVDs

Ripping DVDs It’s easy to rip CDs onto your hard drive, making it simple to convert the files to other formats and play them on any device you want. It’s not hard to duplicate CDs, either. But get ready to enter another world when you want to start ripping DVDs. You can’t make an exact copy of a DVD for several reasons. • Size. Most PC’s DVD burners can burn 4.7 GB of video to a blank DVD, but movie studios stuff about 7 GB of video onto a DVD. Sheer size alone rules out making an exact duplicate for most DVD burners, although the new, dual-layer DVD burners can hold 8 GB. Some third-party programs like the DivX Create Bundle (www.divx.com) take a DVD’s content, compress the video with the DivX codec, and burn it to a DVD, a CD in VCD format (page 298), or formats for portable video players. The compression removes some of the quality, but that may not matter when you’re eager to watch The Simpsons on your cell phone. • Copy protection. Movie studios encrypt their DVD’s video with a Content Scrambling System, and the U.S. government has ruled it illegal to decrypt it— even to make a backup copy. As you search the Internet, you’ll find some programs that can duplicate copyprotected DVDs. These programs are usually stored on Web sites run in countries that don’t observe United States copyright laws. The legality of these programs depends on the soil your PC sits on when using them. For more information about copying DVDs, drop by Doom9.net (www.doom9.net).

Burning DVDs Although Microsoft finally let Windows XP write to CDs, it missed the boat on DVDs: Windows XP can’t write to DVDs by itself; it needs third-party software. Many new PCs come with DVD burners, but since Windows XP can’t do anything with them, the manufacturers usually slip in a DVD-burning program. Like CD-burning programs, DVD-burning programs write to DVDs in different ways, depending on where you intend to play back the DVD. • Data. Intended for DVDs that never leave a PC, data-burning programs give your DVD that familiar look and feel of your CD burner. To copy information onto the DVD, stick a blank DVD into the drive, then drag your files onto the drive’s icon or into its open window. These programs work well for people who enjoy DVDs for their large storage capabilities, letting them make large backups for safekeeping.

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Burning DVDs

To burn CDs on a DVD burner, slip a blank CD in the drive. The drive examines every newly inserted disc; once it identifies it, it knows whether to behave like a CD burner or a DVD burner. • Video. Much more complicated (and expensive) than data-burning programs, these programs walk you through the process of creating a video DVD intended for the DVD player next to your TV (see Figure 10-9). Some programs include minor editing features for trimming the beginning or ending of a video, which is great for adjusting the starting and ending times of recorded TV shows or movies. If you’re doing more serious video editing—splicing together pieces of footage into a movie complete with stereo soundtrack, for instance—try Windows XP’s bundled Movie Maker (page 167). When you outgrow that, you’ll want to buy a separate video editing program, as well. Figure 10-9: Video DVD creation programs like Roxio’s MyDVD walk you through the process of copying your camcorder movies from your hard drive to a DVD so that you can watch them on a regular DVD player. You can create the opening menu that appears when you insert the DVD into a DVD player. You can also add background music, submenus, and buttons to the menu for jumping quickly to different sections of your video.

When shopping, make sure the software can handle your needs, be it data or video. If you find a program just for data, consider picking one up that handles video, as well. The data-only writers may be cheaper, but they won’t help when your friend inevitably walks over with his camcorder and says, “Hey, I hear you have a new DVD burner…”

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Buying a CD or DVD Drive

Buying a CD or DVD Drive

Just as with hard drives, CD and DVD drives come in both internal and external versions. External drives are a snap to install. Just plug them into your USB 2.0 or FireWire port; install the software, if necessary, and you’re ready to burn. Internal drives take longer to install, and they require removing your PC’s case and connecting cables—not a task for the timid. If your laptop didn’t come with a CD or DVD burner, an external burner’s the only way to add one. Plus, only mythical teenagers haunting the minds of record company executives use their CD burners on a 24-hour basis; a real family can easily share one external burner among several PCs and laptops. Internal drives usually aren’t any faster than external drives, and they’re priced about the same. Your decision may ultimately depend upon how cluttered your desk looks. If there’s no room for an external burner, buy the internal.

Choosing a CD Drive Once you decide where the drive will live—inside or outside your PC—the next step is deciphering the drive’s numbering system. CD drives come rated in a string of three “x” numbers: 32x16x40x, for instance. Here’s the breakdown: • The first “x” number carries the most weight; it refers to how quickly your drive burns CD-Rs, the discs used for creating music CDs and just about every other project. CD burners have maxed out at 52x, so a drive at that speed won’t be obsolete by the weekend. Before putting down your money, though, look for a 48x drive at a bargain price. There’s not a noticeable speed difference between 48 and 52. • The second “x” number is also the drive’s writing speed, but it reflects how quickly your drive burns CD-RWs (page 283), the discs used for temporary storage. Unlike their brethren, CD-RW discs are erasable, so they’re ideal for temporary backups that you write over on a regular basis. • The third “x” number refers to how quickly the drive reads information from the CD. You probably notice this most when viewing slideshows off digital photos stored on a CD. The higher the number, the less time you wait for the CD to grab your information. (Even the slowest speed has no trouble playing music CDs.)

Choosing a DVD Drive Shopping for a DVD drive feels like an exercise in polynomials. Anxious to prove that their drives have metaphysical powers, drive manufacturers pack their spec sheets with long strings of numbers. For instance, DVD burners also can burn CDs, so they carry the three strings of CD specs described above. Combine that with DVD’s two compatibility modes, and a typical DVD burner’s specs look like this: 16x/4x/16x DVD+RW, 16x/4x/16x DVD-RW. Chapter 10: CD and DVD Drives PCs: The Missing Manual, eMatter Edition Copyright © 2008 O’Reilly & Associates, Inc. All rights reserved.

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Installing a CD or DVD Drive

The numbers are easier to understand if you break apart the strings at the commas, like this: • 16x/4x/16x DVD+RW • 16x/4x/16x DVD-RW These are the same familiar numbers used in rating CD drives, but here they describe a DVD’s reading and writing speed. In order, the numbers listed above describe the following speeds: writing to regular DVDs, writing to rewritable DVDs, and reading from DVDs. The manufacturer repeated the numbers to show that the drive supports both – (minus) and + (plus) DVD formats. (They could have simplified things by using the “-+” or “±” abbreviation, but they’re trying to make their drive sound super compatible.) Here’s another DVD rating string: • 4x DVD+R DL This drive supports the new DVD Dual Layer format, so it can pack 8.5 GB onto a DVD—if you remember to buy blank 8.5 GB–sized DVDs. And finally, here’s a rating in which the CD burning specs appear at the end of the string: • 32x/24x/40x CD-RW Some friendly DVD burner manufacturers graciously label each “x” number, making it easier to figure out what they’re talking about. As a rule of thumb, the bigger the numbers, the faster the drive. Reliability and compatibility with other players are much more important than speed, though, so ask your friends about their drives and read reviews at sites like PC World (www.pcworld.com), CD Freaks (www.cdfreaks.com), Tom’s Hardware Guide (www.tomshardware.com), PC Magazine (www.pcmag.com), and Amazon (www.amazon.com).

Installing a CD or DVD Drive Installing a CD or DVD drive into your PC works much like adding a new hard drive (page 262), although the process is even easier—if you mess something up, you won’t lose your tax records from the past six years. The worse that can happen is Windows XP doesn’t recognize the drive, something you can usually fix by checking the cable connections. Both CD/DVD drives and hard drives connect to your PC using the same type of connectors, so if you’ve installed a hard drive, this procedure’s a breeze. Just follow these steps: 1. Buy a new CD or DVD drive. DVD burners can also read and write to CDs. If you need a CD burner, consider picking up a DVD burner, instead. They can still write to CDs, and they don’t cost much more than a CD burner. And they’re not limited to storing movies: the latest DVD burners can hold as much information as a dozen CDs, making them that much more valuable for backups. 308

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Although a few CD/DVD drives use SATA cables, the vast majority of CD and DVD drives use flat ribbon cables known as IDE (cables). See page 263 for a quick recap on how to figure out which type of cables your PC uses.

Installing a CD or DVD Drive

2. Turn off your PC and remove its case (page 12). 3. Set the drive’s jumper settings to Master, Slave, or Cable Select, depending on the drive’s position on the internal cable it’s going to be attached to. Since two CD/DVD drives often connect to the same ribbon cable, your PC needs to know how to talk to each drive individually. So it gives the drives one of two names: “Master” or “Slave.” Your job is to tell each drive which one is Master and which one is Slave. (No one has ever accused the PC industry of being politically correct.) Although a simple toggle switch would have done the job nicely, drives instead use a weird communication system. They make you move a little cover called a jumper over certain rows of pins, as shown in Figure 10-10. Covering one pair of pins sets the drive to Master status, while covering a different pair of two pins sets the drive to Slave status. A label on the drive tells you which pins are Master and which are Slave. Armed with that knowledge, you have three rules: Figure 10-10: A little sticker on the top or side of the drive’s case contains a diagram explaining which pair of pins you must cover for each of the three possible settings: Master, Slave, or Cable Select. When you decide which setting applies to your drive, push the jumper over the pair of pins that match your drive’s setting.

• If you’re replacing the only drive on the cable, set the new drive’s jumper settings to Master. • If you’re adding a second drive to a cable, set its jumper settings to Slave. Chapter 10: CD and DVD Drives PCs: The Missing Manual, eMatter Edition Copyright © 2008 O’Reilly & Associates, Inc. All rights reserved.

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Installing a CD or DVD Drive

• If you’re replacing one of two drives on the cable, set its jumpers to match the drive you’re replacing. Note: The rules change slightly if your PC has what is known as a “Cable Select” cable, which does away with some of the messy master/slave decision making. One of the cable’s connectors is marked “Master”; the other connector is marked “Slave.” When attaching any drive to a Cable Select cable, set the drive’s jumpers to “Cable Select.” The PC then talks to the drives according to what cable connector they’re plugged into, either Master or Slave.

4. Insert the new drive into the docking bay. If you’re replacing an existing drive, slide the old drive out of its bay (Figure 1-2) and slide in the new drive to replace it. Fasten the new drive in place with the old drive’s screws or latches. If you’re adding a second drive, slide it into the bay adjacent to the existing drive. Then fasten it in place with screws and/or latches. Most computer stores sell mounting screws or latches; if they don’t, your PC manufacturer probably sells them. 5. Attach the cables from your PC into the back of your new drive. You need to plug at least two kinds of cables into the rear connectors of a newly arriving CD or DVD drive: a power cable and a ribbon cable (see Figure 10-11). Some drives also come with two largely unused connectors, leftovers from older technology. Here’s the rundown on the four connectors you find on today’s drives: • Power. A four-pin “Molex” connector, shown in the top of Figure 10-11, pushes onto the four large pins. Sometimes you need to push with a little force to make a firm connection. • Motherboard. The vast majority of drives connect to the motherboard via a flat ribbon cable called an IDE cable. The cable has three connectors: one plugs into the motherboard; the cable’s other two connectors let you plug in one or two drives. Although each ribbon cable comes with connectors for two drives, don’t mix hard drives with CD or DVD drives on the same cable. That’s not usually a problem, as most motherboards have jacks for two ribbon cables. You can keep up to two hard drives on one cable, and up to two CD/DVD drives on the other. • Audio Out. On some older PCs and drives, a little four-pin cable connects your drive’s four-pin Audio Out connector to the four-pin CD IN connector on your PC’s sound card (page 205). Almost all of today’s PCs grab the sound straight through the ribbon cable, so don’t connect this cable unless you’re sure you need it.

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• Digital Out. Another leftover from yesteryear, this two-pin Digital Out connector on some DVD drives connects to a two-pin Digital In connector on some sound cards. Today’s PCs grab the sound through the ribbon cable, so don’t connect this cable, either.

Installing a CD or DVD Drive

Figure 10-11: Top: Your PC’s internal power supply comes outfitted with extra power cables (like the one white-tipped one shown here), ready for you to plug them into any newly installed devices (a new CD drive, for instance). Push the white “Molex” connector onto the four waiting pins on your drive and—presto— you’ve got juice. Bottom: Most new drives come packaged with their own ribbon cable, which connects between the drive’s rear-side connector (shown here) and an identical connector, usually labeled IDE 1, on your motherboard. If you’re just replacing a drive, feel free to reuse the old cable on the new drive. Ribbon cables fit only one way; make sure the notch and raised spot on the two connectors mesh as you push the ribbon cable into the drive.

6. Turn on your PC. Your PC recognizes the drive when it boots up.

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Troubleshooting CD and DVD Drives

Troubleshooting CD and DVD Drives When your PC can’t play back a CD or DVD that you’ve just burned, your first course of action should be to try a different brand of disc. Some brands just work better with certain drives. Don’t spend much time reading reviews of blank discs, since they don’t mean much unless the reviewer used your brand and model of burner. Instead, experiment with a wide variety of brands. When you find a brand that burns consistently, buy the bulk pack. The rest of this section describes some common troubles found when using CDs, DVDs, and their drives.

Avoiding Skips or Errors When Burning CDs or DVDs Unlike hard drives, which suck up data as soon as your PC sends it, CD and DVD drives are much more finicky, demanding undivided attention. Your PC must send data to the drives at a steady, controlled pace, with no interruptions. Any disturbances can cause skips in music or lost data glitches. If your burned CDs or DVDs show any signs of skipping or data loss, the following steps help your PC, particularly older ones, work undisturbed. • Close any programs to let your PC work uninterrupted while burning. Also, try logging off your PC (Start ➝ Log Off), and then log back into your User Account again. That gives your PC a relatively clean slate. • Don’t work on other programs or browse the Internet while burning discs. Instead, let your PC sit undisturbed until the burn’s finished. • When burns aren’t turning out right, lower your drive’s writing speed (Start ➝ My Computer ➝ right-click your drive’s icon ➝ Properties ➝ Recording tab; adjust the setting in the bottom drop-down menu). Keep moving lower until you find a setting that works consistently with the particular brand of blank disc you’re using. • Turn on error correction. Some burning software offers error correction, a way of double-checking to make sure that written information has arrived on the disc successfully. This extra checking slows down the burning process, so it’s often disabled. If you’re having trouble carrying out glitch-free burns, look for your software’s error correction checkbox and turn it on. • If your screen saver kicks in while you’re burning, turn it off before burning the next disc. (Start ➝ Control Panel ➝ Display ➝ Screen Saver tab. Choose None in the Screen saver drop-down menu.) Screen savers take away resources from your PC. • Defragment your hard disk. When you tell your PC to burn a CD or DVD, your PC gathers all the information, writes it to its hard drive, and then slowly feeds that chunk of information to the CD or DVD drive. Defragmenting your hard drive (page 260) lets your PC write everything to the hard drive in one smooth strip, making it easy to feed the data back to the CD or drive without pauses or delays. 312

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• Clean your discs with a lint-free cloth before burning them. Make sure no dust rests on the disc’s surface.

Troubleshooting CD and DVD Drives

• Free up disc space. If you don’t have 700 MB of free hard drive space (or 4 GB of free space, if you’re creating a DVD), free up some space on your drive (page 256).

DVD Region Settings Movie studios don’t release each movie simultaneously worldwide. Instead, they release the same movie at different times in different regions, sometimes tailoring a movie’s content and price for a specific part of the world. That’s why DVDs come with region codes—embedded signals detailing where a DVD can play. All DVD players, including your DVD drive, obey those region codes. To see your DVD drive’s region code, right-click its icon in My Computer (Start ➝ My Computer) and choose Properties ➝ Hardware tab. Double-click your drive’s name, and then click the Region tab. There, buried beneath all those clicks, Windows XP lists your drive’s Region code (Figure 10-12). Once you’re looking at it, you’ll see in which DVD region your drive is authorized to play. Figure 10-12: Your DVD drive’s Region Code tab lists its current region setting, as well as settings for other countries. If that DVD you bought on vacation uses a different Region Code than your drive, head to this tab and change your drive’s Region Code to match your DVD’s code. You can change your drive’s code only five times, though, and the PC’s manufacturer used up your first change. Some retailers sell “region free” DVD drives, and The Firmware Page (http://rpc1.org) carries firmwareflashing software to “unlock” your drive’s Region Code, if necessary.

Extracting Stuck Discs Occasionally, a CD or DVD ends up stuck in the drive, keeping the tray from sliding out when you push the eject button. The drive manufacturers standardized on a single tool to remove the drive: a straightened-out paper clip.

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Troubleshooting CD and DVD Drives

Look in the front of the drive for a tiny hole, usually located below the slide-out tray. With your PC turned off, push one prong of the paper clip into the hole, shown in Figure 10-13. The paper clip triggers the release mechanism, pushing the tray out and letting you extract the disc. Figure 10-13: Be sure to turn off your PC before pushing the paper clip into the hole to extract a stuck CD or DVD. If the PC’s turned on, the spinning disc could fly out of the tray like a Frisbee.

Codec Problems A codec contains the magic formula for compressing and decompressing large media files. Hundreds of codecs exist, each compressing sound or video in a slightly different way. If you don’t have the particular codec used to compress a song or video, you can’t listen to or view the content. Some hardcore hobbyists create codecs and give them away. But much more often, large corporations are the ones creating, licensing, and selling codecs. For instance, Windows XP’s Media Player includes the codec for decompressing MP3 files, letting you play them on your PC. But until Media Player 10, Microsoft left out the codec for creating MP3 files. That forced you to scramble for a free codec, pay $10 for an official codec (www.microsoft.com/mediaplayer), or resort to Microsoft’s own conveniently included WMA codec, instead. Faced with the iPod explosion, Microsoft added an MP3 creation codec to Media Player 10, which now creates as well as plays back MP3 files. But Media Player still doesn’t include a codec for viewing or creating DVD movies. Movies, especially those downloaded from the Internet, come encoded with a wide variety of codecs. When you try to play material compressed with a codec that

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Media Player doesn’t have, Media Player heads online to look in Microsoft’s stash of collected codecs. (To make sure Media Player searches the Internet, choose Start ➝ All Programs ➝ Media Player ➝ Tools ➝ Options ➝ Player tab ➝ “Download codecs automatically.”) If Media Player can’t find the codec used for that file—or you’re not connected to the Internet—it gives up.

Troubleshooting CD and DVD Drives

When faced with a video that Media Player can’t handle, you may find help at Free Codecs (www.free-codecs.com). Download their tools, Gspot and AVIcodec. The programs examine your problem file, find out what codec you need, and tell you whether your computer can handle it. If your PC needs the codec, the site offers a wide variety of codecs you can download. Many online movies come encoded with DivX, a free codec available from the company’s Web site (www.divx.com).

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chapter

Chapter 11

11

Getting Online

The Internet elevates your PC from a simple word processor to a combination library, communication center, game platform, radio, television, and overseas slot machine. But tapping into all that good stuff depends on one thing: making the initial connection and getting onto the Internet. This chapter’s aimed at readers who haven’t yet established their Internet connections. In the following pages, you’ll learn about the different ways your PC or laptop can reach out and join in the online fun.

Different Ways to Connect to the Internet Your PC can connect with the Internet in a wide variety of ways. Some methods require special equipment, some require you to sign up for an Internet account, and some simply depend on where you and your PC happen to be located. You can tap into the Internet in the following ways: • Plug into a broadband Internet connection. The fastest pipeline to the Internet. Broadband service usually comes from your cable TV or phone service provider, piped through the same cables and wires. It’s fast, always turned on, and, according to the latest industry stats, the connection method of choice for about half of the United States. It’s available mostly in large cities, but it’s expanding quickly. Page 321 weighs the pros and cons of broadband; page 325 shows how to hook up your PC to a broadband modem and speed onto the Internet. • Connect with a dial-up modem. One of the first ways to connect to the Internet, dial-up connections pull in the Internet through your traditional telephone lines. It’s slow, but cheap, widely available, and covered in detail on page 323; page 325 shows how to hook up your PC to a dial-up modem. 317

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Different Ways to Connect to the Internet

• Connect wirelessly with a PC or laptop. A PC or laptop with WiFi—one with built-in wireless Internet access—can connect with the Internet when you’re near a coveted “wireless hotspot,” found in many hotels, airports, coffee shops, businesses, and neighborhoods. Page 319 describes wireless Internet access and how to log on should you find yourself in one of these hotspots. WORKAROUND WORKSHOP

Going Online Without a PC You don’t necessarily need a PC to access the Internet or check your email (page 343). The venues described in this box offer public access to a PC, sometimes for free, sometimes not. Public PCs don’t always offer the types of programs you need, though. If you rely heavily on public PCs, bring a well-stocked CD or USB drive carrying your own data and familiar programs. Not every PC permits you to install and run these kinds of portable programs, but in a pinch, it’s worth a try. Library. Many libraries offer a small cluster of Internet-connected PCs for patrons. You usually sign up for access in 30minute increments. When your time’s up, you must log off and head for the end of the waiting line. Some libraries filter out some content; ask the librarian if any filters may affect your particular line of research. Some libraries require that you have a library card to use their PCs, which effectively rules out travelers. And since you’re in a library, don’t count on playing Internet games unless you can endure the piercing stares of everybody waiting in line. Internet cafes (cybercafes). Most large cities offer Internet cafes, also known as cybercafes, complete with PCs and “pay by the minute” Internet access. Internet cafes allow much more socializing than libraries, and generally come with more tech-savvy attendants.

To find an Internet cafe in your area, check the local phone book, and try these Web sites: the Cybercafe Search Engine (www.cybercaptive.com), Cybercafes (www.netcafes.com), and Netcafe.com (www.netcafe.com). When you find a suitable spot, make sure to call first, as these businesses come and go quickly. If you’re fetching your mail with the PC’s email program— as opposed to a Web-based system like Hotmail or Gmail— don’t forget to delete your received mail from the PC, and then empty the mail program’s “deleted” folder. Business centers. Found in most hotels, airports, and other areas frequented by travelers, these substitute offices usually offer a PC, printer, and Internet access. Some offer free access to the equipment; others charge a fee. Most centers aren’t staffed, leaving you on your own when the printer jams. Also, some business centers lack reservations or time limits, leaving you stuck when another guest hogs the PC all morning. FedEx Kinko’s. Owned by FedEx, Kinko’s offers PCs at many of its stores, each stocked with popular software from Adobe, Corel, and Microsoft. Each store sets its own PC rental rates, usually between $10 and $20 an hour. If you’re bringing a laptop, Kinko’s offers wireless Internet access through T-Mobile with its $10 per day or $40 per month pay-as-you-go rates. The stores offer other technology services, including printing, and CD and DVD reproduction.

• Share another PC’s connection. Windows XP graciously lets two or more PCs share a single Internet connection, as long as you first link them in a network, as described on page 404. Once they’re connected, Windows’ Internet Connection Sharing (page 331) lets you piggyback on the other PC’s Internet connection. • Transfer another PC’s Internet connection settings onto your PC. For every PC that you want to put online, you need to enter a handful of settings in

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Windows—passwords, email account names, phone numbers, and other bothersome details. When you want to move one PC’s Internet connection settings to your laptop or another PC, Windows XP’s Files and Settings Transfer Wizard (page 441) handles the grunt work, sparing you the hassle of filling out all the forms. When the wizard finishes, it leaves your browser and email program stocked with the other PC’s settings, ready to connect to the Internet in the same way.

Different Ways to Connect to the Internet

• Go online through a network. Whenever you run across a group of networked PCs that connect to the Internet (in a small office, say), your PC or laptop can connect by joining this network. Use any of the methods discussed on page 419. • Sign up for a new Internet connection. If you’re not already paying for an Internet connection and don’t know how to connect, this is the chapter for you. It explains how to choose an ISP (Internet Service Provider)—the company that takes your money in exchange for an Internet connection—and ask them for the specific settings you need. It explains how to set up your PC with the proper cables, set up Windows with your new ISP’s settings, and begin your journey onto the Internet.

Wireless Internet Connections Wireless Internet access (also known as WiFi) may be the simplest of all ways to connect to the Internet. When Windows XP senses an Internet signal in the air, it begs you to let it connect. (Wireless Internet networks constantly beam their signals to anything within range, which is usually no more than 300 feet—much less if the signals pass through a wall or two before reaching you.) When the wireless adapter on your PC or laptop comes within range of a wireless network, Windows XP taps you on the shoulder with the balloon shown in Figure 11-1. Note. Probably the toughest thing about connecting to a WiFi network is setting up and fine-tuning your PC or laptop’s wireless adapter, a job tackled along with other network chores on page 419.

If your PC has connected to a particular signal before, Windows connects automatically, and you’re ready to start browsing. But if you’re logging onto that network for the first time, click Windows XP’s balloon, select the newly found network’s name, and then click the Connect button. Windows XP introduces your PC to the wireless network, and you can fire up your browser to start visiting Web sites or checking email. This marvelously easy way to go online requires several key components: • Wireless adapter. If your laptop includes built-in wireless capability, make sure the wireless receiver is turned on, usually with a button or switch on its case. (Most laptops normally keep built-in wireless turned off to conserve battery power.) Other wireless adapters plug into a USB port (page 34) or a laptop’s PC Card slot (page 413). Wireless adapters come in a variety of network speeds with woefully technical terms like “802.11 b,” “802.11 g,” and “802.11 n.” Page 408 explains each one, Chapter 11: Getting Online PCs: The Missing Manual, eMatter Edition Copyright © 2008 O’Reilly & Associates, Inc. All rights reserved.

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but keep this in mind: all wireless adapters can use “802.11 b,” so if you see that magical “b” written on your adapter, its box, or its menus, then your adapter is up to the task. Figure 11-1: Top: Windows XP sends up a bubble when your WiFi-ready laptop wanders within range of a wireless network. If Windows has logged onto that particular network before, it automatically logs on again, sending you another bubble to let you know you’re online. Middle: If Windows doesn’t log on automatically, click the bubble to see all the wireless networks that Windows located. Don’t bother clicking any security-enabled connections, as they require a password, sometimes available for a fee at the hotel front desk or coffee shop counter. Instead, click any connection labeled “Unsecured wireless network,” and click the Connect button. Windows XP warns you that you’re connecting to an unsecured network, meaning somebody with special software could intercept your communications. Translation: Don’t use this connection for credit card transactions. Bottom: Windows XP sends up a second bubble when it’s connected with the Internet, letting you know when you can fire up your browser or email program.

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• Network in range. This one’s the clincher. You must be within range of the wireless signal, which travels only a few hundred feet from its source, be it a coffee shop, hotel lounge, or your next door neighbor. Windows XP represents a network’s strength using a series of green bars (see Figure 11-1, middle). The more bars you see, the stronger the signal. Since you can rarely spot the antenna that broadcasts the signal, move your laptop to different locations to see if the signal increases. Try to stay in an open area; walls absorb the signal, keeping it from reaching your PC.

Different Ways to Connect to the Internet

Tip: Some computer stores sell keychain-mounted “hotspot detectors” or “WiFi finders” that light up when you walk within range of a wireless network. They’re an easy way to find wireless spots for quick email checks while on the run.

• Unsecured or “open” network. Some people (understandably) don’t want others piggybacking on their wireless connections, so they secure them with a password. You should do the same with wireless networks you set up, too (see page 426). Securing your network not only shoos away strangers, it also slows down people who want to break into it. Other people, often those running businesses, want people to connect, hang around, and chug coffee. Still others don’t care, or don’t know that passersby can connect freely. Windows XP lists password-free connections as “unsecured wireless networks,” and they’re your free ride to the Internet. These same three conditions apply when connecting to any wireless network, including one you’ve set up in your own home (page 406), or a neighbor’s wireless network with a signal that drifts into your house. When you’re within range of a wireless network, Internet access doesn’t get much easier. You need one more thing to connect wirelessly at Kinko’s, Starbucks, Borders, and several other public places: your wallet. These places charge an hourly fee for connections, usually through the T-Mobile service (www.t-mobile.com/hotspot). Note: Wireless connections almost always deliver speedy broadband Internet service, described next. However, the connection may slow down a little when many people are simultaneously logged on.

Broadband (Cable and DSL) Connections Speedy broadband Internet service is the king of connections, flowing into your house 24 hours a day. As soon as you open your Web browser on your PC, you see the Internet waiting for you. A huge file that took a half hour to download with a pokey dial-up connection now appears on your desktop in 30 seconds. This speedy Internet stream comes from companies that already pipe large uninterrupted flows of information into your house: your cable TV company and your phone company. Each company takes a slightly different approach.

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Different Ways to Connect to the Internet

Cable companies deliver the Internet signal through your TV cables, already designed to carry huge amounts of data. Most rooms come with a cable TV jack, making cable modems easy to set up. The TV cable sticking out of your wall plugs into a cable modem, a box that separates the Internet signal from The Simpsons. After extracting the Internet signal, the cable modem feeds it to your PC. (Everybody in the house can still watch TV while you’re browsing the Internet.) Phone companies, by contrast, route Internet signals through your copper telephone wires, which presents the first problem: telephone wires meant for handling simple voice conversations can’t compete with a TV cable that already carries hundreds of channels. And if you don’t live within a few miles from a telephone office, the Internet signal isn’t strong enough to reach your house. But if you do live close enough, a DSL (Digital Subscriber Line) modem separates the data from the phone conversations, sending the Internet to your PC and your conversations to your phone. (You can still talk on the phone while browsing the Internet.) Cable Internet service can be about twice as fast as DSL, yet both are better than dial-up for several reasons: • Speed. Broadband is fast. Those large files that took a half hour to download with a dial-up modem take less than a minute with broadband. Web sites, even those with lots of graphics, jump onto the page almost instantly. Once you’ve tasted broadband, you’ll find it difficult to return to any other connection. • Ease. Don’t worry about setting up cable or DSL. Both cable and phone companies will send over a technician to install everything: a modem, any necessary extension cables, and usually even a network card in your PC (if it needs one; chances of that are pretty slim—see page 412 for details). Once everything’s connected to your PC, the technician measures the signal strength, tweaks it, and then leaves you with a speedy connection. • Password free. Cable and DSL don’t always require passwords to log on, simplifying the connections. After all, you’re logged on all the time. • Multimedia. Movie trailers usually fill your PC’s screen when you have a broadband connection; in contrast, they’re grainy and postage stamp–sized when viewed through dial-up connections, which even have problems connecting to FM-quality Internet radio stations. • Gaming. Many online games require a broadband connection. If you log on with a dial-up connection, the broadband players will pick off your spaceship before you even see it on your monitor. So, why doesn’t everybody have broadband? Because it’s limited to areas served by cable TV or those close to phone offices, ruling out rural areas and those on the edge of town. Plus, broadband costs more than dial-up service, usually between $40 to $60 a month. And people who have gone completely cellular will find themselves paying extra fees for DSL, as it requires a land line they don’t need. Another potential drawback: some broadband providers don’t provide free dial-up access for connecting to the Internet when you’re on the road, leaving you stuck

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without a reliable Internet connection. More and more broadband providers are fixing this problem by throwing in a few hours of free dial-up Internet access as a perk. Before traveling, ask your provider if it offers dial-up access, whether it offers a toll-free number and, if necessary, where you can download a list of local numbers for reference.

Different Ways to Connect to the Internet

For a handy portable email address, sign up for a free Internet-based email service like Google’s Gmail (www.gmail.com) or Yahoo mail (http://mail.yahoo.com). You can access those email accounts from any PC, no matter how it connects to the Internet. Best of all, a Gmail or Yahoo email address always stays with you, even if you move to a new city or switch to a different Internet Service Provider. Finally, broadband modems can’t send faxes; most dial-up modems can. This isn’t really a deal buster, though, as most PCs come with a built-in dial-up modem, which, in a pinch, you can use to send a fax, described in the online appendix, “Other Cool Things You Can Do Online,” available on the “Missing CD” page at www.missingmanuals.com.

Dial-up Connections The age-old standby, dial-up phone service (sometimes called “POTS” for Plain Old Telephone Service) connects your PC to the Internet through your telephone line. It’s a foot dragger compared to broadband service, making you wait to log on, wait again for a page to load, and take a nap while a large file downloads. When Windows Update needs to send your PC one of its huge updates, the process could take hours. For people without broadband in their area, however, dial-up remains the only alternative. It’s fairly simple to install, since you merely connect a telephone cable between the telephone jack in your wall and the one in your PC. When you need to connect, your PC takes between 30 and 60 seconds to dial and create the connection. But if the number’s busy, your PC hangs up, waits a minute or so, and tries again until it finally connects. Note: Companies like DirecWay (www.direcway.com) offer connections through satellite dishes, similar to satellite TV providers. Satellites are often the last resort for people living far from cities or who travel on RVs or boats. Satellite service is much faster than dial-up, much slower than broadband, and fairly expensive: DirecWay charges $100 a month and a $100 startup fee, which locks you into a 15-month contract.

On the positive side, many dial-up services provide nationwide access for traveling customers, a handy perk when logging on from hotels. Some Internet addicts buy both a dial-up and broadband account, giving them speed at home, dial-up accounts when traveling, and a backup ISP should one or the other go down. Tip: If the power goes out, your laptop may still be able to connect to the Internet with its built-in dial-up modem. Phone lines usually keep working during power outages. Since broadband modems plug into the wall, they’re useless during an outage.

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Setting Up a Modem

Setting Up a Modem Before you can receive an Internet signal and all the goodies carried on it, your PC needs a working modem (short for MODulator-DEModulator). Modems come in two main flavors: dial-up and broadband. A dial-up modem converts your PC’s data into sound waves and sends them through the phone lines to modems on the other end. The receiving modems convert the sound waves back into data, and the two hold some pretty boring conversations. Although some dial-up modems live in a little box on your desk, the vast majority are designed to live inside the PC, where their only visual identifier is a telephone jack (page 42) or two on the back of your PC. A cable or DSL modem (also known as a broadband modem) sits in a little box near your computer (see Figure 11-2), where it separates the data from the TV or phone signals and passes the Internet signal onto your PC. Figure 11-2: Top: A cable modem is about the size of a small tissue box and sits anywhere near your PC. Although most cable companies give you one when you sign up, they usually charge a monthly rental fee. To save money, compare the rental fee to the cost of buying a cable modem from Linksys, Toshiba, or other manufacturers. (If you’re thinking of connecting your PCs with a network, Linksys stuffs a cable modem, router/ firewall (page 490), and wireless access (page 406) in one box—to create a space-saving, all in-one solution.) Before buying, check your cable company’s support site and make sure the model’s on their approved list. Bottom: This DSL modem looks like a large mouse. You plug your phone cable into the box, and plug the box into your USB port to receive the Internet signal.

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Setting Up a Dial-Up Modem

Setting Up a Modem

Almost all PCs sold today come with a built-in dial-up modem, usually a little silver strip on the back of your PC with two phone jacks (page 42). Some PCs hide a phone jack near where your keyboard and mouse cables are plugged in. If you’re stuck with a modemless PC, you can add a modem fairly easily by slipping a modem card into a card slot (page 27) inside your PC. Setting up your PC’s modem is as easy as plugging in a telephone. The secret is finding the correct modem port to use, since most modems have two ports. Look at the icons next to your modem’s two telephone jacks to figure out which is which: • Phone icon. Plug your telephone into the jack marked with this icon. Although not necessary, connecting a phone to your PC is a handy way to keep a phone close to your work area after your PC hogs the telephone jack. • Jack icon. Connect a telephone cable between this jack and the phone jack in your wall. Laptops come with only one jack; that’s the one that connects to the wall. Don’t think you’re wasting your phone jack if you choose broadband over dial-up service. Connect the modem to the wall jack, anyway. That lets Windows XP turn your PC into a makeshift fax machine, described in the online appendix, “Other Cool Things You Can Do Online,” available on the “Missing CD” page at www. missingmanuals.com.

Setting Up a Cable or DSL Modem Many cable and DSL providers visit your home, install the equipment your PC needs, make sure everything works correctly, and then hand you the delivery papers to sign. But if your Internet Service Provider (ISP) offers a discount when you set up the equipment yourself, consider taking them up on it. Your ISP will send you a box-like modem, a network or USB cable, and an illustrated hook-up guide that explains the following three steps: 1. Connect the TV cable to your cable modem, or connect the phone line to your DSL modem. • Cable modem. On the back of this little box lives a coax cable port, just like the one on the back of your TV (page 96). Connect a standard “cable TV” cable between the cable TV port in the wall and the identical port on your cable modem, tightly screwing down the connector with your fingers. (No need to reach for the pliers.)

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If a TV’s hogging the cable TV port in the wall, you need a splitter, shown in Figure 11-3, which turns that one port into two: one for your TV and the other for your new cable modem.

Setting Up a Modem

Most cable modems plug into an electrical outlet, as well.

To your cable modem

Figure 11-3: Splitters like these transform one cable or phone connection into two, perfect for sharing a cable TV or phone line with your PC. You can buy either of them for a few dollars at Radio Shack, most computer or stereo stores, and even drug stores.

To your TV

To the cable port in the wall

Left: Screw your cable TV’s cable into the single end of this connector. Then screw a cable onto each of the splitter’s two other connectors; screwing one of the cables back into your TV and the other into your cable modem. Right: Push this splitter into the phone jack in your wall to give you two phone jacks. Plug the DSL modem’s phone cable into one jack; plug your telephone’s cable into a filter, described below, and plug the filter into the splitter’s other jack.

To the phone jack in the wall

To your PC’s modem

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To your telephone

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• DSL modem. Connect a regular telephone cable from your telephone jack to this little box.

Subscribing to an Internet Service

If a phone’s hogging your phone jack, buy a splitter, shown in Figure 11-3, at Radio Shack or most drug stores. It doubles your phone jack, giving you one jack for your phone and one for your DSL modem. Almost all DSL companies give you a handful of filters—little two-inch-long gadgets with a phone jack on one end and a phone plug on the other. Unplug your main phone’s cord from the wall jack, plug the cable into the filter, and plug the filter into the wall jack. Then repeat that procedure for all your phones, your answering machine, and anything else that plugs into the wall. Be sure to count your phones and answering machines so you know how many filters to request from the DSL company. Only the DSL modem itself can plug into an unfiltered line. 2. Connect a network or USB cable between the modem and your PC’s network or USB port. If you have a cable modem, take a look at page 42, which shows a picture of the network cables you’ll use (known as an Ethernet cables in tech-speak). DSL’ers: see page 36, which shows a USB port and the connector you plug into it. 3. Plug your modem into the wall’s power outlet. Both cable and DSL modems usually need to plug into a power outlet. If those are scarce goods around your PC, it’s time to buy a power strip. That’s it. If your aging PC still doesn’t have a network or USB 2.0 port, you need to add one (page 25). When you run Windows’ New Connection Wizard (page 331), choose Broadband Connection. Windows XP figures out the details from there, fills out the right forms, and connects you to the Internet. Some broadband services supply a CD that does the same thing, as well as sprucing up Internet Explorer with the service’s own logo.

Subscribing to an Internet Service Unless you’re lucky enough to live above a WiFi-ready coffee shop with a friendly owner offering free service, you have to pay an Internet Service Provider (ISP) for an Internet account. That monthly fee provides you with at least two of these three things: • User name. Along with your password, your user name lets you connect to the Internet, and it usually serves as your email address. Very few people receive their own name as their user name. John Smith snapped up [email protected] in the mid-nineties, leaving the thousands of other John Smiths to forage for leftovers like [email protected]. To avoid dorky numbers after their names, most people opt for a nickname like [email protected]. Some people even prefer nicknames to preserve their anonymity while online. You’ll most likely enter several different names before finding an available user name. Chapter 11: Getting Online PCs: The Missing Manual, eMatter Edition Copyright © 2008 O’Reilly & Associates, Inc. All rights reserved.

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• Password. The ISP supplies a password for you to log on for the first time; then you’re expected to change it. Choosing a secure password requires a difficult balance between convenience and security, an act difficult enough to warrant its own section (see page 475). Also, some ISPs design their passwords to be case sensitive, which means that “bluecheese” and “BlueCheese” are different passwords. When setting up your email program (page 352), you need to enter this password and your user name to receive your mail. • Phone number. If you choose a dial-up ISP, they provide you with a phone number to call when connecting. Some broadband ISPs also provide you with a phone number for dialing in and checking your email while traveling. Your user name and password let your ISP know when you’re trying to log on so they can check to see if you’re paid up. If your accounts are in order, they let you connect. Broadband services rarely require logon passwords because you’re already paying a monthly bill for your cable or phone service; they know who you are.

Choosing a Regular ISP vs. an Online Service Your decision between broadband and dial-up service often comes down to what’s offered in your area. That leaves you with the choice of a regular ISP or an online service provider, like America Online (AOL) or MSN. Both types offer a straight connection to the Internet, but with some differences. • Regular ISPs. These firms provide unfiltered, direct access to the Internet. When you log on, you travel through your computer’s Internet browser, immediately landing on the Web site you choose. From there, you start browsing from site to site. Regular ISPs usually cost a few dollars less than the alternative, the online service providers, described next. • Online service providers. Online service providers like AOL add an extra layer to the Internet, as well as a few dollars to the monthly fee. You don’t see a Web site when you log on; instead, you see the online service’s menus. You can head straight to the Internet from there, if you wish. But other menu options direct you to members-only perks—online games, for instance, or special interest areas and chat rooms. To distinguish between their own service and the actual Internet, online service providers place a thick layer of menus and graphics over their connection, giving common menus to many features. You log onto the online service to check your email, for instance, using the same menus you use for visiting other areas of the service. Some people find online services easier to use. Others find the menus claustrophobic and prefer to head straight for the Internet, where they can choose their own browser and email programs. Since you can head to the Internet straight from an online service, the biggest difference may be national service. Online services offer dial-in access from most major cities, a boon for travelers looking to grab their email. Some smaller ISPs and broadband servers don’t offer that convenience.

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Finding the Best Internet Service Provider Choosing an ISP can be as overwhelming as visiting the horse races for the first time. You understand that you’re supposed to bet on the winner. But you don’t quite know the difference between Place, Show, or a Trifecta.

Subscribing to an Internet Service

You can quickly limit your decisions by seeing which ISP serves your particular area. Call your cable TV and phone company to see if they offer broadband connections. Look up “Internet Access” or “Internet Service Provider” in your phone book to see listings of local providers. Call their tech support numbers, and give extra points to the ones that answer quickly and politely. When you have a list of major contenders, start comparing services by seeing how they meet these criteria. • Price. Unfortunately, price can be misleading. The cheapest ISPs are usually plagued with busy signals and dropped connections. And until you subscribe, you won’t know how busy they are, or how bad the connection will be. If you do sign up on with a cheapie, make sure it’s a month-to-month contract. And instead of using the email address they give you, choose a Web-based email (page 348) address that you can take with you if you switch ISPs a month or two later. • Reviews. Some people love to review movies or books. Others prefer to review their Internet provider’s performance, swapping up-to-the-minute notes on sites like Broadband Reports (www.broadbandreports.com). Before signing with an ISP, check how current subscribers rate it. • Limits. Broadband provides continuous Internet access; some dial-ups limit your connection time to a certain number of hours per month. Find out how many before signing up. • Termination fees. Watch out for early termination fees. Some ISPs tempt you into a year-long contract, give you lousy service, and then point to the $100 “early termination fee” in your service agreement’s fine print. • Equipment. If your ISP supplies equipment, like a modem or network card, compare its monthly rental with the cost of buying your own. Buying your own equipment often adds up to less than a year’s rental fees. Installing it yourself could bring a discount, as well. Installing a network card takes only a few minutes (page 25), as does connecting a broadband modem (page 325). • Phone charges. Before choosing a dial-up account, call your local phone company to make sure the dial-up number your ISP is going to give you is local, not long distance. (Usually the ISP lists these numbers—sometimes called access numbers—on its Web site.) When you connect to the Internet using a dial-up account, your phone company charges you just as though you were making a call to a friend. Even if you’re just checking email, it’s very difficult to log on and off the Internet in less than three minutes. The time could be much longer if you send or receive a lot of email.

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• Email. Most ISPs supply you with an email address. If you’re going to use it, ask if they run a spam filter, to save you the hassle of deleting all the Viagra ads. • Tech support. Make sure your ISP offers 24-hour tech support. You want to make sure they offer help after business hours, which is when many people need assistance the most.

Setting Up an Internet Connection Windows XP lets you set up an Internet connection whether or not you’ve already chosen a specific ISP. If you’ve already chosen one—whether it’s broadband or dial-up—you need to inform Windows XP and begin the process of going online. If you haven’t found an ISP or are still racked with indecision after reading the first part of this chapter, Windows XP will gently lead you by the hand to its own ISP service, MSN, or pass you off to one of its partners that serve your area. Whether you’ve found an ISP on your own or simply want Windows XP to find one for you, tell Windows of your decision in one of two ways: use the setup CD from your ISP (if they gave you one), or fire up Windows XP’s built-in New Connection Wizard. • Setup CD. Many ISPs like AOL (America Online), EarthLink, Cox, and others give you a “setup CD” to help your PC find its way online. If your ISP gave you a setup CD, insert it into your CD drive. A program appears, like the one shown Figure 11-4, to guide you through the process of swapping your credit card number for an Internet connection. Figure 11-4: Some companies make it easy to connect to the Internet by providing a setup CD that automatically tweaks Windows’ settings. Since each setup CD is tailored for a specific online service—like AOL, for instance, shown here— the program is easy to use with no extra interrogations: every question pertains to the particular service you’ve chosen.

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If you have a setup CD, insert it now and follow the onscreen instructions; you don’t need to use Windows XP’s New Connection Wizard, described next.

Setting Up an Internet Connection

• New Connection Wizard. Windows XP’s New Connection Wizard serves as a safe starting point for all types of PC-to-PC connections: networking with another group of PCs, connecting to the Internet, or connecting to another PC by stringing a single cable between the two machines (page 448). (That last maneuver is handy for quick file swaps.) The wizard makes no assumptions as it asks you how you want to connect with the Internet. If the wizard discovers you’re already clutching a setup CD, it tells you when to insert the CD, and graciously steps aside so the CD’s program can take over. When you’re ready to set up an Internet account, either to sign up for a new one or to tell Windows about one you already have, summon the New Connection Wizard, described next.

Firing Up the New Connection Wizard Although the wizard rarely handles the entire job by itself, it asks you a series of questions, a few of which are shown in Figure 11-5, and then summons the appropriate program to complete the job. What the New Connection Wizard doesn’t do, though, is set up your email account. That takes place in your email program, which is covered in the next chapter. Follow these steps to tell Windows about an ISP you’ve already chosen or to have Windows find one for you. If you want Windows to find one for you, make sure your dial-up modem is connected to your phone jack, and that you’re not talking on the phone—your PC will need to borrow the phone line for a few minutes. Tip: If you’ve already signed up with a dial-up service provider, now’s the time to pull out the phone number, user name, and password you were assigned.

1. Choose Start ➝ All Programs ➝ Accessories ➝ Communications ➝ New Connection Wizard. The New Connection Wizard appears, ready to collect your information. 2. Click Next. On the next screen, click Connect to the Internet, and then click the Next button. The Getting Ready screen appears, which lets you choose one of three options: • Choose from a list of Internet service providers (ISPs). Meant for people who haven’t already chosen an Internet service, this option lets Microsoft hawk its own Internet service—MSN—or a service from one of its partners. Choosing this option closes the wizard and leaves you looking at a folder with two links that both rely on your PC’s dial-up modem: one link dials MSN, the other dials Microsoft to see which partner serves your geographic area. Both links

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start by calling a toll-free number with your PC’s modem. Once they locate a local number for your area, they dial again with that new number. Figure 11-5: The New Connection Wizard is your starting point when connecting your computer to another PC, as well as to the Internet. The wizard leads you through a series of questions asking you about what kind of connection you want to make. To enter your Internet account information or sign up for a new dial-up account, start by picking “Connect to the Internet” (top). Next, tell the wizard whether you want its help finding an ISP in your area (“Choose from a list of Internet service providers”) or whether you’ve already picked an ISP and want to enter its settings manually (“Set up my connection manually”). You can also tell the wizard to turn things over to an installation CD if your ISP provided you with one.

At that point, you can read through the service plans offered by the various ISPs, compare them, and choose the one you want. Tip: Click both links to see which one offers service through a local or toll-free phone number. (Before signing up, you may want to cancel your transaction, and then dial your telephone operator to verify that it’s within your local-plan calling area.) If the wizard lists only long-distance numbers, stop. You can probably find a local or toll-free dial-up ISP in your phone book under “Internet Access” or “Internet Service Provider.”

• Set up my connection manually. This option is for people who already have a broadband or dial-up Internet account. Choose this button to enter your account’s settings yourself: your user name, password, and phone number for dial-up accounts. (Broadband subscribers don’t need a phone number and rarely need a user name or password, either.) • Use the CD I got from an ISP. This one’s meant mainly for people who have picked up a CD for AOL at the grocery store check-out line. This option closes the wizard so you can insert the CD. The CD’s built-in sign-up program kicks in, shown earlier in Figure 11-4, walking you through the process of handing over your credit card number. 332

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The wizard ends if you choose the first or third options. If you choose to set up the connection manually, the wizard moves to step 3.

Setting Up an Internet Connection

3. Tell the wizard how you want to connect to the Internet. The window offers three options: • Connect using a dial-up modem. Choose this option for any account that comes with a phone number, and then continue to step 4. • Connect using a broadband connection that requires a user name and a password. Choose this option for those rare occasions where your DSL or cable ISP gave you a user name and password when you signed up, and then move to step 4. Note: Your DSL or cable ISP may very well have given you (or let you select) a user name and password for your email account. But you won’t need those when connecting your PC to the Internet.

• Connect using a broadband connection that’s always on. Choose this option for a DSL or cable connection that’s always on. After selecting this, you’re finished. The wizard sets up the connection and, if your modem’s plugged in, leaves you ready to connect to the Internet. 4. Type a name for your ISP. The wizard marches onward to gather a few last bits of information, shown in Figure 11-6, before setting up your connection. Type the name of your ISP—this is for your benefit, so a shorthand version of your ISP’s name works just fine. This option’s meant for people juggling several ISPs—a national dial-up when on the road and broadband at home, for instance. Different names let you choose the connection you need at that particular moment. 5. Enter the phone number, if you have a dial-up account, and then click Next. Your dial-up ISP should have given you a phone number (and a user name and password) when you signed up for your dial-up account. If you don’t have them, stop the wizard and call your ISP’s customer support staff. You need that information before you can connect. Be sure to enter a “1” before the number if it’s long distance. (Hopefully, you called your phone company to see if it’s long distance before you signed up.) If you’re just here to enter the user name and password for your broadband connection, skip this step.

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6. Enter your user name and password, click Next, and then click Finish. After entering your user name and password, note the two checkboxes at the window’s bottom in Figure 11-6. Figure 11-6: The wizard finishes up by letting you enter a user name and password, required by all dial-up ISPs and some broadband connections. It also asks for the phone number to use if you have a dial-up connection.

• Use this account name and password when anyone connects to the Internet from this computer. This lets Windows know whether these are your personal ISP settings, or if they apply to the entire PC and everybody using it— including other user account holders. Most families turn on this checkbox, because everybody uses the same ISP. In households with roommates, however, everybody may have their own ISP, so you’d turn off this checkbox, letting everybody log on under their own account. Most university students turn off this checkbox when logging onto the Internet through their school’s ISP. 334

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• Make this the default Internet connection. Turn on this checkbox when you have only one ISP. When you turn this setting off, Windows presents you with a list of all your available ISPs (if you have accounts with more than one), letting you choose which one to use.

Dialing into the Internet

Windows XP saves your new connection settings as an icon in the Network Connections window, described next.

Viewing or Changing Your Internet Connections Once you create a new connection to the Internet, Windows saves the settings as an icon in your PC’s Network Connections folder, a handy collecting spot for all your PC’s connection settings. To see all the ways your PC can connect to the Internet (or to other PCs)—and to fine-tune any connections that aren’t meeting your needs—choose Start ➝ All Programs ➝ Accessories ➝ Communications ➝ Network Connections. The Network Connections window appears, as shown in Figure 11-7. Normally, any program that wants to connect to the Internet looks at your connection settings, grabs their information, and connects automatically. You don’t need to do anything. But the Network Connections window is what you want when you need to fetch the settings for a quick tweak. When firing up a laptop in a new city, for instance, change a dial-up phone number by right-clicking your dialup connection’s icon, and then choose Properties.

Dialing into the Internet If your Internet connection comes piped in through cable, DSL, or over a small home or office network, your connection’s always turned on. But if you’re connecting through dial-up, whether at home, at an airport pay phone, or at a hotel, this section explains how to make the call, connect, hang up when you’re through, and tweak any settings to make that process work more smoothly.

Starting a Dial-Up Connection Once the New Connection Wizard preps your PC or laptop for a dial-up connection (page 331), just loading your Web browser summons your modem. The awakened modem, still sleepy, asks if you want to connect, by displaying the window shown in Figure 11-7, bottom. Since few people summon their browser when they don’t want to connect, click the Dial button to start dialing. But if you prefer a speedier setup, you can automate the entire process. That lets Windows XP automatically connect to the Internet whenever you summon your browser or any other Internet-dependent program. Just follow the steps described next.

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1. Open the Network Connections window by choosing Start Accessories ➝ Communications ➝ Network Connections.

➝

All Programs

➝

The Network Connections window appears (Figure 11-7, top). Figure 11-7: Top: The Network Connections window lets you see all the ways your PC can connect to the Internet, as well as to other PCs. This particular PC can connect to the Internet using any of four different methods: a dial-up connection, a FireWire (1394) network, a standard Ethernet network, or a wireless connection. To make use of a dial-up connection, right-click that icon and then choose Connect. Bottom: Windows responds by displaying a dialog box confirming the phone number to dial, your user name and password, and several other options.

2. Right-click your dial-up connection’s icon and then choose Properties. 3. Click the Options tab and turn off the checkboxes marked, “Prompt for name and password” and “Prompt for Phone Number.”

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Click OK to save your settings when you’re through. That tells your PC to automatically connect whenever a program wants to connect with the Internet. If your ISP doesn’t offer you a toll-free dial-up number, turn on the checkbox called “Prompt for Phone Number” in step 3 to undo the procedure and make Windows XP ask permission before dialing.

Dialing into the Internet

Disconnecting from a Dial-Up Connection When you’re through perusing the Internet and want to disconnect from the Internet, closing your browser or other Internet-using program rarely does the trick. Your Internet session stays running in the background, hogging the phone line and, if you’re not calling a local number, racking up hefty long-distance charges. To force a disconnect, choose whichever of these methods seem handiest at the time. • Unplug the phone line from your PC’s telephone jack and run. This method, used mostly by laptop owners, lets you depart quickly when the cab arrives, the plane starts boarding, or your carpool buddy starts honking in your driveway. • Right-click the connection’s taskbar icon and choose Disconnect (see Figure 11-8, top). Figure 11-8: Top: When you’re ready to end your dial-up Internet session, look for the Internet connection’s little icon on your taskbar, near your clock. Right-click the icon and choose Disconnect. The screen on that little pair of computer icons turns blue when you’re sending or receiving information, providing a quick way to tell if the connection’s working. (Hover your mouse over the icon to see your connection speed; anything above 50 Kbps is good.) Bottom: Another, less-convenient way to disconnect is to right-click your dial-up connection icon in the Network Connections window and choose Disconnect.

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• Open the Network Connections folder (Start ➝ All Programs ➝ Accessories ➝ Communications ➝ Network Connections), right-click your dial-up connection’s icon, and then choose Disconnect. • Set Internet Explorer to disconnect when you close it: choose Tools ➝ Internet Options ➝ Connections tab ➝ Settings ➝ Advanced and turn on the checkmark next to “Disconnect when connection may no longer be needed.” (This promised convenience rarely works, unfortunately, because other programs often use your Internet connection in the background.) LAPTOP LIFE

Connecting from Anywhere When you own a laptop, you can set up camp in a variety of locations. The best way for travelers to find a connection to the Internet is to be ready to connect in as many ways as possible. Here are your main options: Wireless. If your laptop doesn’t have built-in wireless connectivity, a wireless network adapter is a must. Many wireless adapters slide into a laptop’s PC card slot (page 413). Others plug into the USB port (page 34), either protruding from the port like a stub or dangling from the end of a cable that plugs into the port. Wireless adapters let you take advantage of the hotspots (page 320) that are found with increasing frequency in places haunted by laptoppers. Dial-up. When wireless isn’t an option, your next solution is a dial-up connection, hopefully one with a number local to wherever you are. Online services like AOL work well here, as many offer local numbers in most major cities. Also, ask your broadband service if they offer dial-up for travelers; Cox broadband, for instance, offers a limited-hour dial-up connection accessible via a toll-free call. In a pinch, dial-up subscribers can always call long-distance to their access number back home. Broadband. If you normally use broadband but resort to a dial-up connection on the road, automate the dial-up connection process: Open Internet Explorer and choose Tools ➝ Internet Options ➝ Connections tab ➝ “Dial whenever a network connection is not present.” This tells your laptop to connect through your speedy broadband or network connection whenever it’s available. But when broadband’s out of reach, your PC automatically switches to dial-up, saving you from fiddling with the settings.

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Network. Plug a network cable (also known as an Ethernet cable) between your laptop’s network jack and any network jack you find while traveling. Jacks sprout from the walls and desks of hotel rooms, conference rooms, some libraries, and Internet cafes. Most laptops come with a built-in network adapter; if yours doesn’t include one, pick up a USB network adapter (page 412) to transform your laptop’s USB port into a network jack. Not all network jacks connect to the Internet, but you may get lucky. (Be sure to use a firewall (page 490) when plugging into strange networks.) 3G (Third Generation) cell phone provider. In the absence of an easy wired or wireless connection, your cell phone provider may help. Not all cell phone companies offer what you need—3G service—and those who do charge extra for the privilege. The best providers hand you a 3G PC Card that slips into your laptop and connects to the cell phone’s service—you don’t even need a cell phone. Others supply a 3G-compatible cell phone and laptop-connecting cable. The 3G market changes quickly, and not all cities offer 3G connections. Before signing any new contracts with a cell phone provider, ask about their 3G options. You may need a different (or a second) cell phone company. Share somebody’s connection. Pack a “crossover Ethernet cable,” FireWire cable, or “crossed USB cable” when traveling. When you find a friendly person connected to the Internet, create an on-the-fly network between the two PCs (page 448), turn on Internet Connection Sharing (page 435), and then piggyback on that person’s connection.

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Troubleshooting Online Connections Troubleshooting Internet connection problems can often prove harder than most garden variety PC annoyances. Sure, your PC’s a prime suspect. But the problem could also lie with the computer on the other end, known as the “server,” that’s delivering your information. If you’re having a hard time connecting to a particular Web site, always start off by paying a visit to your ISP’s Web site. If you can log on to it, you know the problem lies with the Web site you tried to visit, not with your ISP.

Troubleshooting Online Connections

Some broadband ISP’s offer a Status area on their Web site that lists any connection problems currently taking place in different parts of the city or nation. It’s a good first stop when the Internet’s not behaving as well as it should. But other times, the problem lies within your PC: it keeps trying to connect to the Internet for no apparent reason—for instance, a Web site doesn’t appear when you enter its address in your browser, or you’re plagued with busy signals. These three sections should help you find the culprit and slap the right wrists.

Stopping a Program or PC from Trying to Connect Windows XP and many Windows programs itch to connect with the Internet. Some programs want to check with their Web sites to see if you’re using the latest version; others want to check for new email. Antivirus programs want to grab the latest list of viruses to keep these critters from entering your PC. Still others check in as a copy-protection safeguard to make sure you’re using the program on your own PC. Nothing’s more disturbing than firing up your word processor to dash off a quick letter and seeing the window shown in Figure 11-7, begging to connect with the Internet. Even worse is a PC that starts dialing while you’re talking on the telephone. To stop programs from dialing automatically, follow these steps: 1. Click Start ➝ Control Panel Preferences ➝ Autodial tab.

➝

Network Connections

➝

Advanced

➝

Dial-up

2. Turn off the checkboxes listed under “Enable autodial by location.” 3. Turn on the checkbox marked “Always ask me before autodialing.” 4. Turn on the checkbox called “Disable autodial while I am logged on.” Performing those steps should restrain most programs from logging onto the Internet until you explicitly tell them you want to do so. Note: If your PC continues to make calls by itself, or you start to see expensive “toll call” bills on your phone bill, run a virus check with an updated antivirus program immediately (page 486).

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Web Sites That Don’t Answer When you can’t log onto a Web site, you’re left with three suspects: your PC, your Internet connection, or the Web site you’re trying to reach. Here’s how to identify who’s to blame. If you can connect to any Web site, the problem isn’t your PC or your Internet connection. Some Web sites occasionally conk out. Too many people may be trying to connect at the moment, for example, or the page you’re trying to visit may be a “bad link”—a Web address that, for a variety of reasons, no longer works. One quick fix to try: if you’re trying to visit a Web page that has an extremely long URL—for example, http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/2005/writers/tom_verducci/10/ 12/alcs.game1/index.html—try visiting the site’s main page instead, which is accessible by entering into your browser everything before the .com or .org (http:// sportsillustrated.cnn.com, in the previous example). Tip: If a friend emails you a Web address that you subsequently copy and paste into your Web browser, and you get a Page Not Found message, check and see if you spot any instances of the snippet “%20”— that’s URL-speak for a space and it usually ends up appearing after you’ve copied a Web address from an email. The fix is easy: just delete every instance you see of “%20”; thus, you’d change www.redherring. com/Article.aspx?%20a=13945 to www.redherring.com/Article.aspx?a=13945.

If your modem connects, but no Web sites appear in your browser, your ISP’s probably at fault. (One way to verify your modem connection is working: send an email to yourself. If the email comes through okay, at least you know you’re modem’s working properly.) Then call your ISP’s customer service or technical support number. If the line’s busy or the wait on hold is exceptionally long, the ISP’s computers are probably down for a moment. If you have a cable modem, see if your TV still receives channels; if you have DSL, see if your phone still works. If your modem won’t even connect to the Internet, the problem probably lies on your PC’s boxy shoulders. Make sure all the cables are connected properly, restart your PC, and give it another try.

Busy Signals If you’re dialing into the Internet and you hear busy signal noises rather than that sweet robotic connection screech, that means too many people are trying to call your Internet Service Provider. That gives you two options: • Redial. Your modem normally gives up after about 30 seconds, waits a minute or so, and then dials again. You can change the time the modem waits and the number of times it redials by choosing Start ➝ All Programs ➝ Accessories ➝ Communications ➝ Network Communications. Right-click your dial-up

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modem connection’s icon and choose Properties. Click the Options tab, and change the settings shown in Figure 11-9.

Troubleshooting Online Connections

Figure 11-9: The Redialing section of the Options tab decides how your dialup modem handles busy signals. The “Redial attempts” number tells your modem how many times it should redial before giving up. Although it’s normally set to 3, bump it to 20 if your PC’s having trouble connecting. Windows normally waits one minute before dialing after a busy signal; you can change this setting from 1 second to 10 minutes. If you’re connected on a long-distance line, reduce the “Idle time before hanging up” limit from 20 minutes to 2 minutes. That tells your PC to hang up if you haven’t touched the keyboard in two minutes, avoiding long-distance charges while you’re in the kitchen putting out the fire in the toaster.

• Change ISPs. When your ISP hangs up on you frequently, it means it’s overbooked with customers trying to log onto the Internet. Some cheapo ISPs juggle customers, letting some log on for a little while, and then dumping them to let others long on. The only solution is to dump your ISP and choose one with better service.

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chapter

Chapter 12

12

Email

For many people, email makes computers worthwhile. No need to bother rummaging for a pen, stamp, envelope, or mailbox. Just compose, click, and you’re done. Sending and receiving email requires an email program, where you type your letters and send them off to your recipients, and an email address and password, which you get from your Internet Service Provider (ISP), the money grabbers described in the previous chapter. This chapter shows you how to pick an email program, tell it what your address and password are, and how to send and receive email using that address—or even several addresses. And if, by chance, you don’t yet have an email account, a relationship with an ISP, or even a computer, you’ll learn about Web-based email services, like Yahoo, Hotmail, and Gmail, which let you send and receive email from any PC you visit.

Choosing an Email Program Sending mail through the post office, dubbed “Snail Mail” by Internet veterans, requires several steps. You need to type or write a letter, stick it in an envelope, add an address and a stamp, and then drop it in the mailbox. Electronic mail works pretty much the same way: you type your letter into an email program, add the recipient’s email address, and then click the Send button. You don’t even need to pay any postage—a perk long celebrated by spam traffickers worldwide. All email programs, sometimes called email clients, handle the basic task of sending-and-receiving equally well. The difference lies in their frills: copying your

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Choosing an Email Program

address book to your iPod through iTunes, for instance, is a perk that’s offered only by Outlook Express and Outlook. If you want a spell checker, you’ve got to turn to Mozilla’s Thunderbird. And if you want a menu with emoticons (smiley faces, frowns, and so on) to inject into your email, Eudora’s for you. Sometimes the choice boils down to a program’s “feel” rather than its features. To help you choose, here are some pros and cons for three popular programs that shuffle email across many electronic desktops today. The best part? They’re all free.

Outlook Express Many people look no further than Windows’ Outlook Express (Start ➝ All Programs ➝ Outlook Express) to take care of their email needs. Legions have grown up with this freebie, tossed into every edition of Windows for the past decade; its sixth version lives on your PC right now. Outlook Express, shown in Figure 12-1, is not particularly fancy, but it handles the basics very well. It can send, receive, delete, print, forward, sort, and file your email; manage your address book; send and receive files; and even block email from people you’ve marked as spammers, enemies, or just plain annoying. It borrows Internet Explorer’s Web-handling tools to display fancy emails that look like, well, Web pages. Figure 12-1: Outlook Express lives on the Start menu of nearly every PC sold today, making it the world’s most popular email program. Like most email programs, Outlook Express stores your mail in folders along its left edge. Incoming mail moves straight into your Inbox folder (page 365) for you to read; your currently selected message appears in the Preview window. Your sent mail heads for the Outbox, ready for Outlook Express to send. After sending the mail, Outlook Express places a copy of the message in your Sent Items folder for reference. Deleted mail goes into your Deleted Items folder. And Drafts contains mail you’ve started, but haven’t quite found the time to finish.

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• Pros. The huge popularity of Outlook Express forces many other programs to stay compatible with it. Rest assured that if you ever upgrade to a more powerful email program, your old email isn’t trapped: Nearly every email program will import Outlook Express’s messages and contacts. iPods even offer to carry your contacts from Outlook Express or Outlook. Outlook Express is fairly easy to use, free, and already living on your PC. Many people fire it up and never turn back.

Choosing an Email Program

• Cons. Since it’s used so widely, Outlook Express is a big target for viruses, worms, spammers, spyware, and other dark forces in computer-dom. The program shares Internet Explorer’s vulnerabilities as well, since it borrows Internet Explorer’s code for displaying messages. And many viruses peek into Outlook Express’s address book, emailing a disguised copy of themselves to all your listed friends or coworkers. You can nullify most of these threats by installing Windows XP’s Service Pack 2 (page 480) and setting Windows Update to Automatic (page 478), which lets Microsoft automatically patch newly discovered security problems. Add an antivirus program (page 486), and Outlook Express stays reasonably safe. Despite its flaws, zillions of people find no reason to switch from Outlook Express. In fact, the biggest gripe probably boils down to its lack of a spell checker. That’s Microsoft’s subtle way of prodding you to buy Outlook, the fullfeatured email program included with the pricey Microsoft Office. It’s also a way to push you into buying Microsoft Word—when you install Word, Outlook Express sneaks over and borrows Word’s spell checker, giving you an easy way to proofread your outgoing email.

Eudora Eudora (www.eudora.com), shown in Figure 12-2, has a small, but devoted, following, most of whom are determined to cut down on the number of Microsoft products on their PCs. If that quest appeals to you, your biggest challenge will be deciding which version is for you: • Paid Mode. The $50 version, used mainly by businesses, includes 12 months of free upgrades, 6 free calls to tech support (within a 12-month period), and a spam filter. • Sponsored Mode. This free version drops two features from the pay version: the spam filter and the free tech support. This version of the program also displays a small ad in the screen’s bottom corner, as well as two ad buttons on the top menu. • Light Mode. If you find ads so offensive that you’re willing to sacrifice the program’s spell checker to rid yourself of them, choose this option. All three versions of Eudora handle the same email basics as Outlook Express. Installation is easy, too: the program visits Outlook Express to import your email account settings as well as your previously received messages. (It copies your messages only; Chapter 12: Email PCs: The Missing Manual, eMatter Edition Copyright © 2008 O’Reilly & Associates, Inc. All rights reserved.

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your originals remain safe with Outlook Express.) When the program finishes installing itself, it presents itself on the screen with all your old email waiting for you. To check for new mail, you need only enter your email account’s password. Figure 12-2: Eudora looks very similar to Outlook Express, with a row of toolbar buttons along the top and a row of folders along its left edge that contain your mail. Eudora’s “adsupported” version, shown here, contains most of the features of the paid version, but continually displays an ad in its lower-left corner.

• Pros. Eudora comes in both PC and Mac versions, a plus if you find yourself computing on both types of computers. To help keep your different email conversations separate, you can assign different colors to different conversations. The program also makes extensive use of tabs—little clickable protrusions for quickly changing views. Click a tab on your Mailboxes window, for instance, and the window switches from a row of In and Out boxes to a file browser, a handy way to drag a file into an outgoing email. Click the Mailboxes tab to bring back your Inbox, Outbox, and other mailboxes. • Cons. Many people find Eudora to be overkill, yet, frustratingly, it lacks some of the details of Outlook Express. For example, it doesn’t show how many unread messages are waiting in each folder, nor does it let you create and nestle subfolders inside your Inbox to track different projects. And although the ads try to be unobtrusive, it’s annoying when a misplaced click on your part interrupts your work flow with a word from the sponsor.

Thunderbird Thunderbird (www.mozilla.org/thunderbird), shown in Figure 12-3, flies to us from the Mozilla Foundation, the nonprofit organization that also unleashed the popular Firefox Web browser (page 380). Both programs are open source, meaning the

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programs’ code sits on the Internet, freely available for any programmer to inspect or modify (open source programs often get customized to fit the needs of particular user groups). With everything on the drawing board, some miscreants can look for weak spots to unleash viruses. But this open approach also lets other programmers find potential flaws and fix them before the attacks occur.

Choosing an Email Program

Figure 12-3: Thunderbird looks and feels a lot like Outlook Express. One big difference: its open source programming lets anybody examine the application’s internal structure. Most folks are content to work with its existing menus, but creative types are free to add bells and whistles. Some people create and share add-ons to enhance Thunderbird. Others translate the program into their own language or just pitch into the communal bugfixing that contributes to the health and well-being of all open source programs.

So far, open source seems to be working, as Thunderbird contains far fewer security problems than Outlook Express. • Pros. Thunderbird’s open source underpinnings let programmers offer small add-on programs called extensions—spam killers, address book enhancers, duplicate message removers, and so on. By downloading only the extensions you need from inside the program (Tools ➝ Extensions ➝ Get More Extensions), you can keep the program small, speedy, and free of long menus with unused features. Like most competing email programs, Thunderbird automatically imports your information from Outlook Express (as well as from Outlook, or Eudora), keeping your originals safe inside Outlook Express. Thunderbird looks and feels like Outlook Express, but with a few more features—a built-in Real Simple Syndication (RSS) reader (page 401), for instance, alerts you to updates on your favorite Web sites. New features appear almost daily as programmers release more extensions.

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• Cons. Although Mozilla’s Web site is well written, with Frequently Asked Questions areas and a searchable support database, it doesn’t offer person-toperson tech support. Instead, Thunderbird fans need to seek help on the community forums (go to mozilla.org/support/ and, under the Thunderbird header, click Community Support Forums); if that fails, a third-party company, InfoSpan (1-888-586-4539), offers tech support for a $39.95-perincident fee.

Web-based Email Some people don’t want an email program that lives on their PC. Instead, they prefer to log onto the Internet with their Web browser and read their email online, using what’s known as a Web-based email service. These folks can always copy mail to their PC for reference, if they wish, but for the most part, everything stays on the Web. Some people find both types of systems too attractive to pass up. They’ll sign up for a Web-based service to keep in touch while traveling, and keep their standard, PCbased email program for use at home or work. There’s nothing wrong with having several email addresses from different types of email systems. To help you decide which system’s best for you, here’s a look at the advantages and disadvantages of Web-based email. • Pros. Since your messages live on the Internet itself, you can read your mail from any Internet-connected PC—a big plus for travelers. Web-based mail programs keep your address book online, too, making your contact info accessible from anywhere. Another big plus: your email address never changes (unless you want it to, of course). When people move or switch ISPs, they typically have to give up their old email address (for example, [email protected] has to tell everyone that he’s now [email protected]). A Web-based email address, in contrast, never changes. You can move to a new city, state, or even a different country; or you can fire AOL as your ISP and hire Earthlink—the point is, it doesn’t matter who provides your Internet connection. With a Web-based email account, you never have to change your address. Web-based mail also works better when sending mail from certain WiFi hotspots (page 320). An increasing number of WiFi providers block traditional, PC-based mail services to keep spammers from parking down the block and flooding the network with spam. That doesn’t affect Web-based email, which handles mail differently. Some people find Web-based mail easier to set up, because they’re spared the chore of configuring the most confusing part of a PC-based mail program’s settings: those annoying acronyms called SMTP, POP3, and/or IMAP (see the box on page 349). Most Web-based email sites offer ways to send copies of your mail to Outlook Express, if you wish, giving you the best of both worlds: you

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can read and respond to email while on the road, and have that same mail waiting for you in your PC’s inbox when you return home. That lets you store a master record of all your mail on your PC for reference.

Choosing an Email Program

Best of all, the three Web-based email services described in the next sections are free, although two offer more features when you pony up some cash. UP TO SPEED

The DIRT on POP, IMAP, and SMTP Few things break a person’s confidence like being asked to choose between POP3 or IMAP while setting up a new email account. Each acronym describes a different email protocol—a particular way of sending, storing, and retrieving messages so every computer along the delivery chain knows what to expect. Fortunately, this humbling moment occurs only once: when you first set up Outlook Express or any other PCbased email program. Neither POP3 or IMAP is better than the other; instead, you simply choose the one your ISP uses to send your mail. Here’s how both POP3 and IMAP work: • POP3 (Post Office Protocol, version 3). By far the most common way of receiving email. POP (also known as POP3) lets your PC fetch mail from another, centrally located, mail-serving computer. POP works like this: your email program knocks on your ISP’s mail server—the huge computer responsible for storing incoming email—and asks for any waiting email. The mail server sends any new email to your PC’s email program, and then deletes its own copies to make room for more messages. Most POP3 mail servers store about 10 MB of new email for each person, so if somebody sends you a huge file, it could fill your mailbox. Any other incoming mail might bounce: the embarrassing situation where your ISP decides you’ve exceed your storage space and returns your incoming mail to its sender. After you download the huge message to clear out your mail server’s mailbox, your incoming messages stop bouncing. If you want a Web-based email service to forward its mail to your PC’s email program, the service must support POP3 forwarding.

• IMAP (Internet Message Access Protocol). A newer, less common way of receiving mail. IMAP stores your mail permanently on a large network, usually a mail system inside a corporation or a university. The system works especially well for folks with portable email-reading devices, like Blackberries, since IMAP seamlessly updates your inbox and outbox, regardless of what kind of machine (portable or PC) you’re using to view your email. You need to be connected to the network when reading your mail; you don’t actually download the mail into a mail program as with POP3. Instead, you use your email program as a kind of browser, from which you can read and send messages. Since you’re connected the entire time you’re in your email program, you don’t need to click a Get Mail button: New messages automatically show up. The upshot of all this is that you need to know whether your ISP’s mail service supports POP3 or IMAP. Once you learn the answer (it’s almost always listed on your ISP’s Customer Service or Support section of its Web site), choose that option for your email program’s incoming mail server. Choose SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol) for your outgoing mail server. It’s the only way Outlook Express, or any other mail program, can send email. Once you enter these settings into your mail program, you’ll never have to deal with these terms again.

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• Cons. Some people think it’s creepy—and possibly a security risk—to store their email on any computer other than their own. But this shouldn’t be particularly frightening; after all, your PC-based email travels through dozens of other computers, each with its own potential security problems, before safely arriving in your Outlook Express inbox. There’s nothing inherently insecure about Web-based email. Perhaps a bigger problem is that you always need Internet access to see any of your email, or to locate that recipe Aunt Maria sent last week—unless you’ve set up Outlook Express to grab a copy of all your Web-based mail, too. The next three sections describe the three most popular Web-based email providers: Gmail, Hotmail, and Yahoo. Gmail Before Google entered the Web-based email wars with its Gmail service (http:// mail.google.com), its competitors offered free email accounts with thimble-sized storage. More ominously, your account evaporated if you didn’t log on after a few weeks. The competitors hoped people would grow tired of these limitations and fork over the annual subscription fee for a “real” account with larger storage and shelf life. Google shook up the industry by offering free accounts with a whopping 2 GB of storage. And the accounts remain active even if you don’t log in for 9 months (after that, Google shuts down your account). Instead of annoying customers into purchasing accounts, Google makes money selling targeted ads alongside your email; if you’re discussing carpentry with a friend, for instance, small text ads for routers and chisels appear along your screen’s right side. Don’t worry. Nobody’s reading your email. Google’s computers do all the matching and ad placing. Since your email already runs through dozens of computers, checking it for viruses or spam, what’s one more computer in the chain? In addition to the mammoth storage and long-lived accounts, Google includes innovations like letting you apply labels to certain emails to make them easier to find later. For instance, if you find yourself planning a trip to Vermont with your pals, select all the related emails (via the checkboxes next to every message) and then assign them a label like “Vermont Trip” (click the Edit Labels link on the left side of the window to create new labels). To retrieve all the messages pronto, click “Vermont Trip” from the Label menu; Gmail then retrieves all those messages, no matter what subject they use. Gmail also groups messages with the same subject into one thread. Click a subject name, and all the messages with that same subject appear. A built-in spell checker helps catch typos before you hit the Send button. You can read your Gmail on the Web, or have Google send the incoming email to your PC-based email program like Outlook Express, Thunderbird, or Eudora—an easy way to back up your Gmail to your PC. Google’s Gmail easily outclasses the competition, leaving them wondering how to fight back.

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Note: At the time of this writing, you can receive a Gmail account in only one of two ways: through an invitation from an existing account holder or by visiting the Web site with your PC and entering your cell phone number. Google then sends your cell phone a text message with an invitation code that you enter at the Gmail site to complete the sign-up process.

Choosing an Email Program

Hotmail Hotmail (www.hotmail.com), Microsoft’s salvo in the free Web-based email wars, comes with ads next to your messages, like Google. But to make even more money, Microsoft burdens its free account holders with other restrictions, in an attempt to annoy you into upgrading to the $19.95-per-year, restriction-free account. For instance, Microsoft bumped its storage from a paltry 2 MB to a slightly-lesspaltry 25 MB when Google arrived, and plans to increase it to 250 MB. But that’s still only one tenth of Gmail’s storage capacity. Hotmail’s free email account’s shelf life still remains low: if you don’t check your mail for 30 days, Microsoft erases it all, leaving you with nothing to read when you return from that month-long, email-free, yoga retreat. You’re also limited to sending 100 messages a day, and you can’t send mail to more than 50 email addresses, which hampers Hotmail’s effectiveness as an emailer for groups. On a positive note, Hotmail also offers a calendar for tracking your appointments online. However, Microsoft automatically deletes every appointment older than 90 days—a good thing for people seeking to clean up their paper trail, perhaps, but a downer for folks who want to save their old appointments for later reference. Finally, your emails remain stuck online. Unlike Gmail, Hotmail’s free accounts won’t forward mail to your PC’s email program—until you fork over the $19.95 a year, of course, Microsoft’s cure-all for all these annoying restrictions. Yahoo Before Gmail arrived, Yahoo (http://mail.yahoo.com) offered 4 MB of storage. They’ve since bumped it up to 1 GB, and are making serious efforts to compete with Google. Like Gmail, Yahoo’s free mail account also sends mail to your PC’s mail program, if you wish. You can even set up Yahoo to grab mail from other mail servers—the computers holding mail from your other email addresses. The reason that’s a good thing? It means you can log onto Yahoo to read mail from your ISP’s mail account, your Gmail account, and your Yahoo’ email address. It’s a great way for globetrotters to merge all their email addresses into a single spot, accessible from any Internetconnected PC. Like Gmail and Hotmail, Yahoo displays some advertising as you read your mail. If you don’t log in for four months, Yahoo deletes all your email, an inconvenience you can avoid by upgrading to a paid version of the service, the Yahoo Plus account, which costs $19.99 a year. Chapter 12: Email PCs: The Missing Manual, eMatter Edition Copyright © 2008 O’Reilly & Associates, Inc. All rights reserved.

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Setting Up Outlook Express

Although Yahoo’s great at retrieving mail from other accounts you may already have, it drags its feet when it comes to exporting mail. Yahoo forwards email only to Outlook Express, and only if you upgrade to Yahoo’s Plus account. POWER USERS’ CLINIC

Accessing Web-based Mail in a PC-based Program Although having both a Web-based mail account and a PCbased account has its advantages, the system is like storing your shoes in two closets: you can never find the pair you want when you need it.

server names. Here’s where to find step-by-step instructions for setting up any PC-based email program to work with Gmail, AOL, or paid accounts from Yahoo or Microsoft’s Hotmail.

Luckily, it’s a lot easier to copy mail than shoes. Tell your PCbased email program to pick up a copy of every message that gets sent to your Web-based account—automatically.

• Gmail; see the page http://support.email2pop.com/ Gmail_Outlook_Express.html

Most email programs, including Outlook Express, can receive email from a wide variety of email accounts, including those you’ve set up on a Web-based service like Gmail. If a Web-based service says it offers POP3 or IMAP support, those magic terms mean it can send mail to nearly any PCbased mail program. Before Outlook Express or any other email program can fetch your email from a Web-based mail service, you need to know the same three things required by any email account: your user name, your password, and the mail

• AOL; see the page http://postmaster.info.aol.com/ imap/express.html) • Yahoo’s paid “Plus Account”; see the page http:// help.yahoo.com/help/us/mail/pop/pop-06.html • Hotmail’s paid “Plus Account”; see the page http:// support.msn.com To retrieve mail from a Web-based account in Outlook Express, summon the Internet Connection wizard (Tools ➝ Accounts ➝ Add ➝ Mail), slip on a pair of comfortable shoes, and walk through the steps of creating a new account as described in the next section.

Setting Up Outlook Express It never hurts to set up Outlook Express, Windows XP’s free email program, even if you’re considering switching to an alternative, like Thunderbird or Eudora. Those applications, and most other email programs, automatically set themselves up by consulting your Outlook Express account information, saving you from the hassles of manual configuration. To get started, fire up Outlook Express right from your PC’s Start menu; if it’s not listed, choose Start ➝ All Programs ➝ Outlook Express. The program doesn’t always hop straight onto the screen, though. When you load Outlook Express for the first time, the Internet Connection wizard asks you for the following information. Click Next after you’ve answered each question. 1. Your Name. Enter your real name here (assuming you want your recipients to know it). When you send email, this name appears in your message’s From: field, and, with some email programs, automatically winds up in the recipient’s address book.

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2. Internet E-mail Address. Your ISP let you choose this address when you signed up. It’s probably something like [email protected].

Setting Up Outlook Express

3. E-mail Server Names. These are the most confusing settings to enter (see Figure 12-4, top). This screen is where you indicate what type of mail server your ISP uses and what the address is of the servers that send (Outgoing) and receive (Incoming) your mail. (See the “The DIRT on POP, IMAP, and SMTP” box on page 349 for details on your different choices.) • Type. If you’re using a POP3 server, like most people, leave the “My incoming mail server” drop-down menu alone. If you’re using IMAP, choose that setting from the drop-down menu. • Server name. Your Incoming mail server is usually named something like pop.cox.net. Your Outgoing mail server is usually named something like smtp.cox.net. Some ISPs toss in a region like pop.central.cox.net. Make sure you know the exact wording to choose here, or you won’t be able to send or receive mail. If you don’t know the server names, check the sign-up papers you received from your ISP. Most ISPs also list this information on their Web sites in the Frequently Asked Questions area, or in the Customer Service area under “mail setup,” “POP access,” or “server names.” 4. Internet Mail Logon. Here’s where you enter your email account name and password, as shown in the bottom of Figure 12-4. • Account name. Here, you enter only the portion of your email address that occurs before the @ sign: davidcopperfield without the @cox.net part. Either you chose this name or your ISP assigned it to you when you signed up for your Internet account (page 328). • Password. Your email account password is almost always the same password you use if you log onto your ISP’s Web site to check out your account information. Even though you’ll be entering a password here, don’t turn on “Log on using Secure Password Authentication (SPA)” unless your ISP specifically tells you to. When you’re through, the wizard leaves you at the Outlook Express main screen, shown earlier in Figure 12-1.

Chapter 12: Email PCs: The Missing Manual, eMatter Edition Copyright © 2008 O’Reilly & Associates, Inc. All rights reserved.

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Should you ever need to change your settings, or check to make sure they match your ISP’s requirements, view the settings by clicking Tools ➝ Options and then double-clicking your account’s name. Figure 12-4: These two windows are where you inform Outlook Express of key email account settings. Top: Leave the top drop-down menu set to POP3 unless you know that your ISP uses the IMAP mail-server system (see the box on page 349 for more details). Then carefully enter the names of the incoming mail server and outgoing mail server as provided to you by your ISP. A single typo will keep your program from fetching your email. Bottom: Enter your account name and password here. Be sure to turn on the “Remember password” checkbox. If it’s turned off, Outlook Express asks for your password every time it checks for waiting mail—a good thing if you’re extremely security conscious, but a needless hassle otherwise.

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Note: Whenever you open Outlook Express (and most other email programs, for that matter) the program automatically connects to the Internet to check for new messages. Although this convenience brings in your mail quickly, it’s sometimes a bother for people with dial-up connections who simply want to open Outlook Express to check out an old email. To keep Outlook Express from logging on each time you open it, choose Tools ➝ Options ➝ General tab and then turn off the checkbox marked, “Send and receive messages at startup.” Then, when you want to check for new email in Outlook Express, choose Tools ➝ Send and Receive ➝ Send and Receive All.

Composing and Sending Email

FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTION

Reading Mail While Traveling My ISP normally sends my email to Outlook Express, but also lets me read it on the Web when I’m traveling. But whenever I try to read my email on the ISP’s Web site, the page says my inbox is empty. What gives? When somebody sends you email, its first stop is at your ISP’s mail server (page 353), where it lounges comfortably, waiting for Outlook Express (or whatever email program you’re using) to fetch it. When you, sitting at your PC, dispatch Outlook Express to retrieve your mail, the program copies the mail to your PC, and then deletes it from the server. If you’re like most people, you’ve probably set up Outlook Express to check your email automatically every few minutes. So, your PC is obeying orders: it’s grabbing each piece

of mail, dropping it into your Outlook Express Inbox, and deleting the copy from the mail server—leaving nothing for you to read from the ISP’s Web site while traveling. The cure is to stop Outlook Express from automatically collecting your email when you’re away from your PC. To do so, choose Tools ➝ Options ➝ General tab and then turn off “Check for new messages every XX minutes.” That keeps your email on your ISP’s mail server—where you can read it while traveling—until the next time you fire up Outlook Express and click the Send/Recv icon. Another solution is to keep your PC turned off when you’re away from home, which keeps Outlook Express from grabbing your email before you do.

Composing and Sending Email When the Internet Connection wizard—the helper from the previous section that walked you through setting up your email account—leaves you at the main Outlook Express screen, you’ll find your first piece of mail already waiting. To see it, click Inbox from the Folders pane along the screen’s left edge. This message didn’t come through the Internet, though, like most email. Microsoft simply programmed Outlook Express to greet all newcomers with the same welcome message. (They don’t really know your email address.) The best way to get real mail is to start sending some mail to your friends (send and ye shall receive). Outlook Express lets you create and send email using any of the following methods: • Click the Create Mail button from the toolbar at the top of the program. • Choose File ➝ New ➝ Mail Message.

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• Choose Message ➝ New Message. • Click the Address Book icon, right-click a name, and then choose Action ➝ Send Mail. (For more information on entering names into the Address Book, see page 368.) Outlook Express opens a new window containing a blank email, complete with a blinking cursor in the To: box, ready for you to add an address (see Figure 12-5, top). Follow these steps to finish your email and send it on its way. 1. Address the message. Either of these methods make it easy to stock the To: line with your recipients’ addresses: • Start typing a recipient’s name into the To: field. Outlook Express automatically plucks that person’s address from your Address Book (page 368) and inserts it into the To: field. • Click the To: button to reveal your Address Book, shown in the middle of Figure 12-5. Hold down Ctrl, click the names of everyone you want to receive the message, and then click the Address Book’s To: button. Click OK when you’ve selected everybody, and then your Address Book automatically inserts those selected addresses into the To: field of your blank email. If the recipients aren’t listed in your Address Book, however, you need to resort to the old way of entering names: type in the email addresses individually, separated by commas or semicolons, like this: grumpy@messycottage. com, [email protected], [email protected]. 2. Add any additional recipients to the CC: or BCC: fields. The To: field works best for people who need to take action on your email; placing them in the To: field means you’re expecting them to reply. But when other recipients aren’t directly involved, keep them up to date by using one of the other two boxes: • CC (Carbon Copy). Save this box for people who aren’t directly involved and don’t need to reply. For instance, if your boss asks you to buy more coffee, place your boss’s name in the CC: field and the coffee vendor’s name in the To: field. That whisks your emailed coffee request to the vendor and lets your boss know you’ve taken care of the job. • BCC (Blind Carbon Copy). Carbon Copy and Blind Carbon Copy do the same thing: send a single piece of mail to several people simultaneously. There’s one important difference, though: Carbon Copy lists the email addresses of all the recipients, so everyone on the receiving end can see who’s been included; Blind Carbon Copy leaves them off. This small distinction makes a big difference. For instance, add extra recipients to the Blind Carbon Copy field when they don’t know each other, letting them keep their email addresses private. Blind

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Carbon Copy also works great for letting the police see your response to the ransom letter.

Composing and Sending Email

If you absolutely must forward a joke to all your friends, place their addresses in the BCC: field, not the To: or CC: fields. That keeps their email addresses away from the eyes of strangers (and spammers) when it’s forwarded another 14 times. Figure 12-5: Top: To send a message to one person or several people simultaneously, click the To: button (circled) to open the Address Book. Middle: When the Address Book opens, hold down Ctrl and click every person who you want to send your message to; the Address Book highlights each name you click. If you click a name by mistake, click it again to “deselect” it. When you’ve selected the recipients, click the To: button. Bottom: The Address Book automatically addresses your email to your chosen recipients.

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Tip: Outlook Express sometimes hides the Blind Carbon Copy field. To put it back on the menu, open any saved message, choose View ➝ All Headers, and then close the message. The next time you open a message that you want to send, the Blind Carbon Copy area is waiting for you.

3. Sum up your message in the Subject: field. Many people receive dozens, if not hundreds, of emails each day. To make yours stand out, sum up your message’s point in the Subject: field. “Hey there” doesn’t work well as a subject; “Should I buy french roast or decaf” does. If people can’t decipher your email’s subject with a glance at its Subject: line, your mail may disappear in a haystack of other nondescript emails. 4. Choose a format, if you like. Many people ignore this step, preferring to simply type their message. Others take pains with their email’s format—the way the message is displayed on the screen. Outlook Express offers two formats: the fancy HTML (Hypertext Markup Language), shown in Figure 12-6, or the simple Plain Text. Both formats are described below: Figure 12-6: When you choose to write a message using the HTML format, Outlook Express places a toolbar across the top of your note. The toolbar works much like the toolbar in a word processor, letting you select words and change their fonts and colors to spice up an email.

• Plain (Format ➝ Plain Text). Plain text looks just like it sounds. As you type your message, Outlook Express places plain black letters on a white background, with no colors, underlines, italics, pictures, buttons, fancy font sizes, or flashing lights. Since it’s simple and to the point, Plain Text works best in most situations, especially at work. 358

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• HTML (Format ➝ Rich Text (HTML)). The HTML format lets you create letters that resemble mini-Web pages, with elaborate backgrounds and special fonts. HTML works best for party flyers, or casual email between friends. If you’re sending the email to somebody at work, stick with plain text; some corporate email programs strip HTML messages of their formatting, turning your colorful stationary back into plain text.

Composing and Sending Email

To choose the default mail format Outlook Express uses for all your new messages, choose Tools ➝ Options ➝ Send tab; in the area called Mail Sending Format, select either HTML or Plain Text. GEM IN THE ROUGH

Sincerely Yours—Automatically Sending lots of email means lots of repetitive typing, especially when ending a message. Email doesn’t allow for scrawled signatures for a closer, so most people make do by typing their name and perhaps adding the name of their company, Web site, or a witty phrase. To speed things up, add those words to a signature that Outlook Express automatically tacks onto the end of your email. To create a customized signature, choose Tools ➝ Options ➝ Signatures tab ➝ New; the Signature Settings area appears, ready for you to type in a signature in the Edit Signature area.

If you’ve set up several accounts in Outlook Express to handle different email addresses, click the Advanced button, and click the email account you’d like to bear that particular signature. (That lets you assign a bawdy signature for your personal email address, for instance, but stick to standard fare for your work email address.) Tack on your newly created signature to all of your messages from the assigned account by turning on “Add signatures to all outgoing messages.” If you prefer to reserve your signature for a few specific messages, leave that option turned off. Instead, choose Insert ➝ Signature when composing an email.

But no matter which format you choose there, you can change the format setting, on-the-fly, when composing a new message: choose Format ➝ Plain Text or Format ➝ Rich Text (HTML). Chapter 12: Email PCs: The Missing Manual, eMatter Edition Copyright © 2008 O’Reilly & Associates, Inc. All rights reserved.

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One thing to remember, though: choosing Plain Text is always appropriate, as it’s easy to read. But since most spam comes formatted in HTML, your HTMLformatted email may be kicked into the recipient’s Junk folder by her spam filter. The bottom line—use HTML formatting with caution, and definitely not for must-see email messages. 5. Type your message. Type your missive into the message window’s bottom half. The usual editing rules apply here, which means that you can cut (Ctrl+X), copy (Ctrl+C), and paste (Ctrl+V) words or sentences while writing your message. 6. Send your message by clicking Send on the message’s toolbar. As soon as you click the Send button, Outlook Express connects to the Internet, delivers the mail to your ISP’s mail server, and then starts your mail on its path to the recipient’s inbox. That lack of delay can be dangerous. The off-thecuff message you dashed off in 10 seconds could live in somebody else’s PC (not to mention in her mind) for a long time. Tip: You may prefer that Outlook Express wait a few minutes before sending your emails, giving you time to add last-minute thoughts or even cancel the message if you suddenly realize calling someone a toad won’t improve matters. Adding a delay is a two-part process. First, choose Tools ➝ Options ➝ Send tab and turn off “Send messages immediately.” Then click the General tab and turn on “Check for new messages every XX minutes,” changing XX to any number between 1 and 480 minutes. (Ten minutes usually works well.)

Once Outlook Express sends your mail, the program places a copy of your sent email into your Sent folder (page 365), stamped with its send date and time.

Attaching Files to Email Just as you can stuff a photo and other items into a real-world envelope, you can insert a digital photo and other types of files into an email. Outlook Express uses the word attachment to describe a file that rides along with an email message. You can attach one or more files to a message using any of these three methods: • Right-click the file or selected files and choose Send To ➝ Mail Recipient. Outlook Express then quickly opens a new message and attaches your selected file or files. • Open a new message, and then drag and drop a file (or a group of selected files) into your open message window. Outlook Express then tacks the file or files onto your email for transporting. • Open a new message and choose Insert ➝ File Attachment from the New Message window. Navigate to the folder containing the desired file, and then double-click the file you want. Repeat for other files. (To send several files in the same folder, hold down Ctrl while clicking each file you want.)

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Attached the wrong file to your message? Right-click the misplaced file’s icon from within your email window, and from the shortcut menu, choose Remove to pry the file from your message. (Outlook Express was sending only a copy, so your original file stays unharmed.)

Composing and Sending Email

One warning: don’t try to send a friend 25 favorite photos from your trip to Tunisia, or any other large files. Sending files that add up to more than 5 MB can create several problems. • Not everybody has a speedy broadband connection (page 321), so your vacation photos may end up tying up your friend’s dial-up connection for hours. • Many email accounts allow only about 5 MB of storage. Your friend may receive your message, but nothing else. All his other email bounced (page 163) because your huge file hogged his entire mailbox. • Many mail servers balk at large files and bounce them back to you, wasting your efforts. You’ve got several options if you do find yourself needing to send large files; the first step is recognizing when your attachments qualify for beefy status. Keep an eye on the file’s size as you attach it; Outlook Express also lists the size next to each attached file’s name. When the total exceeds 5 MB, try some of these solutions. • If you’re sending digital photos, let Windows XP resize them for you automatically (page 158). Smaller photos consume less space, letting you safely send a dozen decent-sized photos. Consider posting your photos to a photo-sharing site (page 160), and then sending your friend the site’s Web address. • Try sending large files through YouSendIt (www.yousendit.com). This free Web site lets you upload a file, and then sends the recipient an email with the link where he can download it. • To avoid dealing with a third-party service like YouSendIt, chat hounds can send large files through an Instant Messaging program. When you’ve exhausted all these options, don’t forget how our ancestors made do: copy your large files to a CD (page 292), and mail or FedEx it to your friend or coworker’s street address.

Spell Checking Much to the dismay of bad spellers, speedy typists, and fumble-fingered folk, Outlook Express doesn’t include a built-in spell checker. Instead, Spelling is listed on the menu (Tools ➝ Spelling) as an unavailable, “grayed out” option, leading people to think they’ve somehow broken their program. Instead, Microsoft deliberately left out spell checking as one more way to annoy people into upgrading to its full-featured email program, Outlook, which includes a spell checker. However, if you install Microsoft Word, FrontPage, Works Suite, or similar Microsoft programs, Outlook Express sneaks over and borrows that program’s spell checker, letting its spell check option appear on the menu in its full glory. Chapter 12: Email PCs: The Missing Manual, eMatter Edition Copyright © 2008 O’Reilly & Associates, Inc. All rights reserved.

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Then you can press F7 (or choose Tools ➝ Spelling) to spell check your newly composed message. Even better, make Outlook Express automatically check your spelling before sending any messages by choosing Tools ➝ Options ➝ Spelling tab and turning on the “Always check spelling before sending” checkbox. Tip: To spell check a particular word while composing, double-click the word to select it, and then press F7. Outlook Express then quickly spell checks that word, skipping the rest of your message.

Reading and Processing Email Perhaps the only joy greater than sending a message is receiving one. Every time Outlook Express picks up a new piece of email, the program adds it to the growing list of messages waiting in the program’s inbox (page 365). To see these messages, click your inbox, as shown in Figure 12-7. Outlook offers two ways to view a message: inside the preview pane, and inside its own window. To preview a message, click any part of its name in the message list. That message’s contents spill into the preview pane directly below. To make names and messages easier to read, feel free to drag the border between the message list and the preview pane. Drag the border upward to devote more space to the preview pane when reading a message; to see more message names, drag the border downward. The selected folder

The folders pane

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The message list

The preview pane

Figure 12-7: Outlook Express displays your messages in three sections. To see what’s inside any folder listed in the left-hand pane, click the folder’s name; the names of the messages in that folder appear in the top half of the two adjacent panes. Click the message you want to view, and its contents appear in the bottom pane. Once you read a message, its envelope icon indicates that it’s been “opened.” Unread mail is marked with an icon of an unopened envelope. Double-click any message, and it leaps to the screen in its own window.

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To see a message in its own window—the best way to view long messages— double-click the message’s name. The message pops open into its own resizable window. To make it fill the screen, double-click its title bar along the top of the message. (To return it back to its former size, double-click the title bar again.)

Reading and Processing Email

You can quickly plow through many messages in either viewing mode. In the preview mode, press your keyboard’s up or down arrows to view adjacent messages on the list. When viewing a message in its own window, click the Previous or Next buttons (in the message window’s toolbar) to cycle through other messages. Note: Outlook Express normally lets you view images embedded inside messages. Occasionally, you’ll see a blank frame instead of the images—usually when the message comes from a spammer. Outlook Express explains its actions with a banner across the message’s top saying, “Some pictures have been blocked to help prevent the sender from identifying your computer.” If the message came from a friend, click that banner to see the images. But if it’s from a spammer, delete the message, as described in the next section.

Deleting Email Not all of your email will come from friends inviting you to join them in wild adventures, luxurious trips, and fabulous dinner parties. In reality, you’ll want to send a large portion of your mail straight to the trash. Outlook Express offers several ways to delete emails you no longer want (or never wanted in the first place). • Right-click a message’s name and, from the shortcut menu, choose Delete. • Click a message’s name and then click the Delete button on the toolbar. • Click a message’s name and press Ctrl+D or Edit ➝ Delete. However, once you perform any of these steps, the message isn’t really deleted. Just as Windows offers a safety net with its Recycle Bin (page 495), Outlook Express’s Deleted Items folder serves the same purpose. All deleted messages aren’t swept from your PC; instead, they’re swept into the Deleted Items folder. That lets you salvage accidentally deleted items by dragging them back into your Inbox or any other folder, either in Outlook Express or Windows. The Deleted Items folder’s safety net makes true deletion a two-step process: delete the message, then delete it from your Deleted Items folder. You can do that in either of two ways: • To delete a single message from the Deleted Items folder, click the message’s name and then press Del or choose Delete from the toolbar. • To delete everything from the Deleted Items folder, right-click the folder and, from the shortcut menu, choose “Empty ‘Deleted Items’ Folder.” Once you purge anything that’s in your Deleted Items folder, Windows finally understands that you don’t want it around anymore. Outlook Express really deletes the message, bypassing the Recycle Bin.

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To empty your Deleted Items folder each time you close Outlook Express—handy when dealing with sensitive items—choose Tools ➝ Options ➝ Maintenance tab and turn on the “Empty messages from the ‘Deleted Items’ folder on exit” checkbox.

Replying to Email One of the best advantages email holds over letters comes when replying, as Outlook Express automates the entire process. When you’re reading a message that needs a reply, click the Reply button in the toolbar. Outlook Express opens a new message window, automatically addressing the new message’s To: field with the sender’s name and email address. Outlook Express recycles the original mail’s subject line by placing a “Re:” (short for “Regarding”) before the subject’s name, letting the receiver know exactly what message you’re replying to. Outlook Express then dumps the original email’s contents into your reply, prefacing each line with the “>” bracket, which sets apart your reply from the original. That lets the receiver see at a glance what she’s sent you, sparing her a search in her Sent folder. Finally, Outlook leaves you with a blinking cursor at the preaddressed message’s top, ready for you to type in your response. The Outlook Express toolbar offers two reply buttons, each with slightly different effects: • Reply. Used most often, this button simply addresses your response to the message’s sender. • Reply All. This sends your response to the sender, as well as everybody listed on the message’s CC: field (page 356). It’s a great way to keep everybody informed about a work in progress, sparing you from typing in everybody’s email address by hand. However, it’s disastrous when you meant to send a private response to the sender.

Forwarding Email Forward lets you kick a received email into somebody else’s inbox, a handy thing on two occasions: • You want to share a letter with some of your friends. Forward spares you the hassle of cutting and pasting your son’s college letter into a new message when you want to share it with the relatives. • You want to designate a task. When a piece of mail refers to something best handled by somebody else, the Forward button lets you send the mail his way, sparing you the bother of answering it. To forward a piece of mail, click the toolbar’s Forward icon instead of the Reply button. (Or right-click the email and then choose Forward.) A new piece of mail

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appears, with the initial message’s contents pasted inside. Fill out the address just as if you’re sending your own piece of mail, and type a short note explaining why you’re forwarding the email: “I thought you’d get a kick out of this, Geraldine,” or “You’re much better equipped to handle this than I, George.”

Reading and Processing Email

You can forward a piece of mail to as many people as you want by placing the recipient’s names in the To: or CC: fields (see page 356). But if you’re forwarding something funny to oodles of friends, be sure to place their names in the BCC: field, not the To: field. Note: When sending spam or suspicious email (page 481) to a company’s security department, don’t use Forward. Instead, right-click the suspicious email’s name and then choose “Forward as an Attachment. ” That forwards the email as an attached file rather than just quoting the text. This important difference preserves the message’s header—significant technical information for tracing the file back to its nefarious sender.

Sorting and Filing Email From the day you first open it, Outlook Express automatically sorts your incoming and outgoing email into five folders along its left edge. Click any folder to spill its contents onto the adjacent pane, letting you see what’s inside: • Inbox. Messages you’ve received but not deleted. • Outbox. Messages you’ve written and sent, but that haven’t yet been delivered. Click the Send/Recv button, and Outlook Express connects to the Internet to deliver them, and then it places a copy of the message in your Sent Items folder, described next. • Sent Items. Copies of messages that you’ve sent and Outlook Express has delivered. • Deleted Items. Messages you’ve deleted. As handy as your PC’s main Recycle Bin, the Deleted Items folder (page 365) lets you retrieve accidentally deleted items. Unlike the Recycle Bin, however, the Deleted Items folder never empties itself. Right-click it and choose “Empty ‘Deleted Items’ Folder” to delete the messages for good. Tip: Don’t like your deleted emails hanging around? Tell Outlook Express to purge them whenever you exit the program (or turn off your computer): choose Tools ➝ Options ➝ Maintenance tab and then turn on the “Empty messages from the ‘Deleted Items’ folder on exit” checkbox.

• Drafts. Emails you’ve started writing, but plan to finish later. Outlook Express’ five folders work fine for getting started. But once you begin to receive emails, you won’t want every received message to clog your Inbox. To reduce Inbox clutter, tell Outlook Express to create new folders, organized the way you want. You can create new folders in two ways.

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• Folders inside existing folders. You can place folders inside your Inbox, for instance, devoting one folder to each of your ongoing projects. To do that, right-click your Inbox and, from the shortcut menu, choose New Folder, as shown in Figure 12-8, top, to open the Create Folder window, shown in Figure 12-8, bottom. Type a name for your new folder, and then click OK to create the folder. • Folders on the same level as existing folders. To create a folder that’s not hidden inside existing folders, right-click Local Folders and then choose New Folder to open the same Create Folder window, where you type a name for your new folder, and then click OK to create it. Figure 12-8: You can organize your email in Outlook Express by creating new folders inside your Inbox, or in any other folder. Top: Right-click your Inbox (or any other folder) and, from the shortcut menu, choose New Folder. Bottom: Name the folder whatever you like, and then click OK. This Create Folder window also works great if you change your mind midstream; once you’re here, you can click any listed folder to create a subfolder; you’re not stuck with the folder you right-clicked to open this window.

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The folder system in Outlook Express works much like any other folders you encounter in Windows—you can drag files and folders to new locations, for instance, letting you move a project folder out of the Inbox and into, say, your Completed Projects folder when you’re done with it. You can also drag messages from one folder to another—handy for dragging mail out of the Outbox and putting it into the Drafts folder until you have time to add that last-minute thought.

Reading and Processing Email

After you create a folder inside another folder, a plus sign appears next to the newly organized folder indicating it contains other folders. Click the plus sign and, presto, you’ll see the folders lurking inside.

Printing Email When you need to print an email—directions to a friend’s house, for instance, or that recipe for pistachio salsa—click the Print icon along the message’s top, press Ctrl+P, or choose File ➝ Print. In any case, the familiar Print dialog box appears to let you select a printer, paper type, number of pages, and so on (see page 129 for Print dialog box details). Choose your options, and Outlook Express whisks it off to your printer. Things become a bit trickier when printing an email that was composed using the HTML format (page 359). HTML messages can contain extra formatting like images, unusual margin widths, tables, and other items difficult to fit onto paper. So, Windows XP treats the mail as if it were a Web page, offering the same options as Internet Explorer for squeezing the mail onto a single sheet of paper (see page 141). Outlook Express offers a nice finishing touch to your printed email. At the page’s top, it prints your name, the sender’s name and email address, the message’s subject, and the time and date the message was sent.

Opening and Saving Attachments When somebody sends you mail with an attached file, you’ll know even before you open the message—you’ll spot a paper clip icon next to the message’s name. Double-click the email, and you’ll spot the attached file either in the message’s Attach: field or along the message’s bottom. Although you can see the file’s icon inside the message, the file’s not really saved on your hard drive. That attached file is actually embedded inside the email message. So, you need to free the file from its email wrapper by saving it to a folder on your hard drive. You can do this in either of two ways: • Drag and drop. Drag and drop the attached file’s icon from the message to your Desktop or any other folder. If somebody sent you lots of files, click one and press Ctrl+A to select them all; that lets you drag them all to a folder with one quick drag.

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• Click and save. Right-click the attached file, and, from the shortcut menu, choose Save As. When the Save Attachment As window appears, navigate to a folder to store the newcomer, and then click Save to save the file in that folder. To save a group of attachments all in one fell swoop, select them all, as described above, right-click the selected attachments, and then choose Save All. Sometimes Windows XP thwarts your attempt at saving the attachment. Microsoft’s first so-called Service Pack (major upgrade) for Windows XP added a restriction to Outlook Express that keeps everybody from opening—or even seeing—more than 70 types of files, including emailed links to Web sites. Instead of letting you see your attached files, Outlook Express displays a warning banner or “grays out” the file’s names so you can’t save them (see Figure 12-9). This doesn’t mean Outlook Express found some virus-infected files. It means somebody sent you a program, a link to a Web site, or any other type of file that’s capable of carrying a virus. If your PC already has an antivirus program (page 486), put a halt to Outlook Express’ protection goons: choose Tools ➝ Options ➝ Security Tab and then turn off the option called, “Do not allow attachments to be saved or opened that could potentially be a virus” (Figure 12-9, bottom). Click OK, and if it still balks at letting you open an attachment, restart Outlook Express.

Managing Your Address Book You might never need to fill out Outlook Express’ Address Book—the program’s collection of names and email addresses (as well as any other contact information you want to store). Whenever you reply to a message, Outlook Express automatically tosses that person’s name and email address into your Address Book. If it’s not handling that chore for you, tell it to start, pronto: click Tools ➝ Options ➝ Send tab, and then turn on “Automatically put people I reply to in my Address Book.” Even when you don’t reply to a received message, you can add all the addresses from any message’s To: box using these commands: • Tools ➝ Add to Address Book ➝ Sender. This adds the sender’s name to your Address Book, even if you don’t reply. • Tools ➝ Add to Address Book ➝ Everyone on To list. This adds the email address of every person listed in the To: field. It’s a great way to add the address of every member of your knitting club from the emailed newsletter. • Right-click any email address. If you spot an email address listed in the body of an email, right-click it and then choose Add to Address Book. Occasionally you need to peek into your Address Book to edit entries, adding a street address to an existing contact, for instance, or typing in a phone number. In that case, open the Address Book by clicking its icon in the toolbar of either

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Outlook Express or any open message. The Address Book then appears, listing the names, addresses, and phone numbers of all your contacts.

Managing Your Address Book

Figure 12-9: The overzealous Outlook Express sometimes blocks incoming attachments instead of opening them, a fault easily remedied. Top: When the message opens in its own window, Outlook Express completely removes the attached files from view and displays a warning. Middle: When viewed in the preview pane, the message’s attachments are “grayed out,” preventing you from saving them. Bottom: To let yourself open attachments in Outlook Express, choose Tools ➝ Options ➝ Security Tab and then turn off the option called, “Do not allow attachments to be saved or opened that could potentially be a virus.”

You can edit any contact’s information by double-clicking the person’s name. Or, to add a new entry, click the New icon or choose File ➝ New Contact. In either case, an address card appears, as shown in Figure 12-10, with seven tabs for entering enough information to keep the CIA happy. Most people stick with the basics: first name, last name, and email address. But to create a full-fledged dossier, click the other tabs to enter home and business

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addresses and phone numbers, names of the spouse and children, gender, birthday, anniversary, and so on. Figure 12-10: To add somebody to your Address Book, type in the person’s first name, last name, and email address. And feel free to click the Home or Business tabs to enter the address and phone number. If you’ve got an iPod, the accompanying iTunes musicplaying software can take the basic information you enter here and place it into your iPod for on-the-road reference (page 236).

Tip: If your dial-up modem’s plugged into the same line as your telephone, the Address Book even autodials a person’s phone number. To check it out, click a name in the Address Book and choose Tools ➝ Action ➝ Dial.

Email Etiquette Email works much like a normal, person-to-person conversation, yet it carries its own set of potential social gaffes. These short guidelines will help keep you from looking like an amateur. • Don’t write with all capital letters. This LOOKS LIKE SHOUTING, something few enjoy seeing up close on their monitor. • Keep it short. Sum up your letter in the Subject: field, make your point, and then click the Send button. If you have several other unrelated subjects to discuss, place them in separate mails. That makes it easier for the recipient to prioritize them, not to mention find them again when needed. • Don’t forward chain mails or hoaxes. These mails encourage recipients to forward them to all of their friends, helping spread the word about a poor sick child, an act of bravery, or some newly discovered PC-killing virus. Most people hate receiving these. And people who’ve spent more than six months on the Internet have probably already seen it. Before forwarding a chain mail or hoax,

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look it up at Snopes (www.snopes.com), a site that collects hoaxes that continually make the rounds of the Internet.

Email Etiquette

If you absolutely must forward a message like this, place recipients in the BCC: field (page 356), or you’ll expose their email addresses to thousands of strangers, including spammers. FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTION

Moving to a New Address Book I’m switching from Outlook Express to a different email program. How do I move my address book to the new program? Nobody wants to type in several hundred names when switching between mail programs. So most programs, including Outlook Express, show mercy by including an Import/Export area on their menus. That lets you export your Address Book from one program and import it into another. To export your Outlook Express Address Book to a different program, follow these steps. 1. In Outlook Express, choose File ➝ Export ➝ Address Book. 2. Select “Text File (Comma Separated Values)” and then click the Export button. 3. Choose a name for your backup file. The name Address Book works fine here. 4. Click the Browse button, navigate to a convenient folder (like My Documents), and then click Next. 5. Select the fields you want to export, and then click Finish.

Here, the CSV Export box lists all the fields in your Outlook Express Address Book. It turns on checkboxes for the most common fields like Name, E-mail Address, Home Street, and so on, as most programs also use those fields in their Address Book. Feel free to turn on all the checkboxes, though. That gives you a complete backup of your Address Book for emergencies. When you click Finish, Outlook Express gathers the selected information and saves it in your selected file and folder. Outlook, Hotmail, Yahoo!, Thunderbird, Gmail, and other mail programs all support the CSV format for importing contacts from another program. Find the Import option on your new program’s menus, and then tell the program to import the CSV file you’ve created from Outlook Express. The new program reads your exported Address Book information, and then dumps everything into its own Address Book, making sure to place everything in its correct field, but with one catch: if the new program doesn’t offer a certain field—“Nickname,” for instance—that Outlook Express does, the new program simply discards the information. Similarly, the new program leaves blank any fields that the Outlook Express doesn’t offer.

• Reply to an existing message rather than starting a new one. When you receive a message discussing “Upcoming Mars Trip,” click Reply from the toolbar. Your email program automatically renames the subject to “Re: Upcoming Mars Trip,” helping every recipient keep track of the conversation. If you click Create Mail from the toolbar to reply, and then name your response, “Martian Holiday,” you’ve broken the thread, in email lingo. The original discussion breaks into two separate subjects, making them much more difficult to track.

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• Watch the sarcasm. Email carries the impact of the printed word, but it’s often phrased conversationally. Since the reader can’t see the smirk on your face as you type, your sarcasm rarely comes across. Leave it out unless you know the recipient very well. • Don’t send flames. When an email really upsets you, don’t immediately return fire. Wait a day or so to cool off. Even better, discuss it in person; you may be mistaking a misguided attempt at humor for anger. • Don’t send too many attachments. One or two baby pictures, properly resized (page 158), can be a treat for relatives. More photos than that, and you’re consuming a lot of somebody’s time and mailbox space. Instead of mailing them, post them on a photo-sharing site (page 160). That lets the recipients view them at their leisure.

Troubleshooting Email Problems When you’re having trouble sending a piece of email, don’t immediately blame yourself. Email sleuthing involves more suspects than an Agathie Christie novel. Here are some of the more common email problems, as well as their fixes: • Mail won’t send to a newly added address. It takes only one typo to spoil delivery. Email programs like Outlook Express fill out the email addresses of friends automatically from your Address Book (page 368), but if a newly added address gives you trouble, check with the recipient to make sure you’re spelling it correctly. • Mail suddenly stops sending or receiving, but you can still connect to the Internet. This happens when your ISP’s mail server goes down temporarily. It happens to the best of them. These glitches usually last from a few minutes to several hours, and your only course of action is to wait. (To send an urgent piece of email, try using a Web-based email service [page 348] like Gmail or Yahoo.) • No email will send. When you haven’t been able to send any email, the problem may lie with your email program. Run the setup program that comes with Outlook Express (page 352), or any other email program, to make sure you’ve entered the following items correctly: your user name, password, and the ISP’s mail server names (see page 353 for complete details). • No Internet connection or email. When you lose your Internet connection, you have no alternative but to wait until your ISP restores service. If you’re desperate, drop by a library, an Internet Café, or other publicly accessible PC (page 318). Make sure you’ve connected your PC to the Internet correctly, though (page 339), before you rush out of the house. • Your recipient’s email address no longer works. You don’t have any control over this one, either. If you’re having trouble sending mail to a friend, her ISP’s email server might not be working. There’s not much you can do but ride it out.

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• Mailbox unavailable. When your sent message returns to you with the subject “Mailbox unavailable” or something similar, you’re seeing the PC equivalent of an answering machine that’s too stuffed with messages to accept more. Since the recipient’s mailbox can’t hold any more messages, his ISP sent it back to you to resend at a later time. The recipient probably hasn’t logged on for awhile. Or maybe somebody sent him digital photos without resizing them first (page 158), immediately filling up his mailbox.

Troubleshooting Email Problems

When a sent message returns to your Inbox, resend it and hope for the best. Since most mail programs don’t offer a Resend option, choose Forward, instead, to send your message as an attachment. Add a note about how your original message bounced. If it bounces yet again—and you’re sure you have the right email address—try waiting a day or two before sending it. You may just have to reach for the telephone.

Stopping Spam Unfortunately, the battle against spam—unsolicited emailed advertisements— can’t be won easily. Sending one email costs the same as sending one million, making it an irresistible advertising tool. And believe it or not, it’s profitable. Some deluded souls really do buy stuff from spammers—or at least they send them money; the goods aren’t always delivered. Finally, sending spam is already illegal in many areas, but that’s no deterrent. The current email system doesn’t offer a foolproof way of tracking a sender’s identity. That makes the laws difficult to enforce. More and more antivirus programs like Trend Micro’s PC-cillin Internet Security (www.trendmicro.com) and Norton’s Internet Security (www.symantec.com) include spam management programs. These programs install special filters on your PC that watch email you dump into a special Spam folder. As the programs recognize patterns between the mail you toss and the mail you keep, they begin taking over, automatically dumping suspected spam into your Spam folder. Although spam can’t be banished completely, these tactics can help reduce the amount of spam hitting your mailbox: • Ask your ISP if they have a spam filter. Some ISPs put filters in place that trap spam before it hits your mailbox. ISPs are constantly bombarded with spam, and when they see 5,000 messages flowing in from one address, they can turn off that spigot, keeping it from reaching the rest of their customers. • When buying products, signing up for Web site access, or registering products, turn on the No checkbox if they ask to send you marketing materials. • Create a disposable email address at Yahoo, or another free email service (page 348). Use this address for email conversations that don’t really matter—registering at a free Web site, for instance. When that email starts drawing too much spam, delete it from Outlook Express (Tools ➝ Account; click the disposable email address’s name and then click the Remove button.) Then create a new disposable address and start over. Chapter 12: Email PCs: The Missing Manual, eMatter Edition Copyright © 2008 O’Reilly & Associates, Inc. All rights reserved.

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• Never click the “Remove Me” link from spam; when you click such a link, you let the spammers know that your email address works, that you read your email, and that you’re a perfect candidate for their next mailing. • Add the spammer’s address to your blocked senders list, described in the next section.

Blocking Offensive Senders Remember the childhood ploy of plugging your ears and whistling when you didn’t want to hear somebody? Outlook Express offers a similar way of dealing with people who continually send annoying or harassing messages. When you open a message only to find something offensive—spam, insults, or something from somebody you’d rather not hear from—choose Message ➝ Block Sender. Outlook Express adds the sender’s name to your Blocked Senders list (affectionately named a “Twit Filter” by net-savvy citizens), and presents a dialog box offering to remove all of that person’s messages from that current folder. (Click Yes to remove them; click No to leave the messages in place.) The next time Outlook Express notices an incoming message from that sender, it automatically kicks it into your Deleted Items folder rather than your Inbox. If you discover you’ve banished somebody accidentally, or you’ve shaken hands and made up, remove her from your blocked senders list by clicking Tools ➝ Message Rules ➝ Blocked Senders List. Click her name on the Blocked Senders list and then click the Remove button to bring her back into your social circle. Unfortunately, the Blocked Senders list rarely works as a spam killer, as most spammers create a new email address for every batch of spam. But adding spam addresses to your Blocked Senders list provides a sense of moral satisfaction for many people.

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chapter

Chapter 13

13

Surfing the Web

The Web offers you a combination library, entertainment center, and social club— none of which ever closes. Your Web browser is your window into this busy world. This chapter explains how to choose between the two most popular browsers, Internet Explorer and Firefox, as well as how to set them both up, navigate between Web sites, and get the most out of their many frills. You’ll also learn how to pinpoint which sites contain the information you need, and then how to print, save, or forward pages from the sites you visit. And since most sites nowadays force you to create a user account and password, you’ll learn some timesaving tricks to cut down on your digital form-filling chores.

Choosing and Setting Up a Browser All browsers, including Internet Explorer and Firefox, can handle the basics, helping you move from site to site. But just as some cars include drink holders and extra suspension, some browsers offer extra features that smooth out your ride from one site to another. The differences lie mainly in how they manage tasks like these: • Compatibility. Web pages are written in a special programming language (called HTML, or hypertext markup language, if you’re interested in that sort of stuff); it’s basically a series of code words that browsers read in order to display a page’s contents. All Web pages and browsers speak the same language when it comes to the basics—putting words and images onto a page. But some support special dialects; others don’t. That’s why some Web pages look and behave better in one browser than in another. This usually isn’t an issue, but occasionally you’ll find a site with features that display and work in one browser, but not in another.

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Choosing and Setting Up a Browser

• Pop-up blocking. Pop-up ads are advertising-filled windows that pop into your face like irritating gnats, usually when you first visit or attempt to leave a site. The worst sites send flurries of pop-up ads. Simply blocking all pop-ups won’t work, because some of these windows actually do good things, like present you with a map or some other nugget of helpful info. To weed out the good from the bad, some browsers let you manage pop-ups, permitting a few sites to present them and banishing them from all others. • Ad blocking. Free sites need to recoup their costs somehow; most Web surfers have therefore gotten accustomed to viewing a few text ads along the side of a page. But the most irritating ads squat in the middle of your reading material, flashing distracting mini-movies as you try to concentrate on the site’s content. A browser’s ad-blocking features let you manage ads, banishing the most obnoxious ones, while leaving alone unobtrusive ones that may interest you. • Security. Today’s Web browsers must double as security guards, alerting you when deceptive sites try to install unwanted software on your PC, or when something’s fishy about an online shopping site. For instance, some sites try to install spyware—software that nosey sites (and ad delivery companies) sneak onto your PC to monitor your Web-browsing habits. If the spyware notices that you visit lots of bowling sites, for instance, it might start showing you bowling ads—sometimes even displaying them on your monitor when your browser isn’t running. Good browsers help you stay on top of what’s being installed and let you decide what gets on your PC and what gets stopped. • Add-ons. People need a Web browser that works the way they do. Add-on programs called extensions subtly add new capabilities to your browser. Helpful add-ons can, for example, notify you of incoming email or upcoming storms. Malicious add-ons, sneakily applied by shady Web sites, can damage your PC. That’s why a browser needs an add-on manager for deleting the bad and keeping the good. • Backups. Tweaking a Web browser’s settings to work the way you want takes considerable time. A browser should let people save its settings for backup or for moving to another PC or laptop. The following sections describe the two main browsers on the market: Windows XP’s built-in Internet Explorer, and the Mozilla Foundation’s increasingly popular Firefox.

Internet Explorer Microsoft’s Internet Explorer (Start ➝ All Programs ➝ Internet Explorer) attracts big crowds for three main reasons: it’s free, it works pretty well with the majority

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of sites out there, and it’s already installed on your PC. The current version, Internet Explorer 6.0 (shown in Figure 13-1), arrived with Windows XP.

Choosing and Setting Up a Browser

Figure 13-1: When Microsoft added Internet Explorer to new editions of Windows in the mid-90s, people gradually stopped downloading Netscape, the most popular browser at the time, and switched to their PC’s new preinstalled freebie. (This led to the dethroning of Netscape as browser king, antitrust investigations by the U.S. Department of Justice, a lawsuit from 20 states, and Microsoft’s ultimate settlement with the Department of Justice—a story whose details would require a muchthicker book.) Today, Internet Explorer needs updating. Its search box (shown here), for instance, blocks the view of the site you’re trying to search.

Features Windows XP’s Service Pack 2 (page 480) added several crucial security features to Internet Explorer, including an add-ons manager (Tools ➝ Manage Add-ons) for disabling some types of spyware, and other unwanted programs that latch onto Internet Explorer. A much-needed pop-up blocker (Tools ➝ Pop-up Blocker ➝ Turn On Pop-up Blocker) now stops the most annoying pop-up windows. Pros Internet Explorer is free and provides enough basic Web-browsing tools to capture about 85 percent of the browser market. It’s also the only browser supporting ActiveX, a proprietary Microsoft technology that lets Web sites install and run programs—some helpful, some malicious—on your PC. Some Web sites that scan your PC for viruses, for instance, ask you to first download an ActiveX program. Cons Being the top dog for so many years, Internet Explorer remains the prime target for viruses and spyware, many of which install themselves through ActiveX Chapter 13: Surfing the Web PCs: The Missing Manual, eMatter Edition Copyright © 2008 O’Reilly & Associates, Inc. All rights reserved.

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programming tools. Microsoft has also let the program fall behind in development. Competing browsers like Firefox run more securely and offer more features. UP TO SPEED

Switching to the Browser, Emailer, and Media Player of Your Choice Microsoft’s antitrust settlement with the Department of Justice required the company to let PC manufacturers install their choice of Web browser, media player (page 223), email program (page 343), instant messenger, and version of Java software.

you’ve installed competing media players or browsers. (In order to use competing programs like Apple’s iTunes, you need to manually launch them and open up the media files you want to play using the program’s File › Open With menu.)

Microsoft didn’t physically remove its own version of these programs. Instead, it added a way to remove the programs from Windows’ menus, making it appear as if they didn’t exist. Some PC manufacturers added competing programs to the menus, substituting applications like AOL’s Instant Messenger or the RealPlayer media player.

• Non-Microsoft. This button strips Microsoft’s suite of programs of their default status, and strips them from your menus. Choosing this option is usually a bad idea since Microsoft’s programs come in handy when you need to stay compatible with the widest range of sites and files out on the Web today.

Now that your PC has left the sales floor, you can switch the settings to your own choice of programs through the “Set Program Access and Defaults” area (Start ➝ Set Program Access and Defaults). There, you can control two things: which programs appear on the Start menu, and which programs are anointed default (the go-to application that automatically jumps into action when you open a Web link, media file, or piece of email).

• Custom. This option provides much more control than the previous three. First, it lets you add or remove specific items from Windows’ menus through a checkbox called “Enable access to this program.” To keep a program listed on your menus, turn on its checkbox; to remove a program, turn off the checkbox. (Or, go one step further and uninstall your unwanted programs: Start ➝ Control Panel ➝ Add or Remove Programs.)

Your four main choices are shown and described below. The first three are quick-and-dirty presets that automatically make a handful of decisions in one fell swoop; the fourth option lets you hand-pick your settings. • Computer Manufacturer. Click this button to revert your computer’s settings to those chosen by your PC’s manufacturer. Choose this option if you’re happy with the browser, email program, and instant messenger that originally came loaded on your PC. • Microsoft Windows. This button leaves Microsoft’s programs on the menus, while letting you load and use competing programs, as well. However, Microsoft’s programs retain their default status. For example, Windows Media Player plays media files when you double-click them, and Internet Explorer opens double-clicked Web links—even if

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To grant default status to a particular program—if you want iTunes to appear when you double-click a song file, for instance—click the button next to that program’s name. The “Use my current player” option isn’t remarkable for what it does, but for what it doesn’t do. It doesn’t grant default status to any program. Instead, this option lets you stick with the program that currently holds the cherished default status—but lets you switch at any time. It’s easy to switch, too, because selecting “Use my current player” causes one small side-effect: every time you launch an occasionally used browser, media player, or instant messenger, that program sends you a pop-up message begging you to let it be “default.” Click the message’s “Yes” button to hand the reins to that program for awhile; click “No” to let your current player keep control.

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Setting up Internet Explorer Since Internet Explorer comes bundled with Windows XP, you don’t need to install it or set it up. To start Internet Explorer, choose Start ➝ All Programs ➝ Internet Explorer. If you don’t spot Internet Explorer on the menu, thank the long arm of the law—as part of Microsoft’s antitrust settlement with the Department of Justice, Microsoft added an option to drop Internet Explorer from Windows XP’s menus. If you’re not finding Internet Explorer anywhere on your PC, check out the box on page 378 for instructions on how to put it back.

Choosing and Setting Up a Browser

UP TO SPEED

Taking Cookies Off the Plate Most Web sites leave small files called “cookies” on your PC. Cookies serve as a kind of name tag for your PC, letting the site remember you and your preferences. By reading your PC’s cookie, a site can log you in automatically, for instance, sparing you from typing in your name and password at every page. Thanks to cookies, Amazon greets you by name each time you visit. But although some sites use cookies in a good way, others push the ethical envelope. For instance, most sites display ads served up by large advertising companies; these companies, often dubbed cookie harvesters, drop their own cookies onto your PC. By tracking their cookies as you move from site to site, the ad companies know what sites you visit, letting them target their ads accordingly, and perhaps even obtaining your email address so they can send you junk mail. Some people find cookies so creepy, they want to delete all cookies from their PC. Resist the urge. Doing so throws out the handy ones, as well; even worse, some sites refuse to run if you turn off their cookies. (You’ll know the problem immediately when the offended sites say you need to “turn on” or “enable” your browser’s cookies.) The solution is a cookie manager, which lets you handpick which sites can serve cookies. It also lets you block thirdparty cookies—the ones placed by ad-serving companies unrelated to the site you’re visiting. Best of all, cookie managers allow session cookies, which let Web sites function normally as soon as you type in your user name and password. Limiting your cookies to session cookies also adds security: Nobody else can sit down at your PC and enter your favorite online stores without knowing your password.

To block all but session cookies in Internet Explorer, choose Tools ➝ Internet Options ➝ Privacy tab ➝ Advanced. On that page, shown in the illustration on the left, turn on “Override automatic cookie handling,” choose Block for both First-Party and Third-Party cookies, and turn on “Always allow session cookies.” Then click OK to save your changes.

To block all but session cookies in Firefox (shown at right), choose Tools ➝ Options ➝ Privacy ➝ Cookies. Turn on the checkboxes for “Allow sites to set cookies” and “for the originating web site only.” Then, from the Keep Cookies drop-down menu, choose “until I close Firefox.” Click OK to save your changes. If you run across a site that insists you leave all its cookies turned on, add it to your browser’s Exceptions list. In Internet Explorer, choose Tools ➝ Internet Options ➝ Privacy ➝ Sites. In Firefox, choose Tools ➝ Options ➝ Privacy ➝ Cookies ➝ Exceptions. On that page in both browsers, type the site’s address into the “Address of Web site” box, and then click the adjacent Allow button to exempt the site from your cookie management policies.

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Backing up settings Internet Explorer lets you back up your Favorites—your list of shortcuts to frequently visited Web sites. This list of your Favorites is a handy thing to back up to a portable USB drive (page 255), since doing so lets you visit your favorite sites from any PC (see the tip below). Internet Explorer also lets you back up your cookies, tiny Web site preference files (see the “Taking Cookies Off the Plate” box for the full story on what cookies are and how they work). Backing up your cookies lets you copy them to another computer, so that Web sites recognize who you are when you’re visiting from, say, your laptop rather than your desktop PC. To back up either your Favorites or your cookies (or both), choose File ➝ Import and Export to summon the Import/Export wizard. This terse wizard lets you export your Favorites to a file called Bookmark.htm and your Cookies to a file called Cookies.txt, and then places both files in your My Documents folder. To transfer the bookmarks or cookies to Internet Explorer on another PC, copy those small files to a floppy disk, USB drive, or networked folder (page 446). Then, while at the other PC, open Internet Explorer and use the same Import/Export wizard. This time, though, choose Import and point the wizard to the folder containing your exported files. Tip: Internet Explorer actually exports your Favorites in the form of a ready-to-view Web page. If you’ve copied the Bookmark.htm file to a USB drive and want to view those shortcuts on another PC, all you have to do is insert the drive in the PC you’re visiting, double-click the drive’s Bookmark.htm file, and, presto, that PC’s browser presents your Favorites as a Web page, all listed in a row of clickable links.

Firefox Millions of people have downloaded Firefox, shown in Figure 13-2—enough, in fact, to capture about 10 percent of the browser market. That’s a serious chunk, considering that Firefox entered the market only about a year ago. The fastgrowing browser’s threat prodded Microsoft to announce Internet Explorer 7, which incorporates many of the features Firefox has. (Internet Explorer 7 will be released with Windows next generation operating system—Vista—in late 2006.) Features Firefox offers all the basics of Internet Explorer, and then tacks on a few of its own innovations. • Tabbed browsing. To open a second Web page in Internet Explorer, you need to open up a separate window. Consequently, it’s not uncommon to have a half-dozen Internet Explorer windows cluttering a desktop. Firefox, by contrast, places several Web pages in the same window, placing a little tab atop each page. Click the tab, and Firefox switches its view to that site. You can even open several links simultaneously, letting them load in the background while you read the first page.

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• Security. Firefox doesn’t support ActiveX controls (page 257), effectively thwarting the most common point of entry for spyware. Tests consistently rank the program as more secure than Internet Explorer, earning it “Product of the Year” recommendations from PC World magazine.

Tabbed browsing

Search current page

Built-in Web search box

Extensions

Choosing and Setting Up a Browser

Figure 13-2: Compare Firefox’s view of this Web site with Internet Explorer’s (shown in Figure 13-1) to see the results of Firefox’s built-in adblocking. Firefox also lets you open several Web sites simultaneously, each in its own tab. The tabs conveniently let you switch between sites with one click. A search box in the upper-right corner lets you perform quick searches on Google, or other sites you select, through the drop-down menu. Optional extensions—miniprograms written by third-parties—let you add things like a weather forecaster. And unlike Internet Explorer, searching for terms on the displayed page doesn’t block your view of the screen.

• Quick searches. Firefox offers a built-in search box, shown in Figure 13-2, accessible from a little toolbar in the top right-corner of the browser window. Type your search words and Firefox sends them to Google, which instantly displays the results. You needn’t always search with Google, though. A drop-down menu on the search box lets you route your search to several different places, providing quick searches on Amazon, eBay, Wikipedia (an online encyclopedia), and other popular sites. • Find. When you want to search for a particular word on a Web page, Internet Explorer makes you type the word into an intrusive, and separate, onscreen window, which stays out front during the search, blocking your view. A search in Firefox, by contrast, takes place in a toolbar at the bottom of the window; as you type letters, Firefox quickly begins highlighting matches.

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• RSS. Firefox supports the increasingly popular RSS (page 401) technology, letting you know when your favorite sites are updated with new content. • Extensions. Firefox hails from the open source school of code sharing, where programmers create versatile add-ons, called extensions, for their own benefit and then release them to the public, as well. That lets you add things like localized weather forecasters (see Figure 13-2), ad blockers, Macromedia Flash blockers, and zillions of other doodads to customize your browser. Pros Firefox’s tabbed interface, ad-and-pop-up blocker, built-in search box, and RSS reader make it a giant step up from Internet Explorer. Plus, the browser’s stable and easy to use, sticking with a clean design that emphasizes form over function. Should you need an extra function, chances are you’ll find it through one of the neat extensions (Tools ➝ Extensions ➝ Get More Extensions). Finally, Firefox is free, and automatically imports your Internet Explorer Favorites as it installs itself. It’s hard to ask for much more. Cons Firefox doesn’t support ActiveX (page 257), and occasionally crashes when sites sense you’re trying to block their ads too aggressively. Just as with Internet Explorer, you need to download plug-ins (see the “Adding Plug-ins to Your Browser” box) to display content that uses Flash, Real Media, Adobe Acrobat, QuickTime, Windows Media Player, and Java. When you need a particular plugin, most Web sites automatically direct you to the appropriate download link. Setting up Firefox Setting up Firefox on your PC couldn’t be easier. Head to Firefox’s download site (www.getfirefox.com) and select Free Download. Double-click the downloaded file, and Firefox installs itself. As it nestles down onto your hard drive, Firefox imports all your information from Internet Explorer: your favorites, browsing history, passwords, cookies, and the settings Internet Explorer uses to connect with the Internet. It also grabs Internet Explorer’s Autocomplete settings (page 384), which lets the browser fill in some forms automatically when you first start typing a few letters or words. When the installation’s complete, you get a personalized browser that’s ready to connect to the Internet. To launch the program, you have a few options: click the Firefox icon on your Start menu (Start ➝ All Programs ➝ Mozilla Firefox), on your Quick Launch toolbar (next to the Start button), and, depending on your installation choices, on your desktop. Privacy Firefox groups all its privacy controls in one area (Tools ➝ Options ➝ Privacy), where you can clear your browsing history, saved forms, saved passwords, cookies,

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download history, and temporary files—the detritus left behind as you browse Web sites. (Windows XP’s Disk Cleanup program—see page 256—automatically deletes Internet Explorer’s temporary files, but it doesn’t delete those left behind by Firefox.)

Choosing and Setting Up a Browser

UP TO SPEED

Adding Plug-ins to Your Browser Any browser can handle usual Web fare like text, photos, figures, and a few sounds. But to play or display more elaborate offerings, like movies and PDF files, your browser sometimes needs a plug-in: a piece of software that helps your browser understand a particular file format. Sometimes a Web site alerts you when you need a plug-in, giving you its name and, ideally, a link to the plug-in’s download site. Other sites make you go out and search for the plug-in yourself. The free plug-ins listed below are the ones you’ll run across most frequently on the Web. In fact, if a site asks you to download a plug-in that’s not on this list, be sure you’re not accidentally downloading spyware (page 484), hijackers (page 484), or other evil bits. Links to all of these plug-ins are available from Mozilla’s Web site (www.mozilla.org/products/firefox/central.html). • Macromedia Flash Player (www.macromedia. com). Many animations, cartoons, presentations, and, unfortunately, obnoxious “moving” ads, come stored in the Flash format. Firefox users can download the FlashBlock extension (Tools ➝ Extensions ➝ Get More Extensions), which lets you pick and choose among a site’s Flash animations, letting you skip the ads and play the cartoons. • RealNetworks RealPlayer (www.real.com). Many sites offer sound and video files in Real or RealAudio format, which squeezes these offerings into small, easily downloadable files that start playing before you’ve sucked down the entire file. The quality’s lousy compared to other formats, but that’s the least of its problems. RealNetworks’ Web site tries hard to trick you into buying the “enhanced” plug-in instead of the freebie, which usually gets hidden in the site’s small print.

• Acrobat Reader (www.adobe.com). On the Web, many documents come in the Adobe Acrobat format, which preserves a document’s “look,” including its fonts, footnotes, and graphics, making the document look almost like a photocopy from a printed book. That makes it attractive for many government and corporate documents, product manuals, eBooks, and old magazine articles. To read an Adobe Acrobat document (also known as a PDF, or portable document format, file), download Adobe’s free Acrobat Reader plug-in. • Apple QuickTime (www.apple.com/quicktime/ download/standalone.html). Many movie trailers come stored as QuickTime files. Apple normally installs iTunes (page 227) along with its QuickTime player, making for a chunky download. The link above, however, lets you download the player alone. • Windows Media Player (www.microsoft.com/ windows/windowsmedia). Browsers don’t need a plug-in for Media Player. Instead, they use the version of Media Player installed with Windows to play movies within the Web site. Some sites require you to install the latest version of Media Player, however, so if you’re having trouble, try upgrading to the latest version from the link listed above. • Java (www.java.com/en/download/index.jsp). Microsoft and Sun each have their own version of Java, a programming language that, among other things, lets Web developers add fancy doodads to their sites—everything from moon phase calculators to online banking. If a site says you need Java installed to play a game or run a program, visit Sun and download its free version of Java from the link listed above.

Chapter 13: Surfing the Web PCs: The Missing Manual, eMatter Edition Copyright © 2008 O’Reilly & Associates, Inc. All rights reserved.

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Backing up bookmarks To back up your Firefox Bookmarks (the equivalent of Internet Explorer’s Favorites), choose Bookmarks ➝ Manage Bookmarks ➝ File ➝ Export. You can save the resulting Bookmarks.html file to a USB thumb drive (page 255) or anywhere else for safekeeping. Just as with Internet Explorer’s exported Favorites, the Bookmarks.html file is a Web page containing clickable links of all your favorite Web sites.

Opera and Netscape Together, Internet Explorer and Firefox grab about 95 percent of the Web browser market, leaving two other browsers, Opera (www.opera.com.com) and Netscape (www.netscape.com), to battle for the remaining scraps. Netscape’s been pretty much abandoned, although it still attracts a following among Microsoft haters. Another longtime competitor, Opera, serves as a browser for several mobile phones and palmtop computers, making it familiar enough to attract some PC owners, as well.

Managing Forms and Passwords Since so many Web sites require you to fill out forms and enter passwords nowadays, managing all this drudgery can quickly take the fun out of surfing the Web. Both Internet Explorer and Firefox help with these chores, but in slightly different ways. Tip: To keep from juggling dozens of passwords, try a password manager like Access Manager (www. accessmanager.co.uk), 4uonly (www.dillobits.com/4uonly.html), or Password Agent (www.moonsoftware. com/pwagent.asp). When you enter the program’s single master password, you quickly gain access to all the other passwords safely guarded by the program.

Autofilling Forms in Internet Explorer With a feature dubbed AutoComplete, Internet Explorer remembers items that you type into forms—including your passwords—saving you from probing your memory each time you visit a site. To change the way Internet Explorer handles your memorized form entries, adjust AutoComplete’s settings by choosing Tools ➝ Internet Options ➝ Content tab ➝ AutoComplete. Once the AutoComplete Settings window appears (Figure 13-3), turn on or off the following items: • Web addresses. Turning on this checkbox tells Internet Explorer to remember the Web addresses you’ve typed into its Address bar. It’s great for people who manually type in lots of addresses, but not much of a timesaver if you browse mostly by clicking page links or site names on your Favorites list. • Forms. When you turn on this checkbox, Internet Explorer remembers items you’ve typed into online forms. This option is particularly helpful for automatically filling in oft-requested information like your name or address.

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• User names and passwords. This checkbox links your user name to your password; when you type your user name into one box, Internet Explorer automatically places the password in the adjacent box, as well. To be on the safe side, turn on the optional “Prompt me to save passwords.” That makes Internet Explorer ask permission before remembering a password, letting you pick and choose which sites should let you in automatically.

Managing Forms and Passwords

Figure 13-3: Top: Internet Explorer’s AutoComplete Settings window is your control center for deciding which Web addresses, forms, and passwords Internet Explorer automatically fills in for you. To wipe Internet Explorer’s memory clean, click either the Clear Forms or the Clear Passwords button, depending on which kind of info you want the program to forget. Bottom: When you start typing into a form on a Web page, Internet Explorer automatically presents your previous entry on a drop-down menu, letting you enter it with one click.

Tip: If you spot a potentially embarrassing or secret item on the drop-down AutoComplete list, delete it by first clicking in the form’s box and then pressing the Down Arrow key. When you reach the offending entry, press the Del key. Be sure to use your keyboard for this; the mouse won’t do the job.

Autofilling Forms in Firefox Firefox can help you fill out forms much the same way as Internet Explorer, although the program doesn’t automatically turn on that feature. To make Firefox remember your form info, click Tools ➝ Options ➝ Privacy ➝ Saved Form Information and then turn on “Save information I enter in web page forms and the Search Bar.” Firefox takes an extra step when remembering your passwords, in order to help you better protect them. Whenever you enter a user name/password combination

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into a Web site, Firefox asks you if it should remember that password, or never remember it. That lets you choose “remember” for most sites, but choose “never remember” for firms that store precious information, like your bank’s Web site. Firefox then stores your passwords in its Saved Passwords area (Tools ➝ Options ➝ Privacy ➝ Saved Passwords), shown in Figure 13-4. Figure 13-4: Firefox keeps track of your saved passwords in its Privacy section, along with related items: your browsing history, information you’ve typed into online forms, lists of files you’ve downloaded, your cookies, and your cache—Web pages you’ve viewed in the past. Click the Clear button next to any category to delete its entries. Or, to delete them all at once, click Clear All at the bottom of the window.

The Saved Passwords area gives you the following options: • Clear. Click here to delete all your saved passwords, pronto. Although this option’s handy when you hear a burglar walking down the hall, most people delete passwords individually by clicking View Saved Passwords, described next. • View Saved Passwords. A treasure trove when you need access to all your passwords. This button lists everything: a list of Web sites, the user names you’ve entered, and their accompanying passwords. If you’re switching to a password management program (as described in the tip on page 384), visit here to harvest all your user names and passwords. If you spot a password that shouldn’t be listed, click its name and then click Remove to delete it. • Set Master Password. As an extra layer of security Firefox offers to create a master password to protect your password stash. If you create one by clicking this button, Firefox asks for that master password every time you fire up the browser. When you enter the password, Firefox continues coughing up your passwords automatically at sites requiring them. If you don’t enter the master password, Firefox still works, but doesn’t divulge any of your remembered passwords. That keeps thieves from turning on your stolen laptop, visiting your banking site, and transferring all your money into a PayPal account. 386

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• Remember Passwords. This checkbox, which is normally turned on, tells Firefox whether to remember the user names and passwords you type online. People working in high-clearance government jobs usually turn this box off. Most other people, however, leave it turned on for convenience.

Blocking Pop-up Ads and Other Nuisances

WORKAROUND WORKSHOP

Bypassing Web Site Sign-ups Many Web sites require you to create a user account before entering their pages. At a shopping site, for instance, your user account keeps your shopping cart separate from the millions of other online shoppers. The Web sites of some newspapers also ask you to create an account before reading their articles so they can present you with customized greetings (“Welcome, Hal”) and share valuable demographic information with their advertisers. Should you decide that a Web site hasn’t done anything to earn your precious personal details, you might consider creating a user account with made-up information. You certainly wouldn’t be the first veteran Web surfer to pick that route. For instance, you might simply want to skim an

online newspaper article mentioned by a friend. You don’t want to fill out the site’s 20-question reader survey, nor receive the newspaper’s emailed newsletters. When you want to slip in and out of a site quickly, visit the Bug Me Not Web site (www.bugmenot.com). The site stores working user names and password combos created by previous visitors who didn’t want to enter their information. By entering a user name and password somebody else has already created, you can quickly breeze onto the site, read what you want, and slip away, keeping your personal information to yourself.

Blocking Pop-up Ads and Other Nuisances Windows XP’s Service Pack 2 (page 480) bestowed Internet Explorer with a popup blocker that keeps ads from jumping into your face. If you’re seeing a lot of pop-ups, make sure this feature’s turned on (Tools ➝ Pop-up Blocker ➝ Pop-up Blocker Settings). On the Pop-up Blocker Settings window, click the Filter Level drop-down list to change the blocker’s settings to Medium or High. Firefox can also automatically block pop-ups (go to Tools ➝ Options ➝ Web Features and turn on the Block Popup Windows checkbox). Both browsers let you tailor your pop-up blocker by adding Web sites you deem friendly to an Exceptions List. That lets you call off the pop-up blocking dogs for sites that use pop-ups for good ends—an online map that springs up with helpful information, for instance. Note: If you’re still seeing lots of pop-ups, even after activating these pop-up blocking features, your PC may be infected with spyware or adware. See page 484 for help clearing out these menaces.

Internet Explorer doesn’t provide a way to stifle ads that appear as part of a Web page, but Firefox snips them away with a little work on your part. Since a small handful of large companies serve up most Web sites’ ads, Firefox lets you block

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images from those companies. When you spot a particularly obnoxious ad, rightclick it and choose “Block Images from,” followed by the name of the company sending the ad. Blocking images from a few big ad-serving companies can reduce about 90 percent of the ads you see, making Web sites much easier to read. If you block something by mistake, remove its name from the Firefox’s Exceptions list (Tools ➝ Options ➝ Web Features ➝ Exceptions).

Browsing the Web After opening your browser, you’re ready to venture onto the Internet. But before you even start surfing you’ll probably notice a page patiently waiting in your browser: your Home page. Most browsers automatically open to a page that plugs itself or one of its creator’s products. To change the Home page to your favorite site—Google News (http://news.google.com), for instance—simply visit your favorite site. Then, in Internet Explorer, choose Tools ➝ Internet Options ➝ Use Current. From then on, Internet Explorer opens showing your favorite Web page. (In Firefox, do the same thing by choosing Tools ➝ Options ➝ Use Current Page.) Your Home page serves as a starting point; buttons and bars on your browser, as shown in Figure 13-5, and described below, offer several ways to move from one site to another. Address bar Menu bar Button bar Information bar

Address bar Menu bar Button bar Address bar

RSS feeds

Figure 13-5: Firefox (top) and Internet Explorer (bottom) both offer similar screen options for navigating the Web, but with slight differences. Firefox refers to Web site shortcuts as Bookmarks; Internet Explorer calls them Favorites. Firefox also combines its buttons bar with its Web address bar (calling the duo a Navigation toolbar), leaving slightly more space for Web page display. The “radar” icons next to the links on Firefox represent RSS feeds (page 401), letting you click the link to read the site’s headlines—without visiting the site itself.

Information bar

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Tip: If any of the Internet Explorer toolbars you see in Figure 13-5 are missing, choose View ➝ Toolbars and click the missing bar’s name. If you still don’t spot the bar you want, it’s probably scrunched up on the right end of another bar. Here’s how to display it in full. Each bar sports a little vertical line on its left edge that serves as a handle. Drag the scrunched bar downward (off of whatever bar its jammed onto) so that you can see it in its full glory. Then position it where you want it. Once you’ve dragged the bar back in place, choose View ➝ Toolbars ➝ Lock the Toolbars to keep them from moving around. (Firefox doesn’t have the “moving toolbar” problem, as its two toolbars aren’t movable or resizable.)

Browsing the Web

• Address bar. Type a site’s name into the address bar—www.nytimes.com, for instance—and press Enter to visit the New York Times Web site. (For a shortcut, type nytimes and press Ctrl+Enter; the browser fills in the tedious www and com stuff.) • Menu bar. The words on this bar all offer drop-down menus; the Favorites menu, for instance, displays icons of your favorite Web sites. Click Favorites and then select your favorite site’s name from the drop-down menu for a quick visit. To add a site to your Favorites menu in Internet Explorer, right-click anywhere on a page and choose “Add to Favorites.” (In Firefox, right-click the page and then choose “Bookmark this page.”) Other popular menu choices include Print (File ➝ Print; covered in Chapter 4) and Save Web Page (File ➝ Save As; page 393). Note: Firefox combines Internet Explorer’s Address bar and Menu bar into one bar, called the Navigation toolbar.

• Standard buttons. Click the left arrow icon to revisit the page you just left; when you’re done, click the right arrow to return to the page you started from. (See the little black arrows beside those two icons? Click either of them to see the last five Web pages you’ve moved through—either forward or backward— since opening your browser.) • Links bar. The shortcut buttons stored here provide one-click access to your most favored Favorites. To add a currently displayed site to your Links bar, drag its icon from the Address bar to your Links bar. • Information bar. This bar appears along the top of the main browser window when your browser’s stopped something from appearing: a blocked pop-up ad, for instance, or a possibly harmful program download. Most of the time, you’ll jump from one Web site to another without touching your browser’s menu bars and buttons. After all, the reason the Web’s more popular than free candy is its legendary ease-of-navigation: just click underlined or highlighted words on a Web page and off you go to the page the link represents. Tip: You know your mouse is hovering over a linked item when the pointer morphs into a little hand.

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The rest of this section explains how to find sites, print or save their information, forward pages to friends, and download files.

Finding Sites The Internet contains more information than all the nation’s phone books; what it lacks is a convenient centralized directory. To help you pull what you need from the giant stack of pages, several sites offer a searchable index. The best by far is the now famous Google (www.google.com), shown in Figure 13-6. Google’s even crept into street lingo as a verb: “I Googled him before going out on our date.” When you’re ready to start your own search, type what you’re looking for into Google’s search box and click Google Search; Google then lists the sites that match your query, ranked in order of popularity (among a few other factors). Figure 13-6: Google finds 1,560,000 sites that contain the exact term “paper clip,” and then displays the results in the center of the window (the right side features links from advertisers). Click Images to search for pictures of a paper clip; click News to find current newspaper and magazine articles mentioning “paper clip.” The Groups link takes you off to a section of Google featuring Usenet groups, an elderly branch of the Internet reserved mostly for categorized discussions. Froogle finds online shops that sell paper clips. And if you install Google’s Desktop Search program (www. desktop.google.com), Google also sniffs out mentions of “paper clip” on your PC.

Following these few rules will help you pull the best information out of Google: • Put search strings in quotes. Putting quotes around “paper clip” searches for those two words as a single term. Without the quotes, Google retrieves sites that contain the word “paper” and “clip,” but not necessarily the phrase “paper clip.”

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• Mind your ANDs and ORs. If you search for paper OR clip, Google locates pages mentioning either “paper,” or “clip,” and then displays the combined results. Be sure to capitalize the word OR; otherwise Google ignores the word, just like it ignores other small words: a, an, I, the, of, for, how, it, in, is, and so on. Google automatically considers a search for the term paper clip to be a search for paper AND clip. That means it will locate any site mentioning both words, even if they’re not adjacent.

Browsing the Web

• Weed out unwanted words by using the minus sign (-). When you’re looking for references to John Wayne that don’t talk about his movie career, weed out the word “movie” by searching for “john wayne” –movie. Google offers oodles of other search features and companion programs, all neatly documented in Google: The Missing Manual. Tip: Firefox offers an easy way to conduct a quick search using any word or phrase you see on a Web page. To do so, select a word or short phrase—the words “celery stalk” for instance—right-click the selected item, and then, from the shortcut menu, choose “Search Web for ‘Celery Stalk’.” Firefox sends the phrase to Google and displays the search results.

Although Google’s the most popular search engine by far, it’s not the only game in town. The three biggest contenders are Yahoo (www.yahoo.com), Ask Jeeves (www. askjeeves.com), and Microsoft’s own MSN (www.msn.com).

Printing Sites To quickly print a Web page using Internet Explorer, choose File ➝ Print ➝ Print. In Firefox, choose File ➝ Print ➝ OK. However, when you do this, you often get a page that runs off the paper’s righthand margin. That’s because Web site designers work hard to create sites that look nice on a monitor of any size or resolution (page 106), but they rarely create sites that unfurl themselves neatly onto a piece of paper. If you’re lucky, you may spot a “Print this site” link near the page’s top. Click that for a reformatted page that fits neatly onto a printed page. But should you run across a site that gives you trouble when printing, page 141 explains the best ways to print an entire Web page or a small portion of it.

Saving Information from Web Sites Web sites contain a vast amount of reference material that’s handy to keep around, even when you’re not online. You may want to snag a photo, grab your flight schedule, or save an entire Web page that explains race track betting systems. Those who don’t mind wrestling with a few settings may even want to save several Web pages from a site automatically, stocking your laptop with the newspaper’s business section for your morning commute.

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Saving a portion of a Web site—a single Web page, a photo, or a snippet of text— is easy. Automatically saving a good chunk of Web site takes much more work, although Internet Explorer makes a valiant attempt to help you (for details, see page 393). This section explains how to stuff small bits and pieces of a Web site— or a thick slab of its contents—onto your PC for viewing even when you’re not connected to the Internet. Saving photos Any Web browser lets you save any photo you spot, which can be handy for grabbing and printing out a quick map of Disneyland or adding an album cover to your new They Might Be Giants folder. To grab any image from the Internet, right-click it to display the pop-up shortcut menu. In Internet Explorer, choose Save Picture As; in Firefox, choose Save Image As. Navigate to the folder where you want to save your image and then click Save. Tip: Internet Explorer normally offers to save your right-clicked pictures as JPG files, the same compressed format used by digital cameras. But if you only see an option to save photos as bitmap files— uncompressed files about 10 times as large—fix the problem by flushing your Temporary Internet Files folder (Tools ➝ Internet Options ➝ Delete Files).

Saving text snippets If you want to grab only a few bits of text from a Web page—your flight schedule, for instance—you need to first select the information. To do so, click the information’s top-left corner, and then—while holding down your mouse button—drag across to the passage’s bottom-right corner. The selected information changes color, letting you know what you’ve selected. Next, right-click the selection, copy it (Ctrl+C), and then paste it (Ctrl+V) into the word processor of your choice. Even Notepad (Start ➝ All Programs ➝ Accessories ➝ Notepad) or WordPad (Start ➝ All Programs ➝ Accessories ➝ WordPad) can catch pasted text, which you can then save as a text file. Saving a Web page When you spot something irresistible in a newspaper or magazine, it’s easy enough to tear out that page for safekeeping. You can do the same thing with a Web page, saving it to your hard drive for later reference. Internet Explorer (File ➝ Save As) and Firefox (File ➝ Save Page As) both offer “Save as type” drop-down menus for saving pages in the following formats. • Web Page, complete (*.htm;*.html). This format creates two items: a folder containing all the page’s images, and a file containing the site’s text and HTML codes—the instructions for mixing the images and text to recreate the page. To see the Web page in your browser again, double-click the saved page’s file. Your browser dips into the image folder and recreates the Web page’s contents, just as it looked the day you saved it. 392

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Separating a page into a file and folder can be a tad awkward, though, especially when you save them into an already crowded folder.

Browsing the Web

• Web Archive, single file (*.mht). The best option for capturing an entire page. This format compresses the entire page into a single file, making it much handier to copy to a laptop, another PC, or even a USB drive (page 255). (Firefox doesn’t offer this option, unfortunately, but Internet Explorer does.) • Web Page, HTML only (htm;*.html). Another not-so-useful-for-civilians option. This format copies the file’s text and underlying coding, but leaves out the figures. Opening these types of files when you’re not connected to the Internet shows the text positioned around blank areas where the pictures used to be. If you are online, the pictures appear correctly—if the Web site hasn’t deleted them or moved them to a different place since the time when you saved the page. • Text File (*.txt). This format works great to scrape all the text off a page and place it in a file, ready for editing in a word processor. Then you can tweak the paragraphs, editing them into a neatly formatted document. That makes this option handy for grabbing recipes, directions to a friend’s house, and other important words. Saving parts of a Web site automatically for offline reading Internet Explorer can save a Web site to your PC automatically for your offline viewing pleasure. (It calls this process synchronization.) That’s a great time-saver, since this feature saves you from having to wake up at 4:30 each morning and manually save the 2,900 new pages that appeared overnight on your favorite newspaper’s Web site. But before trying to stuff the entire New York Times onto your laptop for browsing, take heed of a few cautions. Saving an entire Web site can be tricky because you need to let Internet Explorer know where to stop. Web sites contain links to other Web sites, which in turn point to other Web sites in a never-ending spiral of information. By saving an entire Web site, including every site it links to, and all the linked sites on those sites, you could find yourself trying to stuff the entire Internet onto your laptop. Thankfully, Internet Explorer lets you adjust the spigot so that you automatically scoop up a select few pages rather than the whole site. The trick is to identify and save a single page and then decide which of that page’s links should still bring up information when you click it while you’re offline. The following steps take you through the process: Note: Unlike Internet Explorer, Firefox doesn’t offer a built-in way to gather portions of a Web site automatically. The Scrapbook extension (Tools ➝ Options ➝ Get More Extensions) adds that ability, but without the automated scheduler: You must tell Scrapbook each time you want to gather a page and its links.

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1. Bookmark (Favorites ➝ Add to Favorites) the page you want to designate as Page Zero: the page that Internet Explorer uses as the synchronization starting point. This could be your newspaper’s home page, if that’s where you normally begin reading. But if you always jump to a particular spot—the newspaper’s local section, for instance—create a link to that particular page. 2. Right-click the Web page’s name from the Favorites menu (or the Links toolbar), and then choose “Make available offline.” This summons the Offline Favorite wizard, which helps you decide which parts of the site you’ll save and which parts you’ll leave behind. 3. Read the wizard’s introduction page, and then click Next. If you visit this wizard often, banish this introductory page by turning on the “In the future, do not show this introduction screen” checkbox. 4. Decide whether to gather any linked pages, and how many to gather; then click Next. The wizard’s first real question, shown in Figure 13-7, asks whether you want to gather that page’s linked pages, as well. Your choices are pretty straightforward. Figure 13-7: Choosing Yes and then choosing “1” tells your PC to download that linked page, plus every page that’s linked to from that page. That’s a large chunk of information, but it ensures that every link on the downloaded page also brings up more information. Although the wizard lets you download up to three links deep, that level of page-collecting could gather more information than will fit onto your PC (depending, of course, on the size of your hard drive).

• No. Click No to gather just the page itself—the online newspaper’s front page, for example—but none of its linked pages. This option works much like tearing off the front page of a real newspaper and tossing it into your briefcase. You can read the day’s headlines and the first few paragraphs of each story. However, it leaves you dangling when you want to read the rest of an article after that front page teaser.

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Choosing No works great for grabbing blogs, which usually stuff most of their content on one long, flowing page.

Browsing the Web

• Yes. Click Yes to gather that page’s linked pages, as well. Since the wizard’s not, er, magic, it can’t predict which story you’ll find interesting enough to continue reading. So the wizard plays safe by grabbing every page linked to by that first page. This is risky on many sites. Try it on Google News, which links to several hundred newspaper articles, and the download could take several hours. But this may work on small sites or small newspapers. Choosing Yes gives you one more option, also shown in Figure 13-7: how many pages deep do you want to grab? Normally, the wizard leaves the setting at “1,” which grabs all the pages referenced by the first page. That’s fine for most people, since it lets you click any link to see more information. Downloading two links deep grabs not only those same links, but every page linked to by those second-tier pages, as well. Be careful here—grabbing more than one link deep can take a very long time to download, and, depending on the site, fill a huge chunk of your hard drive. 5. Tell the wizard when to synchronize your pages, and then click Next. The wizard gives you three options for synchronizing your pages, as shown in Figure 13-8, top, and explained here: • Only when I choose Synchronize from the Tools menu. This lets you grab the pages whenever you choose Tools ➝ Synchronize. It’s ideal for casual surfers who want to grab the site only occasionally—as well as for experienced Web-heads who want to synchronize several times during the day, perhaps for the morning and evening commutes. • I would like to create a new schedule. This lets you automate the page-grabbing process so that it happens once a day. Click this option and click Next to choose the days and times for your PC to grab the pages, as shown in Figure 13-8, bottom. To have your paper’s front page waiting on your laptop each morning, choose “Every 1 day(s) at 5 AM,” for instance. • Using this existing schedule. This option, if it appears on your screen, offers a drop-down menu for selecting previously created schedules. If you spot a schedule that meets your needs, choose it; otherwise, create your own schedule by using the previous option. 6. Enter a user name and password if the site requires it, and then click Finish. Finally, the wizard asks if the site requires a logon name and password. Enter them, if needed, and then click Finish to close the wizard. Depending on your choices, your site will be waiting for you at the scheduled time or ready for the plucking when you right-click its name from the Favorites menu

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and choose Synchronize. Depending on the level of your links, a broadband connection should be able to grab everything in a few minutes; give it much longer if you’re using a dial-up service. Figure 13-8: The wizard offers three ways to download your requested pages. Top: To choose your own download schedule, choose “I would like to create a new schedule.” That brings up the window below. Bottom: Choose an exact time of day for automatically downloading your selected pages. If you use a dial-up connection, turn on this page’s “If my computer is not connected...” checkbox. It lets your computer dial the Internet at the right time, connect, download your requested pages, and hang up when finished.

To read the site when away from the Internet, choose File then click the link with your stored pages.

➝

Work Offline, and

To cancel an automated synchronization that’s hogging too much space or causing other problems, choose Tools ➝ Synchronize and then turn off the checkbox next to the problem site’s name. Note: If your synchronized site still grabs too much information, you can fine-tune it with some additional, well-hidden settings: Tools ➝ Synchronize ➝ Setup. From the list of synchronized sites, click your site’s name and then choose Properties ➝ Download. That page offers oodles of additional options that Microsoft describes on a page (http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=196646) at its Knowledge Base (page 536) Web site.

Forwarding Sites When you spot a Web page that would be perfect for Uncle George, given his interest in African honey ants, let him know. Most browsers offer two ways to alert 396

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friends to Web sites of interest. Both methods open your email program, create a new message containing either the page itself or its link, and wait for you to address it and then click the Send button. But some subtle differences exist:

Browsing the Web

• Send ➝ Link by Email. Known as Send ➝ Link in Firefox, this method emails only the Web page address, packaged as a clickable icon that directs the recipient to the site. This option doesn’t send any part of the page, just a clickable link that scoots the recipient to the Web page. This method works well when you just want your friend to know about the site itself; it doesn’t matter if the particular page that excited you changes slightly, perhaps showing a different species of honey ants by the time your Uncle clicks the link. • Send ➝ Page by Email. Meant for recipients who might not have a constant Internet connection, this technique sends the Web page (stored in the “Web Page, HTML only” format described on page 393) along with the link. When the recipient opens the link, he sees the Web page’s text and formatting, but not the photos or figures—unless he’s connected to the Internet, in which case his PC dashes off, fetches the images, and properly plugs them into the Web page. (If he’s offline, all he’ll see in place of the images are empty boxes.) This method works best when you want the recipient to read that page’s text as it looked the moment you visited it. For instance, the page may have profiled honey ants in Zimbabwe, and you know Uncle George cares about that particular region only. By clicking the link you emailed, your uncle can read the Zimbabwe article even if the live Web site has already begun profiling Australian honey ants. • File ➝ Save As ➝ Web Page, complete. This option (covered on page 392) lets you save a mirror image of an entire Web page—images and text. After saving the page, you need to manually open your email program, create a new message, and then drag the saved Web page—both its file and the folder containing its files—into your email. Then send it off. The recipient then sees the same, identical Web page you saw and can save it on her hard drive for reference. (Firefox calls this File ➝ Save Page As ➝ Web Page, complete.) This procedure’s a bit more work—both for you and your recipient—but it’s the best way to send a complete replica of the page you want to share. But no matter which method you use, some recipients may have trouble opening your attachment. Emailed links contribute to a large amount of viruses, fraud, and general Internet unhappiness, so many PC security programs (including antivirus programs and some firewalls) either strip your emailed link from the email, prevent your recipient from opening it, or rename the link so it won’t open when double-clicked. To avoid these problems, just copy the site’s link from your browser’s Address bar, shown earlier in Figure 13-5, and then paste the text into the main body of your email message. To do so, select the link by clicking anywhere in the Address bar

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and then press Ctrl+A; copy the selected link by pressing Ctrl+C, and then paste the link into your email message by pressing Ctrl+V. UP TO SPEED

Necessary Netiquette The Internet gathers people from across the world and brings them together in a close-knit social community where nobody can see each other, nobody knows each other, and nobody knows if their compadres are even who they claim to be. That leads to some odd behavior, exclusive to the online world. Here are some etiquette guidelines, slang translations, and general advice to prepare you for what you might encounter when you start clicking away. • Trolls. Like children who throw tantrums for attention, trolls enjoy upsetting people on the Internet. They’ll join conversations in online discussion groups or chat rooms and, while pretending to be sincere, make comments designed to provoke others into responding. Discourage trolls by ignoring them; eventually, they’ll move on to other unsuspecting folks. Responding is only “feeding the troll.” • Flaming. Face-to-face conversations rarely end with violent personal attacks; when talk degrades to “You’re a drooling idiot,” one person usually leaves. On the Internet, though, conflicts often erupt and continue, unabated. The insults that go back and forth are known as “flames.” Before lashing out at an insultflinger, step back—you may be dealing with a troll. • Think before posting. Remember, although you’re just typing letters on a keyboard, you’re really talking to a person. Be polite. If you’re trying to be funny, add an emoticon :-) so your words won’t be mistaken for an insult.

• Emoticons. Email can’t convey emotions in the same way a face-to-face conversation can. To simulate some of the nonverbal clues that people often pepper our real-world chat with, consider using any of these symbols: :-) happy :-( sad :-| confused ;-) wink

• Think of the future. On the Internet, words don’t fade away with time. Before posting, make sure you don’t mind that a future spouse, employer, or date will read them when they search on Google for clues about what kind of person you are. • Acronyms. People often abbreviate common phrases. The site No Slang (www.noslang.com) offers a translation service for many of these often confusing terms. Some of the most popular: ROFL=Rolling on the floor, laughing; IANAL=I am not a lawyer; LOL=Laughing out loud; IMHO=In my humble opinion; AFAIK=As far as I know; RTFM=Read the, er, freakin’ manual. • Lurker. It may seem like everybody’s participating in the fun when you visit a chat room or other Internet-based conversation. Actually, those who post messages represent a very small percentage of participants. Most people log on to read the messages, but not participate. These folks are dubbed lurkers. There’s nothing wrong with being a lurker, and they’re much preferred over trolls and flamers.

That gives your recipient a backup plan. If his email program has trouble with your attachments, he can still paste the link into his Web browser’s Address bar

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and visit the page. It’s not fancy, but it serves your main objective: letting someone know about a site he might enjoy.

Browsing the Web

Downloading Files Many Web sites offer files for downloading: programs, music, books, and just about anything else that can be stored in a computer file. Most sites take one of two approaches to file-downloading: • Automatic download. To simplify the process, some sites graciously offer a button named “Download now” or “Download,” as shown in the top of Figure 13-9. When you click the button, Internet Explorer may ask if you want to Run or Save the file (see Figure 13-9, middle). Choose Save, not Run. (In Firefox’s query window, choose “Save to Disk,” not “Open with.”) Whichever browser you’re using, when Windows’ Save As window appears, choose Save. Figure 13-9: Top: When a site offers a Download or “Download now” button for downloading a file, click the button. Internet Explorer

Firefox

Middle: When Internet Explorer’s File Download window appears (left), choose Save. (Choosing Run makes Windows try to run or play the file immediately, which is a security risk.) In Firefox’s equivalent window (right), choose “Save to Disk.” Bottom: In Windows’ Save As window, navigate to the folder where you’d like to place the file, and then click Save. The file then begins downloading onto your PC, taking anywhere from a few seconds to a few minutes, depending on the file’s size and your connection speed.

• Link. Smaller sites often skip the convenience of an automatic download. Instead, they list the file’s name as a link, often as an underlined word or phrase, as shown in Figure 13-10. You then need to prod your browser into downloading the file. Right-click the file’s link and then choose Save Target As. (Firefox calls it Save Link As.) When Windows’ traditional Save As dialog box appears,

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Browsing the Web

shown at the bottom of Figure 13-9, navigate to the folder where you want to save your file, and then click Save to start the download. Figure 13-10: When a Web page doesn’t offer a download button, download the file yourself by right-clicking the file’s name. From the shortcut menu, choose Save Target As. (Firefox calls it Save Link As.) When the Save As window appears, navigate to any folder you like and then click Save.

If you anticipate saving a lot of downloaded files, open your My Documents folder, and create a new folder named Downloads (File ➝ New ➝ Folder). Downloading files to a Downloads folder makes them much easier to find later.

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Warning: Before opening any downloaded file, be sure to scan it with an up-to-date virus checker (page 486).

Viewing RSS Feeds

Viewing RSS Feeds Internet hounds love to visit their favorite sites, always seeking out fresh content. But if the site doesn’t have anything new, it’s a wasted trip. RSS (which stands for either Really Simple Syndication or Rich Site Summary, depending on who you ask) solves that problem by regularly publishing updates of newly created headlines (and short summaries that usually accompany these headlines). Instead of clicking through sites to see whether they’ve added new material, you glance over headlines (also called “news feeds”) from all your favorite sites. When you spot something interesting, give it a double-click to fetch that specific story for a read. Receiving headlines requires a program called an RSS reader, also known as a news aggregator. Some sit in your Desktop’s taskbar, sending announcements of newly published stories. Others function as standalone programs, letting you browse through interesting feeds during your spare time. Still others are built into browsers like Firefox, as shown in Figure 13-11. Figure 13-11: The Firefox Web browser comes with a built-in RSS reader that creates live bookmarks. Whenever you open Firefox, it dashes off to each site, collects the latest headlines and presents them to you on menus sprouting from the site’s bookmark. That saves you time, letting you jump to the good stories, and ignore those that are boring. When you spot the little orange Live Bookmark symbol in Firefox’s bottom-right corner (circled), you know you’re viewing a site with RSS support. Click the link, and Firefox bookmarks the site, letting you view its RSS list for new stories.

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Viewing RSS Feeds

Not all sites support RSS, however. Sites currently offering RSS support include Flickr (page 161), blogs, and many online magazines and newspapers. RSS is growing in popularity, so expect to see more RSS live bookmark symbols in Firefox, like the one circled in Figure 13-11.

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chapter

Chapter 14

14

Networking

Setting up a home network used to be about as much fun as going to the dentist. Thanks to the complex patchwork of cables and arcane settings that had to be fiddled with, you really did need to be something like a rocket scientist—or at least a seasoned network administrator—to link up all your PCs. Nowadays, thankfully, Windows XP has made things a whole lot easier, especially when it comes to the main reason most people need a network: sharing an Internet connection and one printer among multiple PCs. As an added bonus, a network lets you access files from any computer connected to it, quickly shuttling information back and forth without leaving your chair. This chapter explains how to connect your PCs on a network that’s wired, wireless, or a mix. You’ll learn how to choose the right network for your needs, buy the right equipment, hook everything up, set up Windows to play nicely with your new toys, and keep it all securely password-protected. You’ll also get a quick course in how to operate your network, including copying files between different PCs, sharing printers and folders, and creating shortcuts for accessing your data more quickly. (If you’re not looking for anything fancy, you might want to head straight to the “Networking Two PCs” section on page 448, which gives you a quick course in creating a cheap, on-the-fly network between two PCs, using whatever you happen to have in your laptop bag. MacGyver would be proud.) Note: This chapter gives you everything you need to get started setting up a home network, but if you’re determined to get the most out of all the PCs on your network, and you want to do things like play music on your stereo, mix in a Mac or two, and add backup storage, check out Home Networking: The Missing Manual. 403

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Choosing a Network

Choosing a Network Strangely enough, neither the kind of computers you have, nor the size of your wallet holds the trump card over the type of networking gear you need. Everything boils down to the location of your PCs. Are they all in the same room? Two adjoining rooms? On opposite ends of the house? Or were you hoping to use your laptop in two or three different rooms? If your PCs are fairly close to each other—say, on different sides of the same room—you’ll want to set yourself up with a wired network. Connecting your PCs with wires creates the cheapest, fastest, and most dependable network possible. If, on the other hand, your PCs are in different rooms, out of wire’s reach, you should consider the alternative method: a wireless network. Wireless networks bypass wires by broadcasting information to PCs using radio waves; the PCs translate the waves back into files or Internet access. Don’t be afraid if you have a few adjacent PCs in one spot and one or two humming away in a back room, out of wire’s reach. Many people mix wired and wireless networks, a fairly easy task as technological advances pack more and more features into the same small box that lies at the heart of a network: the router (more on that device in a moment). The rest of this section explains these different kinds of networks—wired, wireless, and mixed—in more detail. As you read this chapter, grab a piece of paper and sketch out a floor plan showing your PCs’ locations, and the location of your broadband modem. Think about where you want you and your PCs positioned, and then make your decision. Note: Don’t have broadband? See the box “Networks and Dial-up Connections” on page 412 for suggestions on networking if you’re still living in dial-up land.

Wired Networks Wired networks come in two main varieties: Ethernet, which uses cheap and easyto-use network cables, and Powerline, which backpacks on the wiring already in your home’s electric system. Ethernet When most people talk about wired networks, they’re talking about Ethernet—the most popular networking standard for the past 25 years—a lifetime, in computing terms. Ethernet is cheap, easy to install, and the fastest way to shuffle information from one computer to another. It links together computers in offices and homes worldwide. When you check into hotels that offer Internet access, the broadband signal is usually piped through an Ethernet port into your room. Ethernet cables, also sometimes called network cables, are the bloodlines that help route data across an Ethernet network; these cables look similar to plain old telephone cables, but with thicker plastic plugs on the ends. 404

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Most PCs (and Macs, by the way) come with a built-in Ethernet port (see page 43), which gives you a place to plug in the cable. If your PC lacks an Ethernet port, you can install one fairly easily; mass production has made them the cheapest adapters on the market (see page 412 for details on how to install an Ethernet adapter).

Choosing a Network

Ethernet’s biggest shortcoming? Having to run all those wires through your home. If your PCs are in different rooms, you might want to summon an electrician and get an estimate of what it would cost to snake cables through walls, ceilings, and floors. Some people tuck the cables beneath carpeting; others staple them along the floorboards and hope nobody notices. Powerline (HomePlug) Although Ethernet easily wins the “Best Networking” award for its price, speed, and popularity, it assumes people have no qualms about stringing wires through their homes or offices. To save people from trying to tuck wires under their carpeting, an alternative standard called Powerline takes advantage of the hidden wires already connecting every room in your home: your electrical system and its conveniently positioned power outlets. Note: You might sometimes see Powerline referred to as HomePlug—that’s the name of the official networking standard that all Powerline devices use. Some hardware makers also slap their own names, like HomeLink or PlugLink, on top of their Powerline products.

A Powerline adapter, shown in Figure 14-1, looks sort of like an electric bar of soap with a network port. Plug the adapter into any power outlet, and you’ve instantly added an Ethernet port to the room. Of course, you need a pair of these things— one for each PC—to set up a two-PC network; add more to include additional PCs. Powerline adapters reduce your wiring needs to a short Ethernet cable to reach from your wall outlet to each PC on your network. Best of all, when you move your PC to another room, simply unplug the adapter and plug it into the other room: instant portability. The adapters include built-in security to keep your network from spilling over to the neighbor’s outlets—especially important if you live in an apartment building. Before buying a Powerline adapter for every outlet in your home, garage, and outdoor kitchen, however, be aware of a few drawbacks that come with this technology: • Expense. Each adapter will set you back around $35, and you need one for each PC. And that just connects the PCs. To inject Internet signals into your home wiring, you need yet another Powerline adapter. • Speed. At top speeds of 14 Mbps, and actual speeds of around 5 to 10 Mbps, Powerline adapters are fine for sharing a high-speed Internet signal between a few PCs. But that rate is kind of pokey for moving large files from one PC to another, especially if you’ve grown used to, say, your iPod’s transfer rates of

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around 400 Mbps. The latest HomePlug standard, dubbed “HomePlug AV,” calls for an upgrade to 200 Mbps, an eagerly anticipated improvement scheduled to arrive in the first half of 2006. Figure 14-1: Sold under the names “HomePlug,” “Powerline,” “PlugLink,” and, most charmingly of all, “Wall-plugged Ethernet Bridge,” these adapters conveniently convert power outlets into network ports, keeping you from stringing cables from room to room. Buy one for your laptop, and plug it into any outlet, letting you work from anywhere in the house. They’re easy to combine with Ethernet and/or wireless networks, as well, letting you add PCs to spots that your network doesn’t quite reach.

• Outlets. Powerline adapters must plug directly into an electrical outlet, not a power strip or an extension cord. And if you’ve added a “power line conditioner” to your home theater setup, forget about HomePlug—the conditioner treats the HomePlug’s networking signal as noise and filters it out. Note: Don’t confuse HomePlug with HomePNA, a relatively obscure networking standard that runs lowspeed network signals through phone lines.

Wireless (WiFi) Wireless networks, often called WiFi networks, bypass the need for cables by shooting your information through the air from PC to PC. With WiFi, it’s just as easy to browse the Internet from an outdoor patio as it is from an office desk. Many coffee shops and hotels offer free wireless Internet access, and many new laptops are coming with WiFi capability built-in (it’s also pretty easy to add, as you’ll learn in a moment). Unfortunately, air doesn’t carry information nearly as well as copper wires, giving wireless a few limitations: • Range. As with radio stations, wireless signals fade with distance. Through open air, the signals can reach up to 1,500 feet away. Place a few walls between your PCs and the transmitter that broadcasts your wireless signal (usually a wireless router; page 409), and the signals may be stopped cold. Everything depends on the structure of your house: the number of walls, the shape of the rooms, the location of wall studs, and even the pipes inside in the walls.

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• Speed. The fastest wireless networks are still 20 times slower than the fastest wired networks.

Choosing a Network

FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTION

Megabits (Mbps) vs. Megabytes (MB) What’s the difference between a “megabit” and a “megabyte”? Techies usually describe storage size in megabytes (MB); 256 MB is a popular size for USB keychain drives, for instance. But when measuring network speeds, the techies switch to megabits, or megabits per second (Mbps), which measures the rate at which data travels across a network. How long that trip takes can vary quite a bit depending on what kind of connection you’re using. Eight megabits equal one megabyte, so divide megabits by 8 to come up with the megabyte equivalent. But forget the techtalk. With network speeds, the actual meaning of the term isn’t nearly as important as comparing different types of network’s speed potential.

For example, transferring an album (about 40 MB) to an iPod takes about 10 seconds with USB 2.0 (capacity: 480 Mbps). The same album would take about 40 seconds over a standard Ethernet link (100 Mbps); nearly 2 minutes to fly over a WiFi “g” network (54 Mbps; see page 406 for more about WiFi); and a little under 10 minutes when traveling along our ancestors’ pokey USB 1.1 cables (12 Mbps). This table compares the theoretical maximum speeds of the different networks mentioned in this chapter (plus a few others for comparison’s sake). Networks never run at their theoretical maximum, due to things like the distance from a WiFi or Powerline transmitter, the amount of traffic flowing through the wires, and the quality of the adapter. When looking at these pie-in-the-sky figures, count on receiving anywhere from 40 to 80 percent of their rated speed.

Network Type

Maximum Speed

Bluetooth

1 Mbps

Broadband

5 Mbps

Wireless b (802.11b)

11 Mbps

USB 1.1

12 Mbps

HomePlug Powerline 1

14 Mbps

Wireless g (802.11g)

54 Mbps

Ethernet 100 (Fast)

100 Mbps

HomePlug Powerline AV

200 Mbps

FireWire (1394)

400 Mbps

USB 2.0

480 Mbps

Ethernet 1000 (Giga)

1,000 Mbps

• Expense. Wireless networks require one wireless transmitter (often built into a router) and a wireless adapter on each PC to pick up the signal. While costs for all this WiFi gear have been dropping, setting up a wireless network will usually cost you about 20 to 30 percent more than a wired Ethernet network.

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• Interference. Wireless equipment shares the same radio frequency as cordless telephones, microwave ovens, fluorescent lights, and even other nearby wireless networks, including Bluetooth (page 452). When the signals interfere with each other, the network speed drops. If you’re nuking some popcorn and talking to your sister on a cordless phone, your online poker game may become unbearably slow. UP TO SPEED

Wireless Networking Speeds Wireless networking gear comes in two main speeds: the older, and slower, 802.11b standard (maximum speed: 11 Mbps), and the newer, five-times-as-fast, 802.11g variety (54 Mbps). But don’t count on ever enjoying either of these connections at their full speeds. Although both standards offer a theoretical range of 1,500 feet in an open field and 300 feet indoors, the signal rarely arrives intact. It’s a rare and happy day when the signal reaches from one end of a house to another at full-strength. Parts of the signal disappear when they hit your wall’s pipes, electric cables, and metal inserts, forcing the transmitter to resend missing parts. That slows everything down until all parts of the signal arrive. The highest speeds arrive only when you’ve got a straight, line-of-sight connection between transmitter and receiver— what you might get when you finally move into that artsy downtown loft, for example. The speed of your network doesn’t matter much if you’re just browsing the Internet; even your broadband signal rarely moves into your home faster than 5 Mbps. But you’ll feel the crunch when copying files between PCs (or when trying to route a hefty video file between your PC and a network-connected TV). In either of those cases, you can easily

experience network lulls, since the data you’re moving is, in effect, larger than the size of your network pipes. If you’ve got a mix of “g” and “b” equipment—say, a gflavored wireless router (page 409) and a b-rated wireless adapter (page 412) on your laptop—the network will drop down to the lower speed. One more network speed oddity: today’s stores carry super-fast-but-experimental “MIMO” and “Pre-N” gear that promise even more speed and greater range. Since the powers-that-be are still thrashing out the next upgrade to the WiFi standard—called 802.11n— manufacturers simply guess at the specifications, and release their equipment early with a Pre N or MIMO name. (MIMO stands for Multiple-Input Multiple-Output.) Buying equipment that uses experimental standards is risky business, though. These devices do offer higher speeds, but only when talking to other gear that uses the same company’s standard. But even when not working at those tweaked higher speeds, they’re still compatible with the older standards used by every company. Finally, the manufacturers all promise to release firmware upgrades (see page 533) that offers full compatibility with the real 802. 11n standard when it arrives in late 2006.

• Security. Unless you live in a windowless, concrete-and-rebar building, your wireless broadcasts won’t stop at your home’s walls. They almost always spill over into your neighbor’s homes and apartments, as well. To keep these folks from accessing your network, you need to encrypt your wireless network with a password, an undertaking many find intimidating (full and friendly details await you on page 426). Even with its faults, wireless networks can be pretty darn attractive when you find yourself trying to snake wires through heater vents, attics, drywall, or basements.

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Note: Wireless mice (see page 73) and keyboards (see page 60) also communicate using radio waves. However, they chat on a different frequency, so they don’t interfere with a standard wireless network.

Networking Hardware: What You Need

Mixing Wired and Wireless Some people are lucky enough to stick with wired networks all the way; others choose wireless to string together distant PCs. But many people find it easiest to combine both: connecting their closest PCs with wires, adding some wireless capability to serve roving laptops, and tossing in a few Powerline adapters to service far off nooks that neither wires nor wireless can reach. Creating a network often turns into a game of mix and match to reach every place in the house. Don’t think you need to be a purist and go completely with one or the other.

Networking Hardware: What You Need Regardless of whether you choose wired, wireless, or a combination, your network needs the following ingredients: • A device that routes all your network traffic. Most people use a wireless router, which not only connects the PCs but lets them share an Internet connection. Confusingly, a “wireless” router almost always includes Ethernet ports, so it can connect computers wirelessly or wirefully. • A network adapter for each PC (so that it can receive the network’s signal). • A connection system, either cable or wireless, to connect each PC’s network adapter to the router. The next section explains each part in detail, and helps you figure out the equipment you already have and what to put on your shopping list.

Router The router sits in the middle of your network like the body of a spider, with virtual legs extending out to each PC. Packaged inside a small box, as shown in Figure 14-2, today’s modern router offers a spot to plug in each PC, as well as a place to plug in your DSL or cable modem. With those items connected, the router serves as traffic director, constantly coordinating the information flowing between each PC, the Internet, your printer, and, depending on your router, even the wireless laptop on the patio. Routers come in several shapes and with different capabilities, but the most convenient by far is a router with wireless access. These are called wireless routers, and they let you plug in PCs where you need the fast, reliable speeds of a wired connection, while still letting you roam the house with your WiFi-equipped laptop. With

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a wireless router, you can transform your home from a one-PC-connected-to-oneInternet-connection outfit into a thriving, multi-PC setup, as shown in Figure 14-3. Figure 14-2: A wireless router offers the best of both wireless and wired networks. Top: The back of the router contains ports to plug in network cables from nearby PCs, as well as a cable from a broadband modem. The router splits the Internet signal among all the plugged in PCs and lets each PC share each other’s files. Bottom: An antenna broadcasts the same information to any PCs connected with wireless adapters. The lights on the front of the router turn on when you plug in a PC, letting you see at a glance which PCs are turned on. For extra excitement, the lights flash as the data moves between PCs and the Internet.

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Tip: All modern routers come with a handful of ports, which is where you plug in the PCs you want to connect (via Ethernet cable) to your network. Buy a router with more ports than you need. That gives you room to add your relative’s PC when she visits, as well as any other PCs, network printers, or other goodies. If you do run out of ports, buy a piece of networking gear called a “switch,” which plugs into one port and expands it into four or more openings. It’s the networking world’s equivalent of a powerstrip—an easy way to turn one socket into several.

Old setup

Figure 14-3: Left: Before installing your network, your PC connects directly to your broadband modem.

New setup

Internet

Internet

Cable or DSL Modem Ethernet cable

Ethernet cable

Networking Hardware: What You Need

Cable or DSL Modem Wireless Router

Right: Installing a wireless router lets you “branch” off that Internet connection, adding more PCs either with or without cables.

WiFi equipped laptop

Desktop PC

Desktop PC

Desktop PC

A router offers a layer of protection to your Web browsing, as well. Normally, your PC faces the Internet directly, exposing any of Windows’ unpatched or undiscovered security holes. With a router taking your PC’s place as the first link between your home and the Internet, some of the Internet’s base-level attacks hit only the router—rather than your computer. But attacks come in many forms, so a router’s no reason to stop using your software firewall, like the one built-in to Windows XP (see page 490) or even a much stronger one from a third-party firm like ZoneAlarm (www.zonelabs.com). Neither routers nor firewalls protect you from viruses, so you still need an antivirus program (page 486) to protect you from emailed or downloaded threats. Buying recommendation Buy an 802.11g wireless router with four ports. Computer stores are packed with a wide variety of routers, all featuring different looks, prices, and technologies. The best news for shoppers: regardless of who the manufacturer is, all networking gear that follows the 802.11g standard can communicate with other 802.11g gear. Your biggest challenge may be interpreting the marketing chatter that sometimes makes it tough to understand what kind of router you’re buying. Look for any of the following terms: “802.11g wireless router,” “wireless G broadband router,” or “wireless cable/DSL router with 4-port switch.” It’s all marketing-speak for the same thing. Chapter 14: Networking PCs: The Missing Manual, eMatter Edition Copyright © 2008 O’Reilly & Associates, Inc. All rights reserved.

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In the past, most routers left out wireless capability or charged considerably more for it. But now that wireless technology fits onto a few inexpensive chips, more and more manufacturers are adding wireless to their offerings. Even if you’re just looking to set up a plain old Ethernet network, go ahead and buy a wireless router: That way, when you get that new WiFi-ready laptop, you won’t have to pony up for a new router. UP TO SPEED

Networks and Dial-up Connections If you have only dial-up access, you can still buy a router to connect your PCs and let them talk to each other. But a less expensive method may be to buy a switch instead of a router. A switch does everything a modern router does, but lacks the Internet connection. And if you’re connecting just two PCs, you can network even more simply by connecting them with a special “crossover” cable. Check out the “Networking Two PCs” section (page 448) for more money-saving tips.

Once you’ve connected your PCs, share one PC’s dial-up connection with the rest of the network by running Windows XP’s Network Setup Wizard (page 419). Dial-up connections don’t have much oomph, making it tough for a whole household of people to surf the Web at once. But at the very least, a shared dial-up connection lets one person check his e-mail while another surfs the Web.

Network Adapter Every PC on the network needs a network adapter, a mouthpiece of sorts that lets it tell the router when the PC wants information from the Internet or from another PC. Adapters come in two forms: • Wired network adapters. These include Ethernet ports for plugging in cables that connect to the router. • Wireless network adapters. Wireless network adapters always contain antennas, but sometimes the antenna hides inside the adapter itself. Your PC may already have a network adapter, either wired or wireless, as both types come in these three flavors: • Built-in. Many PCs and most laptops already include a built-in wired network adapter. It looks just like a phone jack, but slightly wider (see Figure 1-19; the network port is labeled “Network”). If your PC already connects to a broadband network, it’s most likely via this built-in network port. You can add a built-in network port with some fairly simple surgery: open your PC’s case and slide a network card into one of its slots, as explained on page 27. Note: Some stores refer to a network adapter as a “Peripheral Component Interconnect (PCI) Ethernet Fast card.” Others call them a “Network Interface Card” (NIC). But they’re all the same thing: a place to plug in your network cable.

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• USB plug-in. If you need to add a network adapter and you’d rather not remove your PC’s case, buy a USB network adapter. One end plugs into your PC’s or laptop’s USB port (see page 34); the adapter’s other end accepts an Ethernet cable.

Networking Hardware: What You Need

• PC Card. When your laptop doesn’t have a built-in network port, you can plug one into a USB port, described above. If you’re running short on USB ports, though, buy a PC Card network adapter and slide it into one of your laptop’s PC Card slots. Network cards are widely available at computer stores, some office supply stores, and online at stores like Amazon (www.amazon.com). Network cards that mount inside your PC cost from $10 to $25, USB adapters range from $25 to $50, and PC Cards average from $40 to $50. (For wireless, add an extra $30 or so, and even more for the faster speeds.) Tip: Buy a wireless adapter that’s the same speed as your wireless router. Also, although different brands of wireless equipment are compatible, the installation often goes more smoothly when the wireless adapter and the wireless router come from the same manufacturer.

Ethernet Cables Most routers and network cards don’t come with cables, so you must buy one for each PC. Network cables are sometimes flat, sometimes tube-shaped, but they all end with a plug slightly thicker than a phone plug. It’s officially called an RJ-45 connector. (By the way, network cables look much like phone cables, but they’re not interchangeable.) The stores refer to networking cables as “Cat 5,” “Cat 5e,” “Category 5” or the wacky “100BaseT,” but they’re all the same thing. Most come in standard office gray, but blue’s growing in popularity, too. Note: Don’t buy an Ethernet cable that’s labeled as a “cross-over” cable. Those cables are wired differently than regular Ethernet cables, which make them good for only one thing: directly connecting two PCs without a router. Page 448 tells you how to create a simple, two-PC network.

If you’ll be running cable outdoors, over the roof, or any place exposed to sunlight, buy cables created specifically for outdoor exposure. Sunlight eats away at the plastic covering on the indoor cables. For indoor cables, you may be struck with the wild idea of running Ethernet cables from room to room through your home’s heating or cooling ducts. Although it’s certainly been done, make sure to buy fire-resistant cable. Regular cable can catch fire, spreading the flames quickly to other rooms. Fire-resistant cable’s easy to find and many local safety codes require it for work environments.

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Tip: Check out WireTracks (www.wiretracks.com) if you’re looking for ways to hide your network cables. The company sells hollow baseboard molding, chair rail molding, and door casing. Favored by home theater buffs, it’s quite a few steps up the elegance ladder from a stapler gun.

If a certain wiring project seems insurmountable, call an electrician. Many are well-versed in stringing and hiding Ethernet cables. No matter what type of cable you buy, watch its length: standard Ethernet cable can’t be longer than about 300 feet. Buying recommendation Buy Ethernet cables long enough to reach comfortably from each PC you want to plug directly into your router. Each PC needs its own cable. If you’re having difficulty estimating lengths, tie a string around a thick book and place it near your broadband modem. (That’s where the router will sit.) Then measure the length of the string as it snakes from the router to each PC. Tip: Be sure to buy longer cables than you think you need. You’ll be routing this stuff along the bottom of your walls and behind furniture. It’s easy to coil up the leftover few feet or so with twist-ties and leave them behind either your router or PC. FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTION

Those Blinking Router Lights I thought the lights on my broadband router blinked whenever I was sending or receiving information from the Internet. But my router’s lights blink all the time, even late at night when I’m not using my PC. What gives? The router’s lights flash because life on the Internet continues long after you’ve left your keyboard. Some of your software “calls home,” looking for updates. If you’ve left a Web browser open, it may be checking for RSS updates (see page 401). And don’t forget your e-mail program, which, depending on how you’ve configured it, may be constantly checking for new mail in the background.

However, many of those blinking lights aren’t caused by your own PC, but by the Internet itself. Viruses and worms constantly prowl the Internet, hoping to find an unprotected PC. Similarly, some people run programs that try to break into every PC on the Internet, hoping to find unprotected networks. When you see those router lights flash, you know why you need a good software firewall (page 490) to protect you from the nasties. Some newer routers include built-in firewalls for an extra protective punch.

Setting Up a Simple Home Network Once you have a network’s basic ingredients, you’re ready to join the networking party. The following steps show you how to create a home network that serves almost everybody’s needs. At first, the work might seem like you’re putting together a large and complicated puzzle that doesn’t ever finish. But have faith: you only have to go through this hassle once.

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1. Turn off your PCs. Just like surgery, setting up a network works better when the patients are anesthetized, unable to protest.

Setting Up a Simple Home Network

2. Install network adapters for PCs that need them. The wireless router is friendly to wired and wireless connections alike. You just need to make sure that every PC on your network has some kind of network adapter (page 412). If you do need to add one, you’ve got three choices, described on that same page. Whichever method you go with, Windows usually picks up on what you’ve plugged in and helps you install the drivers (page 514) from the adapter’s installation CD. Chapter 16 has troubleshooting advice if your machine doesn’t seem to recognize your newly installed adapter. 3. Plug in the wireless router. Remove the router from its packaging and find its power cord and installation CD, then plug your router into an electrical outlet near your broadband modem. Routers are designed to turn on automatically; they don’t have on/off switches. (That lets them jump back to life after a power outage.) Also make sure your router’s within reach of at least one PC—at least as close as the length of the network cable that will be connecting them. 4. Connect your broadband modem to the router. If your cable or DSL modem is currently connected to a PC, unplug the Ethernet cable from the PC. Then plug the newly freed cable into the port on your router that’s reserved for the modem. That port’s usually off to one side, as shown in Figure 14-2, top, and often bears the name “modem,” “Internet,” or the acronym “WAN” for “Wide Area Network.” (The Internet’s a very wide network.) Your network is a “LAN” (a Local Area Network), by contrast, since it’s limited to your residence or office. Note: Network cables make a little “click” as they lock in place. Give each cable a slight tug to make sure it won’t fall out.

5. Connect your PCs to your router. You can connect your PCs to the router in a number of ways: • Network cable. Routers come with a row of numbered ports reserved for your PCs. Connect a cable between your first PC’s network adapter and one of the numbered ports; then repeat for your other PCs. • Powerline adapters. Plug one Powerline adapter into an electrical outlet near your router, and then connect a network cable between the Powerline adapter’s network port and a numbered port on your router. You only need this one Powerline adapter to inject the network signal into your home’s electric wires. Chapter 14: Networking PCs: The Missing Manual, eMatter Edition Copyright © 2008 O’Reilly & Associates, Inc. All rights reserved.

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Plug your other Powerline adapters into electrical outlets near your out-ofthe-way PCs; then connect a network cable between the Powerline adapter and those PC’s network adapters. • Wireless adapters. Depending on your wireless adapter, it plugs into your USB port, your laptop’s PC Card slot, or a slot inside your PC. If you’ve got a really modern PC or laptop, your wireless adapter might already be installed (Look for anything in your machine’s documentation that says something about your computer being WiFi-ready or WiFi-capable.) 6. Turn on your PCs. As soon as Windows wakes up on your PC, it should sense the router, which is feeding it an Internet connection. Your wired PCs might even be able to fire up a browser at this point. If not, they will after the next step. PCs with WiFi adapters will display a balloon in the corner of the screen, shown in the top of Figure 14-4, saying, “Wireless networks detected.” 7. On your wireless PC, click the message balloon to see a list of the wireless networks within range—including the one created by your newly installed wireless router. The Wireless Network Connection dialog box opens, shown in the middle of Figure 14-4, listing the nearby wireless networks. WiFi-laptop owners will become very familiar with this step. You’ll see the message balloon whenever Windows sniffs out the presence of a nearby wireless network, be it inside a coffee shop, hotel lobby, or airport. It may even appear when your ever-helpful laptop tries to connect with your neighbor’s WiFi network. If the message balloon disappears before you have a chance to click it, the detected network didn’t necessarily disappear. You can always see nearby wireless networks by going to the Control Panel (Start ➝ Control Panel), doubleclick Network Connections, and then, from the shortcut pane along the left side, choose View Available Wireless Networks. That same Wireless Network Connection dialog box comes into view. 8. Find your wireless network in the “Choose a wireless network” list, click its name, and then click the Connect button. Repeat this step for all your PCs that connect to the router using a wireless adapter. The Wireless Network Connection window lists all the nearby wireless networks that Windows notices. If you see more than one network listed, your job is to guess which one belongs to your newly installed wireless router. Here are the clues: • If only one wireless network is listed, you’ve found it. Click its name, click the Connect button, and then move to the next step.

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• Your wireless network probably has the strongest wireless signal. Since you’re so close to the wireless router, check the signal strength meters along the window’s right edge (Figure 14-4, middle). The little bars fill up as the signal grows stronger, so look for the network name with the fullest signal strength meter.

Look again for networks Wireless network name (SSID) Not password protected Password required Strong signal Signal strength meters Weak signal Connect to network

Setting Up a Simple Home Network

Figure 14-4: Top: This balloon lets you know when Windows senses a wireless network within range. Click the balloon to see the wireless networks it found. Middle: The window lists each network’s name, known as its SSID (Security Set Identifier), along with the network’s signal strength. (The stronger the signal, the higher the signal strength meter.) Password-protected networks have a padlock icon, meaning you must enter a password to connect to them. Networks without a password, called unsecured networks, let you log on without a password. To connect to a network, click the network’s name and then click the Connect button at the bottom of the window. If you move to the coffee shop across the street, click “Refresh network list” to make sure you’re still within range. Bottom: Windows lets you know when the wireless connection begins working.

• Your new wireless network isn’t password-protected, since you haven’t yet entered a password. (That comes later in these steps.) • Your new wireless network might be named after your router’s manufacturer—Linksys, for example, or Belkin. Chapter 14: Networking PCs: The Missing Manual, eMatter Edition Copyright © 2008 O’Reilly & Associates, Inc. All rights reserved.

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When you connect to the network, the word “Connected” appears over your connected network’s signal strength meter on the right. 9. Run Windows Network Setup Wizard, covered in the next section, on every PC on your network. Windows Network Setup Wizard fine-tunes the network settings on each PC, introducing them to the router to make sure they can talk to the Internet, as well as share the files (page 423) stored in each PC’s Shared Documents folder. The wizard also flips some switches to let any networked PC send files to any other PC’s printer (page 437). Finally, the wizard turns on Windows XP’s builtin firewall to protect your network. At this point, all your computers should be able to connect to the Internet. 10. Secure your wireless and Powerline connections. Depending on your network connection, you may need to add security to keep passing strangers (or the neighbors) from waltzing in on your network. Here’s the rundown: • Ethernet cable. Ethernet cables are pretty airtight. No extra security is required. POWER USERS’ CLINIC

When Your Router Needs a Password Most routers work fine when you follow the steps listed above. But a few Internet Service Providers (ISPs) pipe their Internet signal to you using a technology known as PPPoE (Point-to-Point Protocol over Ethernet). That fancy language boils down to one main thing on your end: you need to enter your user name and password before using the Internet. Some ISPs also require you to enter a service name. (You’ll know you’re in PPPoE land when you sign up with your ISP; they’ll tell you they use PPPoE in the setup materials they send you.) Since your broadband modem now connects to a router rather than a PC, your router now needs to know those brief tidbits of information. You may have forgotten your user name and password after dutifully typing them in when first hooking up your PC to the DSL or cable modem. Or perhaps your ISP’s technician entered them for you when hooking up your PC. If you

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don’t recall your user name and password now, look on the service contract papers your ISP left you after setting up your broadband modem. If you’re stuck, call your ISP’s customer support line; explain that you’re adding a router and ask for any settings you may need. (They’ve heard this question many times from frustrated subscribers, and they’re used to giving it out.) Be sure to write everything down, confirming the spelling, before hanging up. Then fire up your router’s installation CD and run its setup program. When the program asks if you have a PPPoE modem, say Yes; then fill in the boxes for your user name, password, and, if your ISP requires it, the service name required to connect. For more information about how to configure routers, check out Home Networking: The Missing Manual.

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• Powerline. Powerline adapters send your network’s signal through your home’s electrical wiring—which eventually leads off your roof, onto the telephone pole, and into your neighbor’s homes. To keep others from entering your network, add passwords—an easy task that’s covered on page 432.

The Network Setup Wizard

• Wireless. If any or all of your PCs connect to your router via WiFi, you need to secure your network by adding a password (to your router and each of your WiFi-connected PCs) and giving your network its own name, as described on page 426. Securing a wireless network is much easier to do when connected—temporarily—via a wired connection. All you need to do is plug an Ethernet cable between any single PC and the router, and then you can whip through all this security business. Once you’re finished securing your network, you can then unplug the cable and live a full wireless life.

The Network Setup Wizard Up to this point, you’ve dealt with the hardware side of networking. You’ve bought the necessary equipment, plugged it in, and fired it up. Now it’s time to inform Windows XP of your handiwork, letting it sniff out all the connections, flip all the right switches, and make sure the PCs on your network can do these things: • Share an Internet connection. The wizard checks the networking settings to make sure each PC can get online and surf the Web, send email, and so on. • Set up Windows XP’s firewall. The wizard turns on Windows XP’s firewall to protect each PC’s Internet connection from intruders. • Name each PC. The wizard lets you assign a name to each PC. That lets you find Matilda’s PC by looking for her PC’s name on your PC’s menus. • Share files and folders among your connected PCs. The wizard sets up each PC’s Shared Documents folder as “community property.” Each PC’s owner can share files with other networked PCs simply by copying or moving them into their PC’s Shared Documents folder. But it preserves each owner’s privacy by leaving all the other folders off limits to other networked PCs. • Share any connected printers. If one PC has a printer attached, the wizard tells the other PCs about it so they can print to it, as well. Since all these tasks can be daunting for everybody but computer technicians, Microsoft supplies you with the Network Setup Wizard to handle the chores. The wizard uses some odd language, though, so be prepared. It refers to a router as a “residential gateway,” for some reason. And it refers to network adapters as “network cards,” forgetting that adapters now come in a variety of forms, including USB port plug-ins, Powerline plugs, and PC Cards for laptops. If you’ve created a network with a router at its heart (as covered earlier in this chapter), run the wizard on every PC. It doesn’t matter which PC you choose first. But if you’ve created a network without a router—one PC hogs the broadband

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Internet connection and you want the other networked PCs to share that bandwidth—first run the wizard on the PC with the Internet connection. Then run the wizard on the other PCs. To launch the wizard on any PC, choose Start ➝ Control Panel, and then doubleclick the Network Setup Wizard icon. (If the wizard’s not listed separately, open Network Connections and then choose “Set up a home or small office network” from the task pane along the left edge; see Figure 14-5, top.) Figure 14-5: Top: Start the Network Setup Wizard by clicking the “Set up a home or small office network” link in the task pane’s Network Tasks area. Bottom: Select the option that best describes how your network will connect with the Internet. Choose the first option to set up Internet Connection Sharing, letting other PCs connect through this PC’s connection. Choose the second option if you’ve connected a router to your broadband modem. And choose the third option for a closed network that doesn’t connect with the Internet.

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The wizard starts with a brief welcome message, and then walks you through the screens described next.

The Network Setup Wizard

“Before you continue” The wizard starts by listing the three steps you must take before handing it the reins: • Install your network adapters and cables. You’ve done this in the previous sections. • Turn on your printers and broadband modem. Modems don’t have on/off switches, so just make sure yours is plugged into the wall. • Connect to the Internet. Since you’ve connected your router to the broadband connection, you’ve essentially already connected the network to the Internet. The wizard’s job is to make sure all the PCs know about your handiwork so they can all share the same connection. If you’re sharing a dial-up connection— not using a router—now’s the time to connect to the Internet. Feel free to click the “checklist for creating a network” link near the top of the window. Doing so calls up Windows XP’s Help and Support center, which sums up, in Microsoft-ese, much of the same information you’ve read so far in this chapter. When you click Next, the wizard searches for your PC’s Internet connection, which brings you to the next window.

“Select a connection method” The wizard runs a few tests on your PC to verify you’ve got a working Internet connection; it then offers three different ways to share that connection with other PCs on your network (see Figure 14-5, bottom). The wizard actually takes a guess at the sharing scheme it thinks you want; feel free to change the selection if the wizard’s a lousy guesser. Your choices include: • This computer connects directly to the Internet. Choose this option if you want to share this particular PC’s Internet connection with one or more other PCs. This option assumes you don’t have a router and that you want to set up Internet Connection Sharing, covered on page 435, which allows every networked PC to share this particular PC’s connection. This method spares you the expense of a router, but it also means you must leave this PC turned on whenever any other PC wants to connect to the Internet. • This computer connects to the Internet through a residential gateway or through another computer on my network. Choose this option if you’ve installed a router (Windows calls it a “residential gateway”), which splits up your Internet signal and serves it up to each PC on your network. When you run the Network Setup Wizard on your other PCs, choose this option, as well. • Other. Choose this option if you’re not trying to share Internet access. You may just want to connect a few PCs to share files or a printer, for instance (see page 423). Chapter 14: Networking PCs: The Missing Manual, eMatter Edition Copyright © 2008 O’Reilly & Associates, Inc. All rights reserved.

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The Network Setup Wizard

To visualize what you’re selecting, click the “View an example” links (listed below the first two choices). The wizard shows a picture of a typical home’s floor plan, the positions of the PCs, and the location of the Internet connection. Make your selection and then click Next. Note: If you choose the first option, intending to share this PC’s connection with the other networked PCs through Internet Connection Sharing (page 435), the wizard designates this PC’s Internet connection as “Shared.” When that happens, this wizard screen changes slightly when you run the wizard on your other networked PCs—the ones that will be sharing the first PC’s connection. Instead of showing Figure 14-5, bottom, the screen simply asks if you want to share the existing shared connection. If you choose Yes, the wizard sets up your PC to connect through the shared connection.

“Give this computer a description and name” In this window, type in a short description of your PC, followed by a name—every PC on the network needs its own unique name. Later on, you’ll see that Windows XP lists that information for each PC on the network, helping you find the one you want to connect to. This may not matter much when connecting between two PCs in the family room, but it’s a godsend to companies networking 20 PCs. Since you (or your PC’s manufacturer) gave your PC a name while installing Windows XP, that original name appears here. If you don’t care for your PC’s given name, now’s the time to change it. One caution, though: Every PC needs a unique name on the network; they can’t both be named “R2D2.” All names must be upper case only, and can’t contain any punctuation symbols or other odd characters. Windows chokes on these characters in particular: \ / : * ? ” < > |. After entering your PC’s name and description, click Next.

“Name your network” The wizard presents a single box and asks you to enter a “Workgroup name.” This is simply a name for your new network or, as Windows XP calls it, your “workgroup”—a mini-network of sorts. Although every PC on the network needs a unique name, your network’s name should be identical on each PC. That keeps your network unified, letting everybody share printers and files. Microsoft suggests the name, MSHOME, for your workgroup, although you can choose a different name for your pack o’ PCs, if you wish. Just stick to one word, no spaces, with a limit of 15 characters. (The Network Setup Wizard insists on uppercase letters.) Of course, if you’re in a small business and want different networks for your sales and marketing departments, here’s your chance to separate them. Enter “SALES” as the workgroup name on your Sales Department’s PCs and enter “MARKETING” for your Marketing department’s PCs. That breaks your network into two isolated pieces, preventing the department’s separate networks from sharing files and printers. (They can still share the broadband modem, though.) 422

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Tip: When one PC can’t see the others on the network, fire up the outcast PC’s Network Setup Wizard. Click next on each menu until you reach this point. Then make sure the troubled PC has the same workgroup name as the others. One typo can cast a PC into network limbo.

The Network Setup Wizard

After typing in a name for this particular PC into the “Workgroup name” box, click Next.

“File and printer sharing” If you want to share files or a printer on the network, turn on file and printer sharing. That automatically shares each PC’s Shared Documents folder and its contents, making it a handy place to store items that everybody can use: digital photos, music files, recipes, and so on. The other files on each PC (those that aren’t in the Shared Documents folder) remain isolated, although you can choose to share other folders later, if you wish (page 440). But if you want the PCs to share only the Internet connection—not files or a printer—turn off file and printer sharing. That limits every person to their own PC, keeping them from sharing any files on the network. Make your choice, and then click Next.

“Ready to apply network settings” Windows XP sums up all your choices from the previous screens. If something looks out of place, click the Back button to reach a particular screen and change your settings. If everything looks right, click Next to send the wizard into Windows XP’s inner crevices, changing settings to put your choices into action. You may need to restart your PC before Windows finalizes the settings, letting this PC connect with the network.

“You’re almost done” The wizard may say that you’re almost done, but you’ve actually barely started. You need to repeat these same steps on every other PC on your network so this first PC has others to talk with. The wizard bids adieu, leaving you with four choices, shown in Figure 14-6 and described in the list below. These choices all hinge on whether you’re running older versions of Windows on any of your networked PCs. If all of your networked PCs run Windows XP (lucky you), choose the last option: just finish the wizard. That lets you move on to the next PC, flip back to step 1, fire up that PC’s Network Setup Wizard, and walk through these same menus to bring that PC into your new network’s fold. But if one or more of your PCs runs Windows 95, 98, or Windows Me, choose one of the other three options.

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The Network Setup Wizard

• Create a Network Setup Disk. Choose this if any of your networked PCs run an older version of Windows (Windows Me or Windows 98, for instance). Those older versions don’t include the Network Setup Wizard, so this option tells the wizard to stuff itself onto a floppy disk, which you can then run on those older PCs. The wizard’s much easier to work with than manually entering network settings. Creating a Network Setup Disk involves placing a floppy disk into your floppy drive. The wizard erases everything on the floppy as it settles into place, so don’t insert a floppy with anything valuable. No floppy drive on your PC? Choose the “Use my Windows XP CD” option, described below. • Use the Network Setup Disk I already have. Choose this if you’ve already created a Network Setup disk, and don’t need another one. The wizard then finishes its job, and exits the screen. • Use my Windows XP CD. No floppy drive on your fancy new PC? Microsoft’s got you covered. Instead, of creating a Network Setup Disk on a floppy, insert your Windows XP CD into your older PCs. When the Windows XP Setup program opens up, click the link at the left side called “Perform additional tasks.” On the next screen, click “Set up home or small office networking.” The wizard loads from your CD, letting you walk through these same steps on your older, pre-wizard versions of Windows. • Just finish the wizard. Choose this to close the wizard—the right choice for networks that don’t have any PCs running older versions of Windows. Figure 14-6: The next-to-last screen in the Network Setup Wizard lets you decide whether you need to run the wizard again on other computers on your network—or not.

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Note: The Network Setup Wizard turns on Windows XP’s built-in Firewall, which is normally a good thing. But if you’re running a third-party firewall on your PC, XP’s firewall may cause conflicts and should be turned off (see page 491).

Securing Your Network

GEM IN THE ROUGH

Putting the Network Settings in the Taskbar When something goes askew with your network, you’ll want to peek at your network’s settings—checking to see if you’re online, for instance, or if you have enough wireless signal strength to connect. Normally, you wade into the network’s settings area through a series of menu options: choose Start ➝ Control Panel ➝ Network Connections, and then double-click the icon for the particular connection you’re interested in—the Wireless Network Connection, for instance. But a faster way is to place an icon for each network connection in your task bar by following these steps: • Click Start, and then right-click My Network Places; from the shortcut menu, choose Properties. • Right-click a network connection’s icon; from the shortcut menu, choose Properties. • Turn on “Show icon in notification area when connected” and then click OK.

An icon for that connection appears in your taskbar near your clock. Repeat the process to add any or all of your other network connections: your dial-up Internet connection, home or office Ethernet link, wireless Internet connection, and even your 1394 (FireWire) connection, if you use that to connect two PCs (page 449). The icon lets you see your network’s condition at a glance. When a network connection goes down, for instance, a red “X” appears over the icon. Hover your mouse pointer over any network connection’s icon for connection details, including its speed and status. Hover over a wireless connection to see its strength, speed, and the name of the WiFi network (page 426) you’re currently connected to.

Securing Your Network Ethernet cables aren’t pretty, but they’re secure. If you’re using these sturdy pipes to connect your PCs, a hacker would have to break into your home to break into your network. Wireless networks, by contrast, spill past the confines of your home and out into the neighborhood, where other people can detect them. Powerline adapters—the ones that connect PCs through your home’s electrical wiring—also spill your network’s signal outside your home, spreading through the power lines into your neighbor’s house. That’s why it’s important to add a password to both your wireless connection and your Powerline adapter’s connection (should you be using either one of these systems). Without password protection, you’re dangling a virtual network cable out your window, inviting strangers to connect to your network. Anybody who can access your network has free range. They can not only copy your files and plant viruses, but they can delete any and all of your shared files. And

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Securing Your Network

when somebody deletes files from your PC through a networked connection, those files are gone for good; they don’t drop into your Recycle Bin (see page 495). With that bit of unpleasantness out of the way, this section explains how to secure both wireless and Powerline networks.

Securing Your Wireless Connection Security is so much easier in the spy movies. The guy wearing the dark sunglasses flips open a little box, pushes a red button, and the metal doors all slam down from the ceiling. Unfortunately, securing your wireless network isn’t as easy as pushing a button. That’s why so many people ignore it. Instead, it requires accessing your router’s settings, rummaging through menus, and dealing with unfamiliar words, all so you can accomplish these three tasks: • Name your wireless network. Your wireless network needs a simple one-ortwo-word name, known among WiFi geeks as a “SSID” (Service Set Identifier). Naming your network helps keep it separate from other wireless networks filling the airwaves. When Windows presents you with a list of nearby wireless networks (page 417), you can spot your own network at a glance. • Turn on encryption by assigning your router a password. When assigned a password, the router encodes your network’s wireless signal before sending it through the air waves. Only people who know the password can decode the signal, bringing you to the next step. • Enter the encryption password on your PCs that have wireless adapters. After adding a password to your router’s wireless signal, you need to enter that same password onto your wireless-enabled PCs. Without it, they can’t make sense of the Internet connection and assorted data being served up by the router. Once you enter the password—and your new SSID—into your wireless PCs, they can accept the signal just fine. All this encoding/decoding stuff happens transparently, although the network may run a tad more slowly. The biggest change you’ll notice is spotting the little “lock” icon appear next to your network’s name in the list of wireless networks, shown in the bottom of Figure 14-4. Windows XP’s Wireless Network Setup Wizard simplifies these three requirements down to a few choices on two simple menus, sparing you from navigating your router’s complex setup menus. The downside? Only a few routers from Belkin and D-Link support the wizard. If you spot the code word “Windows Connect Now” on your router’s box or packaging, then it’s wizard-friendly: head for the box on page 427 to finish off this password business with a few quick clicks. If your router doesn’t support the Wireless Network Setup wizard, reach for your router’s setup software. Look for instructions on how to secure your wireless network (other terms to look for: “adding security,” “activating encryption,” and “advanced settings”).

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If the CD for your wireless equipment has long disappeared or the instructions prove too daunting, follow the steps in the next two sections to manually password protect your wireless network.

Securing Your Network

WORKSHOP WORKAROUND

The Wireless Network Setup Wizard Securing a wireless network involves entering a password—a lengthy string of seemingly random letters and numbers— into your wireless router, and entering that same password into each of your wireless-connected PCs. If your router supports “Windows Connect Now,” the Wireless Network Setup Wizard can help handle the job of copying the password. The wizard, a piece of software added to Windows XP by Service Pack 2 (page 480), creates and stores a password on a USB drive (page 255)—a thumb-sized drive for carrying small files. After the wizard copies the password onto the USB drive, you need only plug that USB drive into your router and each PC that needs the settings. Then you’re finished, comfortable with a secure, password-protected network. To put the Wireless Network Setup Wizard to work on “Windows Connect Now” equipment, double-click the wizard’s icon in the Control Panel (Start ➝ Control Panel ➝ Wireless Network Setup Wizard). After the wizard introduces itself, follow these steps to secure your router: 1. Give your network a name. Type a name for your wireless network into the “Network name (SSID)” box. The SSID can be any name you like—as long as it contains no more than 32 letters, numbers, and/or punctuation marks. 2. Decide how to handle the network key—a technospeak term for “password.” The wizard offers two options: Automatically assign a network key (recommended). Choose this option, and Windows thinks up a password, sparing you the effort. It’s the easiest option, as you’ll see in the next step.

Manually assign a network key. This lets you type in an existing password. Choose this if you’ve already waded through your router’s setup menu, created an SSID and set up a password, and now want the wizard to enter that password into this PC. 3. If your router and wireless adapter both support the WPA (WiFi Protected Access) encryption standard, turn on the checkbox called, “Use WPA encryption instead of WEP,” and click Next. 4. Choose “Use a USB flash drive (recommended).” If you don’t have one of these little marvels, choose “Set up a network manually,” instead. Windows copies the network’s SSID and password onto the USB drive for transport. 5. Insert the USB drive into your “Windows Connect Now"-compatible router’s USB port. Like something out of a James Bond thriller, the router’s lights blink three times to let you know it’s received the code. 6. Insert the USB drive into every PC with a wireless adapter and click OK after every screen. When you insert the USB drive into a PC, a window appears, asking if you’d like to run the Wireless Network Setup Wizard. Click OK and the wizard adds the PC to the wireless network and hands it the SSID and password, and your PC connects to the network. It’s a simple solution to a complex problem. If the wizard doesn’t appear when you insert the USB drive, open My Computer (Start ➝ My Computer), double-click the USB drive’s icon, and double-click the file SetupSNK.exe. The wizard installs the SSID and password, which are both stored in the adjacent “userkey.psw” file.

Name your wireless network and add a password Every wireless network requires a name—called its SSID—before it can work. Strangely enough, though, most wireless networks begin working as soon as you Chapter 14: Networking PCs: The Missing Manual, eMatter Edition Copyright © 2008 O’Reilly & Associates, Inc. All rights reserved.

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plug in your wireless router and turn on your wireless PC. They work because the manufacturer already names your network before shipping it out the door. The name’s neither imaginative nor personalized. If you bought your wireless router from Linksys, for example, your wireless network is most likely named “Linksys.” When you turn on your wireless laptop outdoors in any major city and begin looking for wireless networks, as shown in the middle of Figure 14-4, you’ll grow accustomed to seeing the name “Linksys” listed as an available network. The name “Linksys” means that that network’s owner didn’t bother to change the name, which you’re going to do in this section. And since they didn’t bother to change the name, they probably didn’t bother to set a password on their network, either—and that’s the second thing you’ll do in this section. Here’s how to find your router’s setup menu, rename your wireless network, and add a password to keep other people from using it: 1. Open any Web browser. When you open a Web browser on a newly installed wireless network, the browser may complain that it can’t connect to the Internet, but don’t worry. You don’t need to connect to the Internet to set up your router. Instead, you’re taking advantage of something crafty your router does with its settings menu. The settings menu is listed on a special Web page that’s actually tucked inside the router. The beauty of this arrangement is that you can change your router’s settings by firing up any Web browser on any of your networked PCs and visiting that hidden Web page. There’s no security risk here, as the router’s smart enough to limit access to your own networked PCs. That keeps people from accessing that page through the Internet and messing with your setup menu. Changing a router’s settings works best on a PC with a wired (that is, Ethernet) connection. So to follow these steps, either do so from a PC that’s already plugged directly into your router, or to temporarily make that happen: plug an Ethernet cable between any PC and one of the ports on your router. 2. Connect to your wireless router by typing its Web address, user name, and password into your browser’s Address bar. To view the router’s hidden Web page, you need to enter three pieces of information: • A Web address • A user name • A password You can find all three items in your router’s documentation, but feel free to cheat by checking out Table 14-1. That table lists this information used by the most popular router manufacturers.

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Router’s don’t use normal Web site names like www.router.com. Instead, you need to type in a string of numbers known as an IP (Internet Protocol) address. For instance, if the address is http://192.168.1.1, type that entire string into your browser’s Address bar, as shown in the top of Figure 14-7, and then press Enter.

Securing Your Network

When the router displays its log-in screen, type in the username and password, as shown in Figure 14-7, top right. If the address, username, and password listed in Table 14-1 don’t work, consult your router’s documentation; the information is probably listed there. Table 14-1. SSID, user name, password, and Web address info for popular router brands

Router Brand

Default SSID

User name

Password

Address

Belkin

WLAN or belkin54g





http://192.168.2.1

D-Link

default

admin



http://192.168.0.1

Linksys

Linksys



Admin

http://192.168.1.1

Microsoft

MSHOME



Admin

http://192.168.2.1

Netgear

NETGEAR

admin

Password

http://192.168.0.1

3. Find the wireless router’s main settings page. Most routers make finding this page easy by showing it to you as soon as you connect to the router. 4. Enter a new name into the SSID box. Delete the listed name in the SSID box and type in something new. What you choose isn’t as important as what you don’t choose. Since you’ll be broadcasting this information along with your network’s signal, don’t choose your own name or street address. That gives too much information to some dedicated loser who wants to break into your connection. Instead, call it “Potato Chip,” “Tree,” “Joy,” or something similarly non-descript. Your only limits are keeping the name to within the 32-character limit. The SSID is case sensitive, so it treats “joy” as a different name than “Joy.” 5. Turn on password protection. Depending on its age, a router comes with two types of security: • WEP (Wireless Equivalent Privacy). This older type of security has been cracked. But since most people don’ bother to type in any passwords, WEP is still one step up the security ladder from a completely unprotected network. If it’s all your router offers, turn it on.

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• WPA (WiFi Protected Access) and WPA2. These options offer the most security. If you spot either of these options on your router’s settings page, turn either of them on instead of WEP. Figure 14-7: Top: Type your router’s address in your Web browser and press Enter to visit the router’s settings page. Second from top: You’ll be greeted by a settings page gatekeeper; enter your browser’s user name and password for admittance. Second from bottom: Enter a different name into the SSID box, set WEP to Mandatory, and then click WEP Key Setting to create a password. Bottom: Type a passphrase and then click Generate. The router presents you with a password key, which you’ll need for each wirelessly connected PC that you want to join the newly secured network (details on entering the key start on page 426).

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6. Create a password, and then click Apply.

Securing Your Network

Because of the way the various encryption systems work, passwords must meet rigorous specifications regarding length, capitalization, and characters. They’re so difficult to think up that most routers toss you a lifeline: they think one up for you if you hand it a word to begin with. That word is called a passphrase. Enter a passphrase, click Generate, and the router kicks out a password that looks something like 628105712FE6CEEA92040A8AA4. When you click Apply, the router immediately starts encrypting its wireless communications, knocking off all of your wirelessly connected PCs—including the one you may be using now to change its settings (that’s why you want to make sure you’ve got a direct Ethernet connection to your router). 7. Write down the SSID, the password, and your passphrase. This step could be the most vexing part of the whole security process. You need to enter the SSID and password into each computer that connects wirelessly to your network. One typo will lock you out. And you need the passphrase so you can regenerate that exact password should the router lose its settings. (If you use a different passphrase down the road, you’ll need to enter whatever new password it generates into all your wirelessly connected PCs.) Tell the password to your wirelessly connected PCs Now that you’ve password protected the network signal, you must enter the password into each of your wirelessly connected PCs. The Wireless Network Setup Wizard (Start ➝ Control Panel ➝ Wireless Network Setup Wizard) can do this for you automatically—if you have a USB drive (page 255) and your PC has a USB port. If you meet those requirements, head to the box on page 427 and follow the steps listed. The wizard copies the SSID and password to the USB drive. When you insert that USB drive into a PC, the wizard leaps back into action, automatically entering the information into that PC’s wireless adapter. If you don’t have a USB drive or your PC doesn’t have a USB port, you can type in the settings by hand by following these steps: 1. Open your wireless network’s Properties page. You can do this in any of several ways: • Double-click the wireless icon in your taskbar, and then, from the window that appears, choose Changed Advanced Settings from the task pane. • Right-click My Network Places (Start ➝ My Network Places) and choose Properties. Right-click your wireless connection’s icon, and then choose Properties from the shortcut menu. • Choose Start ➝ Control Panel ➝ Network Connections. Then right-click your wireless connection’s icon and choose Properties from the shortcut menu.

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2. Click the Wireless Networks tab, and then click Add. 3. Type the name of your SSID and your password, as shown in Figure 14-8, and then click OK. Figure 14-8: Type in the name of your SSID and the network key (the password) you created on your router. Be sure not to make any typographical errors, or you won’t be able to connect to the network.

Activating Powerline Security A Powerline adapter’s signal runs through about 1,000 feet of electrical wiring before it eventually peters out. That’s plenty of room for the signal to flow through your electrical system’s wires as they twist and turn around studs, doorways, and windows. It’s also enough oomph to spill over into your neighbor’s homes, letting them tap into your unprotected signal. To stop people from eavesdropping on your network, follow these steps to password-protect a Powerline network. Compared to password-protecting a wireless signal, this procedure’s a leisurely stroll through a sunny park. These instructions apply to Netgear’s XE-102 Powerline adapters; the menus will probably be slightly different for other manufacturers. 1. Copy each adapter’s password onto a piece of paper. Look on the back of each adapter, and you’ll find a password—a series of numbers or letters. The password faces the outlet, so visitors can’t read it. Write down each password, dashes and all. Double-check your work to make sure you haven’t made any errors.

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Each adapter’s password serves as its personal identifier, letting your network know who’s who. In a moment, you’ll assign a “master” password to your entire network, and the setup software will send that new master password to each adapter you’re identifying here.

Securing Your Network

POWER USERS' CLINIC

Adding More Security Most wireless equipment comes with plenty of built-in security that nobody bothers to turn on, usually because it’s too difficult to figure out. If you’re feeling adventurous, poke around in your router’s settings page and make the following additional changes. Each adds an extra layer of security to your wireless network. • Disable “broadcast SSID.” Any time you turn on a PC with a wireless adapter, it lists the SSID of all the available wireless networks, making it easy to connect with them. If you tell your router not to broadcast the SSID, your wireless network drops off those menus. To connect your own PCs, enter the SSID manually on your PC’s wireless settings page (see Figure 14-8). That limits your wireless network to people who already know your SSID and keeps strangers in the dark. • Change the router’s default password. Most routers come with well-known passwords, shown in Table 14-1. Changing the password keeps kids from breaking into your router’s settings and changing them for kicks.

• Keep your wireless router away from windows. Signals travel further through glass than walls. Keep the router in the center of the house, if possible, to keep the signal from spilling over to the street. • Buy equipment with flashable firmware. Security standards keep changing to keep up with people who have broken them. When a security standard changes, flashable firmware (see page 533) lets you upgrade the router with the latest standard, letting you stay one step up on the bad guys. Most routers support flashable firmware and firmware upgrades to keep pace with new features. Firmware upgrades lengthen the life of your router, but they’re no free ticket to the fountain of technological youth. Eventually, new features require different circuitry that can’t be added with new firmware. When you need that hot new feature, it’s time to buy a hot new router. Some of these changes require you to spend some time with your router’s menus, finding and changing these settings. Change as many as you need to give you peace of mind.

2. Plug one Powerline adapter into a wall outlet near your PC, and connect an Ethernet cable between that adapter’s network port and your PC’s network port. In order for you to set the password, your PC needs a direct connection to the Powerline adapter. You can’t set the password if a router sits between your PC and the adapter. 3. Plug all the other Powerline adapters that you’re using into nearby wall outlets. You can, but you don’t need to, plug the other adapters into outlets in the same room.

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4. Install and run the Powerline Setup software on the PC connected to the Powerline adapter. The adapters come with their own installation CD, which includes an encryption utility. Run the installation CD, and it installs the encryption utility program, usually leaving an icon for the utility on your desktop, as well as on your Start menu. If you’re using a Netgear Powerline adapter, start the program by clicking Start ➝ Netgear ➝ Powerline Encryption Utility. 5. Enter the passwords for each of your Powerline adapters, as shown in Figure 14-9. For Netgear’s XE 102 adapters, click the Setup program’s Advanced tab, and then enter each adapter’s password into the Remote Device Password box, clicking Add after entering each password. Each time you enter a password and click Add, the password appears on the adjacent Remote Passwords list. Once the program knows the individual passwords of all your Powerline adapters, you can password protect them all, as explained in the next step. 6. Enter a network password in the Network Password box, and then click Apply (see Figure 14-9). The password should be between six and 16 letters long for Netgear’s XE 102 adapters. The program considers upper- and lowercase letters to be different: “MeatLoaf” is a different password than “meatloaf.” Figure 14-9: Each adapter comes with a unique password stamped on its backside. Enter the passwords into the encryption program’s Remote Device Password box, one by one, clicking Add after you enter each one. After entering them all, type your own made-up password in the Network Password box. Then click the Set All button to assign each adapter the same password you just created. The adapters remember the password even after they’ve been unplugged, making it easy to use one adapter for your laptop, plugging it into different outlets whenever you move your laptop to another room.

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The program shoots your chosen network password through your home’s wiring to share it with all your Powerline adapters simultaneously—a nice touch of convenience. The adapters remember their passwords when they’re unplugged, too, so you need only to wade through these six steps once—when first passwordprotecting your system.

Sharing an Internet Connection

Sharing an Internet Connection Psssst. You don’t have to buy a router (page 409) to share your Internet connection with other PCs. Windows XP’s built-in “Internet Connection Sharing” (ICS) feature lets one PC share its Internet connection with any other networked PC. Since it doesn’t require any extra equipment, this freebie comes in handy on several occasions. For instance, when you set down your laptop on the same desk as your broadband-connected PC, Internet Connection Sharing lets your laptop piggyback on your PC’s Internet connection: both computers can go online simultaneously. Or perhaps you’ve got one PC plugged into a broadband modem and you want to share its Internet connection with another PC in a different room. By connecting each PC to a Powerline adapter (page 405) and turning on Internet Connection Sharing, you’ve solved your problems. Internet Connection Sharing even lets your laptop share the wireless connection of any other Windows-laptop in your favorite WiFi-enabled coffee shop—provided you find a laptop with a friendly owner, that is. Whatever your situation, ICS takes any Internet-connected PC—known as the host—and transforms it into a makeshift router, letting it shuffle Internet information to and from any connected PC (or PCs), known as the clients. ICS comes with a few shortcomings, though. Since your host PC works doubletime dishing out the Internet information, it may run more slowly than usual. And the host PC must be left turned on, or the poor client PCs won’t have Internet access. Likewise, should the host PC crash, it cuts off Internet access to all the other PCs. (A router, by contrast, provides an “always on” connection to any PC that wants it.) One more problem surfaces when you share a PC’s broadband Internet connection. Since the broadband modem must plug into the PC’s Ethernet port, that speedy port is no longer available to connect to another PC. The easiest fix for that problem is to install a second Ethernet adapter into the host PC, a job detailed on page 412. That gives you a host PC with two ports: one for the broadband modem, and the other to connect with another PC. Windows XP’s Network Setup Wizard (page 419) offers to set up Internet Connection Sharing for you when you let the wizard connect your PCs. The following describes how to take it up on its offer.

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1. Connect your PCs. You can connect two PCs in any of several ways—using Ethernet ports, FireWire ports, or WiFi adapters—all covered in the “Networking Two PCs” section beginning on page 448. If you’re connecting three or more PCs, head for the computer store and buy a switch—a small box that plugs into a wall outlet and offers a handful of Ethernet ports (page 412). Connect a cable between each PC’s Ethernet port and a port on the switch, and you’ve connected all the PCs. Or, connect each PC using Powerline adapters (page 405). 2. Turn on the Internet connection of the host PC. The wizard refers to your host PC’s Internet connection as a “gateway.” If the host PC’s Internet connection isn’t turned on, the wizard won’t find anything to share. No Internet connection yet on any of your PCs? Chapter 11 explains how to set one up. If you’re sharing a dial-up connection—certainly possible, but rarely enjoyable because of its slow speed—dial the Internet now to make your connection. 3. Run the Network Setup Wizard on the host PC. Head back to page 419 to run the Network Setup Wizard (Start ➝ Control Panel ➝ Network Setup Wizard). On the wizard’s “Select a Connection Method” window, shown on page 420 (Figure 14-5, bottom) select the first option: “This computer connects directly to the Internet.” Finish the rest of the Network Wizard’s steps, just as described in that section. When you’re through, your PC will start sharing its Internet connection with every connected PC that asks for it. 4. Run the Network Setup Wizard on each client PC. Now that the Host PC is sharing its Internet connection, let the other PCs know it’s available: run the Network Setup Wizard on each client PC. When you arrive at the Network Setup Wizard’s “Do you want to use the shared connection?” window, choose “Yes, use the existing shared connection for this computer’s Internet access.” Finish the rest of the Network Setup Wizard’s steps as described in that section, beginning on page 422. If you have any problems browsing the Web or sending email from a client PC, first double-check that your host PC’s Internet connection is working (visit http:// www.microsoft.com; that’s always a reliable test). If your host PC’s Internet connection is down, it takes down the connection of all your client PCs.

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Sharing Printers

Sharing Printers

The Network Setup Wizard introduces your PCs to each other, letting them share files, as well as an Internet connection. The wizard also turns on printer sharing, a nifty feature that lets every PC know about any shared printers on the network. There’s one catch: until you specifically designate a printer as “shared,” the other PCs won’t know about it. That extra step also lets you keep certain printers off your network—handy when you don’t want to let the kids print their homework on your color inkjet-guzzling photo printer, for instance. When you want to share a particular printer with the network, sit down at the PC connected to that printer and follow these steps: 1. Open the Printers and Faxes section of the Control Panel (Start Panel ➝ Printers and Faxes).

➝

Control

The Printers and Faxes window appears, listing every printer connected to that particular PC. 2. Right-click the icon or name of the printer that you want to share, and then choose Sharing from the shortcut menu (Figure 14-10, top). The Sharing tab of that printer’s Properties window appears, shown in Figure 14-10, middle. 3. On the Sharing tab of the Printer Properties window, turn on “Share this printer” (see Figure 14-10, middle). Windows XP sends up a warning about the security risks of sharing printers on the network. You can safely ignore it. Only people on your own network can print to your printer, and they’re presumably trustworthy. 4. Type a name for the printer in the “Share name” box. The name you create here appears on the other PC’s list of available printers, so forget the dorky name Windows XP chooses and create something descriptive—“Jerry’s printer,” for instance, or “Inkjet.” The printer’s model name still appears on your own menu, but this new name lets others figure out which printer they’re printing to. (People sitting at the other networked PCs probably can’t physically see the printer, unlike you.) Note: Should you try to choose a name longer than 12 characters, Windows XP mutters an odd warning about MS-DOS clients not being able to access the printer. MS-DOS clients hail from the days of Windows 3.1 and earlier, and live comfortably in museums—not on your network. In other words, you can ignore the warning.

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5. If some of your PCs run Windows 95, 98, or Windows Me, click the Additional Drivers button (see Figure 14-10, middle). When the Additional Drivers window appears Figure 14-10, bottom, turn on the “Windows 95, 98 and Me” checkbox, click OK, and then insert the printer’s Setup CD into your CD drive. Figure 14-10: Sharing one PC’s attached printer lets all the PCs on your network use it. Top: Right-click the printer you want to share and then choose Sharing. Middle: Name your printer by entering its name in the “Share name” box; that way, other PCs can list its name on their menus as an available printer. If you’re running Windows 95, 98, or Me, click the Additional Drivers button. Bottom: Turn on the “Windows 95, 98 and Me” checkbox, as shown here, and then insert your printer’s installation CD so the PC can copy those drivers and send them to your older PCs. The other checkboxes are for more exotic strains of Windows that you can safely ignore.

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Windows XP does something neat with drivers, the utility software you ran when you first installed your PC’s printer. A printer’s driver gives Windows XP a handy translation chart, letting Windows know how to talk to that particular model printer. Normally, you need to install a printer’s driver on every PC that wants to use the printer. But since the PCs are networked, Windows XP simply sends over a copy of the Windows XP driver to the PC that needs it. That lets the other PC print, and you don’t have to get out of your chair.

Exchanging Files Between PCs

But if some of your networked PCs run Windows 95, 98, or Windows Me, they need their own version of the driver, not the Windows XP version. The solution is to install that older driver now, on this connected-to-the-printer PC. Then, when your older PC tries to use this printer, the host PC will send over the older version of the driver. 6. Install the newly shared printer on your other PCs. When you share a printer on the network, it doesn’t automatically appear on the print menus of all your networked PCs. To add the printer to these PCs, visit each PC and run the Add Printer Wizard (see page 123). The wizard lists the newly shared printer under the networked PC’s name. For instance, if you shared the printer on the computer named Tinky, click the name “Tinky” to see that PC’s shared printers. WORKAROUND WORKSHOP

Network Printer Idiosyncrasies When you share one PC’s printer with the entire network, you’re subject to a few restrictions, most of which you can bypass with a little tinkering. First, the PC attached to the shared printer must be turned on before any other PC can use the printer. To leave that second PC out of the mix entirely, you can buy a networked printer that connects to your router rather than a PC. A cheaper option is to buy a print server for between $50 and $100. Connect an Ethernet cable between the print server

and the router, and then plug your printer into the print server’s USB or printer port. Second, you can share any printer but a “fax printer”—the printer that appears on your menus when you install fax software onto a PC. The best workaround is to copy the file you want faxed to a shared folder like your Shared Documents folder. Then politely ask the person with the faxing PC to open your file and fax it for you.

Exchanging Files Between PCs The Network Setup Wizard automatically lets all your networked PCs share files and printers. Although you need to tell your PC which printer you want to share (as described in the previous section), you don’t need to do anything to start sharing files. The wizard simply creates one shared folder on each PC called, appropriately enough, the Shared Documents folder. Two folders live inside it: Shared Photos and Shared Music, both handy repositories for those files you want every PC to access but don’t want to copy to every PC on the network.

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To view your own PC’s Shared Documents folder, open My Computer (Start ➝ My Computer). The Shared Documents folder appears (alongside a few other folders and any drives on your machine). While you’re looking inside the folder, remove anything you don’t want accessible to others. Anytime you want to share a file with somebody else, just copy it to the Shared Documents folder. Note: Your PC may sport a Shared Documents folder even if you’re not on a network. That’s because Windows XP automatically creates a Shared Documents folder on every PC that has two or more user accounts. That lets the owners of the two user accounts share files by placing them in the Shared Documents folder.

Viewing, Copying, and Moving Files on Other PCs When you’re ready to go spelunking for files on your network, open My Network Places (Start ➝ My Network Places) and choose “View workgroup computers” from the task pane. Windows XP displays an icon for every networked PC, followed by the PC’s name and description. If you don’t spot your networked PCs listed, give Windows XP some time. The PC’s icons may take a few minutes to show up the first time you look for them. My Computer treats each networked PC the same way it treats a folder: doubleclick any networked PC’s icon to see its contents, all displayed inside a folder. You should spot that PC’s automatically shared Shared Documents folder, and perhaps a shared printer. If you don’t see the Shared Documents folder, rerun the Network Setup Wizard (see page 419), and be sure to turn on “File and Printer Sharing.” Once you’re peering inside a networked PC, Windows XP acts as if you’re looking at folders on your own computer. You can copy and move files just as if you were copying files and folders on your own PC. Warning: Normally, deleting a file places it in your PC’s Recycle Bin, giving you another chance to retrieve it later. But drives on networked PCs provide an exception to that rule, which could turn into a gotcha. If you connect to Ted’s PC and delete a file from Ted’s Shared Documents folder, Ted’s file disappears for good, irretrievably bypassing the Recycle Bin on both PCs. That’s why it’s important to limit what you share on a network, as it’s all fair game for irretrievable deletion by other network inhabitants.

Sharing Additional Folders The Shared Documents folder works fine for sharing occasional files. But you may want to share a group of files without dragging them to the Shared Documents folder. For instance, you may want to share a large project temporarily for somebody else to view. For those occasions, Windows XP lets you share any folder with the rest of the network by following these steps:

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1. Right-click the folder, and then from the pop-up shortcut menu, choose Sharing and Security.

Exchanging Files Between PCs

That folder’s Properties window appears. 2. Turn on “Share this folder on the network.” Sharing a folder lets people on other PCs open and view that folder’s files or even transfer copies of the files to their own PCs. But Windows XP keeps a protective blanket over your copy of the files by not letting anybody change or delete any file that you’re sharing. If you want to give others the privilege of changing or deleting your files, turn on “Allow network users to change my files.” 3. When you click OK, your folder immediately appears on the menus of the other networked PCs. If somebody calls out from across the room, saying they can’t see your shared folder yet, tell them to press F5; that refreshes their screen, letting it display the newly shared folder. You can share an entire drive on the network by following the same steps, but it’s rarely worth the risk. Shared information is accessible not only to other networked PCs, but to anybody who breaks into your network. Be careful not to share sensitive information. Instead, limit your file sharing to a few shared folders and the Shared Documents folder, which is much easier to police. Tip: You may want to leave your laptop’s Shared Documents folder empty, as laptops move through more unsecured environments than desk-bound PCs.

Files and Settings Transfer Wizard New to Windows XP, the Files and Settings Transfer Wizard solves the question new PC owners have asked themselves for years: how do I move my old PC’s information to my new PC? The Files and Settings Transfer Wizard grabs your old PC’s files, program settings, and your My Documents folder. It packs all that information into one gargantuan file, and then unpacks everything on the new PC, placing each item neatly in the right place. Your new network provides just the pipeline the wizard needs to move that mammoth file from old PC to new. And remember: a network can be as simple as a cable between two PCs (see page 448). Although the wizard excels at mass moves, don’t forget that it works just as well for moving settings and data from a single program—all your e-mail from Outlook Express, for instance. If you want to move files and settings from a Windows 95, 98, or Windows Me PC to a Windows XP PC, jump ahead to step 7 in the list below.

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But if you’re moving from one Windows XP machine to another, follow all these steps to move files and settings from your old PC to your new one: 1. Run Disk Cleanup on your old PC. Disk Cleanup (see page 256) quickly dumps the files you don’t need: items from your Recycle Bin, temporary files left by programs, leftover Web browser trash, and other things you don’t want to waste time transferring. Deleting them now can save a lot of transfer time. 2. Install your old PC’s programs onto your new PC. The wizard copies your programs’ settings and data; it doesn’t copy the programs themselves. So before running the wizard, scrounge around for the original installation CDs for your old PC’s programs. Then install the programs onto your new PC. When the wizard copies all your data and settings to the new PC, the programs will be waiting. 3. Run the Files and Settings Transfer Wizard on the old PC, and then click Next at the Welcome screen. Start the wizard by choosing Start ➝ All Programs ➝ Accessories ➝ System Tools ➝ Files and Settings Transfer Wizard. When the wizard leaps to the screen, click Next at the Welcome screen. The wizard, trying to orient itself, asks: “Is this your new PC or your old one?” 4. Tell the wizard it’s running on the old PC, and then click Next. Telling the wizard it’s on the old PC lets the wizard know that you want it to pack up your files and settings for the impending transfer. 5. Tell the wizard where to store the computer’s collected files and settings, and then click Next. The wizard scopes out your PC’s available connections, and then asks how you’d like that whopper file transferred to your new PC. Since you have a network, choose Other, shown in Figure 14-11. That lets you click Browse and navigate to a folder on your new PC. If you don’t have a network, though, your only real choice is a portable hard drive. The wizard packs up your files, settings, and folders into one huge file that’s much too large to transfer in any other way. To move the information to a portable hard drive, choose Other, click Browse, and navigate to your portable hard drive. 6. Tell the wizard what files and settings to grab, and then click Next. The wizard first offers to move all your files and settings to your new PC—a safe bet, ensuring that everything moves over. To copy all your files and settings to your new PC, click Next.

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But if you only want a few items moved over, choose “Let me select a custom list of files and settings when I click Next.” The wizard then presents a list of program settings, specific folders, and types of files, as shown in Figure 14-12. Click the Add or Remove buttons to pick and choose which items to copy to the new PC.

Exchanging Files Between PCs

Figure 14-11: Although the “Home or small office network” option seems the obvious choice, choose Other, instead. Then click Browse to navigate your network and choose a specific folder—perhaps your Shared Documents folder—on your new PC for the wizard to deposit your data and settings file. Later, when you run the wizard on the new PC, tell the wizard to unpack that file.

This custom selection tool comes in handy, for instance, when you want only to move your mail from Outlook Express, in order to back it up. Figure 14-12: The wizard presents a list with three categories—settings, files, and folders—and it pre-selects every item in each of the three categories. That’s great if you want to move everything, but awful if you only want to move a few things—your Internet Explorer settings, for instance. To empty an entire category quickly, click the first item—Accessibility, in this figure—and then press Alt+R. The wizard speedily removes every item, one after the other, until it leaves you with an empty list. Then click Add Setting and add the settings you want, one by one. Repeat that process for the other two categories, Folders and Files, adding only the few folders and files you want transferred.

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7. Run the wizard on the new PC, and then click Next at the Welcome screen. Just as before, start the wizard by choosing Start ➝ All Programs ➝ Accessories System Tools ➝ Files and Settings Transfer Wizard. After the Welcome screen, the groggy wizard once again asks: “Is this your new PC or your old one?” ➝

8. Tell the wizard it’s running on the new PC, and then click Next. Here’s where the wizard deals with people who want to move stuff from an older, pre-Windows XP PC. If you hail from that camp, tell the wizard to create a “Wizard Disk,” which packs the wizard onto a floppy disk. After the wizard creates a Wizard Disk, run that floppy on your pre-Windows XP machine— those versions of Windows don’t come with a built-in Files and Settings Transfer wizard—and start back at step 1. When you reach this step, your files and settings will now be waiting on your new PC. If you’ve started at step 1 and already gathered your files and settings from your old PC, choose “I don’t need the Wizard Disk,” and then click Next. 9. Create a Wizard Disk, if you need one; otherwise, click Next. The wizard asks where to look for the files you’ve transferred. 10. Choose Other, click Browse, and navigate to the folder containing your transferred files, then click Next. Browse to the folder on your new PC that you chose in step 4. Inside that folder, you’ll find a new folder called USMT2.UNC. That oddly named folder contains all your files, settings, and folders that you told the wizard to transfer from your old PC. The wizard grabs your copied files and settings, unpacks them, and then files them away in the appropriate places. When the wizard is through, restart your new PC. That lets all the programs wake up with their recently acquired settings.

Windows Briefcase When moving a few files between a PC and laptop, the biggest question isn’t really how—it’s easy enough to move files back and forth with a floppy, a memory card, or even over a network. No, the bigger question is which: which file is the newest version—the one on your PC or the one on your laptop? This problem never happened in the old days, because you’d simply toss your papers into a briefcase when carting work home. The papers in the briefcase were always the latest drafts. Windows XP tires to recreate that era with its digital Briefcase, which computerizes the process to keep your documents up to date.

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The Briefcase works like this:

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1. Create a briefcase. Right-click anywhere on your desktop; from the shortcut menu, choose New ➝ Briefcase. A folder named New Briefcase appears on your desktop. Strangely enough, the folder’s icon resembles a briefcase. 2. Copy your portable files into the Briefcase. When you’re ready to take files on the road, copy them into the Briefcase the same way you copy them into any folder: drag them onto the icon. Or doubleclick the Briefcase icon to open the folder, and then drag your files inside. 3. Copy the briefcase onto the other PC, laptop, or to a USB drive (see page 255). Since your laptop is networked now, it’s easy to copy a file-packed briefcase to your other PC. A network’s not a necessity, though. If the Briefcase stays small, it can fit on a floppy for transport. You can also copy the briefcase to a USB drive. 4. Open the Briefcase on your new PC and work on the files. The key is to work on the files while they remain inside the Briefcase. Don’t copy them out of your Briefcase and onto the second PC. 5. When you return home, reconnect your laptop to your PC. Or, if your Briefcase lives on a USB drive or floppy, insert the USB drive or floppy disk into your PC. 6. Right-click the Briefcase; from the shortcut menu, choose Update All Items. Here’s where the Briefcase stops acting like a “dumb” folder with a spiffy icon. The Briefcase compares its copies with the copies currently on your PC and displays a list showing which files are newer—the ones in the Briefcase, or the ones on your desktop PC. 7. Click Update. The Briefcase replaces the old documents with its newer versions, keeping everything up to date. You must remember two important points when using the Briefcase. First, always open the items while they’re inside the Briefcase—don’t copy them outside the Briefcase. Second, once you copy files to your Briefcase and copy the Briefcase to your laptop, feel free to work on either the Briefcase’s copies or your PC’s original copies. But don’t work on both copies. If you change them both, you’re confusing the Briefcase. The next time you choose Update All Items, the Briefcase tells you both copies have changed, and it leaves you with the problem of sorting out the mess.

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Tip: If you find that that you’ve updated the same Word document on both your PC and your laptop, you’re not completely out of luck. Use Microsoft’s Word’s Compare feature (Tools ➝ Compare and Merge Documents) to merge the two documents into one. It highlights all the differences, letting you right-click any highlighted item and choose whether to keep or discard that change.

Mapping Network Drives The biggest storage hogs in today’s PCs are digital photos and music files. They’re so large that copying these files to every networked PC wastes gobs of space. And while you can always place your files on one PC’s Shared Documents folder, that leads to an awkward spate of path clicking when you want to reach that folder: Start ➝ My Network Places, double-click the icon of the networked PC with the goods, navigate to its cherished folder, and begin browsing your way though all the shared files. If your digital editing program or music player wants to access those files, you need to tell the program to follow that same convoluted path. That’s where mapped network drives step in to simplify the process. Mapping lets you assign a drive letter to any commonly accessed folder, like the folder containing all the goodies on a networked PC. Your PC then assigns a drive letter to that folder, treating the folder as if it were a drive on your own PC. Open My Computer, and there’s your folder, sitting right next to your C: drive. The bottom line? Creating a mapped drive shortcut can save you a lot of click work if you’re a frequent traveler across your network. Follow these steps to assign a drive letter to any folder, whether it’s on your own PC or deep within your network: 1. Open My Computer (or any other folder, actually). 2. Choose Tools

➝ Map Network Drive.

The Map Network Drive window appears, letting you select a drive letter as well as a folder to transform into a networked drive. 3. Choose a drive letter for the distant folder. To choose a drive letter for your favorite folder, click the drop-down arrow in the Drive box and select any available letter. You can’t use C as a drive letter, as your hard drive always snaps that one up. But any other listed drive letter is fair game. 4. Choose the folder you want to map. Click Browse (see Figure 14-13) and navigate to the folder you want to make more accessible; then click OK. That folder’s name appears in the Folder box. 5. Turn on “Reconnect at logon,” and then click Finish. The “Reconnect at logon” option speeds up access by telling Windows XP to reconnect automatically every time you turn on your PC. If you don’t turn this on, the mapped drive will still appear listed in My Computer. But the drive will take longer to open the first time you double-click its name. 446

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Your newly mapped network drive immediately appears in your My Computer folder, ready to open with a quick double-click.

Sharing Monitors

Figure 14-13: Choose Map Network drive from any folder’s Tools menu to launch the Map Network Drive window. Top: Pick a memorable drive letter for your folder— “P” for digital photos, for instance, or “M” for MP3 files—and then click Browse. Bottom: Navigate to the folder on your network, and click OK to assign the drive letter you’ve just chosen to that folder.

Note: Even though a mapped network drive behaves as if it lives on your own PC, don’t forget that it’s living on somebody else’s PC, subject to the same networked Recycle Bin rules: anything you delete from somebody else’s PC is gone for good, bypassing the Recycle Bin’s on both PCs.

Sharing Monitors You can share files and printers on a network, but not monitors. If you want to share your big monitor with two PCs, or perhaps your PC and your laptop, you Chapter 14: Networking PCs: The Missing Manual, eMatter Edition Copyright © 2008 O’Reilly & Associates, Inc. All rights reserved.

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need to physically disconnect the monitor from your PC and connect it to other computer’s VGA port (see page 34). POWER USERS’ CLINIC

Mapping an Internet Drive Although most people stick to mapping folders that live on their own network, you can assign a drive letter to a folder on the Internet. That puts a quick pipeline to, say, your Web site storage folder, right on your desktop, letting you shuffle back and forth without using an FTP program. Mapping a folder on the Internet is similar to mapping one on your own network: Open any folder, choose Tools ➝ Map Network, and then choose a drive letter. The key is what you type in the Folder box (see Figure 14-13, top), since you must enter the exact words you would use when accessing the folder with an FTP program. If you’re lucky enough to have access to Microsoft’s FTP site, for instance, you’d enter this:

A shared folder on a Web site would look something like this: http://webserver.com/share Click the phrase “different user name” (it’s right below the “Reconnect at logon” checkbox in Figure 14-13, top), and then type the username and password you need to access to that folder. Turn on “Reconnect at logon,” and you’ll have an open connection to that folder whenever you log onto your PC.

ftp://ftp.microsoft.com

But if that gets to be a hassle, a simpler solution is to pick up a KVM switch (see page 93), a box with a cornucopia of ports. Plug the monitor into the KVM switch’s monitor port and then connect each PC’s monitor cable to the box as well. To toggle your view between the two PCs, flip the KVM box’s switch from one PC to the other.

Networking Two PCs If you’re connecting only two PCs, you don’t have to buy a router. Networking two PCs can be as simple as connecting a cable between them. Once they’re connected, you’ve created a full-fledged mini network; the two PCs are ready to share printers (see page 437) and exchange files (see page 439). Plus, if one of the PCs has an Internet connection, the second PC can share it through Windows XP’s Internet Connection Sharing (see page 331). Whether you’re connecting two PCs in a home, conference room, or at a bus stop, the following sections explain how to make the link using a variety of different methods.

Ethernet Crossover Cable Most PCs and laptops come with a built-in Ethernet port. It seems natural that connecting an Ethernet cable between the two ports would let them talk—but it

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won’t, as many people discover. Connecting those network ports requires a special breed of Ethernet cable, called a crossover cable, sold at most computer stores for a few dollars more than the average breed.

Networking Two PCs

Link the two computer’s network ports with the crossover cable, run the Network Setup Wizard (see page 419), and you’ve got yourself an instant network.

FireWire Cable FireWire cables can’t extend more than 15 feet, but that’s long enough to connect two PCs in the same room. Connect any FireWire cable between each PC’s FireWire port (see page 40) and run the Network Setup Wizard, and a speedy network is born. (You’re creating a similar FireWire network every time you connect your FireWire iPod to your PC’s FireWire port.) Since some PCs have two or more FireWire ports, you can connect several PCs in a chain to create a super speedy network that’s great for gaming. FireWire works especially well when connecting a laptop to a PC that’s already hooked up to a network. To let the laptop share the fruits of the other networked PCs (including their Internet connection), tell Windows XP to “bridge” the FireWire and Ethernet networks, described in the “Bridging Networks” box. POWER USERS’ CLINIC

Bridging Networks Sometimes you need to reach out and network with someone. For instance, say you and your laptop drop by a coffee shop that’s got a juicy WiFi signal, only to realize you left your wireless adapter at home. Fortunately, you spot a friend who not only is happily surfing away, she’s also got a spare FireWire cable (actually any of the two-PC connection methods will work: FireWire, Ethernet crossover cable, and so on). To share her Internet connection, hook up your two machines using the FireWire cable and then follow these steps on her computer: 1. View the two network connections on the host PC. Click the PC’s Start menu, right-click My Network Places, and then choose Properties from the shortcut menu. The PC displays all its available network connections. 2. Select the two networks you want to combine.

3. Right-click the selected icons, and then choose Bridge Connections. If the connection doesn’t take place immediately, repeat step 1, but right-click each network’s icon and then choose Repair. Then proceed with steps 2 and 3. When Windows XP builds a “bridge” between the two connections, each network can share the other’s benefits. And in the case of the two coffee shop laptops, that means you can piggyback on your friend’s wireless connection even though you left your wireless adapter at home. You can also bridge some (but not all) Bluetooth networks, letting a palmtop surf a PC’s Internet connection, for example. To remove a bridge when you’re through, right-click the Bridge icon, and then choose Delete.

Either drag across both icons or hold down the Ctrl key while clicking them both.

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Powerline Powerline adapters (see page 405) provide an astonishingly easy way to connect two PCs in the same household, even if they’re in distant rooms. 1. Plug one Powerline adapter into a wall outlet, and then connect an Ethernet cable between the Powerline’s Ethernet port and your PC’s Ethernet port. 2. Plug another Powerline adapter into a wall outlet, and then connect an Ethernet cable between the Powerline’s Ethernet port and your second PC’s Ethernet port. Run the Network Setup Wizard (page 419), and you’ve created a quick, portable network that works especially well for laptops. When you move your laptop to another room, just plug its Powerline adapter into the new room’s outlet. To keep the people living in neighboring apartments from joining in, run Powerline’s built-in encryption software on one of the connected PCs (see page 432). That password protects the signal, keeping out everybody but the two PC owners.

Wireless Ordinarily, wireless connections are made through a router, just like Ethernet connections. However, a little-known wireless trick called ad hoc allows two PCs to connect directly, bypassing the router completely. Why bother? First, it’s a cheap way to set up a two-PC network, letting you skip the router. Second, it lets you set up quick connections between two laptops for swapping files or playing a networked game. Unlike the other two-PC connections discussed in this chapter, you can connect a group of PCs this way, creating small, on-the-fly networks for games, discussions, file sharing, or quickly sending a file to everybody in the conference room. What this ad hoc setup won’t give you, though, is an Internet connection, since the PCs all connect with each other, but there’s no router in the mix to pipe in an Internet signal. To set up a two-PC network with wireless-ready PCs, follow these steps: 1. On either PC, view your network connections. Click Start ➝ Control Panel ➝ Network Connections to see icons representing each of your PC’s network connections (shown earlier in the top of Figure 14-5): wireless, Ethernet, dial-up, and “1394 Connection,” which most people simply call your FireWire port. 2. View the properties of your wireless network connection settings. Since you want to fiddle with your wireless network settings, right-click your Wireless Network Connection icon and then, from the shortcut menu, choose Properties. The Wireless Network Connection Properties window appears, listing lots of technical mumbo-jumbo you can safely ignore. 450

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3. Click the Wireless Networks tab.

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The window you’re looking at brings you two main goodies. It lists the names of any wireless networks you’ve previously connected with, and it lets you add a new wireless network: your ad hoc network. 4. Click the Add button on the Wireless Networks tab. The “Wireless network properties” page appears, shown in Figure 14-14. Here’s where you type in settings for your little group of ad hoc PCs. Figure 14-14: Setting up an “ad hoc” wireless connection lets two PCs talk to each other directly, bypassing the need for a router. Make sure both PCs use the same SSID (page 427) in the top box, and turn on the “computer-to-computer (ad hoc)” checkbox at the bottom of the window. To password protect the network, everybody should choose Enabled from the Data Encryption drop-down menu, and then enter an agreed upon password into the “Network key” box. Once everybody enters the same key and clicks OK, you’ve created a cozy little passwordprotected network.

5. Type a name for your ad hoc network in the “Network name (SSID)” box. The standard SSID naming rules described on page 429 apply: no more than 32 letters, numbers, and punctuation marks. Choose something short, sweet and memorable. Each PC on the ad hoc network must enter this same name on this same box, or they’ll be left out. 6. Turn on “This is a computer-to-computer (ad hoc) network; wireless access points are not used.” This checkbox lives at the bottom of the “Wireless network properties” window (see Figure 14-14). 7. Click OK, and then move to the other PC or PCs and repeat the same steps. If you already spot the name of the new, ad hoc network listed as an available network, just like the networks shown earlier in Figure 14-4, pounce on it with a double-click. This lets you connect immediately without following all the steps and entering the information by hand. Chapter 14: Networking PCs: The Missing Manual, eMatter Edition Copyright © 2008 O’Reilly & Associates, Inc. All rights reserved.

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But if you don’t spot the ad hoc network’s name, enter the settings by repeating these first six steps. You should then be able to connect. If the PC has trouble connecting, head back to step 3 and remove the names of all previously connected wireless networks: Click each name, and then click the Remove button below it. That keeps Windows XP from latching onto the signal from normal Wi-Fi networks instead of your more esoteric ad-hoc network. 8. Turn on encryption. Now that the connection’s up and running, password-protect the network: Everybody should enter the same network password, as explained in Figure 14-14. 9. Run the Network Connection Wizard to give the two PCs the same workgroup name (see page 422), and then turn on File and Printer Sharing (see page 423). Once you give the PCs the same workgroup name and turn on File and Printer sharing, they can both share files.

Bluetooth Bluetooth isn’t really a form of networking as much as it’s a cable replacement—a wireless way to get rid of that mass of cables snaking from your PC to your printer, cell phone, keyboard, mouse, and so on. Each gadget participating in a Bluetooth connection needs either a built-in Bluetooth transmitter or some kind of add-on device, making it Bluetooth-ready. To accommodate the usual variety of desktop accessories most folks have, Bluetooth lets your PC connect with up to seven devices, more than enough to handle the average person’s Bluetooth gadget arsenal. While most people use Bluetooth to zap data between a PC and a peripheral, in a pinch, you can use Bluetooth to communicate between two PCs. However, unlike most of the network setups you’ve read about so far, in which all PCs are on equal footing, able to communicate with any computer on the network, a Bluetooth PC gathering works differently. Your PC can exchange files with any PC that’s connected to it, but, in cases where you have multiple computers sipping from your PC’s Bluetooth signal, those satellite PCs can’t talk to each other. It’s also slow—an Ethernet network sends information about 100 times more quickly. Nor can you let one PC connect to another Bluetooth PC and share its Internet connection. Still, it’s a handy way to shoot a file or two to an adjacent friend’s laptop at a board meeting or coffee shop. And it can’t be beat in a car, letting your Bluetooth headset talk to your Bluetooth cell phone without a cord wrapping itself around the steering wheel.

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Most PCs don’t include built-in Bluetooth support, so people buy a little Bluetooth doodad, shown in Figure 14-15, and push it into a USB port to give their PC Bluetooth powers.

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Figure 14-15: These tiny Bluetooth adapters sell for around $40. Insert one into your PC’s USB port to connect with other Bluetooth devices: headsets, palmtops, cell phones, or even another Bluetoothenabled PC. Microsoft added Bluetooth support to Windows XP with Service Pack 2 (see page 480), but most gadgets still include their own Bluetooth software that’s often easier to figure out than Windows XP’s built-in software. (Some third-party Bluetooth software even lets a PocketPC or other palmtop share a PC’s Internet connection, something Microsoft’s Bluetooth software doesn’t support on its own.)

The following section explains how to put Bluetooth to work using Windows XP’s built-in support. Your Bluetooth adapter probably came with software that’s much more powerful than the utility provided by Windows XP, so you might want to fire that up, instead. Connecting with a Bluetooth device Before you can connect your PC to any Bluetooth gadget, be it a headset, cell phone, or even another PC, you need to get these three things out of the way: • Turn all your machinery on. Turn on your PC and insert a Bluetooth adapter into your PC’s USB port. A little Bluetooth icon appears in your PC’s taskbar and in its Control Panel (Start ➝ Control Panel ➝ Bluetooth). For Bluetoothenabled gadgets, simply flipping their On switch does the trick. • Give each Bluetooth device a name. Every PC and gadget already comes with a name, making this step a no-brainer. But if your vendor named your PC something ugly, like TUW-RX83, change it to something better. Open the Start menu, right-click My Computer, and then choose Properties. Click the Computer Name tab, and then click the Change button to select a more attractive nickname. Note: If you change your PC’s name after connecting it to a network, you must rerun the Network Setup Wizard (see page 419) before you can connect again.

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• Make all your devices “discoverable.” This is the most important step; it lets devices tell neighboring Bluetooth devices that they’re ready for action. To make a PC discoverable, double-click the Bluetooth icon in the taskbar or the Control Panel, click the Options tab, and then turn on the “Turn discovery on” checkbox. On a gadget, flip through its menus until you find the Bluetooth settings, and then change the Discoverable setting to “On.” After taking care of those tasks, follow the steps below to connect your PC to any Bluetooth gadget within a 30-foot radius, give or take a few feet. UP TO SPEED

Bluetooth and Security Bluetooth has a few security problems, like anything else in network-land today. These three threats appear most often: • Bluejacking/Bluecasting. Some people with Bluetooth-capable palmtops scan for other Bluetooth gadgets set to discoverable mode. When they find one, they’ll beam over a witty message like, “You’ve been Bluejacked!” Some billboards use Bluetooth to beam ads to cell phones and palmtops in the pockets of people walking by. If you choose to accept the message, it appears on your screen. These problems are more of a nuisance than anything.

• Eavesdroppers. Eavesdroppers count on people using obvious passcodes, like 1111. They turn their Bluetooth headset to that passcode, and wait until somebody walks by with a device set to accept communications from that passcode. The moral? Stay away from the obvious passcodes like 1111 and 1234. If your device lets you create a 16-digit passcode, use it. • Viruses. Some viruses and worms spread through Bluetooth connections. To prevent these, turn off discoverable mode on your Bluetooth gadgets and PCs.

1. Right-click your Bluetooth icon in the taskbar, and then choose Add a Bluetooth Device (see Figure 14-16). If your Bluetooth icon isn’t on your taskbar, open its icon in the Control Panel (Start ➝ Control Panel ➝ Bluetooth Devices), click the Devices tab, and then click Add. 2. Turn on “My device is set up and ready to be found” and then click Next. The Add Bluetooth Device Wizard’s sole purpose in life is to make sure you’ve changed the settings to “discoverable” on both Bluetooth devices: PCs, headsets, printers, and so on. Once they’re set to discoverable, your PC searches for neighboring USB Bluetooth devices. 3. Click the other Bluetooth device’s name, and then click Next. If the other device didn’t show up on the Add Bluetooth Device list, click Search Again. If it’s still not showing up, make sure the other device is turned on, has a name, and is set to discoverable.

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4. Create a passkey (see Figure 14-17), and then click Next.

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Any sequence of numbers fewer than 16 digits works fine, as long as you’ve entered it on both the sending and the receiving devices. That keeps bystanders from butting in on your connection. Figure 14-16: Top: Summon the Add Bluetooth Device wizard by right-clicking your Bluetooth icon in the taskbar and then choosing “Add a Bluetooth Device.” Middle: Tell the wizard that you’ve set both devices to Discoverable mode by turning on the “My device is set up and ready to be found” box. Bottom: Choose the name of the other Bluetooth device (in this case, another PC).

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5. On the other PC or device, accept the incoming connection; type in the same passkey you just created, click Next, and then click Finish. The two devices circle each other like cautious animals before exchanging passkeys and embracing, creating a connection. If your gadget doesn’t use passkeys, by chance, cancel the communication and start over. This time, though, choose “Don’t use a passkey” in Figure 14-17, top. Tip: The handy Bluetooth icon (Figure 14-16, top) might disappear from your PC’s taskbar at this point. To put it back, especially if you’re connecting two PCs, open the Control Panel’s Bluetooth icon, click the Options tab, and then turn on “Show the Bluetooth icon in the notification area.”

Yes, this is a lot of work. However, once the two devices connect, they’re considered paired, and they usually remember each other. Even after you turn one or both of them off, they still show up in each other’s list of connected Bluetooth devices. After being paired, they remember what the other device offers, whether it’s incoming sound from a headset, or a cell phone that can dial an Internet connection for your laptop. Transferring and receiving files Bluetooth’s a natural for letting your PC make small talk with gadgets, like headsets or sending files to an adjacent Bluetooth printer. But in a pinch, it works fine for sending a file or two to a friend at the coffee shop. Don’t count on sending a folder full of digital photos, however. Bluetooth sends files one at a time only, and at the slow speed of 1 Mbps—about 20 times the speed of a dial-up modem, but 100 times more slowly than an Ethernet network. And if you’re thinking of sending a large video, grab your sleeping bags. (Or grab a FireWire cable [see page 449], which sends files 400 times as fast.) To send a quick file to a neighboring laptop or PC, follow these steps: 1. Open the Bluetooth File Transfer Wizard on your PC, and then click Next. To open the wizard, choose Start ➝ All Programs ➝ Accessories ➝ Communications ➝ Bluetooth File Transfer Wizard. 2. Tell your partner to open the Bluetooth File Transfer Wizard on his PC, and then click Next. The wizard asks if you’d like to send a file or receive a file. 3. Choose “Send a file,” click Next, choose your friend’s PC, and then click Next. The wizard lists a Send To: box, ready for you to select a PC to receive the sent file. 4. If your friend’s laptop isn’t already listed in the Send To: box, click Browse, choose his PC’s name, and then click Next.

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5. Tell your friend to choose “Receive a File” from the Bluetooth File Transfer Wizard, and then to click Next.

Networking Two PCs

Your pal’s PC waits eagerly for your file to arrive. Figure 14-17: Top: Enter a passkey for this Bluetooth connection. Middle: On the other Bluetooth device (another PC, in this case) tell it to accept the connection. Bottom: Enter the same passkey on that device to complete the connection.

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6. Click Browse, select the file to send, and then click Next. When you click Next, the file flies invisibly through the air to the other computer. 7. Tell your friend to choose a folder to save the file he just received. The folder zips across the table to your buddy. LAPTOP LIFE

Getting Your PC Online with Your Bluetooth Cell Phone With a Bluetooth-enabled PC, you can dial the Internet with your Bluetooth cell phone—provided you’re already paying extra to your cellular provider for the privilege of a data connection (in addition to your regular phone calling package). Few companies toss that in as a perk. Follow these steps to add your cell phone to your PC as a dial-up modem, letting your PC automatically dial that phone when you fire up your browser to connect to the Internet. 1. Turn on your cell phone, set its Bluetooth mode to discoverable, and then connect with your PC, following the steps listed in the “Connecting with a Bluetooth device” section.

3. Click the Modems tab, and then click Add. 4. The Select Bluetooth Device dialog box opens. If it doesn’t open, click Next and let your PC try to autodetect the modem. 5. Click your Bluetooth device to use as a modem. That should leave your cell phone on the list of dial-up modems. To connect to the Internet, choose your cell phone from your list of available dial-up modems (see page 336), and then use it to ring up your dial-up Internet account. Don’t be surprised if it’s even slower than your regular dial-up connection.

2. Add your phone to your laptop’s list of modems by clicking Start ➝ Control Panel ➝ Phone and Modem Options.

Troubleshooting Network Problems Networks are notorious for problems, since it takes only one weak link to break the chain. After hours of struggling, you’ll sometimes discover that the glitch is as simple as a disconnected cable or a mistakenly flipped setting. This section lists some quick fixes for both wired and wireless networks.

General Network Problems If you’re having trouble with a new network, or a newly added PC, run through these steps first. • Turn off and restart. Unplug the router’s power cable and turn off all the PCs. Then plug the router’s power cable back in, wait 30 seconds, and start one PC. When it’s up and running, turn on the next; repeat until you turn on all the PCs. Sometimes this maneuver doesn’t do anything, but old network hands know that about half the time, this restart procedure is all you need to chase the gremlins away. 458

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• Check the network cables. If one of those little plastic locking tabs on the plug breaks off, you’re sunk. The cable will fall out of the port, breaking the connection, and leaving you with handfuls of hair as you try to track down the wrong setting that’s messing things up. Fortunately cables (page 413) are pretty cheap nowadays and are easy to replace.

Troubleshooting Network Problems

Also, double-check that each PC’s network cable plugs into a numbered port on the router. If the port lacks a number, that port’s not meant for PCs. If only one PC is acting up, try swapping cables with another PC; you may just have a bad cable. • Run the Network Setup Wizard. Although the wizard can’t help with hardware problems, it can eyeball your settings, making sure nothing’s out of line and making changes where needed. • Let Windows repair the connection. From the Start menu, right-click My Network Places; from the shortcut menu, choose Properties to see any network connections you have, including Ethernet, dial-up, FireWire, or any other connection methods on your PC. Right-click the Local Network icon; from the shortcut menu, choose Repair. This breaks the connection with the router, taps the router on the shoulder, and requests a new connection—hopefully one that’s working a little better. • Restart the router. You can restart a router in two ways. You can always unplug the router’s power cord, wait a bit, and then plug it back on. Or you can push its reset button, usually a tiny recessed button on its back panel. • Check the firmware and drivers. Check the versions of the drivers (see page 12) and firmware on your router and your network adapters. Update old versions to see if that fixes the problem.

Wireless Network Problems When a wireless network gives you trouble, start by turning off the password protection (page 429). If that cures the problem, you know your password settings are at fault, probably due to a mistyped password (see page 431). Try entering it one more time, or, if you have a USB drive, letting the Windows Wireless Network Setup Wizard (page 427) have a go at entering the password for you.

Bickering Wireless Software Windows XP didn’t offer full wireless support until Service Pack 2 (page 480). To make up for the delay, most wireless adapters come with their own software, which installs itself when you run your wireless adapter installation program. That immediately starts a power struggle. Which software should control your PC’s wireless network connection, the wireless adapter’s bundled software or Windows XP’s built-in software? Although both pieces of software usually start up when you turn on your PC, only one can have control.

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To see which software currently controls your adapter, look at an obscure checkbox in Windows’ wireless settings: choose Start ➝ Control Panel ➝ Network Connections. Right-click your wireless connection icon, choose Properties, and then click the Wireless Networks tab. There, on the page’s top, sits a checkbox called, “Use Windows to configure my wireless network settings.” When this checkbox is turned on, Windows XP remains in control, and you see all the settings and menus described in this chapter. When turned off, Windows XP passes control to the adapter’s built-in software, which uses completely different menus. If Windows XP’s wireless software doesn’t seem to be working well for you, turn off that checkbox and let your adapter’s built-in software take over. You can launch your adapter’s software by clicking the Start button, then clicking an entry for your brand of wireless adapter—D-Link or Linksys, for instance—and then running the program called “Setup,” “Utility,” or something similar. The adapter’s built-in software also usually sits as an icon on your taskbar near your clock. Give it a double-click to start using it. (Hovering your mouse pointer over any taskbar icon tells you its purpose in life.) If your adapter’s software doesn’t do the trick, however, feel free to switch back to Windows XP’s version by turning that “Use Windows to configure my wireless network” checkbox back on.

Signal Strength The bane of wireless connections everywhere is that wireless signals fade in and out, seemingly at random. When the signal doesn’t have enough oomph for you to connect, try these fixes: • Realign the antennas. If your router and wireless adapters have antennas, point them directly at each other. If your PC’s wireless adapter lives on the end of a cable, try moving the adapter to different places on your desk. Sometimes placing it on a nearby shelf gives it the boost it needs. • Relocate your wireless router. Add a longer cable between your modem and router, letting you move the router to a more central spot in your home. • Buy a wireless access point and a long cable. Plug a Wireless Access Point (WAP)—a little wireless transmitter—into your router with a long cable. Then place the wireless access point in the weakest area of your home, to extend the wireless signal into that area. • Buy a wireless access point and Powerline adapters. If running cable proves too awkward in the previous scenario, plug a Powerline adapter into your router, and then plug a second Powerline adapter into a wall outlet near your home’s weakest wireless spot. Plug a Wireless Access Point into that second Powerline adapter, and you’ve extended the reach of your wireless network so that it now covers the previous dead spot.

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• Buy a wireless repeater. These hardcover sized devices plug into the wall, absorb any incoming wireless signal, amplify it, and retransmit it, spreading your WiFi beams farther throughout your house. Unfortunately, the repeater cuts the signal’s speed in half during the process.

Troubleshooting Network Problems

• Replace your router’s antenna. The antennas on most wireless routers broadcast evenly around all sides of the router. (That’s why routers should be in the center of a house, if possible.) If your wireless router must be near a side wall, replace its antenna with a directional antenna that can be aimed at dead spots. Not all wireless routers come with replaceable antennas, unfortunately, but if yours screws off, it’s probably replaceable. • Replace your laptop’s PC Card adapter with a wireless adapter on a cable. Some wireless adapters come in the form of little boxes attached to a long cable that plugs into a USB port. The long cable lets you situate the wireless adapter in a spot—a high shelf, for example—where you can get better WiFi coverage. • Buy equipment from a single manufacturer. Equipment from the same company often adds proprietary speed boosts that work only with that firm’s equipment. This holds especially true with “Pre N” (see page 408) wireless equipment. POWER USERS’ CLINIC

Universal Plug ‘n’ Play (PnP) Some Internet-connected programs like Instant Messengers and online games want you to turn on your router’s UPnP (Universal Plug ‘n’ Play) setting. Developed by Microsoft more than five years ago, the technology lets programs automatically change settings on your router so they can communicate better. Specifically, the programs want to open ports—little windows of communications—that let them talk freely with other computers. Instead of asking confused people to “open TCP port 3389” on their router, the program uses UPnP to flip the router’s switch itself.

In today’s world of viruses, worms, and spyware, many people are afraid to give programs any control over their router. But if you’re running a trusted program that asks you to turn on UPnP, you need to open your router’s settings menu (see page 428) and flip through the menus until you spot the UPnP option. The UPnP option usually offers buttons for Enable and Disable. Click Enable, and you’re through.

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chapter

Chapter 15

15

Security

More than 200 million copies of Windows XP live on PCs worldwide. With such widespread distribution, Windows XP is an attractive target for legions of wannabe virus writers, scammers, and shady business opportunists. For example, as soon as a teenager discovers a vulnerability he can exploit on his own copy of Windows, he can immediately inflict damage on millions of Internet-connected PCs across the globe. This chapter shows how to thwart these evildoers by backing up your software regularly, creating and managing effective passwords, automatically installing newly released software “patches,” and preventing the theft of your PC or laptop. You’ll also learn how to avoid email scams, viruses, and spyware, and what to do if your PC’s already infected.

Backing Up Your Computer The most important step you can take to secure your computer is to regularly back up your data. Once you’ve put a reliable backup system in place, you’re prepared for just about anything that can happen. Without one, you stand to lose family photos, tax records, home movies, years of correspondence, music collections, and other valuables that have slowly migrated from bookshelves and closets onto your computer. There’s one bright spot: you don’t need to back up any of your programs that came on their own CDs. You can always reinstall these programs should your hard drive melt down. If you’ve downloaded software online, be sure to copy those programs onto a CD and keep the CD with the others for safekeeping.

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Backing Up Your Computer

But you must back up all your data by copying it out of your PC and onto something else: a CD, DVD, portable hard drive, USB flash drive, or even a second PC. Backing up to a different folder on your hard drive won’t help; a crashed hard drive takes down everything with it, including duplicates of files you’ve stored there. The next two sections describe quick ways to find and back up a selection of important files, as well as a sure-fire savior: backing up everything—automatically. Tip: As you work in any program, frequently press Ctrl+S—the universal “Save this file now” shortcut. Doing so immediately moves your current work from your PC’s memory (its temporary storage repository) to its hard drive (its permanent safe haven). That way, even if you lose power, or your PC crashes, you’ll have an up-to-date version of the file you’re working on.

Backing Up Individual Items Sometimes you just need to back up a few precious items: your novel-in-progress, your list of Internet Explorer favorite sites, or the Loch Ness monster photo you just downloaded. The backing up part’s actually pretty easy (see the list below for reminders on what you need to do). Tip: To back up important files quickly, email them to your own Web-based email account, like Gmail (www.gmail.com) or Hotmail (www.hotmail.com). For details about setting up a Web-based email account, see page 348.

For many people, the big challenge lies in simply finding their data, especially when some program’s stashed it away in the deep recesses of the PC. The rest of this section explains where to find, and how to back up, some common, yet irreplaceable, items. Once you’ve found your data, copy it to a CD (page 292), an external hard drive (page 266), a shared network drive (page 446), or a USB keychain drive. • Digital music and photos. These files present the biggest problems, since they’re often too large to squeeze onto a few CDs, or even onto a DVD. Backing up these files onto a portable hard drive (see page 266) is the best answer. Note: If you lose any music files you’ve purchased from either iTunes or a Media Player store, those shops won’t let you download them again. Replacing your tunes means making additional purchases.

• Digital music licenses. Whenever you purchase music online through Media Player, be sure to back up your digital licenses (Media Player ➝ Tools ➝ Manage licenses). If your PC crashes and you don’t have a backup of your licenses, your purchased music disappears from your virtual shelves. To avoid that problem with CDs you rip yourself, make sure Media Player isn’t adding copyprotection to your ripped music (see page 250 for details).

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• Downloaded programs. Some software companies sell their programs straight from their Web sites; you download a program onto your PC and you don’t have to deal with shipping charges or having to pry a CD from its oversized container. Although speedy and convenient, this distribution method also leaves you stuck without a backup CD. Therefore, after downloading any program, copy it to a CD, then write its name and your order number onto the CD with a black Sharpie marker. (To play it really safe, place a copy of your “order confirmation” email onto the CD as well.)

Backing Up Your Computer

• Financial records. Look for a Backup or Export option on the File menus of Quicken, TurboTax, and other financial programs. • Firefox bookmarks. (See page 384.) Back up your favorite Web sites, grouped by category, so you can quickly move them from one PC to another. Click Bookmarks ➝ Manage Bookmarks ➝ File ➝ Export, and then save the bookmarks.html file. • Internet Explorer favorites. (See page 380.) Just as with Firefox, back up your favorites for quick transfers. Click File ➝ Import and Export. The Import/ Export wizard then leads you through “exporting” your favorites to a file called bookmark.htm. • Microsoft Outlook. Microsoft Outlook stores your email, calendar, and contact information in one large file with a .pst extension. When you’re ready to back up this file, the hardest part is finding it, as the location varies among versions, installation methods, and setup options. The easiest way to dig it up is to let Windows’ Search program (Start ➝ Search) look for all files ending in “.pst”. To do so, open the Search program and turn on the “All files and folders” checkbox. In the “All or part of the file name” box, type *.pst and then click Search. The Search program then looks for files that meet your criterion, and lists the files it finds in the Search Results window. The file you need is probably the largest file, and it usually lives nestled somewhere in the reaches of your C:\Documents and Settings folder. But if you’re unsure, be safe and copy all those .pst files to a CD. • Miscellaneous files and folders. To back up any file or folder to a CD, portable hard drive, or even another PC on a thrown together two-PC network (see page 448), select the items, right-click them, and choose Copy. Then right-click inside the receiving container and choose Paste. • Outlook Express account settings. Although the Files and Settings Transfer wizard (page 441) will copy and save Outlook Express email, the wizard leaves your account settings behind: your user name, password, server name, and other technical tidbits required to access your email account. Outlook Express can export those settings directly to a file for backup when you choose Tools ➝ Accounts ➝ Export.

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• Outlook Express email. To back up your email, Windows XP’s Files and Settings Transfer wizard (page 441) will copy your mail into one large file, which you can then copy to a CD. To copy that file back into Outlook Express, either on the same PC or a new PC, run the Files and Settings Transfer wizard once more. This time, tell the wizard to copy that large file from your CD, and place its contents back into Outlook Express’ proper mailboxes. • Program settings and information. Some programs don’t offer a convenient way to export their settings or data. When a program leaves you scrambling for a backup method, run Windows XP’s Files and Settings Transfer wizard (see page 441). Although the wizard’s designed to copy your data and settings from one PC to another, you can also use it to back up your data and settings. Here’s how. Once the wizard packages your data into a big file, keep that file safe by storing it on an external hard drive, or burning it to a CD (page 292). If you ever need to use the backup, run the wizard again on your PC—but tell the wizard a white lie: Tell the wizard it’s running on a new PC (it’ll ask whether it’s operating on your old or your new PC). Thinking it’s unpacking your files on your new PC, the dutiful wizard places all your backed up files back into their original folders. • Windows Address Book. (See page 371.) This file contains all your contact information from Outlook Express. Consider this file one of your backup “musts,” and a good one to toss onto your iPod or USB flash drive.

Backing Up with Microsoft Backup Microsoft’s built-in Backup program makes it fairly easy to back up your data automatically, every night. The biggest problem is finding a place to store all your stuff. The Backup program takes the files you’ve chosen to back up and packages them inside one huge file that’s almost always too big to fit on anything but another hard drive. Manufacturers have rapidly lowered prices on external hard drives (see page 266), letting more people plug them into their PC’s USB or FireWire ports for a backup solution. Sure, it’s an extra expense. But when your hard drive crashes, the 100 bucks or so that you’ve forked over may seem like the best money you’ve ever spent. Tip: For the ultimate in backup safety, buy a program like Norton Ghost (www.symantec.com) or Acronis TrueImage Backup (www.acronis.com). These programs automatically send a mirror image of your hard drive to an external hard drive. If your hard drive crashes, that mirror image can get you back up and running in the least amount of time.

Follow these steps to back up your data automatically with Windows Backup.

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Start the Backup program Launch the Backup program from its perch on a long limb of the Start menu (Start ➝ All Programs ➝ Accessories ➝ System Tools ➝ Backup). If you don’t spot Backup there, you’re probably using Windows XP Home; Microsoft not only left the program off the Start menu, they left it off your PC (see page 473 for instructions on installing Backup).

Backing Up Your Computer

Tip: When the Backup wizard appears, make sure the “Always start in wizard mode” option is turned on. The Backup program’s advanced menus are terse and frightening; you don’t want to walk down this path unaccompanied. If the Backup program somehow slips into Advanced mode, choose Tools ➝ Switch to Wizard Mode to put the wizard back in charge. LAPTOP LIFE

Backing Up Your Laptop Laptops network with desktop PCs fairly easily (see page 448); sometimes a 10-dollar cable does the trick. If your PC has enough empty space on its hard drive (see page 256 for details on how to check), feel free to store your laptop’s backup file on your PC. Microsoft’s Backup program lets you back up to a networked drive just as easily as to any other hard drive.

Since your laptop probably won’t remain constantly tethered to your PC, making these backups will never be an automatic affair. But if you can remember to periodically network your laptop and your PC, your laptop’s data will be much safer.

Choose Backup or Restore Making no assumptions, the wizard first asks whether you want to back up your data or restore it. Choose Backup, of course, because you’re preparing for the impending catastrophe. If you’re returning here post-catastrophe, choose Restore (see page 473). After choosing, click Next. Decide what to back up Instead of presenting you with a list of several thousand files, the wizard simplifies matters by presenting you with four scenarios, each described below. • My documents and settings. The natural choice when you’re the only person working on the PC. This option grabs everything within your local user profile: your My Documents folder, Desktop files and shortcuts, Start menu, Outlook Express email, Windows Address Book, some program settings, and some program data. To see exactly what this option backs up—and what it leaves behind—open My Computer (Start ➝ My Computer) and browse to C:\Documents and Settings\ Username, substituting your own user account name for “Username.” (If you can’t recall your user name, take a peek at the top of your Start menu.)

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Note: Windows normally makes some of the files and folders in your Username folder invisible in order to protect you from accidentally deleting them. To see any of these ghosts when browsing in My Computer, open any folder and choose Tools ➝ Folder Options ➝ View tab. Turn on “Show hidden files and folders” and turn off “Hide protected operating system files.” The Backup program then backs up all of a folder’s files, whether they’re hidden or not. But turning off the hidden files mode when you’re spelunking through folders gives you a reassuring glimpse of all the items inside a folder that are being backed up.

• Everyone’s documents and settings. Designed for families that share one PC, this option grabs the local user profile of everybody with a user account; it also saves a copy of the Shared Documents folder. (Specifically, this option backs up the entire C:\Documents and Settings folder including the folders inside it.) • All information on this computer. This backs up everything on your PC. Although it seems the natural choice when preparing for future emergencies, it’s rarely the best choice. For one, you need a backup drive as large as your PC’s hard drive. And since it’s backing up everything, it’s also going to waste time and space grabbing things you don’t really need: Windows XP itself, for instance, as well as all of your programs. Your operating system and programs come on CDs, in most cases, which you can reinstall. If you’re worried about a disk-obliterating catastrophe, you’re better off buying a hard disk–imaging program for backups (see page 466). That will put your PC back on track faster than Windows XP’s sparse (and not especially customizable) Backup program. • Let me choose what to back up. Designed for the pickers and choosers, this option brings up a Windows Explorer-like box, shown in Figure 15-1, where you turn on checkboxes of the files and folders you want to save. There, you can grab your account’s Documents and Settings folder, for instance, just like the first option. You can also tack on a few other folders with important data. This option also lets you turn off some checkboxes to remove unnecessary items from the backup. (Internet Explorer’s wastefully large Temporary Internet Folder, found in your Local Settings area, is a prime candidate.) Choose your option, and then click Next. Choose a backup type, destination, and name The wizard packs your entire backup into one enormous file, and it needs to know where to stash your precious goods. Oddly enough, the wizard starts by suggesting the smallest storage area on your PC: a floppy disk (Figure 15-2), which works fine if you have a roomful of floppies and a week’s worth of take-out food. Instead, click Browse to gently guide the wizard to a better solution. Unfortunately, the choices aren’t great: • External Hard Drive. By far the best option. This little hard drive in a box (see page 266) has several things going for it. First, it’s external, living outside of your PC and often coming with its own power supply. That lets it survive when 468

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your PC goes up in smoke. Second, it’s easy to grab and run in emergencies. Third, external hard drives are fairly inexpensive: an 80 GB drive costs about $100; smaller drives cost less.

Backing Up Your Computer

Figure 15-1: Microsoft Backup lets you pick and choose which files to backup or restore. To make your choices, click the plus sign to expand any category. While you’re browsing, be sure to select System State. This backs up many of the same settings as System Restore (page 497), making it easier to put your PC back into working shape.

Best of all, external hard drives allow for completely unattended backups. Your automatic backups can take place automatically each night, so you don’t need to remember that time-consuming backup chore. Figure 15-2: The wizard asks you to make three decisions: what type of backup to make, where to store the backup, and what to name the backup file. Your PC actually makes your first decision for you. If your PC’s attached to a tape backup drive, your PC chooses that in the top box. If you don’t own a tape backup drive, the program “grays out” that box and lists the name “File.” Although the wizard, amusingly, suggests storing your backup file on a floppy disk, click that box’s dropdown menu to choose an external hard drive (assuming you have one). In the bottom box, type a distinctive name for your backup so you’ll recognize it on sight when searching for it later.

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• CD or DVDs. Astonishingly, the Backup program can’t save files to CDs or DVDs. If you select one of your CD or DVD drives, the wizard responds with a curt “The backup file name could not be used.” • Your Own PC. The wizard lets you save the backup on your PC’s own hard drive, but don’t fall for it. Inside every hard drive, a little metal head coasts atop platters that spin more than 80 times each second. A crash often pushes that head scratching across your platters. Instead of leaving an annoying click through your Rolling Stones album, that scratch wipes out large chunks of your data. Always keep your backup outside of the potential destruction zone. • Tape Backup Drive. If you’re one of the rare breed with a tape backup drive in the house, choose that. Even better, backtrack a bit: most tape backup drives include their own backup software that’s much more versatile than Windows XP’s Backup program. • Iomega Cartridge. Some people still own those old Zip and Jaz external drives cartridges, which will work in a pinch. If you choose this option, hopefully you own the newer cartridges that hold at least 750 MB; the older 100 MB and 250 MB ones fill up much too quickly. Plus, opting for a cartridge requires you to hang around during the backup, feeding your PC new cartridges. • Network Drive. A choice only if you’ve got a house full of networked PCs (see Chapter 14). This option lets you save your data on a second PC’s hard drive. You can back up your laptop to your PC’s hard drive, for instance. It’s a money saver, but only if you’re on a network and the receiving PC has enough room on its hard drive. If you’re like most people, the wizard automatically chooses File in the “Select a backup type” box, as explained in Figure 15-2. The wizard chooses the name “Backup” for your saved file, but you should change that name (in the “Type a name for this backup” box) to something more descriptive. People with two or more PCs should name each backup after the PC that they’re backing up, which makes it easy to find the correct file later on. The standard file naming rules apply here; don’t try to name your backup file anything you wouldn’t name a folder. After selecting the file’s storage area and name, click Next; then click Finish to start backing up immediately (see the following Tip for advice on when you may want to click Advanced rather than Finish). When the wizard finishes, it displays a final window reporting its accomplishments. If it complains of an error, click Report to find out what went wrong. Tip: For the ultimate in backup convenience, however, don’t start backing up immediately. Instead, click Advanced to make your backups automatic, described next.

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Automate your backup Although a few people on each continent possess the discipline to run the Backup program every evening, everybody else should take the wizard one step further by automating the backup. If you’re backing up to a drive that’s always connected to your PC—an external hard drive, for instance, or a network drive—follow these steps to let the wizard automatically back up your files every day at a chosen time. (If you’re one of the poor souls backing up to floppies or cartridges, you can’t automate the Backup program unless you own a particularly well-trained robotic dog.)

Backing Up Your Computer

1. At the Backup wizard’s closing window, click Advanced rather than Finish. 2. Choose Normal, and then click Next. Normal creates a complete backup of your chosen files. The other options, Copy, Incremental, Differential, and Daily, offer more advanced, space-saving options for large-scale backups. 3. Turn on any needed options, and then click Next. The wizard offers three options: • Verify data after backup. Turn this on; it tells Backup to double-check that each copied file safely arrives at its new destination. Since you won’t be hand-feeding your PC floppies or cartridges, let the program take that little extra time. • Use hardware compression, if available. Available for tape drive owners. Turn this setting on only if you see it. When this option’s available, it means that the Backup program recognizes your tape drive’s brand and model, so it knows how to pack more data onto less tape by turning on the drive’s compression option. • Disable volume shadow copy. Always leave this option turned off. When turned off, your PC can copy files and programs even when the files are open or in use. That way, Backup can back up Chapter 13 of your autobiography while you’re still rewording the third paragraph. 4. Choose “Replace the existing backups,” and then click Next. This tells Backup to replace yesterday’s backup file with the one it’s creating right now. That saves space, preventing it from piling a second backup into the same ever-growing file. 5. Schedule the backup time and add your password. Here’s where everything comes together. Choose Later instead of Now, and type in a Job Name—Automated Backup, for instance. Then click the Set Schedule button and choose a date and time for your automatic backup (Figure 15-3).

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At the appointed hour, Backup packs your selected files into one huge file and places it in your chosen location for safekeeping. At least that’s what it’s supposed to do. Be sure to check the date and time of your first backup, making sure it matches what you’ve chosen. Then restore a few files, described in the next section, to get a feel for how the restore feature works—and to make sure it’s actually working. Figure 15-3: Top: The Backup wizard’s advanced settings let you schedule automatic backups whenever you like. To schedule a daily backup every morning at 3 a.m., for instance, click the Schedule Task drop-down menu and choose Daily. From the Start time drop-down menu, choose 3 a.m., and then click OK. Bottom: Enter your User Account password to give the wizard permission to back up your files and add your backup plan to Windows XP’s Scheduled Tasks list. If you need to tweak the settings of your backup schedule later on, head to the Control Panel’s Scheduled Tasks area and open the Backup entry.

Remember to leave your PC turned on and awake—not hibernating—all evening if you choose to back up your PC automatically at night. To turn off hibernation, choose Start ➝ Settings ➝ Control Panel ➝ Power Options and then choose Never for these three settings: “Turn off hard disks,” “System Standby,” and “Turn off hard disks.” Then click the Hibernate tab, and turn off Enable Hibernation. Click OK when you’re done. (Screen savers are fine, and you can even turn off your monitor; the Backup program will still run.)

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If you prefer to turn off your PC at night, choose a time when you know your PC will be on. Backup can run in the background while you’re working.

Backing Up Your Computer

Note: If your scheduled Backup never takes place, rerun the Backup wizard, but be sure to add your user account password when setting up the automated backup. In fact, if you haven’t yet password-protected your user account (see page 478), now’s the time to do it. Scheduled tasks run only on user accounts that have a password. WORKAROUND WORKSHOP

Windows XP Home’s Missing Backup Program Microsoft places its Backup program on Windows XP Professional’s menu (Start ➝ All Programs ➝ Accessories ➝ System Tools ➝ Backup). After all, XP Pro costs twice as much XP Home, so owners of that version need some perks. Windows XP Home owners lack that luxury. To install the Backup program, XP Home owners must dig out their Windows XP CD and follow these steps: 1. Insert your Windows XP CD and, on the Welcome screen, choose Perform Additional Tasks. If Windows XP’s Welcome screen doesn’t appear automatically, open My Computer (Start ➝ My Computer) and double-click your CD drive.

2. Choose Browse this CD and navigate to the Backup utility’s installation program (ValueAdd ➝ Msft ➝ Ntbackup ➝ Ntbackup.msi). 3. Install the Ntbackup.msi program by double-clicking it. If you don’t spot the Ntbackup.msi file, however, or perhaps don’t even find a ValueAdd folder, you’re not alone. Many manufacturers leave that file out of the Windows CD that they provide. (Searching on Google for that file’s name often turns up some sneaky download opportunities, but be sure to scan any downloaded file with a virus checker [page 486].)

Restoring a Backup with Microsoft Backup Hopefully, you’ll never need to read this section. But if you’re here, now’s the time to cash in on the time you’ve spent setting up your backup system. To do that, you need to enlist the help of the Backup wizard’s alter ego: the Restore wizard. Although the Backup wizard makes it fairly easy to back up your files, the Restore wizard seems strangely intimidating the first time through. The lazy wizard doesn’t bother to display your file’s familiar icons, for instance. Instead, it shows only a list of file names. Oddly enough, much of that obfuscation works to protect your backed-up files from inadvertent damage during the restoration process. That’s because the Restore wizard works much like the indexer of a book. The Restore wizard peeks inside your backup file, creates an index of its contents, and then shows you the index—which it refers to as a catalog—letting you pick and choose which files to restore. Since the wizard displays only an index of your files—not the files themselves— you’re completely separated from your files. Even if you delete the index for some Chapter 15: Security PCs: The Missing Manual, eMatter Edition Copyright © 2008 O’Reilly & Associates, Inc. All rights reserved.

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reason, there’s no harm done—the wizard doesn’t delete your backed up files. Just tell the Restore wizard to peek into the backup file again and create a new index, which takes a second or two. You don’t need to wait for a disaster before enlisting the Backup program’s restore feature. The program comes in handy if you want to restore just a few selected files or folders, which is a nice fallback if, say, you deleted a file in the morning and cleaned out your Recycle Bin in the afternoon, but realize you need the file back in the evening. Restoring a file or two is also the only way to know for sure that your backup program is really working the way it should. Follow these steps to retrieve any or all files and folders from your backup file: 1. Open Microsoft Backup and click Next. Click Start ➝ All Programs ➝ Accessories ➝ System Tools ➝ Backup. 2. At the Welcome Screen, click Next. Choose “Restore files and settings,” and then click Next. The wizard lists a screen much like the one where you chose the files to back up. The big difference is the word “File” at the top, shown in Figure 15-4. Click the word “File” to see your “catalogs”—indices to the backup files you’ve created. (If you’re running Backup on several PCs, you’ll see a catalog for each backup file.) Figure 15-4: To display a backup file’s contents, the Restore wizard peeks inside the file and creates a catalog—an index—of its contents. Then the wizard displays the catalog in this window: the backup file’s name appears on the window’s left pane, and the backup file’s contents appear on the right. If the window looks confusing, showing too many backup files on the left or the wrong dates on the right, you’re probably seeing an out-of-date catalog. To start with a fresh slate, delete any or all of the listed catalogs. Right-click the index file’s name on the right and then choose Delete Catalog. That scarysounding option doesn’t delete your backup file, just an outdated index. Then, create an up-to-date index of your current backup file: click Browse, navigate to your backup file, and choose the Backup file you’d like to restore. The Wizard quickly catalogs that file and displays its contents in the window for you to restore.

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The wizard then displays the catalog—the index to that file—on the screen.

Creating Passwords

Click the plus sign next to the word “File” to see the contents of your backup file. Tip: To expand all the folders and subfolders on a particular backup file, click that file’s name and then press the * key on your numeric keypad. Pressing the up or down arrows lets you move through the folders fairly quickly.

3. Select the files or folders to restore and click Next. Turn on the checkboxes next to any files or folders you want to resuscitate. 4. Restore the files. Clicking Finish neatly extracts the files and tucks them back in their original positions, which is what you want to do when replacing lost or damaged files. However, the Advanced button offers three other options that come in handy on certain occasions: • Original location. This option restores your selected files and folders to their original folders—unless the Backup program encounters a file in that folder with an identical name. If it does, the Backup program assumes you don’t need that particular file restored, so it skips it. Choosing this option lets you restore an entire folder’s contents quickly, knowing that only the missing files will be restored. • Alternate location. This lets you restore the selected files and folders to any folder you want. This option preserves the original folders’ structures, neatly tucking the right subfolders into the appropriate parent folders. But it places that whole “branch” of folders in a different location. For instance, you can tell the wizard to restore your My Pictures folder inside a Test folder. When the wizard’s through, your My Pictures folder appears inside your Test folder, with all its original files and folders intact. That lets you peek at the contents of the restored files and folders, making sure they’re really the ones you want to salvage. (This comes in especially handy when restoring digital photos.) • Single folder. This dumps all the selected files and folders into a single folder of your choice. Unlike the “Alternate location” option, this option ignores the file’s original folder structure. You may find this option handy for restoring a handful of files to a USB drive, for instance, but impractical when restoring lots of files.

Creating Passwords A password of 75aRvLx3 is pretty darn unguessable. Unfortunately, it’s also impossible to memorize except by a few child prodigies. And therein lies the problem

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with passwords: picking them creates a constant tradeoff between convenience and security. To make things worse, everything seems to wants a password these days: ATM machines, Web sites, email accounts, cell phones—even Windows XP asks for a logon password, if you password-protect your user account (Start ➝ Control Panel ➝ User Accounts). When faced with a deluge of password requests, too many people resort to the quick and dirty approach: using the same password for everything, which creates a master key for a thief. Other people choose simple, easy-to-remember passwords like “1234” or “asdf” that fail most basic “good password” guidelines. Several worms (see page 485) released on the Internet in the past two years come with password crackers that try the most common passwords. Tip: A good password is eight characters or longer and mixes numbers with uppercase and lowercase letters. A bad password is your own name, the words admin; 1234; password; open sesame; the name of a spouse, relative, or pet; or your home or work address.

Although passwords will always be an inconvenient necessity, several creation tricks make them slightly less bothersome: • Mnemonic phrases. Anybody who’s taken piano lessons remembers “Every Good Boy Does Fine,” which helps them remember the E, G, B, D, and F positions on the music scale. Similarly, passwords based on mnemonics hold special significance to their creators. For instance, the phrase “I ate fish last Thursday evening” could be reduced to I8flTe, creating that rare combination of both a strong and memorable password. • Word combinations. Combine two random four-to-six letter words with a number or symbol between them, like apple#deluge. • Browser automation. Both Internet Explorer and Firefox will memorize passwords for Web sites, automatically filling in both your user name and password whenever you visit. That’s fine for your recipe swap site or woodworking group. But your browsers repeat that helpful act for anybody sitting at your PC, including the person who walked off with your laptop yesterday. Limit your browser’s password stash to low-risk sites. To change Internet Explorer’s password assistance settings, open the program and choose Tools ➝ Internet Options. On the Content tab, click AutoComplete, and then either turn on or off “User names and passwords on forms. ” Doing so tells Internet Explorer to stop memorizing your passwords. To change Firefox’s password settings, open the program and choose Tools ➝ Options ➝ Privacy ➝ Saved Passwords, and then turn off Remember Passwords. Or, to have security and Firefox’s password helper, click Set Master Password on that same page. After you set a Master Password, you must enter that

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password each time you open Firefox on your PC. Without that password, Firefox will still run, but it won’t automatically fill in your passwords at the Web sites you visit.

Creating Passwords

Both programs place a password-clearing button on these password settings pages, which is handy after you enter your password at a public terminal. Just click the button at the end of your session, and you instantly force the browser to forget any password you’ve just entered. When you find yourself juggling more passwords than you can remember, you may want to enlist the help of a password management program. These programs let you enter one strong password, after which they display your entire password collection. Whenever you visit a site requesting a password, open your password management program by typing its single password, copying the password you need, pasting it into the Web site, and then closing the program. Some of the more popular password managers include Password Safe (http:// passwordsafe.sourceforge.net), which even creates those hard-to-think-up passwords like “i5GBh9F6.” Other people prefer hardware devices like a fingerprint reader, shown in Figure 15-5, for quick access to sites. Figure 15-5: Microsoft’s fingerprint readers (www.microsoft. com/hardware) come in a standalone model (shown here), as well as models built into keyboards and mice. All three variations let you log onto Windows XP at the touch of a finger, but they really shine at logging onto passwordprotected Web sites, automatically entering your user name and password when you touch the pad.

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Activating Windows Update

For security on your own PC, these passwords will stop most people from accessing your data: • Entire PC. To stop people from even getting into Windows, much less your files, password protect your PC’s BIOS (page 528). That tells your PC to request a password when first turned on, before it loads any operating system or program. It’s only a first line of defense, as some PCs make a BIOS password easier to bypass than others. Try to break in (see page 524) and see whether your PC’s BIOS opens the door or keeps it slammed shut. • Windows user account. Password protecting your user account (Start ➝ Control Panel ➝ User Accounts) keeps out others, but be sure to create and hide a Password Recovery Disk before you find yourself locked out of your own account. If you’re already locked out of your own account, sans Password Recovery Disk, you’re not completely out of luck. Note: For more information about creating, deleting, and managing Windows XP’s user accounts, see Windows XP: The Missing Manual.

Activating Windows Update Microsoft releases critical patches (software fixes) on the second Tuesday of each month to address the latest in an endless flow of Windows XP security threats, among other problems. Occasionally, Microsoft releases “ultra critical” patches too important to wait for the monthly delivery schedule. But rather than trying to keep up with Microsoft’s security problems, set your PC to grab and install patches automatically, as described in this section.

Setting Windows Updates to Automatic To fix problems with Windows XP as quickly as possible, Microsoft turned its update site (www.windowsupdate.com) into a constantly running spigot. Once you’ve activated a feature called Automatic Update, Windows Update downloads new patches as soon as they’re released, and then installs them on your PC, even if you’re working online at the time. To make sure your PC takes advantage of Automatic Update, click the Start button, right-click My Computer, and from the shortcut menu, choose Properties. To see or change your settings, click the Automatic Updates tab, shown in Figure 15-6. Then choose from the following options: • Automatic. The best option for most people. This tells your PC to fetch any newly released updates in the background as soon as you connect to the Internet. It also lets you choose a particular time of day to install newly acquired patches. For best results, choose the default setting: “Every day at 3 a.m.” If your PC is turned off at the appointed hour, Windows XP asks to install the downloaded update the next time you turn on your PC.

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• Download updates for me, but let me choose when to install them. A good choice for laptoppers. This automatically downloads available updates in the background whenever you connect to the Internet. Once the update arrives on your PC, your taskbar sprouts a “notification balloon,” asking permission to install it. Should you need to turn off your laptop and dash for the taxi, change the permission balloon’s “Now” option to “Tomorrow.” Otherwise, install the update.

Activating Windows Update

Figure 15-6: Set Windows Update to Automatic so your PC downloads new patches as they’re released. The downloads take place in the background, so they don’t interfere with your other Internet browsing and email activities. Should you disconnect before downloading the entire update, Windows resumes downloading where it left off the next time you connect to the Internet. You can install downloaded updates any time, even when you’re not online.

• Notify me but don’t automatically download or install updates. Chosen only by those who enjoy nagging screens, this option makes Windows Update ask permission before downloading an update, and then ask yet again before installing it. • Turn off Automatic Updates. Microsoft tossed this in mostly for large corporations with dozens or even thousands of PCs. The delay gives the company’s techies enough time to test patches for potential conflicts with in-house software before installing the patch on every PC, thereby freeing workers from the chore. Tip: Even if you’ve set Windows Update to Automatic, drop by the Windows Update site (www. windowsupdate.com) occasionally and click the Custom button. The Automatic Updates install only “Critical” updates—fixes that keep vandals from messing with your PC and its contents. The Custom button lets you view nonessential updates: enhancements to Media Player, for instance, as well as bug fixes—not security fixes—for programs like Outlook Express. Be sure to use Internet Explorer when you visit; Windows Update doesn’t work with any other Web browser.

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Windows XP’s Two Service Packs Since Windows XP’s release in 2001, Microsoft has released a flood of patches to plug security problems. To simplify the patch-grabbing process, Microsoft released two mammoth patch bundles: Service Pack 1 and Service Pack 2. (Some people resort to the term “Service Pack 0” to describe Windows XP without any Service Pack installed.) Service Pack 1, a large 133 MB file released on September 9, 2002, contained all of Windows Update’s patches from Windows XP’s first year of release, as well as support for the speedy new USB 2.0 ports (see page 34) and faster S-ATA (page 263) connections for new technology hard drives. Don’t worry if you missed Service Pack 1, though. Service Pack 2, a whopping 266 MB file released on August 6, 2004, contains everything in Service Pack 1, plus enough patches to bring it up to date through July 2004. Service Pack 2 adds much-needed security enhancements by turning on Windows XP’s built-in firewall, improving wireless Internet support, adding a pop-up blocker to Internet Explorer (see page 387), and adding Bluetooth support (see page 452). Note: Service Pack 2 installs only on legitimately purchased copies of Windows XP, which includes any PC purchased from a manufacturer like Dell or Gateway. If you had a friend build you a new PC with Windows XP for “really cheap,” you might be in for an unpleasant surprise when you try to install Service Pack 2 on your PC.

If you haven’t yet installed Service Pack 2, shown in Figure 15-7, you can download it from Microsoft’s Security Essentials site (www.microsoft.com/protect). The Service Pack interferes with some older versions of software like Norton AntiVirus. If Service Pack 2 causes problems with one of your programs, visit that program manufacturer’s Web site; most have released free downloadable patches to fix the problem. You’ll find more information about Service Pack 2 on Microsoft’s Service Pack 2 information site (www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/sp2). Figure 15-7: To see the Service Pack version installed on your PC, click Start and then right-click My Computer; from the shortcut menu, choose Properties. When the window opens to the General tab, the Service Pack version appears as the bottom line of the System section. Setting Windows Update to automatic tells Windows to grab waiting Critical Updates, including Service Pack 2.

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Preventing Theft

Phishing

In statistics trumpeted by vendors selling computer security products, the FBI reports a laptop is stolen every 53 seconds, and that 97 percent are never recovered. Even worse, the FBI announced in 2002 that 310 of its own laptops—about two percent of its inventory—were missing. To keep laptops and other computer equipment firmly attached to their owners, several companies sell security devices: • Absolute Software (www.absolute.com); CyberAngel (www.sentryinc.com). Both companies sell computer recovery systems for tracking a stolen PC’s whereabouts. The first time the thief connects to the Internet, the software silently and securely drops by the company’s computers, which log the missing PC’s IP address—a traceable number showing the PC’s geographic location and Internet Service Provider. Working with the police, the company traces the IP address to the Internet account owner’s billing address, and then sends in the dogs. Both companies report nearly 90 percent recovery rates. • CaveoAntitheft (www.caveo.com). This motion-sensing PC Card shrieks when somebody moves a laptop without first disarming the alarm. • CompuCage (www.compucage.com). Built to keep equipment from ever leaving a desk, CompuCage’s products include a variety of chunky metal holders, thick cables, and bolt-on devices for PCs, laptops, and monitors. • Kensington’s Security Slot (www.kensington.com). The Kensington Security Slot comes installed on a wide range of computer hardware, including laptops (see Figure 15-8), and works with a variety of locking devices to keep computers and other devices from walking off.

Phishing If a stranger came up to you on the street and asked for your banking password, you’d probably think he was loony. Yet, thousands of people feel compelled to hand over their banking passwords when that same request comes through email. In a practice known as phishing, scammers send emails that appear to come from your bank, PayPal, eBay, or similar finance-related sites (see Figure 15-9). Unfortunately, the emails are carefully crafted spoofs that try to trick you into visiting the scammer’s site (cleverly constructed to look like a legitimate site) and entering your coveted account name and password. Legitimate companies never send you email asking you to verify your password. If legitimate companies need to contact you, they’ll send a letter. Or, they simply wait until you visit their site and log in. The “urgent” requests in your mailbox come from thieves waiting for you to click their links and enter your account

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information, password, credit card numbers, and anything else they can trick you into revealing. Figure 15-8: Top: Many laptops, portable hard drives, monitors, projectors, and other expensive gadgets include a Security Slot—a small rectangular hole in the case that’s left more than a few owners wondering what plugs into it. Bottom: The answer comes from Kensington (www. kensington.com), which, along with many other companies, sells cables and locks that latch onto the slot, letting you fasten your laptop or other equipment to the nearest desk leg, chair, or other large, solid object. Manufacturers often place a reinforcing strip of metal behind the security slot; ripping the lock out of the slot takes a good chunk of the laptop’s case along with it.

Note: The easiest way to avoid phishers is to never give any personal, financial, or account information to any Web site or email address unless you started the communication. When in doubt, open your browser, and type in the institution’s Web site address by hand, not by clicking any emailed link. Check the link displayed in your email program’s lower corner against the link at the company’s legitimate Web site. If they’re different, you’re being scammed.

Adware, Spyware, and Other Threats Just about everybody’s heard the terms virus and spyware by now, but they’re only a few examples of a growing category of software called malware: programs designed for malicious purposes. Most slip into your PC behind your back, leaving

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problems in their wakes. This section describes the various types of malware, how to identify them, and most importantly, how to get rid of them.

Adware, Spyware, and Other Threats

Figure 15-9: These “phishing” emails are some of more than 35 million fraudulent email messages sent to people during the first six months of 2005, according to IBM. Don’t respond to any requests like this that arrive through email; they’re all scams. Instead, type the company’s email address into your browser—don’t click the emailed link—and then forward the email to the company’s security department.

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Types of Malware Malware goes unloved by everybody but its creators. Unfortunately, removing malware is much more difficult than becoming infected by it. Here are some of the most common types of malware found today, so you’ll know just what your antivirus program is talking about. • Adware. Just as some free magazines support themselves with ads, some programs do the same: an advertising banner appears inside the program as it runs. Examples include Eudora email (see page 345), AOL Instant Messenger, and some popular file-sharing programs. The worst type of adware hijacks your Web browser and places an ad-filled bar along one side of the browser window. Some ads continue to appear even long after you’ve disconnected from the Internet. • Back doors. Whether spread as a virus or worm, this software lets its creator enter and use your PC from remote locations. These back doors are often used to create Zombie PCs (see later in this list). • Cookies. Not to be confused with viruses, adware, or spyware, cookies (see page 379) are small identifying files that Web sites place on your PC. They’re not inherently evil, and some work to your benefit. • Dialers. These programs tell a dial-up modem to call expensive “pay-per-dial” numbers, resulting in hefty charges on your next phone bill. If you hear your PC dialing at odd hours of the day when you’re not at the keyboard, you may be a victim. • Hijackers. These attach themselves to Internet Explorer, changing its settings so you’re sent to certain pages automatically. Many hijack your Home page and search pages, redirecting your PC to Web sites loaded with advertising or pornography. • Key logger. This software waits until you visit a secure site—a bank, online merchant, or similar site—and then begins recording your keystrokes, catching your credit card number as you enter it into the online form. Most work with back doors to send the information back to the thief. • Spyware. This software monitors your computing activities, learning about your life. Some spyware simply watches the Web sites you visit to learn your interests. Then, as you visit your usual round of sites, the ads you’re presented with are tailored to your interests. The worst type of spyware works like a key logger, waiting for you to type in a credit card number so it can catch the information and then send it to the spyware’s creator. • Trojan Horse. Not a virus as much as a delivery mechanism, this software contains something different than you expected: a virus or back door built into a seemingly innocent game, for instance.

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• Viruses. This software attaches itself to another file—email, for instance, or a program. When you open the file or run the program, you launch the software instead, and end up infecting your system. The virus then embeds itself into other files or email, waiting to be sent to the next victim.

Adware, Spyware, and Other Threats

• Worms. Worms behave much like viruses, but they’re able to spread themselves without human assistance. Some come with built-in email programs that email copies of themselves to people in your address book; others travel the Internet, or internal networks, looking for unprotected PCs to infect and, from there, to begin replicating themselves. • Zombie PCs. These Internet-connected PCs have been broken into by online thieves and harnessed for their own projects. Some virus writers create flocks with hundreds or thousands of broadband zombie PCs, and then sell or rent them to others for sending spam. Zombie PCs behave naturally, so most owners—often businesses or universities with dozens of PCs—don’t notice anything unusual. Security firms estimate that more than 50 percent of spam now comes from zombies, as spammers try new tactics to thwart anti-spam laws.

Symptoms Any or all of these symptoms may appear when your PC’s infected with a virus, spyware, or other malware variant: • Extra ads. You may notice advertising banners that don’t go away as you move from one Web site to another, or pop-up/pop-under ads that seem to thwart Internet Explorer’s pop-up blocker (Internet Explorer ➝ Tools ➝ Pop-up Blocker ➝ Turn On Pop-up Blocker). If you don’t see the pop-up blocker, you need to install Windows XP’s Service Pack 2 (see page 480). Some ads may appear even when you’re not online. • Sluggishness. Since your PC’s burdened with extra tasks taking place surreptitiously, it may run more slowly than usual, taking longer for Windows to load, or to move from one Web site to another. • Error messages. Most malware isn’t written with performance in mind, leading to cryptic error messages about programs or things you’ve never heard of before, much less installed. You may see phrases like “Illegal Operation Error.” • Internet Explorer problems. You may not be allowed to visit sites you’ve previously visited, or Internet Explorer may visit sites you haven’t requested. When your browser first opens, it may show a Web site other than your Home page and refuse to let you change it back to your original selection. • Toolbar issues. Some malware installs a new toolbar in your browser that’s difficult to pry off. • Crashes. Your Internet browser or even your PC may crash unexpectedly at times, and for no apparent reason.

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Adware, Spyware, and Other Threats

When your PC’s acting strangely, fire up a free spyware scanning program (see page 487) instead of calling tech support or reinstalling software. If you’ve never run an anti-spyware program before, you’ll be amazed at all the critters it finds bedding down in your PC.

Removal Like a bad cold, malware is easy to catch, but difficult to get rid of. A variety of programs detect, remove, and protect against infections. Although some antivirus programs are slowly adding spyware removal to their inventories, most only protect you from viruses. Unless your virus program specifically says that it detects and removes spyware, you need two separate programs: one to remove viruses, and another to recognize and remove spyware. The key word here is recognize. When these programs scour your PC, they search for code that matches code in their databases. When they find a match, they either delete it or send it into “quarantine,” leaving it powerless. But since the most recently released viruses and spyware don’t yet appear in the latest databases, the programs can’t detect them. To keep up, companies constantly update their databases, sometimes hourly. That’s why running any antivirus or anti-spyware program requires you to download the latest database. Antivirus programs usually require a yearly subscription for access to their latest databases. Some programs keep themselves automatically updated, visiting the Internet and downloading what they need in the background. Others require you to connect to the Internet and download the latest “definitions” each time you run the program. But whether they call it a database or a definition, it’s mandatory; without this new information, the program’s no defense against the latest batch of villains. Antivirus programs Windows XP doesn’t include any antivirus program, but Microsoft offers a page that links to discount trial offers from a variety of software manufacturers including the four biggies: Symantec (www.symantec.com), McAfee (www.mcafee.com), Trend Micro (www.trendmicro.com), and Computer Associates (www.ca.com). The following page is an excellent first stop if you’re running an unprotected PC. To download the trial versions, visit this Web page: www.microsoft.com/athome/security/viruses/wsc/en-us/default.mspx Several companies offer free antivirus software, letting you try a product without any strings attached. They’re limited to personal use, which means you’re not supposed to run them if you’re working in an office. Their updates and definitions don’t download as quickly as do the pay versions; and they offer no technical support. Some are given away in the hope you’ll upgrade to the pay versions with their additional features. These are the three biggest antivirus freebies:

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• AVG Antivirus (http://free.grisoft.com) • Free avast! 4 Home Edition (www.avast.com/eng/free_software.html)

Adware, Spyware, and Other Threats

• ClamWin (www.clamwin.com) Note: Windows XP’s Security Center nags you when you install an antivirus program that it doesn’t recognize. If XP’s Security Center doesn’t recognize your’s, stop the nagging screens by visiting the Security Center (Start ➝ Control Panel ➝ Security Center) and then choose “Change the way Security Center alerts me.” There, you can turn off the Virus Protection option, effectively stifling the alerts. TROUBLESHOOTING MOMENT

Removing Specific Viruses If you recognize a certain virus on any PC, perhaps spotting a telltale file name or symptom, you may not need to buy a virus checker. Several sites offer free tools that specialize in the removal (rather than the detection) of common and particularly damaging viruses. Symantec offers free removal tools for nearly 100 common viruses: • http://securityresponse.symantec.com/avcenter/ tools.list.html You’ll find similar downloadable tools at these sites:

Those three sites each require separate tools for the viruses you’re able to identify on your own, but McAfee packs up 54 of its removal tools into one handy program called “Stinger.” Stinger scans your hard drive, and identifies and removes the most common viruses and worms. Stinger is certainly no substitute for an up-to-date antivirus program that catches the latest week’s virus arrivals. But at around 500 KB, it’s a great addition to your USB drive. Before using any PC, insert your USB drive and run Stinger to let the program purge the PC of the most common viruses. • http://vil.nai.com/vil/stinger/

• www.bitdefender.com/site/Download/ browseFreeRemovalTool/ • http://www.grisoft.com/doc/Utilities/lng/us/tpl/tpl01

Removing spyware and adware The first step in removing spyware and adware is to not get tricked into installing it. Lots of spyware tries to install itself automatically when you click a pop-up ad, like the ones shown in the top of Figure 15-10. As the software begins to install, it spills the beans midway through the fine print of the multipage End User Legal Agreement, shown in Figure 15-10, bottom. Most people miss this not-so-fine print as they race to click the I Accept button. To avoid picking up unwanted software, follow these tips: • Install Service Pack 2 (see page 480) and turn on Internet Explorer’s pop-up blocker (page 387).

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• Better yet, switch to Firefox, which doesn’t support the type of programming exploited by many unwanted programs. Figure 15-10: Top and Middle: Pop-up ads lure you by mimicking Windows XP’s own messages or claiming to do something useful. Bottom: When you install this “junk email blocking” software, more details emerge deep in the licensing agreement: the utility displays targeted ads and popups from both the company itself and thirdparties. And get this part: “Spam Blocker Utility, from time to time, may work with email direct marketers, affiliates, and/or sponsors to offer users the opportunity to subscribe to various subscriptions to newsletters and information, whether by e-mail or otherwise.”

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• Don’t click any pop-ups except the X in their upper right-hand corners. (Clicking the pop-up’s button marked Close sends you to the company’s Web site.) If you’re barraged with pop-ups, don’t try to close them individually. Instead, close them all in one swoop: right-click the group of Internet Explorer programs on your taskbar and then, from the shortcut menu, choose Close Group.

Adware, Spyware, and Other Threats

• Read licensing agreements thoroughly before installing anything offered to you on the Internet. If it’s too late, and your PC’s plagued with unwanted toolbars, ads, and other nuisances, several free programs can scan your PC and strip away any spyware or adware they find. • Ad-Aware SE (www.lavasoftusa.com/support/download/) • Spybot-S&D (www.safer-networking.org) When those programs can’t catch a particularly clingy piece of spyware—or they won’t even run—follow these steps to put Windows into troubleshooting mode, giving the spyware killers a better chance to wring the spyware out of your PC: 1. Download and install both pieces of anti-spyware software mentioned above. Some spyware restricts Internet Explorer so it can’t visit anti-spyware sites. If your copy of Internet Explorer’s in similar bad shape, download and install Firefox (see page 380). It’s a much more difficult target for spyware programs. 2. Load each program, one at a time, updating its definitions and then closing it without performing any kind of scanning operation. 3. Disconnect from the Internet and restart Windows XP in Safe Mode. Disconnect your PC from the Internet by unplugging your PC’s phone or network cable, or unplugging its wireless adapter. Safe Mode, a basic troubleshooting tool, starts Windows in a no-frills mode, bypassing all but the most basic drivers and not running your PC’s normal “start up” software—which often consists of spyware or adware. To enter Safe Mode, restart your PC (Start ➝ Turn Off Computer ➝ Restart), and then press F8 once or twice a second before Windows XP loads. When Windows XP’s Boot Mode menu appears, select Safe Mode. 4. Run Ad-Aware SE and remove any spyware it finds. 5. Run Spybot-S&D and remove any spyware it finds. 6. Restart your PC normally and reconnect to the Internet. 7. Visit Windows Update with Internet Explorer and install any “critical” patches. Be sure to download and install any patches marked “Critical.” If you’ve turned on Automatic Updates (see page 478), you shouldn’t find many, if any.

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Tip: Microsoft entered the anti-spyware market, and it’s currently giving away a copy of the program during its testing phase. Feel free to download it (www.microsoft.com/athome/security/spyware/software/ default.mspx) and let it extricate any spyware the other two programs may have missed.

Installing a Firewall PCs are no longer safe when directly connected to the Internet. A new, unpatched version of Windows XP typically becomes infected within 15 minutes of connecting to the Internet. Microsoft finally realized the extent of the problem, and its collection of patches in Service Pack 2 automatically flipped Windows XP’s built-in firewall to “On.” (Before that, Microsoft expected you to find the firewall and turn it on yourself.) Firewalls work their magic by constantly monitoring the flow of information between your PC and the Internet. When a program—your Web browser, for instance—needs information, it sends a request to the Internet, asking for information to be sent back to your PC. The firewall takes careful note of every request, as well as every piece of incoming information. When the firewall finds a match between a request and an answer, it lets the answer enter your PC. But if information arrives without a matching request, the firewall assumes it’s either evil, lost, or simply background noise; either way, the firewall prevents it from entering. Firewalls come in two types, hardware and software, both described next.

Hardware Firewall Letting your broadband-fed PC connect directly to the Internet is like not bothering to install a door. It’s convenient when carrying in groceries, but otherwise it’s a pretty unsafe arrangement. That’s where a hardware firewall comes in. A broadband router (see page 409) works as a base-level hardware firewall by sitting between your PC and the Internet. Potential intruders can’t “see” your PC, which means that none of their Windows exploits work. And since they also won’t know your brand of router, their arsenal of router exploits is further limited. The triple crown protection benefit is the simple software that controls the router’s traffic directing: it’s small, and much easier to keep secure than Windows. A router is a very safe investment for anybody with an always-on broadband Internet connection. The latest routers come with more advanced firewall software built in for added protection. When shopping for a router, look for one that advertises a built-in firewall with both SPI (Stateful Packet Inspection) and NAT (Network Address Translation).

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Software Firewall

Installing a Firewall

Whereas a hardware firewall sits between the PC and the Internet, a software firewall lives inside the PC itself, inserting itself between the Internet and your programs. Software firewalls come in two types: one-way, and two-way. One way firewalls simply turn away any unrequested information coming from the Internet. That’s enough to stop many worms from slipping inside your PC. Windows XP’s built-in firewall (see below) is a one-way firewall. Like most one-way firewalls, it’s small and easy to live with. Two-way firewalls, like one-way firewalls, also keep things from entering your computer without permission. But a two-way firewall keeps things from leaving your computer without permission as well. That lets you catch spyware, key loggers, back doors, and other programs that slip into your PC, and then try to notify their creator of their whereabouts. That second layer of outgoing protection places a big burden of inconvenience on you, however. The firewall asks you questions like, “Should AcroRD32.exe be allowed to connect to the Internet?” Unless you already know that AcroRD32.exe is Adobe’s Acrobat Reader checking for a newer version, you’re left feeling like a 5year old in a calculus class. Fortunately, plenty of other people feel the same way, and a search for any questionable program’s name on Google usually turns up the answer immediately. Once you flag a program as Trusted, the firewall no longer bugs you about it. As a result, only your first few days with a two-way firewall are a nightmare; after that, the firewall rarely bugs you until you either install a new program or the firewall notices something evil trying to phone home. Zone Labs (www.zonelabs.com) offers both a free and paid version of its two-way firewall, ZoneAlarm.

Windows Firewall Service Pack 2 not only turns on Windows XP’s built-in firewall, it also makes it difficult to turn off. For instance, the Network Connection Wizard, a requirement for setting up a new network, promptly firewalls every connection on your PC. If you manually flip Windows Firewall’s On switch, Windows places a firewall on all your network-capable connections. It even protects your FireWire port from your digital camcorder. To decide for yourself which connections the firewall protects, click Start ➝ Control Panel ➝ Windows Firewall. Windows Firewall’s Properties page, shown in Figure 15-11, separates its controls into three tabs: General, Exceptions, and Advanced. As soon as you turn on a firewall, adding that layer of insulation between your PC and the Internet’s evils, the clamoring begins. Many Internet-connected programs

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like messengers and online games insist that you start poking holes in the firewall’s protective layer so they can talk to the outside world. Figure 15-11: Top: The General tab lets you turn on Windows Firewall. Since you want only one software firewall working at a time, Windows Firewall is smart enough to turn itself off when it spots another firewall. If you install an unrecognized firewall, come here to turn off Windows Firewall so the two firewalls don’t interfere with each other. Middle: Windows Firewall lists all your network connections here, letting you turn off the firewall for connections that don’t need protection. Turn the firewall on for your dial-up or broadband Internet connections, for instance, but turn it off for your local network and FireWire port. Bottom: The Advanced tab lets you grant safe passage to programs like AOL Instant Messenger that need to receive spontaneous communications from the Internet.

To add a program to Windows Firewall’s exceptions list, follow these steps: 1. Open the firewall’s Exceptions tab. Click Start ➝ Control Panel ➝ Windows Firewall and then click the Exceptions tab, shown in Figure 15-11. 492

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2. Click the Add Program button, add the program, and then click OK.

Installing a Firewall

The firewall lists a wide variety of programs it recognizes. If you spot your program, click its name from the list and then click OK to add it. If it’s not listed, though, follow the next step. 3. Click Browse and navigate to the program’s folder; click the program’s name, and then click OK. The firewall adds that program to the “okay” list, allowing any program on the Internet to communicate with it. Some programs want you to add ports—little communications portholes—so they can talk to the Internet uninterrupted. To add a port to Windows Firewall’s Exceptions list, you need to know two things from the program: the port number and the port’s protocol (either TCP or UDP). For instance, the World of Warcraft online multiplayer game wants you to open two ports: TCP port 3724 and TCP port 6112. Armed with that information, follow these steps to open those ports in Windows Firewall: 1. Open the Firewall’s Exceptions tab. Click Start ➝ Control Panel ➝ Windows Firewall and then click the Exceptions tab, shown in Figure 15-11. 2. Click the Add Port button and then add the port name and type, shown in Figure 15-12. Figure 15-12: If you’re having trouble with an Internet-connection-hungry program, ask the troubled program’s Customer Support site the port “number” and “type” to open in Windows Firewall. Then click Add Port on the Exception’s tab to fill out this form. In the Name box, type a name so you’ll remember why you’re opening that particular port. In the Port number box, type the port number. Then choose the port’s type, either TCP or UDP. Click OK to finish the job.

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Tip: If your firewall ends up with so many exceptions and ports that you wish you could start back at square zero, do just that: press the Advanced tab’s Restore Defaults button. POWER USERS’ CLINIC

Testing Your Firewall Setting up and configuring a firewall is a lot of work with little visible reward. How do you know this thing’s working, anyway? You could hang out on dark and dirty hacker’s sites, begging the kids to break into your PC. But a safer test is to visit any of these sites: • ShieldsUP (www.grc.com) • Sygate Online Scan (http://scan.sygate.com/) • Planet Security Firewall-Check (www.planet-security. net) • Hackercheck (www.hackercheck.com) When you give the site permission, it reads your PC’s IP address and sends it a flurry of port scans, informational

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packets that test for commonly exploited openings. In fact, it sends so many, your company’s network administrator may start screaming and pulling plugs. Limit these tests to your own PCs. If you pass, your firewall’s doing its job. If you don’t pass, try reinstalling the firewall, making sure it’s turned on, and then check its Exceptions list for unnecessary additions. Remember that each time you open a port on your firewall, you’re adding a potential hole for intruders to locate and slip through. Before adding a program to your firewall’s exception’s list, ask yourself if it’s worth the risk.

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Chapter 16

16

Fixing Common Problems

Sometimes the simplest fixes help set straight a PC that’s in the dumps. Before spending too much time troubleshooting, try restarting your PC (Start ➝ Turn Off Computer ➝ Restart). Occasionally that little kick in the pants is all your PC needs to clear its head. But when that nudge doesn’t work, the fixes in this chapter will help you through the most common PC problems, including retrieving mistakenly deleted files, zapping frozen programs off the screen, and helping you log back into your Windows user account when you’ve lost your password. On the hardware side, this chapter walks you through tracking down and installing a new driver, a fairly reliable cure for the majority of your PC’s hardware problems.

Undeleting Deleted Files When you delete a file, Windows XP doesn’t toss it into the fire pit immediately. Instead, Windows places the deleted files on a long conveyor belt called the Recycle Bin. The larger your hard drive, the more time you have to retrieve your deleted files before they fall off the edge. Most deleted files stay alive for weeks— even months—after you press the Del (Delete) key. To retrieve a deleted file, double-click your Desktop’s Recycle Bin icon, right-click the file you want, and then choose Restore. Windows XP immediately undeletes the file, placing it back where it was before you trashed it. If you deleted a file from your Desktop, for instance, the Recycle Bin puts it right back on your Desktop. Tip: To immediately delete top secret files, bypassing the Recycle Bin, hold down Shift while deleting the file.

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Undeleting Deleted Files

To retrieve files that have already been dumped out of the Recycle Bin, download a free undelete program like Brian Kato’s Restoration (www.snapfiles.com/get/ restoration.html) or FreeUndelete (www.officerecovery.com/freeundelete). Both programs probe your hard drive, list deleted files, and let you resuscitate the important ones. Several undelete programs specialize in retrieving deleted files from your digital camera’s flash card, even if the card’s damaged. Undelete programs can’t work miracles. Once you delete a file, Windows considers its space fair game to overwrite with newer files. The longer you wait, the less successful your chances of retrieval. But undelete programs are certainly worth a chance, considering the alternative. Note: Running Disk Cleanup, Windows’ built-in hard drive cleaner, automatically empties your Recycle Bin, dumping all your deleted files. If you’d prefer that Disk Cleanup not empty your Recycle Bin, turn off that option (page 256) before running the program. POWER USERS’ CLINIC

The Recovery Console When Windows XP itself freezes up—your PC greets you with a plain blue screen, or strange noises, instead of the familiar log-on screen—you’re left in an uncomfortable position. How can you fix Windows when Windows locks you out? For techies, the answer lies in Windows XP’s Recovery Console. This back door provides a last-gasp way to resuscitate Windows XP from inside the operating system itself. The Recovery Console does away with the Desktop, windows, and even menus. It displays only a command prompt, something familiar to DOS, Unix, or CP/M old-timers, but understandably forbidding to the vast majority of PC owners.

copy of Windows that needs repair. (Almost everybody presses “1,” since most people run only one copy of Windows on their PC.) Even if you study command-line textbooks, don’t expect the Recovery Console to salvage files from your My Documents folder. For security reasons, the Recovery Console restricts access to Windows system files and folders. It won’t let you copy any information to a floppy disk, USB drive, or CD, either. In short, save the Recovery Console for techies at the shop. If you’re just looking for a last-resort way to salvage your data files, a Knoppix CD (page 538) provides a better tool.

To start the Recovery Console, start your PC from your Windows XP CD. (You may need to set the BIOS (see page 525) to boot from a CD, something that’s possible even if Windows XP can’t currently get on its feet.) When the “Welcome to Setup” screen appears, press the R key to see the Recovery Console, shown here. Then, press the number of the

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Quitting Frozen Programs

System Restore

When one of your programs freeze onscreen. and refuses to close down despite your repeated clicks in its upper-right corner, call in the Big Gun: the Task Manager, which tracks the condition of all your running programs, among other things. To summon the Task Manager, hold down the Ctrl+Alt+Del keys simultaneously. On the Applications tab, the Task Manager lists all your currently running programs, as shown in Figure 16-1, as well as their status: Running or Not Responding. When you click the one that’s no longer responding, and then click End Task, the Task Manager carts it off your screen. Unfortunately, the program tugs any unsaved data along with it—yet another reason to get in the habit of frequently saving (Ctrl+S) any document you’re working on. Figure 16-1: The Task Manager’s Applications tab lists the names of all currently running programs. Click any program that’s not responding, and then choose End Task to force it off your screen. To get rid of processes—mini-programs that sit in your taskbar—click the Processes tab. (Enlist Google to look up any particularly mysterious program names listed on the Processes tab; many sites devote themselves to identifying these processes, as some are spyware.) The Task Manager also lets you bypass the Start menu to quickly restart your PC (choose Shut Down ➝ Restart), shut it down (Shut Down ➝ Turn Off), or hibernate (Shutdown ➝ Hibernate). This is a quick trick you can use when you’re rushed, as it requires fewer clicks than shutting down from the Start button.

To avoid losing your unsaved data, give frozen programs an extra minute of thinking time before resorting to the Task Manager’s kill switch. The program may be working on some background calculations, waiting for an Internet connection or performing some other task. Some programs snap back to attention if you give them a minute or so to regain their composure.

System Restore It’s fun to watch parts of movies played backwards. That puddle of spilled coffee suddenly curls up, flies through their air, and lands inside the cup; the anguished person holding the cup resumes smiling, and then walks backwards up the stairs. Chapter 16: Fixing Common Problems PCs: The Missing Manual, eMatter Edition Copyright © 2008 O’Reilly & Associates, Inc. All rights reserved.

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If only the bottom step of every staircase had a built-in rewind button. Windows XP’s is called System Restore, and while it won’t remove coffee from your keyboard (page 71), it often can return your PC to a time when everything worked correctly. System Restore does this by automatically taking snapshots of Window’s most important settings, tucking them away in Restore Points, and then files them by time and date. When you install a promising new program that turns into a disaster—even after it’s uninstalled—head for a Restore Point created before you installed the program. The Restore Point not only resurrects Windows’ settings, but also flushes out any newly installed programs that may be causing problems. When Windows XP wakes up, everything’s back to normal. Running System Restore won’t change any of your data or emails. That letter you wrote yesterday will still exist when you use a Restore Point from last week. Instead, think of System Restore as a backup system for Windows XP’s own settings, the boring things you don’t particular care about—until they’re botched and Windows XP suddenly stops working correctly. Windows XP automatically creates a Restore Point approximately once a day (depending on how often your PC’s been running) and whenever these things happen: • You install a new program. • Windows Update (page 478) applies a patch from Microsoft. • You use a Restore Point (Windows creates a Restore Point immediately beforehand). • You ask it to create a Restore Point. Windows XP stakes out up to 12 percent of your PC’s hard drive for System Restore’s stash of system settings—a considerable amount of room. If you value your hard disk space more than System Restore’s safety net, lower that percentage a few notches: right-click My Computer, choose Properties, and then click the System Restore tab, shown in Figure 16-2. Click the Settings button, and then adjust the percentage by dragging the slider to the left or right.

Performing a System Restore Enlisting the help of System Restore involves selecting one of your PC’s many Restore Points, hopefully one created just before things went wrong. System Restore is completely reversible, so you don’t have much to lose. Follow these steps to fire up System Restore and return to the past. 1. Load System Restore (Start System Restore).

➝

All Programs

➝

Accessories

➝

System Tools

➝

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The System Restore window offers two options:

System Restore

• Restore my computer to an earlier time. The most-used option, this lets you restore Windows’ damaged goods to their previously working order. • Create a Restore Point. Described in the next section, this lets you create your own Restore Point when things are running splendidly. (You can then select that particular Restore Point in times of need to bring back the good times.) Figure 16-2: System Restore makes perfect sense on your C drive, the home base for Windows and the bulk of your programs. It takes periodic snapshots of their settings, letting you retrieve them should their health deteriorate. If you’re using a second drive for storage (for music and movies, for instance) rather than programs, you probably don’t want System Restore to grab 12 percent of that drive’s space. To turn off System Restore on that drive, click the drive’s name on the System Restore tab, click Settings, and then turn on the option called, “Turn off System Restore on this drive.”

2. Choose “Restore my computer to an earlier time,” and then click Next. Windows then displays the calendar shown in Figure 16-3, letting you choose any of Windows XP’s automatically created Restore Points or one you created earlier. 3. Click a Restore Point from the calendar, shown in Figure 16-3, and then click Next. System Restore tells you the time, date, and name of your chosen Restore Point, and then reminds you to save any information in your currently running programs (that’s because restoring from a Restore Point will shut down and restart your PC). Windows XP usually saves a program’s open files before shutting

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System Restore

down, but you don’t want to take any chances, so saving your files yourself is always a good idea. 4. Close any running programs so Windows XP can restart. Figure 16-3: Each bold-faced date on the calendar represents a Restore Point created on that day. Click any boldfaced date to choose that day’s Restore Point. Or, to flip quickly through all your available Restore Points, click the little leftor right-pointing arrow on either side of the current month. The box on the right lists all the Restore Points that were created for the day you’ve chosen. Windows XP’s automatic, daily Restore Points are named System Checkpoints.

When Windows XP reappears on your screen, it’s decked out with whatever settings it had on the Restore Point you chose. If everything seems fine, you’ve cured the problem. If your PC wakes up with an even worse headache, return to System Restore and choose “Undo my last restoration.” That brings you back to where you started, letting you choose a different Restore Point.

Creating a Restore Point System Restore’s nifty time travel concept sounds wonderful, as long as you can choose from a large selection of Restore Points. Without them, you’re stuck in today’s catastrophe with no place to go. To keep System Restore well-stocked, Windows XP automatically creates a new Restore Point almost every day. But the real beauty of System Restore is when you create your own Restore Points rather than relying on Windows XP’s robotic automation. Create your own Restore Point after you fix something problematic—when you uninstall a balking program, for example, or you finally install all the drivers necessary to run a temperamental computer part. Setting a custom Restore Point lets you go back to a time where you know for certain things worked well. Actually, anytime that you notice your PC running particularly well, feel free to create a Restore Point to preserve that moment. The routine goes like this:

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1. Launch System Restore (Start ➝ All Programs ➝ Accessories ➝ System Tools ➝ System Restore).

Resetting Windows XP Passwords

Just as before, the System Restore window offer two options: “Restore my computer to an earlier time,” and “Create a Restore Point. 2. Click “Create a Restore Point,” click Next, and then type in a description of your new Restore Point. System Restores asks you to type your new Restore Point’s name into the “Restore Point description” box. Type in a short sentence or a few words to jog your memory as to why you’re creating the Restore Point. For instance, type something like, “Just before trying out that new registry editor,” or “No crashes all week!” Windows XP automatically stamps the Restore Point with the current time and date, so don’t bother adding those items. The information you enter here appears as one of the descriptions shown in Figure 16-3, helping your custom-created Restore Point stand out from the long list of automatically created Restore Points all named “System Checkpoint.“ TROUBLESHOOTING MOMENT

System Restore and Viruses If your PC has come down with a nasty virus, System Restore can’t “go back in time” to disinfect your machine, unfortunately. Today’s virus writers are too smart for that. Instead, a Restore Point can contain an infection that could reinfect your recently disinfected PC. If your PC catches a virus, be sure to delete all your Restore Points to keep your PC completely clean. Most antivirus programs can’t delete Restore Points by themselves, leaving the job up to you. Deleting your Restore Points works like this: 1. Click Start, right-click My Computer, and then choose Properties. Then click the System Restore tab.

2. Turn on “Turn off System Restore on all drives,” and then click Apply. 3. Restart your PC, and then run your updated antivirus program. 4. Repeat step 1, and then turn off “Turn off System Restore on all drives.” Finally, click Apply. Following this procedure manually deletes all your Restore Points, keeping you from inadvertently reinfecting your PC by using one of them.

Resetting Windows XP Passwords If you’re snuggled up on the couch, reading this section merely to bone up on your Windows knowledge, do yourself a favor: pop over to your computer and take the time to make yourself a Password Reset Disk. The disk works as a “key,” letting you crawl back into your PC should you end up forgetting your password when

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facing Windows XP’s Logon screen. To create your personalized Password Rest Disk, follow these steps: 1. Choose Start ➝ Control Panel ➝ User Accounts. The User Accounts window appears, listing all the user accounts on your computer. 2. Choose your user account’s name, if it’s not already selected. Click your user account picture—it’s the same picture you see at the top of your Start menu. 3. Click the “Prevent a forgotten password link” from the task pane along the window’s left edge. The Forgotten Password Wizard then appears, leading you through the steps necessary to create a floppy disk that provides access to your account during emergency states of forgetfulness. No floppy drive on your PC? The wizard won’t let you slide in a CD, instead. However, if your PC has a memory card reader attached (page 152), you can use a memory card, instead. A memory card reader also works with some brands of USB keychain drives, depending on their internal circuitry. Once the wizard creates your Password Reset Disk, keep the disk (or memory card) handy—but not too handy, as anybody who finds it can slip into your account. But if you’re desperately reading this section with neither password nor Password Reset Disk in hand, you’re not completely locked out. If you or somebody else owns an administrator account on your PC— a user account with additional powers and privileges, usually held by the PC’s owner—you can remove the password from your (or any other) account by opening the Control Panel’s User Accounts area, selecting an account, and then selecting “Remove the password.” Note: Resetting the password also prevents you from being able to access any encrypted files or email; you’ll also have to log in anew to any Web sites whose passwords you’ve saved using Internet Explorer.

If you’ve forgotten the password to your PC’s only administrator’s account, you’re still not out of options. Try either of these tricks, depending on whether you use Windows XP Home or Professional. (If you’re unsure which breed of Windows lives on your PC, open the Start menu, right-click the My Computer icon, and choose Properties. You’ll see your version listed in that page’s System area.) • Windows XP Home. Restart (Start ➝ Turn Off Computer ➝ Restart) your PC. Press F8 repeatedly until the Boot Mode menu appears. (Boot Mode is a special way of starting Windows XP that offers additional troubleshooting options.) Start Windows XP in troubleshooting mode by choosing Safe Mode. When the Windows Logon screen appears, a new user account called Administrator appears at the top. Log on with that account, which rarely needs a password. Once you’re in, reset the password on your user account.

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• Windows XP Professional. When Windows XP’s Logon screen appears, press Ctrl+Alt+Del twice, quickly. Type “Administrator,” leave the password box blank, and you’re usually in. Head for the User Accounts area to remove the password from your user account.

Troubleshooting Driver Problems

If your luck’s waning at this point, you have another option: visit the Login Recovery Web site (www.loginrecovery.com). The site offers a downloadable file that creates a bootable CD or floppy disk. Start your PC with that floppy in your A: drive (or the CD in your CD drive), and the program grabs your encrypted password file. Email that information to the site and twiddle your thumbs for about two days until the site’s computers manage to decrypt and email you the password. (You can reduce the wait to about ten minutes by forking over around 20 bucks.) POWER USERS’ CLINIC

The Installation CD’s Dirty Secret Many external devices come with an installation CD that promises a trouble-free installation. Insert the CD, and it adds the drivers Windows XP needs to speak with your gadget, be it a printer, mouse, or something else attached to your PC. However, sometimes you don’t want to run the installation CD, since most have several drawbacks: • In addition to installing the driver, these CDs pile on extra software. A scanner’s installation CD, for instance, could tack on an Optical Character Recognition system for converting scanned pages to text files (see page 188), graphics software for manipulating images, a photo management program to organize your digital photos, and one-month trial versions of more advanced graphics software. Not everybody wants or needs these things. • Installation CDs are usually out of date. The manufacturer slipped them into the scanner’s box when it left the factory, months ago. The drivers on the manufacturer’s Web site are usually newer and work better.

That leaves you with two options. You can run the installation CD, and then fire up the Control Panel’s Add or Remove Programs wizard to remove the software you don’t want. Or, you can skip the installation CD and run the Add Hardware wizard after plugging in your device. When the wizard presents you with a list of installed hardware, choose “Add a new hardware device,” and then tell it to “Install the hardware that I manually select from a list.” Next, choose your device from the category list and then click the Have Disk button shown in the top of Figure 16-6. When the Install from Disk window appears, choose your CD from the dropdown list, click OK, and then the wizard scoops up the driver—and nothing but the driver. That gives you the best of both worlds: installing the driver, but ignoring the other software. Should you find a newer driver on the Web site, update the driver (page 514) with the newer version.

Troubleshooting Driver Problems Thanks to Microsoft’s hard work in modernizing its operating system, Windows XP recognizes many devices as soon as you plug them into your PC. Plug a USB lava lamp into your laptop’s USB port, for instance, and Windows XP immediately takes notice, as do the rest of the people in the coffee shop. Installing any

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device, whether an easy-to-install mouse or a troublesome new video card, normally requires two-steps: 1. Run the gadget’s installation program, if it has one. Tip: Before inserting the installation CD, create a Restore Point (see page 500) and name it, “Before installing the new gizmo.” That Restore Point gives you a safe haven to return to should some something dreadful happen as a result of said gizmo’s installation program.

Most new gadgets come with installation software that introduces your new part to Windows, making sure the two understand each other. Most installation programs come on a CD marked Setup or Installation. Put the CD into your PC’s CD drive. Windows XP should notice the newly inserted CD and automatically run the installation program, copying the needed driver (see the box below) onto your PC’s hard drive. If Windows doesn’t notice your newly inserted CD, open My Computer (Start ➝ My Computer), double-click your CD drive’s icon, and then double-click any program named Setup or Install. On the rare occasion you find a CD without an installation program, hang onto it, anyway. Even though that CD lacks an installation program, the CD probably still contains a driver, which Windows XP can install manually with the Device Manager, covered on page 508. 2. Connect the part. Plug the gadget into one of your PC’s ports (see page 32), slide it into one of your PC’s internal slots (see page 27), or slip it into your laptop’s PC Card slot. UP TO SPEED

About Drivers Windows plays middleman between your software and your PC’s many parts. When your browser wants to connect to the Internet, for instance, your browser tells Windows to fire up the modem (if you’re using a dial-up connection). Windows asks the modem to connect to the Internet, and then hands control to the browser. Unfortunately, modems all speak slightly different languages, so Windows relies on a translator—a piece of software called a driver. The driver translates Windows “connect to the Internet” command into the steps necessary for the modem to pick up the phone, dial the number, wait for an answering modem, and establish a connection.

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Every part inside your PC needs its own driver. To spare you from tracking them all down, Windows XP comes with a huge sack of makeshift drivers that recognize common parts. Plug in any printer, for instance, and Windows XP’s built-in driver usually works well enough to let you print your work. But Windows’ built-in driver may not have the smarts to control every feature on that particular printer’s model—alerting you when its ink cartridges or paper tray are almost empty, for instance. To take full advantage of a newly added gadget, it’s always best to use the driver supplied by the device’s manufacturer.

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On a good day, your work’s finished. Windows XP takes over and recognizes the newly added item immediately, as shown in Figure 16-4, top and middle. You’re good to go.

Troubleshooting Driver Problems

On a bad day, Windows XP doesn’t even notice the new device. Or perhaps it notices it, but can’t find the driver on your installation CD or even by enlisting Windows Update. (A small handful of companies send updated drivers to Microsoft’s Windows Update site, which Windows checks automatically at times like this.) Driver problems plague very new equipment, as well as leftovers from older PCs, forcing you to hunt down a driver on the Internet. This section covers all those scenarios, explaining the odd world of drivers and how they can make or break Windows. It explains how to track down a missing driver, install a new one, update an old one, and remove a driver that’s causing problems.

Troubleshooting with the Add Hardware Wizard If you just want to install a driver for a new item you’ve just added, skip ahead to the “Working with Drivers in the Device Manager” section (see page 508). The Device Manager’s much more helpful because the Add Hardware wizard has lost its magic over the years. A remnant from older Windows versions, the wizard walks people through installing a new part—something not necessary in a world where most parts either install themselves or come with their own installation programs. Figure 16-4: Top: When you plug in a device (or when Windows XP wakes up and discovers something new connected to your PC), Windows greets it by name and begins searching for the item’s driver.

Exclamation point signals potential problems

Middle: After Windows XP locates and installs the driver, it tells you the device was successfully installed. Bottom: If Windows can’t find the driver or some other problem happens, this error message appears, instead.

So why bother with the Add Hardware wizard at all? At its best, the wizard occasionally works, successfully shepherding you from botched installation to devicehappy nirvana. And even when the wizard doesn’t work, it may point you to an

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odd error message that holds a clue to what went wrong. Whether the Add Hardware wizard works or not, it leads you through a wide range of potential fixes, letting you narrow down the potential culprits—and that’s what troubleshooting is all about. To give the ancient wizard a shot at the problem, start up the Add Hardware wizard (Start ➝ Control Panel ➝ Add Hardware), and let it lead you through this series of questions and commands: Tip: Before running the Add Hardware wizard, restart your PC. That gives Windows XP one more chance to notice, recognize, and install your new part.

1. If you haven’t run the new item’s installation CD, close the wizard and do so now; otherwise, click Next. The wizard launches a reminder to run the installation CD. Since that avenue already failed you—or perhaps your part didn’t include an installation program—click Next. The wizard then searches for any so-called Plug-and-Play devices it may have missed the first time. (Plug-and-Play is Microsoft’s term for devices that happily introduce themselves automatically, saving you many installation headaches.) The wizard almost never finds any, but the search is mercifully brief. 2. Tell the wizard whether the device is connected or not, and then click Next. The wizard pounces on an obvious culprit: the part may not be connected. But since you’ve already connected or installed it, click Next to let the wizard march onward. 3. Choose your device from the list of installed items, and then click Next. The wizard lists all your currently installed hardware, placing potential troublemakers at the top. (Misbehaving parts sport a yellow exclamation point next to their names, as shown in Figure 16-5, top.) Click your part’s name, if you spot it, and then click Next. The wizard then sums up the problem with a vague error message like the one shown in the bottom of Figure 16-5 and listed below: • This device is not configured correctly. (Code 1) • This device cannot start. (Code 10) • This device cannot find enough free resources that it can use. (Code 12) The wizard can kick out nearly 50 of these vague, frustrating messages. Microsoft explains them all in article number 310123 of its Knowledge Base (page 536), a cavernous index of Windows problems and solutions. Many errors simply mean the part needs a new driver. Others mean you’ve installed more parts than your PC can handle, and you need to yank some out before

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installing others. Others are worth searching on Google for (see page 513) in order to see how other folks in this quandary have handled the same problem.

Troubleshooting Driver Problems

If the wizard’s list of your PC’s installed parts doesn’t even mention your device—a common occurrence—choose “Add a new hardware device” from the bottom of the list. Figure 16-5: Top: The Add Hardware wizard lists all the parts it’s found connected to your PC, placing potential troublemakers at the top, with a yellow exclamation mark beside their names. Bottom: When you select a potential troublemaker and click Next, Windows lists only a vague error code. Click Finish, and the wizard quits, passing you off to the next tier of support: the Hardware Troubleshooter section of Windows XP’s Help and Support program.

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4. Tell the wizard how to proceed, and then click Next. The wizard offers you two choices: • Search for and install the hardware automatically (Recommended). Although it’s listed as the “recommended” option, selecting this option merely tells the wizard to try yet one more time to find and install your hardware. Give it a shot; should it fail, return here and then choose the next option. • Install the hardware that I manually select from a list (Advanced). Choose this option to see a list of device categories, shown in Figure 16-6, top. Select your device’s category—“Imaging devices” for digital cameras and Webcams, for example—and the wizard lists several manufacturers in that category, along with the models made by each one (see Figure 16-6, bottom). Click your manufacturer’s name to see the list of models. When looking at the list of models made by your part’s manufacturer, you have three options: • If the wizard lists your particular model but you don’t have a driver, click Next. The wizard asks you a few more questions—how that gadget’s connected to your PC, for instance, or what special settings it needs. Then the wizard installs one of Windows’ own bundled drivers for that model. If this driver installation fixes the problem, you’re through. But if Windows still can’t make your part work, head for the next section for further sleuthing. • If the wizard lists your model and you do have the driver—either on a floppy disk, a CD, or in a folder on your PC—click Have Disk (see Figure 16-6, bottom) and then navigate to the driver’s location. This option lets you install a driver that’s newer than Windows XP’s built-in driver. • If the wizard doesn’t list your particular model and you don’t have a driver, click Cancel. The wizard gave its all and failed. It’s now up to you to track down a driver, covered next, and install it yourself through the Device Manager.

Working with Drivers in the Device Manager When the Add Hardware wizard leaves you stuck with a part that won’t work, it’s time to pull off the floorboards and start looking deeper for solutions. That’s where Windows XP’s Device Manager comes in handy. The Device Manager, shown in Figure 16-7, dishes up a master list of all the parts inside or connected to your PC: its keyboard, hard drive, monitor, motherboard, and everything else. The Device Manager is like the circuit panel in a house or apartment, showing every connection. Unlike circuit breakers, though, the Device Manager’s neatly labeled, letting you see everything. By looking at the Device Manager’s list of parts, you know if Windows even notices that your part is connected or attached. If your part isn’t listed, for instance, 508

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perhaps a bad cable’s causing your problems. The Device Manager also gives you hands-on tools for installing drivers manually, and for tweaking deep-level settings that you can’t reach any other way.

Troubleshooting Driver Problems

Figure 16-6: Top: Windows XP comes with a few builtin drivers. When you choose a category from this list, Windows looks into its bag of drivers, and then lists the items it knows how to install from that category. For instance, choosing “Imaging devices” brings up the window shown below. Bottom: Here, Windows lists all the models of Hewlett Packard imaging devices (aka cameras) that it can install. Click the manufacturer name of the device you’re trying to install. If you spot your model on the adjacent list, click its name. Windows XP then installs its built-in driver for that model. If you’re trying to install a driver that you already found yourself, click Have Disk and then navigate to the CD or folder containing your device’s driver. The wizard then installs the driver and finishes the installation.

Windows lets you open the Device Manager in several ways: • Right-click My Computer or anywhere on your desktop, and then choose Properties. When the System Properties window appears, click the Hardware tab and then click the Device Manager button.

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• Choose Start ➝ Control Panel and open the System icon. Click the Hardware tab and then click the Device Manager button. Figure 16-7: The Device Manager lists every category of equipment inside your PC; click the “+” symbol next to any category to see parts falling into that genre. The Device Manager marks any troublemakers with a yellow exclamation point, signaling that Windows wasn’t able to install them correctly. Double-click any part to see its properties. The Driver tab lists valuable information for driver hunters: the current driver’s creator, issue date, and version number. Comparing version numbers of an existing driver with one on the Web lets you know which one’s newer.

The Device Manager then appears, listing of all your PC’s parts. Double-click any listed part to see its Properties window, which sums up the item’s current state of health, letting you immediately see which parts are acting up and why. It also lists each part’s manufacturer and model name, handy when hunting down replacement drivers. When you’re looking for action rather than information, click the Driver tab on the Properties window; the Device Manager offers buttons to update old drivers, uninstall troublesome ones, and “roll back” a newly installed driver that only made things worse. The Device Manager alerts you to problematic parts with two symbols: a Red “X” or a yellow “!” Both symbols mean the part’s currently not working, or not working to its full capacity; both scenarios are covered in the next two sections. Red Xs A red X next to a device means it’s disabled. Windows XP knows the part’s installed, but Windows is deliberately stopping that part from working. This happens on three main occasions, each described next.

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• Duplicate entries. The Device Manager occasionally lists two entries for the same part, usually because you’ve recently replaced a device on your PC—a new mouse, for instance. Your PC recognizes and installs your new mouse, but still lists the old one, marking it as disabled, and flying the red “X” flag.

Troubleshooting Driver Problems

Fixing duplicate entries requires a special trick: right-click the first duplicate entry you see (starting from the top, going down), and then choose Uninstall from the shortcut menu. (Ignore Windows XP’s request to restart your PC.) Then uninstall the second duplicate as well, leaving no entry for that part at all. The part will keep working, oddly enough. After uninstalling both entries, restart your PC. When Windows wakes up, it spots and installs the attached device, automatically grabbing its driver. But since Windows no longer finds the second, no-longer-actually-there item, Windows doesn’t list it. • You disabled the part yourself. Windows XP lets you disable any attached device, sending it into limbo and placing the dreaded red “X” next to its name in the Device Manager. Why would anybody disable something that they’d installed? Well, perhaps you’ve plugged a real mouse into your laptop, but your wrist keeps brushing against that darn touchpad, scooting the mouse across the screen. To temporarily disable the touchpad or any other troublemaking item, right-click its name in the Device Manager and then choose Disable. To return a disabled item to working condition, right-click its name and then choose Enable. • Too many devices. Your PC has a limited number of shoulders for parts to tap on when they need attention. Your PC refers to those shoulders as Interrupts, or IRQs for short. Devices also stake out a piece of your PC’s memory to communicate with your PC. Since your PC has a limited number of IRQs and memory ranges to dish out, devices often squabble for a share of the action. Windows assigns the resources automatically, so this problem rarely happens. Occasionally you’ll install a new card (see page 25), and the card begins bickering with an existing PC inhabitant over who claims what IRQ. Windows marks the loser with a red X, and makes you settle the battle. Sometimes the easiest solution is to give Windows another chance to sort things out. Right-click the device or devices with the red X and then choose Uninstall from the shortcut menu. Next, reboot your PC. After that, Windows XP often juggles its resources better, managing to assign them so every part receives a cut of the pie. If that doesn’t work, divvy up the resources manually. Right-click the troubled part and then click the Properties window’s Resources tab, shown in Figure 16-8. Turn off “Use automatic settings,” since they’re obviously not

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working. Then click the Change Setting button and cycle through the different settings until the “Conflicting device list” window no longer shows a conflict.

Troubleshooting Driver Problems

Figure 16-8: Top: Most parts offer several possible settings, which is a good thing to know when they squabble over the same resources. Here, Communications Port (COM2), the name of the part listed near the top, wants a setting called “Interrupt Request 04,” also called “IRQ 04.” But the “Conflicting device list” section near the bottom shows that Communications Port (COM1) already uses that setting. To stop the fight, click the Change Setting button.

The part’s name

The part’s setting

The button to change the device’s settings The part’s problem

Bottom: To change the settings, click the “Settings based on” drop-down menu. Then cycle through the alternate settings until the “Conflicting device list” section says “No conflicts.” Click OK to save the new settings, and then restart your PC.

Yellow !s A red X means the device or part won’t work at all. A yellow exclamation mark, by contrast, means the part’s still struggling along. Windows knows it’s there, but just can’t figure out a way to correctly talk to it. Some features may work, for instance, but not others.

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But no matter how it’s behaving, the solution’s always the same: the part’s driver isn’t working correctly. That leaves you with two choices: take the part back to where you bought it and exchange it for a different model, or find a new driver for it (a chore described in the next section).

Troubleshooting Driver Problems

Finding a New Driver Without a working driver, your newly installed gadget simply lives on your PC like an appendix, with little purpose in life. When Windows’ wizards try and fail to find a driver, the burden of locating that driver falls squarely on your shoulders. Like it or not, you’ve become a driver hunter. Your first step when searching for any driver is to identify the part as precisely as possible: you need the exact model number, including any numbers. The “ABIT RADEON X600XT 128M,” for example, is different from the “ABIT RADEON X600 256M.” If you still own the part’s box, it’s a simple matter to find the name of both the manufacturer and the device. But when the box has long since disappeared, scrutinize the part itself. On a mouse, look for a model name and number etched onto its plastic bottom. On a video card, the manufacturer’s name and the part’s model number are almost always stamped onto the circuit board, often along one edge. If you’re desperate, reach for a screwdriver to remove any plastic casing. You may find a circuit board inside listing the manufacturer and model number. After arming yourself with the part’s manufacturer, model name—and perhaps a part number—follow these guidelines to track down the missing driver: • Visit the manufacturer’s Web site. Most manufacturers realize that easily accessible drivers make or break their product. Find the manufacturer’s Web site using Google (www.google.com) or your favorite search engine. Then visit the site and look for the driver in their Customer Support or Downloads area. Google can translate Japanese and Chinese sites, a helpful tool when tracking down drivers for imported parts. Many video card companies, including ATI (www.ati.com) and Nvidia (www. nvidia.com), offer extensive archives of older drivers. They’re helpful when trying to nurse an older card into a newer computer, perhaps to give your PC a second monitor (see page 97). Creative Labs (www.creative.com), a longtime maker of sound cards, also carries an extensive backlist of drivers. All three companies sell their chips to dozens of other companies; examine the names on an unidentified sound or video card’s chips for a clue as to its real manufacturer. • Search for the driver on Google. When you’re looking to replace a troublesome driver, be assured you’re not alone. Dozens, and perhaps hundreds or thousands, of others have searched as well, and they’ve usually left clues. A search for your part’s specific model number usually turns up posts in the Internet’s newsgroups (http://groups.google.com) or on Web sites; many posts contain followup messages listing download links to replacement drivers.

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Many Web sites build businesses around driver searches, stocking thousands of drivers. DriverGuide (www.driverguide.com) carries one of the largest driver collections, including older drivers from long-dead companies. Some driver sites ask you to set up a user account before letting you download. Since you need to visit these types of sites only once, feel free to enter a disposable email address (see page 373). And be sure to scan anything you download with an upto-date virus checker (see page 486). • Try the Windows 2000 driver. Microsoft built Windows XP atop the bones of an older Windows version called Windows 2000. When you can’t find a Windows XP version of a part’s driver, a Windows 2000 version often works just as well. Forget about drivers built for Windows Me (Millennium), Windows 98, or Windows 95. Although programs from that era may still work, the drivers won’t. Once you download the driver, store it in a familiar folder (perhaps in My Documents); you need to enter that folder’s name when installing the driver, as explained in the next section. Note: Drivers often come inside a zipped folder containing two or more files. Be sure to unzip the folder before trying to install it. Right-click the folder and then choose Extract All. The folder should contain at least two files: the driver itself, and an INF file containing instructions for Windows to read when installing the driver.

Installing or Updating a Driver Tracking down the right driver can take hours or even days for obscure parts and gadgets. Part of the problem is that drivers are packaged and delivered in several different ways. For instance, sometimes you’ll be able to download a driver that’s stuffed inside an installation program. Other times your driver is in a folder containing only a file or two (oftentimes, the other file is a text file, containing instructions about the driver). If you’re lucky and the driver includes an installation program, run it. The program should install the driver, finishing your work, and providing a nice sense of closure to the ordeal. If the driver didn’t come with its own installation program—for instance, if the download consists of simply a file or two—follow these steps to manually install the driver: 1. Open the Device Manager. You can open the Device Manager in either of two ways: • Right-click My Computer or anywhere on your desktop, and then choose Properties. When the System Properties window appears, click the Hardware tab and then click the Device Manager button. • Choose Start ➝ Control Panel and open the System icon. Next, click the Hardware tab and then click the Device Manager button.

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2. Right-click the problematic device and then choose Update Driver. The part that needs the new or updated driver has the yellow exclamation point by its name, as shown in Figure 16-9. Right-click the part and then choose Update Driver; the Hardware Update wizard then materializes, ready to help install the driver.

Troubleshooting Driver Problems

Figure 16-9: Whether you’re installing a new driver or updating an old one, the procedure doesn’t change: right-click the part and then choose Update Driver. Parts with failing drivers almost always have a yellow exclamation point next to their names, making them easy to find. However, sometimes you may want to update a driver that’s already working, especially if the newer driver promises more features. Don’t go crazy trying to keep up to date with the latest driver unless you’re convinced you need it. A solid, working driver is always better than a newcomer that may cause more problems than it’s worth.

3. Choose “No, not this time,” and then click Next. The Hardware Update wizard immediately asks if it can connect with Windows Update to search for software. You’ve already tried that unsuccessfully, so tell it “no,” since you already have the driver. 4. Choose “Install from a list or specific location (Advanced),” and then click Next. The wizard next graciously offers to install the software automatically. It’s failed every time before this, so take no chances—tell it to install from a specific location.

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5. Choose “Don’t Search. I will choose the driver to install.” Then click Next. The wizard begs yet again to let it search for the driver. Cut it short by choosing “Don’t search.” That lets you tell the wizard the precise location of your newly acquired driver, be it a folder on your hard drive, a floppy disk, or a CD. 6. Choose Have Disk, and click Browse to navigate to the folder containing your driver. The wizard shows you the drivers inside that folder. If it doesn’t show you anything, you don’t have a recognizable driver in the file. Did you unzip the zipped folder first? (See the earliers Note for unzipping details.) Still can’t find the driver? Navigate to a different folder to let Windows look in there, repeating the process until Windows has looked into every folder on the CD. 7. Click your driver’s file name, click Open, and click OK; then click Next. The wizard reaches into your folder, grabs the driver, and lists the manufacturer and model of the part it’s designed for, as shown in Figure 16-10. That’s a handy reassurance that yes, you’re installing the correct driver. 8. Click Next to approve the installation. Windows creates a Restore Point before installing the driver, just in case something awful happens. Then it tells you it’s finished completing the Hardware Update wizard, meaning your driver’s installed. You don’t need to restart your PC; the part should immediately begin working without any problem. Head back to the Device Manager to make sure the yellow exclamation point has disappeared. If so, you’re through.

When the New Driver Doesn’t Work In the past, Windows assumed newly installed drivers always worked fine. Once the driver moved into Windows, spreading its files and settings throughout Windows’ vast settings storehouses, removing it became a tedious game of hunt and peck. Thankfully, Microsoft introduced the Roll Back Driver option in Windows XP. When a newly installed driver works even worse than your old one, follow these steps to expel the new driver and restore the old one: 1. Open the Device Manager as described in the first step of the previous section. The Device Manager displays different categories for the each kind of part installed in your PC: disk drives, modems, monitors, network adapters, and so on.

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2. View your PC’s parts in any particular category by clicking the “+” symbol next to that category’s name.

Troubleshooting Driver Problems

To see your particular model of network adapter, for instance, click the “+” symbol next to Network Adapters. The Device Manager responds by listing the models of network adapters installed in your PC. Figure 16-10: Windows kicks up a fuss when you try to install a driver that’s not “digitally signed,” or hasn’t passed Microsoft’s “Logo testing.” Those disclaimers mean the company didn’t pay Microsoft to test its driver beforehand, something few companies bother with because of the time and expense involved.

3. Double-click the item with the terrible new driver, and then click the Driver tab on that item’s Properties window. Double-clicking an item brings up its Properties window, which shows detailed information about that item.

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4. Click Roll Back Driver (see Figure 16-11). Windows then removes the new driver, restores the old one, and you’re back at square one: hunting for a new driver, hopefully one that’s better than the old this time. Figure 16-11: The Roll Back Driver button makes it easy to try several different drivers for a certain part, testing each to see which one works best. If one works better than the original, keep it. But if a new driver is making things worse, click the Roll Back Driver button, and then try a different driver. This technique comes in particularly handy with drivers for video cards, because video card companies release new video drivers every few weeks. The Roll Back Driver button makes it quick, easy, and fool-proof to see if the newest driver really does solve the problem you’re having with your old driver. If it doesn’t, it’s a simple matter to roll back to your old driver.

Speeding Up a Slow PC Eventually, your PC won’t seem to be the speedy workhorse it was when you first plugged it in. To clean it up a bit, restoring its former power and agility, run through this checklist: • Run a virus checker (see page 486) and an anti-spyware program (see page 487). Viruses and spyware are two big culprits behind a slow PC. Spammers hire virus writers to infect PCs, turning them into “zombies” that churn out spam. Head for CipherTrust’s ZombieMeter (www.ciphertrust.com/resources/statistics/zombie.php) for hourly updates on the number of zombie PCs worldwide. • Back up your PC (see page 463). Your PC should be backing itself up automatically, preserving your data in case of a hard disk crash, accidental deletion, or other computing catastrophes. If you’ve already installed an automatic backup program, make sure it’s still working by checking the date of the most recent backup. If you haven’t yet set up a backup program, now’s the time.

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• Free up space by running Disk Cleanup (see page 256). Your PC needs hard drive space not only for storage, but for virtual memory (see page 19), which lets Windows borrow parts of your PC’s hard drive for extra calculations when memory runs low.

Windows Activation

• Defragment your hard drive (see page 260). After a few months, the files on your hard drive spread themselves thin. Defragmenting them gathers all their pieces and groups them back together again, making for quicker access. • Uninstall unwanted programs. Head to the Control Panel’s Add or Remove Programs area (Start ➝ Control Panel ➝ Add or Remove Programs) and delete programs you never use. To place your least-used programs at the list’s top for easy plucking, click Sort by, and then choose Frequency of Use or Date Last Used. • Weed out any unused network drives (see page 446). Networked drives offer an easy way to access frequently used information by letting you assign a drive letter to a folder on a networked PC. Whenever your PC restarts, it tries to connect with each networked drive, slowing down your PC. This slowdown’s particularly apparent when Windows searches futilely for a network drive that no longer exists. Weed out the outdated, unnecessary ones.

Windows Activation Microsoft always intended for people to buy a separate copy of Windows for every PC they owned. But since those intentions lay hidden in the fine print of a thick licensing agreement, many people ignored them. Instead, they’d upgrade their desktop PC with Windows, and then slip that same Windows Upgrade CD into their laptop as well. With Windows XP, Microsoft carries a much bigger stick than a vague licensing agreement. It comes in the form of copy protection, also known as Windows Product Activation (WPA). As soon as you install Windows XP onto any PC, a 30-day clock begins ticking. Before those 30 days expire, you must click the “Click here to activate now” button as it rises over your taskbar’s clock. When you click the button, Windows jumps into copy protection mode: Windows takes the 25-character Product Key (those individualized numbers printed on every Windows XP CD box), creates another 25-character key containing some details about your PC’s hardware, and stores them both as a new, 50-character key in a secret file on your PC. Windows also sends all that information over the Internet to Microsoft’s database. Whenever you subsequently turn on your PC, Windows XP compares your PC’s current equipment with the equipment listed in the key stored on your hard drive. If they match, you never know all this activity took place. If they don’t match, Windows XP assumes it’s now running on a different PC and a new clock begins ticking. You have three days to call Microsoft and explain what happened, usually that you’ve upgraded your PC with a substantial number of new parts. Chapter 16: Fixing Common Problems PCs: The Missing Manual, eMatter Edition Copyright © 2008 O’Reilly & Associates, Inc. All rights reserved.

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Windows’ Troubleshooters

And for those three poor souls who lack an Internet connection? Clicking the activation button provides them with a toll-free number to call Microsoft’s activation police. After explaining their lack of an Internet connection, and reading Microsoft the contents of their “key”—all 50 characters of it—Microsoft reads back a 42digit number that must be typed into Windows XP—without typos. That’s right— you’re exchanging 92 characters over the phone, something terrifying to those who hate reading a 16-character credit card number to have a pizza delivered. Not every PC owner faces the activation process. PCs sold with Windows XP preinstalled come with a preactivated, OEM (Original Equipment Manufacturer) version of Windows XP: you don’t need to click any buttons or read any numbers over the phone. And large corporations can distribute preactivated, “volume licensed” copies of Windows XP, saving their 3,543 employees from activating their PCs. Note: If your copy of Windows XP isn’t activated, Windows Update (see page 478) may refuse to install the latest patches and Service Packs.

Windows’ Troubleshooters Proving that artificial intelligence is limited to robots that vacuum the room in easygoing circles, the troubleshooter programs you’ll find in Windows XP’s Help and Support area make a very limited attempt to diagnose problems with your PC. Sometimes they guess correctly and provide a solution. Most of the time, however, the troubleshooters admit defeat, and pass you off to yet another program. The troubleshooters work best when you simply want a checklist of possible problems to make sure you’re not overlooking something obvious when diagnosing what’s gone wrong. You can visit Windows’ troubleshooters in either of two ways: • Add Hardware wizard. When the Add Hardware wizard (see page 505) reaches the end of its rope, it passes you off to the troubleshooters, launching the correct one for the item you’re trying to add to your PC. For example, the Video Display troubleshooter handles video and monitor problems, while the Input Devices troubleshooter handles keyboards, mice, trackballs, cameras, scanners, and infrared devices. • Windows Help and Support. To summon the troubleshooters yourself, choose Start ➝ Help and Support and type list of troubleshooters in the Search box at the top of the screen. Windows lists its 17 troubleshooters, which walk you through a wide variety of problems. The troubleshooters work much like a grade school quiz, asking you questions and letting you choose between possible answers. For the frustrated, almost every screen offers an option called, “I want to skip this step and try something else.” As you choose an option, the troubleshooter displays a page from Windows XP’s Help and Support system explaining that particular problem. It’s not as intuitive as a service call from a private PC technician, but it’s worth a try before giving up.

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chapter

Chapter 17

17

Advanced Troubleshooting

Some problems go beyond the “troublesome” category and fall into the “real headscratcher” department. You’ve checked and double-checked the cables, the drivers, and the software. You’ve run wizards and troubleshooters. You’ve tried all the fixes suggested in Chapter 16. Everything should be working properly, but the gremlins are still up to no good inside your PC. This chapter explores those really tough-to-implement fixes, showing how to hunt for hidden clues by watching your PC start and probing its nether regions called the BIOS. This chapter explains how to locate and upgrade firmware, that lastresort fix that can add new features to older devices like routers, video cards, CD burners, or even your PC itself. You’ll also learn about Microsoft’s Knowledge Base, a huge Web site where Microsoft admits its faults, dishes out solutions, and sometimes offers downloads or articles that fix specific problems. Armed with this wisdom, you can apply a fix, if possible, or know when it’s time to give up and either replace a part or take the PC into the shop. Finally, should Windows fail both you and your PC, head to this chapter’s last section. There, you’ll find instructions for running Knoppix—a neatly packaged version of the Linux operating system that fits on a single CD—which can help rescue your data before it’s at the mercy of your PC’s repair shop.

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Watching Your PC Start

Watching Your PC Start When you first turn on your PC, you may notice some words popping onto the screen before Windows even appears (see Figure 17-1). Those words hail from a “mini-operating system” called the BIOS (Basic Input Output System) that’s built into every PC. The BIOS performs a series of simple tasks known as a Power-On Self Test (POST), prodding your PC’s parts into action, identifying them, and passing that information to the first operating system it finds on your PC—most likely, Windows XP.

Cached memory Add these to figure out your PC s total memory CPU type and speed BIOS manufacturer BIOS version number

Figure 17-1: When your PC first starts to display information onscreen, press the Pause key to “freeze” the words. That lets you see information about the parts the BIOS found, as well as spot any error messages. This display provides a first clue as to whether your PC really contains the parts listed on the dealer’s receipt. Pausing this display lets you write down bits of information that normally disappears in a flash, providing you with words or numbers to search for on Google for helpful information.

Mouse recognized CD/DVD drive model number Hard drive model number CPU serial number Stored in memory

At least, that’s what the BIOS is supposed to do. But when your PC fails the POST and flashes an error message on the screen, you know you’re dealing with a hardware problem—a malfunctioning, unidentified, or unnoticed part—not a software

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problem. That’s why watching your PC as it starts can yield important clues when something’s wrong.

Watching Your PC Start

Sometimes the lack of sound or a dark screen provides a clue as soon as you turn on your PC: • No sound or video. Sometimes pushing your PC’s On button doesn’t do anything at all. You don’t hear your computer’s fans or whizzing hard drives, nor do you spot any lights, except perhaps a brief flicker onscreen. This lack of activity reveals the culprit at once: your PC’s power supply, which grabs the electricity from the wall outlet and dishes it out to the various parts of your machine, has expired. Check your PC’s power cable; if it’s plugged firmly into both the wall and your PC, you may need to replace the power supply (see page 47 for details). • Sound, but no video. When you hear your PC’s whirling fans and its hard drive, but nothing appears on the monitor, you’ve narrowed the problem down to any of four things: your monitor (see page 84), your monitor’s cable (see page 102), your video adapter (see page 101), or the video adapter’s driver (see page 514). If your PC starts normally, watch the monitor as the BIOS displays the results of its checks, shown earlier in Figure 17-2. If you don’t see anything on the monitor— Windows just leaps onto the screen—you may need to edit a setting in your BIOS (page 525), telling it to display its opening comments rather than hide them. The BIOS inspects the following items every time you turn on or restart your PC: • Video card. The BIOS makes the video card one of its first stops, firing it up so you can watch the rest of the boot-up process. As your PC first starts, the BIOS often displays the version of your video adapter’s firmware (page 533), helpful if you’ve traced a specific problem that’s fixed by a firmware upgrade. If your PC’s version number is lower than the version offered on the card manufacturer’s Web site, upgrading the firmware could be a solution. • BIOS version. After the video’s up and running, the BIOS usually displays its own version number and manufacturer name. The BIOS doesn’t come from Microsoft or your PC’s manufacturer. Instead, it comes from companies that specialize in creating the stuff. Two of the biggest BIOS manufacturers, Phoenix Technologies (www.phoenix.com) and Award Software (www.award-bios. com), merged in 1998. The other big player in the BIOS market is American Megatrends (www.ami.com). The BIOS version number comes in handy when checking on your PC manufacturer’s Web site to see if a later version’s available—one, perhaps, that offers new support for that fancy cutting-edge-technology gadget you just plugged in. You may also find BIOS updates on the BIOS manufacturers’ Web sites.

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• CMOS. One of the BIOS’ early stops is to look at the CMOS (Complementary Metal-Oxide-Semiconductors), a chip storing the BIOS password—as well as the equipment the BIOS found the last time you turned on your PC. Tip: If the BIOS notices changes between your currently installed parts and the ones logged in the CMOS, it presents you with a message onscreen, letting you know that it’s found a new item (or that a previously found item is now missing). That important confirmation lets you know your new part was found at the computer’s most elemental level, meaning you’ve probably installed it correctly.

• Password. The BIOS of most PCs lets security-conscious owners create a BIOS password. Then, whoever turns on the PC must type in that password before the BIOS lets Windows XP load. If you find yourself locked out of your own PC—or you’re locked out of a used PC you just purchased—you’ll need to use the secret password bypass trick explained on page 528. • Identify parts. The BIOS pokes everything connected to your PC. It checks each of your PC’s slots (see page 27) for network cards, modems cards, or anything else you’ve added. It doesn’t necessarily list these all on the screen, though, so don’t be surprised if your handiwork goes unnoticed when the BIOS reports its findings onscreen. • Drives and memory. Your BIOS normally displays the model name of each drive it discovers: hard drives first, followed by CD drives. The BIOS also tallies up the amount of installed memory, listing the total on the screen. If the total amount of memory displayed on your screen doesn’t match what you’ve just added to your PC, the memory chip may not be seated deeply enough into its socket. Sometimes moving a chip to a different socket lets a PC find it (see page 20 for more about installing memory). Tip: If your PC can’t find a hard drive or CD drive you’ve just installed, check both of the missing drive’s cables: the power cable (see page 270), and the IDE or SATA cable (see page 270). Also check that the newly installed drive’s jumpers (see page 269) are set in the correct position.

• Find operating system. After the BIOS locates all the connected drives, it checks to see which drive holds an operating system. As soon as the BIOS finds an operating system, it hands over the reins to the PC, along with a list of the discovered parts. Normally, Windows kicks in at this point, as the BIOS finds it waiting on your hard drive. Tip: If you don’t want your PC to load Windows from the hard drive—you want it to load from the Windows CD or another CD, you need to edit your BIOS to change your drive’s “boot order” (see page 531)— the order your BIOS peeks into your PC’s drives when looking for an operating system.

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The next section describes how to open the BIOS, see its options, and make any necessary changes.

Editing the BIOS Settings

Editing the BIOS Settings If you don’t know why you need to edit the BIOS settings, you don’t need to read this section except perhaps out of rainy day curiosity. This section describes how to enter the BIOS and make some of the changes discussed throughout this book. Don’t change anything unless you know exactly what setting you’re supposed to change, either through advice from your PC’s tech support staff, a trusted Internet site, or something listed in this book. Unlike Windows XP, the BIOS doesn’t come with a System Restore safety net. Experimenting can lead to unexpected and unfortunate consequences. The closest thing to a safety net awaits you at the Exit screen (see page 532) where you leave the BIOS and load your operating system. There, your BIOS may offer the chance to “Exit and Restore Factory Defaults.” That reverts all the settings to their states when the PC left the factory, a helpful last resort that wipes out all the changes you’ve made (including any helpful ones). LAPTOP LIFE

A Lightweight BIOS Laptops offer their own set of hurdles for BIOS sleuths. A standard challenge is finding the magic key sequence that opens the BIOS settings for editing. Trial and error, starting with F1 or F2, usually solves this one. But another challenge comes when trying to push the Pause button to “freeze” the screen, so you can jot down a version number or other bit of identifying information. Most laptops don’t come with a dedicated Pause key; instead, you need to hold down the Fn key (see page 60), which toggles another key into a Pause key. Since the Fn key and a toggled Pause key often live on opposite ends of the keyboard, dedicate two hands to this task.

Once you finally reach the BIOS, don’t expect much; since laptops offer few replaceable parts, they don’t offer many BIOS options. The BIOS of most laptops lists version numbers for your video adapter and the BIOS itself, as well as the amount of installed memory. Some let you add a power-on password (page 528) and change your drive’s boot order (page 531). You may find some hidden gems, though, like a way to lower your laptop speaker’s default volume. Adjusting this setting to a lower volume means that Windows XP’s startup jingle is broadcast a bit less loudly. That alone makes your laptop’s BIOS worth a look, even if just to see what’s available.

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Editing the BIOS Settings

Entering the BIOS Settings The first obstacle to editing the BIOS settings is simply putting the darn thing on the screen so you can see it. Most PCs scoot through it in less than a second or two, letting Windows jump onto the screen as quickly as possible. Viewing the BIOS settings involves not only pressing certain keys immediately after your PC starts (see Figure 17-2), but pressing them before Windows jumps onto the screen. Since Windows jumps onto the screen faster than a dog runs out a front door, that doesn’t leave much time. Figure 17-2: Keen-eyed observers may see the key that lets them enter their PC’s Setup area, otherwise known as the BIOS. Other PCs hide that information, making you guess at it. For clues, you can consult your PC’s documentation, but an easier way is to search on Google for your PC’s model number followed by the words “access” and “BIOS.” If you’ve reached the guesswork stage, most PCs use either F1, F2, F3, F10, Del, Ctrl+Del, Ctrl+Alt+Esc, Ctrl+Alt+S, or Ctrl+Alt+Ins. Work your way through them all, letting Windows XP come fully to the screen before restarting your PC and trying again.

It’s hard to know what key or keys to press. Several companies have sold BIOS versions to vendors, and many versions use different access keys, or even combinations of keys. Nor do all vendors use the same BIOS manufacturer for all their PC models. That’s the problem: knowing what keys to press, and pressing them with the split-second timing necessary to catch the BIOS’ attention before Windows jumps in. Tip: The trick is to restart your PC, and then repeatedly press the key two or three times per second. If Windows boots up, you missed it. Restart Windows normally (Start ➝ Turn Off Computer ➝ Turn Off)— don’t just press your PC’s power button, since Windows needs time to shut itself down normally. Then try again.

The table below lists some of the main BIOS varieties; you may spot one of their names as your PC first starts (see Figure 17-1). If you spot a name, head to that company’s Web site and download a manual for your particular BIOS version. Armed with the BIOS manual, you can look up the key sequence that lets you in, as well as find explanations for all your BIOS options.

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Acronym

Company

Web site

AMI

American Megatrends Inc.

www.ami.com

Award

Phoenix

www.phoenix.com

DTK

Datatech Enterprises

www.dtk.com.tw

Intel

Intel

www.intel.com

Phoenix

Phoenix

www.phoenix.com

Editing the BIOS Settings

Navigating the BIOS Menu Screens Once you’re inside your PC’s BIOS area, you’ll see several menus, like the ones shown in Figure 17-3. Near the screen’s bottom or side, you see a list of which keys to press to navigate the menus. Figure 17-3: Some menu items appear as a row along the top; here, they’re along the left edge. Press the arrow keys to move through the categories, highlighting each one to see its contents. Keep a notepad handy when paging through your BIOS, and jot down any changes you make. That makes it easy to undo the change should your PC wake up in even worse condition.

Menu options Selected items

Navigation instructions Contents of selected item

That presents a problem for the small number of people using USB keyboards on older PCs. The BIOS from those old PCs recognizes only the old-style PS/2 keyboards (see page 44), which plug into a special “keyboard-only” port. If your USB keyboard doesn’t work while you’re in the BIOS, turn your PC off. Return with an old PS/2 keyboard, and plug it into your PC’s PS/2 port.

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Tip: If you own an older PC, keep its old PS/2 keyboard handy, as it’s universally recognized by the BIOS of every computer.

These keys let you meander through the menus found in most BIOS versions: • Arrow keys. These let you move from one menu to another. Press the up/down arrow keys to move up or down through a column of menus; press the left/right arrow keys to move across a row. • Enter. When you’ve reached the menu setting you want to change, press Enter. After you press Enter, you can enter a different option, usually by selecting Enable or Disable. Press Enter again to save that change. • Esc. Press this key to move to the Exit menu (see page 532), which lets you leave the BIOS area. Almost every PC has a slightly different BIOS, each offering different menus and options, so there’s no way to predict exactly what you’ll see. Unless you have your motherboard’s manual (see page 542), you need to spend some idle time paging through the menus, searching for the option you want to change.

Disabling “Silent Boot” Normally, your BIOS doesn’t bother to display the results of its searches when you turn on or restart your PC. That’s because it’s usually set to Silent Boot or to “Skip Tests. Although that speeds up Windows XP’s entrance, speed is the least of your worries when you’re diagnosing a problem. Disable the Silent Boot or Skip Tests options when you spot them. Enable any other options that let your BIOS perform a thorough check of your PC’s parts when turned on, as well as list the results of its tests on the screen. Once you’ve diagnosed the problem, feel free to revert to the previous settings, letting Windows jump to the screen a wee bit faster.

Changing the Power-On Password A BIOS password offers your PC’s first line of protection from intruders. Most BIOS settings include a place to create and type in a new password. If you enter one, your PC acts differently the next time it’s turned on. Instead of loading Windows (or any other operating system), the BIOS places a password box in the face of the person who started the PC. If she doesn’t enter the correct password, she’s locked out. But if your PC mistakes you for the intruder, it’s usually easy to bypass the barrier with any of the following tricks.

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Remove the battery Some manufacturers want the BIOS password to stop casual passersby, but they assume if you’re willing to devote a few hours to resetting it, you’re probably the troubleshooting owner. To remove the password, remove the battery from the PC’s motherboard (see page 54). Then leave the PC sitting for an hour or so until the CMOS drains all of its stored information—including the password.

Editing the BIOS Settings

When you replace the battery and restart your PC, your BIOS reverts to “factory default” settings, which didn’t include a password. Remove the password jumpers Many motherboards come with a pair of jumpers (plastic covers with metal innards), shown in Figure 17-4. Removing the jumper from the pins removes the password and returns your PC to its “factory default” settings. Figure 17-4: Locating the right jumper is easy if you have the motherboard’s manual (see page 542); otherwise, look on the motherboard for vertical pins labeled Clear, Clr, Clr CMOS, PWD, or something similar. To remove the password, turn off your PC and pull off the jumper straddling the two pins. When you turn your PC back on, it should no longer have a password. If your trick works, turn the PC back off and replace the jumper. Cached memory Stored in memory

Back door passwords To help people who have accidentally locked themselves out of their own PCs, many manufacturers build a “back door” into the BIOS in the form of a secret password that unlocks any of the PCs that the manufacturer makes. Call your PC’s manufacturer, explain your predicament, and ask if your model PC has a back door password that opens your locked BIOS.

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Remove the hard drive If all efforts to remove the password fail, you can usually still salvage your data by removing the hard drive and putting it in another PC. But at that point, it may be time to call or email a professional data recovery specialist like Password Crackers (www.pwcrack.com), explain your mournful predicament, and ask for a quote.

Upgrading BIOS Firmware The BIOS lives on a chip or two as firmware (see page 533), or semi-permanent instructions. However, you can completely replace the firmware, if necessary, either to fix bugs or add features (usually to add support for that exciting new technology that wasn’t around when your PC was built). You can often find the version of your BIOS’ firmware in three places: • Your PC often displays the BIOS version as the first sentence when it boots up. • The BIOS usually lists its version on its opening menu. • The BIOS version often appears in Windows XP’s System Information program (Start ➝ All Programs ➝ Accessories ➝ System Tools ➝ System Information) on the System Summary page. Compare your BIOS version to the version available on the BIOS manufacturer’s Web site; you may have an old version. If your current version still works fine, don’t automatically upgrade to the new version; you may introduce a new problem. But if the new one contains a fix for a bug that’s plaguing your PC, download the latest version and upgrade your BIOS the same way you update any other firmware (see page 533).

Disabling Onboard Motherboard Circuits Some PCs come with video and sound built right into the motherboard, that flat platter of circuitry connecting all your PC’s parts. The manufacturer shrunk the sound and video circuitry into a little chip or two, stuck them on the motherboard, and connected them to the VGA and sound ports on the back of your PC (see Chapter 1 for a refresher on the motherboard and its many ports). This design saves you money, as you needn’t buy additional cards to handle specific jobs like playing audio or video. But if you upgrade your PC with a more powerful video or sound card for gaming, the built-in circuits can cause problems; your PC won’t know whether to use the built-in circuits or the newly installed ones. The solution is to tell the BIOS to stop using the built-in circuitry and switch control to your newly installed card instead. Or, if you add a video card but want to use two monitors (page 89), you may need to tell the monitor to use the motherboard’s video in addition to your newly installed card.

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The solution to both problems is to enable or disable the motherboard’s onboard or integrated sound, video, or network adapter, shown in Figure 17-5. If you disable the onboard item, the BIOS then ignores the motherboard’s built-in circuits, locates your newly installed part, and hands its name over to Windows as the preferred part that Windows should use.

Editing the BIOS Settings

Figure 17-5: This PC came with sound built in to the motherboard, which you need to disable if your PC doesn’t notice your newly installed, highperformance sound card. Disabling the circuits doesn’t kill them completely; if your new sound card doesn’t sound as good as your old sound, just remove the new card and enable the onboard circuits to return your machine to the way it used to sound.

Changing the Boot Drive Order When you turn on your PC, the BIOS examines each of your PC’s drives, and then loads the first operating system it finds, usually the one on your hard drive: Windows. But you may want to make your PC start running from an operating system on a CD, either your Windows XP CD or a diagnostic program. Or perhaps you want your PC to find an operating system on a hard drive you’ve plugged into a USB port, especially if that hard drive contains a backup of your main hard drive. That’s when you need to change the “boot order,” shown in Figure 17-6. You want to tell your PC’s BIOS to look for the operating system first on the floppy drive, then your CD drive, then any “removable drives” like your USB drive, and finally end up looking in the hard drive. Once you’ve changed the drive’s order, the change takes place as soon as you save your changes at the BIOS’ Exit screen (see page 532) and restart your PC.

Numeric Keypad Bankers, accountants, and mathematicians prefer that their PCs start up with the numeric keypad enabled, so that pressing the arrow keys creates numbers. Other people prefer their PCs to start up with the numbers turned off; they just push the NumLock key on the rare occasion they’re working in a spreadsheet (see page 59 for more details on how the NumLock key system works).

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To please both camps, most PC’s offer an option for the numeric keypad in the BIOS. Look for the setting “Numeric Keypad” and choose whether you’re a banker (Enabled) or an editor (Disabled). Figure 17-6: Here, the BIOS lists the order it searches drives when looking for an operating system. It starts looking on a CD, then a floppy disk, then a hard drive, and finally a USB device (like a keychain drive). To change the order, highlight a drive by pressing the arrow keys; next, press Enter to select it, and then press the up or down arrows to move it to the front or back of the list. When you’ve placed the drive in the position you want it, press Enter again to drop it in place.

Exit the BIOS Unlike spray paint, the changes you make to BIOS entries don’t take place immediately. Instead, the BIOS waits for your confirmation on your way out. The Exit menu usually offers choices like these: • Exit (Save Changes). Choose this option when you’ve made careful changes and want them to take effect as you leave. • Exit (Discard Changes). Tossed in for the curious or the mistake-prone. This option lets you exit the BIOS without saving any changes. • Get Factory/Default Values. When you’ve chosen BIOS settings that made things worse, choose this option to reset all values to the factory settings. • Discard Changes. Much like an Undo option offered by many programs, this option removes all changes you’ve made this session. However, it leaves you in the BIOS area so you can make additional changes. • Save Changes. This saves any changes you’ve currently made during this session for safekeeping, and then leaves you inside the BIOS, ready to make more changes. Choose the setting that meets your needs; if something awful happens the next time you try to start your PC, head back into the BIOS and choose the Get Factory/ Default Values option.

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Replacing Firmware

Replacing Firmware

You’ve read a lot about drivers in this book, mostly because manufacturers constantly tinker with them. Manufacturers try to speed up a video card, for instance, squash a new bug, or perhaps add a new feature. Since drivers are only software, they’re fairly easy to change, distribute, and install. For information that’s not supposed to change, manufacturers rely on something different, called firmware—a tiny chunk of software stored on a ROM (Read Only Memory) chip embedded inside the part’s circuitry. The firmware talks to nearby circuitry on a base level, routing signals to send video to your monitor, carry on network conversations, restrict your DVD drive to play only Region 1 and 2 movies (see page 313), control your broadband router, or tell your iPod which menus to display on the screen. That system worked fine for years, until devices started growing so complicated that firmware couldn’t keep up. Somebody would discover a bug before shipping, for instance, or a new networking standard arrived unexpectedly. In either case, the obsolete firmware left the manufacturers stuck with a warehouse of old parts. Eventually, manufacturers wised up. They wrote the firmware to an EPROM (Erasable Programmable Read-Only Memory) chip, a relative of the memory cards used by digital cameras. When faced with unexpected changes, manufacturers simply overwrote the old firmware with the new, instantly updating the product. Here’s the beauty of updatable firmware: if you’re stuck with an electronic device that has an outdated version of its firmware, updating the firmware yourself lets you fix bugs, add new powers, and bring your digital doohickey back up to par with newer models. Most people discover a firmware problem when they read a notice on a Web site, receive an email from a customer support desk, or hear a friendly technician say they can fix a bug by “updating the firmware.” To find the latest firmware for your part—be it a DVD drive, iPod, video card, or video game console—drop by the manufacturer’s Web site and enter the Support or Downloads area. Some firmware updates come packaged as an easy-to-run program; others come stuffed inside an ISO image, a special file (see page 301) that lets you create a CD containing the program. If you’re upgrading firmware of an iPod or something else that connects to a PC, make sure it’s connected and turned on. Then run the program or restart your PC with your newly created CD in the drive. The program “flashes” the firmware, overwriting the old with the new. It’s a simple way to avoid having to upgrade yet another part. One caution: should your power fail before the firmware finishes updating, the item you’re upgrading may end up on the scrap heap. It won’t be smart enough to accept the update when you try again, and the old firmware may no longer work. If this happens, hey, you needed a new part anyway. And while you’re shopping, pick

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Searching for Clues with Google

up an Uninterruptible Power Supply (see page 546), a handy box giving your PC an extra 5 or 10 minutes of life during a power outage.

Searching for Clues with Google When you see an error message pop up on your screen, or you’re faced with a question about some obscure part on your PC, you’re not alone. These same problems appear on hundreds, thousands, or even hundreds of thousands of other PCs. The Internet’s loaded with places for people to complain about their computer problems; many techies love to prove their mettle by answering them, so it’s a perfect match. Google provides an index to just about every one of those conversations, and your challenge is to extract the one that answers your current problem. To narrow down your search results, search for these specific items: • Error messages. Error messages always use the same wording on every PC, making them easy search targets. You must post the exact wording, in quotes, to find an answer. To limit your searches to your own operating system—Windows XP, for instance—add the term “XP” after your search phrase, like so: "Error – Does Not Compute" XP

• File names. When a particular file name keeps appear within an error message, search for that file’s exact name, including its three-letter extension, followed by the letters XP. If Windows XP isn’t displaying the file’s extension, open any folder and choose Tools ➝ Folder Options. From the View tab, turn off, “Hide extensions for known file types.” • Part numbers. Some parts come with a number stamped on their circuit board. Sometimes searching for the part number reveals the part’s manufacturer and version number, which is valuable when tracking down drivers (see page 514), the software that lets various devices communicate with Windows XP. • Part names. Searching for “Epson 1280” narrows down the information to include that particular printer model. • Software name. Be sure to include the version number of your troublesome software, which you can find in just about any program by clicking Help ➝ About. • FAQ. Short for Frequently Asked Questions. Tossing this acronym into your search finds answers to the most common questions about that particular item. It’s a quick way to find easy answers. Try stringing together several short quoted phrases in Google’s search box. The more specific you are in describing your problem, the better your chances of

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finding a solution. When you click the Google Search button, shown in Figure 17-7, the search engine whips through Web sites, looking for matches.

Reverting to Old Programs

Figure 17-7: Place your exact error message in quotes when searching Google for possible answers. Start your search on the Web, but also be sure to search “Groups” as well. That tells Google to search the Internet’s newsgroups, a huge collection of forums where people discuss nearly everything—including solutions to error messages and other computer problems. Google Groups contains more than 3 billion messages spanning the past 20 years.

As you search, add newly encountered words to your search that may be helpful in leading to a clue. You’ll notice that the following sites frequently pop up when you search for answers to computer problems. • Doug’s Windows Tweaks and Tips (www.dougknox.com). Many fixes involve editing a specific area of Windows XP’s backbone called the Registry. Since not everybody wants to become a Windows surgeon to fix their problems, a visit to Doug Knox’s site brings a quick solution: little programs that edit the specific registry entry you need to solve your problem. Doug has created downloadable mini-programs that fix some of the most common registry problems. • Kelly’s Korner (www.kellys-korner-xp.com). Like Doug’s site, Kelly’s site also offers a wide variety of tweaks and mini-programs for fixing specific portions of the Registry. Replies to questions often include a link to a specific program, saving you from Kelly’s “sea of text” approach to Web page layout. • Microsoft Knowledge Base Article number. Microsoft lists solutions to problems on its Knowledge Base, explained on page 536. Armed with an article number, you can head straight to the section of the Knowledge Base containing an answer.

Reverting to Old Programs When a new version of a program conflicts with other software, has too many features, or drops a much-loved feature, nothing prevents you from uninstalling the new version, using Windows Control Panel (Start ➝ Control Panel ➝ Add or Remove Programs), and then reinstalling the old model.

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Swapping Parts

If you don’t have the old version on hand, visit Old Version (www.oldversion.com). With the slogan, “Because new isn’t always better,” the site offers more than 500 older versions of more than 50 programs, all available for downloading. Internet Explorer 1.0, anyone? Tip: Sometimes a smaller, older version is enough to stuff onto a USB drive (see page 255) for emergencies.

Swapping Parts The best troubleshooting helper is a second PC, either in your home, at a neighbor’s house, or at work. When something’s not working correctly on your home PC, see if it works on a different PC. Here are some of the easiest things to try: • Cables. Before you replace your PC’s power supply, borrow a power cable from another PC and connect it between your PC and the electrical outlet. If it works, you know your original cable is bad or has a loose connection. Similarly, swap cables before performing last rites on a printer or scanner. If your printer connects to your PC with either a PS/2 cable or a USB cable, try switching to the other type of cable to see if it makes a difference. • Monitors, keyboards, mice, and printers. After swapping the cables with other PCs, try connecting the actual devices to a different PC. That lets you know if the problem lies with the device, or your PC. • Cards. PCs come with internal slots (see page 27) for slipping in cards, letting you beef up your PC’s sound or video, for example, as well as to add features like a FireWire port. If a card isn’t working correctly in your PC, try slipping it into another PC, as well as trying adjacent slots, to see if the card itself is bad. Whether swapping parts fixes the problem or not, it provides one more piece of information as to where the real problem lies. Tip: Try running Knoppix (see page 538)—a free operating system that loads from a CD—on your PC. If the troubled part works with Knoppix, but not Windows, you know the problem lies with Windows itself, not your PC.

Microsoft’s Knowledge Base Whenever Microsoft discovers a problem with one of its products, it adds that problem—and its solution, if one exists—into its Knowledge Base, shown in Figure 17-8. Stuffed with more than 150,000 articles, Microsoft’s Knowledge Base (http://support.microsoft.com/search/) contains solutions to problems asked by

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customers on its tech support lines, documentation of bugs (and possible workarounds), and tutorials for getting through tricky situations.

Microsoft’s Knowledge Base

Figure 17-8: With more than 150,000 entries, Microsoft Knowledge Base’s Advanced Search (http:// support.microsoft.com/ search/?adv=1) offers several ways to narrow your search. Search for articles about a specific product, including Windows XP, in the top box. In the For box, enter an error message, file name, or other pertinent information, and then click the arrow button to see what Microsoft knows about that particular error.

Tip: KBalertz (www.kbalertz.com) offers a free service that alerts you to new Knowledge Base articles dealing with specific subjects. If you’re an avid Word 2000 user, for instance, sign up to have KBalertz let you know whenever Microsoft adds information about a Word 2000 idiosyncrasy, conflict, workaround, or plain old bug.

Microsoft numbers each article in its Knowledge Base, making everything easier to retrieve. For instance, searching Google for the error message “Error 1606. Could Not Access Network Location,” may turn up an answer with somebody saying, “You’ll find that answer in article in KB307683.” That six-digit number (with the acronym for “Knowledge Base” in front of it) identifies a specific Knowledge Base article. Armed with the Knowledge Base article number, you can retrieve that helpful solution in three ways: • Visit the Knowledge Base article directly. You can head straight for any particular article by typing this into your browser address: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/816506/ Substitute your own Knowledge Base number for the one above to head straight for that particular article. Chapter 17: Advanced Troubleshooting PCs: The Missing Manual, eMatter Edition Copyright © 2008 O’Reilly & Associates, Inc. All rights reserved.

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Last Resort: Data Grabs with Knoppix

• Search the Knowledge Base directly for the article. You can also retrieve a particular article directly in the Knowledge Base’s search window, shown in Figure 17-8. On the Search Type drop-down list, choose Article ID. Then type the article ID in the For: box. • Run your own Knowledge Base search. Feel free to run your own searches in Microsoft’s Knowledge Base, as shown in Figure 17-8. GEM IN THE ROUGH

Knowledge Base Key Words Microsoft places keywords at the bottom of each article, summing up its category. By searching for specific keywords, you can see everything relating to that particular category. For instance, keywords for people with special physical needs are “kbEnableSight,” “kbEnableHear,” “kbEnableMove,” and “kbEnableLearn.” That lets blind people search for “kbEnableSight,” for instance, to locate specific articles about how Microsoft’s software handles people with special visual needs.

When you find any article particularly helpful, take note of its keywords, and search for them to find articles with similar information. Microsoft lists all its keywords in article 242450 (http:// support.microsoft.com/kb/242450/).

Last Resort: Data Grabs with Knoppix The “recovery CDs” that come with most new PCs don’t rescue your data; they merely return your PC to its original state, wiping out all your data in the process. And many PC repair shops don’t bother to fix a PC’s problems; they, too, erase your hard drive and reinstall Windows from scratch. When Windows lets you down, leaving you with a PC holding your documents, music files, and other data hostage, turn to another operating system: Linux. Specifically, Knoppix is a stripped-down version of Linux that fits on one CD—and it’s free. Restart your PC with the Knoppix CD in your CD drive, and your PC wakes up with a completely new operating system. Since Knoppix doesn’t require a hard drive, it can often salvage files from a PC after Windows has curled up and died. Knoppix certainly isn’t for the faint at heart. But when you’re desperate, your PC no longer loads Windows, and you need to salvage your files before risking a trip to the PC repair shop, follow these steps to copy your files and folders from your My Documents folder onto your USB drive (see page 255). Before you can use Knoppix, your PC must still be able to start, even if Windows XP doesn’t load successfully from your hard drive.

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Note: If your USB keychain drive isn’t large enough to store your data, consider getting a portable USB hard drive, which holds lots more information. The same steps listed here apply to a hard drive, as well as to a tiny USB drive. Make sure the hard drive is formatted with FAT32 rather than NTFS (see page 175), however, as Knoppix can’t save data to a NTFS-formatted drive.

Last Resort: Data Grabs with Knoppix

1. Download and create a Knoppix CD. From a working PC, download Knoppix from the Web (www.knoppix.org). If the site appears in German (it’s written by a German programmer), click the American/British flag to see the English version. Knoppix comes in the form of an ISO file—a single file containing an image of an entire CD—so you need a CD-burning program that can burn ISO files to CD (see page 301). Tip: Feel free to create a Knoppix CD right now for future emergencies.

2. Connect your USB drive (or portable USB hard drive) to your ailing PC. 3. Put the Knoppix CD in the CD drive of your PC or laptop, and then restart your computer. If your PC doesn’t start running Knoppix from the CD, you need to change the boot order in your PC’s BIOS so it looks for an operating system in the CD drive (see page 531) before looking in the hard drive. 4. Press Enter at the “boot:” command line. Knoppix starts up with a bare command line, meant to offer people extra configuration options. (Type “Knoppix failsafe” at the command line, for instance, if Knoppix has trouble detecting some of your PC’s hardware.) Pressing Enter starts Knoppix immediately with the default options, which work on most PCs. When Knoppix first appears, it leaves a browser window on the desktop with brief instructions. Close the browser, or, if your PC has a working Internet connection through a router (see page 409), feel free to browse the Internet or send mail through a Web-based email account like Gmail (see page 546). Or, proceed with the rescue by closing the browser, leaving the screen much like Figure 17-9. 5. Make your USB drive writable—in other words, so you can save information to it. Your USB drive appears as an icon on your desktop, as shown in Figure 17-10. To let Knoppix write to it, right-click the drive icon, and then choose Actions ➝ Change read/write mode ➝ Yes.

Chapter 17: Advanced Troubleshooting PCs: The Missing Manual, eMatter Edition Copyright © 2008 O’Reilly & Associates, Inc. All rights reserved.

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6. Navigate to your My Documents folder.

Last Resort: Data Grabs with Knoppix

Knoppix displays your drives along the desktop’s left edge (see Figure 17-9). Click your hard drive to open it. If your PC has more than one hard drive listed, try the one listed at the top first.

Floppy disk CD drive Desktop

Figure 17-9: Knoppix resembles Windows in that it presents a desktop, a taskbar, and icons representing your drives. Icons open with one click; to close them, click the X in their upper-right corner, just as with Windows. Your C: drive is usually the first hard drive listed on the left. Click that one to see inside, and then begin navigating to your My Documents folder.

Task bar USB drive Hard drives

When the hard drive appears, click the Documents and Settings folder inside. Click the folder inside named after your user account, and then click the My Documents folder to see your files, as shown in Figure 17-10. Tip: Click the Desktop folder to see items stored on your Windows desktop.

7. Open your USB drive and copy folders and files onto it. Click your USB drive icon to open it in its own window.

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Selecting items from your My Documents folder works the same way it does in Windows: click one folder to select it; hold down Ctrl to keep selecting additional items, or lasso the whole lot.

Last Resort: Data Grabs with Knoppix

Figure 17-10: Here, Knoppix displays the folders inside your My Documents folder, ready for you to select and copy what you need to a USB drive or portable USB hard drive. Knoppix displays thumbnails of photos on their icons, helping you salvage important pictures from your My Pictures folder.

Drag the selected folders into your USB drive’s window; from the shortcut menu, choose Copy Here. Knoppix copies the selected folders to your USB drive. 8. Right-click your USB drive or USB hard drive and then choose Unmount from the shortcut menu. This “unmounting” business finalizes the writing process, preparing the drive to be removed. 9. Shut down Knoppix. Click the K icon in the screen’s lower-left corner, and then from the shortcut menu, choose Logout. Then choose Turn Off Computer from the End Session window. Knoppix exits the screen. It didn’t fix your PC or Windows, but it rescued your data, and that’s what’s most important.

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If you’d like to explore Knoppix further, pick up a copy of Kyle Rankin’s Knoppix Hacks (O’Reilly). POWER USERS’ CLINIC

The Missing Motherboard Manual

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The BIOS sometimes displays the version and model of your PC’s motherboard. Armed with that information, you can visit the manufacturer’s Web site and download a manual that explains the motherboard’s built-in parts like video, sound, and a network adapter; it’s a fantastic find when you’re searching for an updated driver.

The manual also identifies the motherboard’s pins and jumpers, letting you identify the pins for USB ports, for instance, as well as for resetting the BIOS password. A manual also offers more thorough explanations of all the options listed in the BIOS, helping you change the right settings.

Although manufacturers place those drivers on your PC when it’s built, the drivers are often lost during a hard drive crash, forcing you to scramble for replacements. Until you find them, you may not be able to put your sound and network adapters back to work, or see your video at its highest resolutions.

If your BIOS doesn’t offer a clue as to the motherboard’s model or version, several programs on the Internet let you probe inside your PC to uncover it (page 12).

PCs: The Missing Manual PCs: The Missing Manual, eMatter Edition Copyright © 2008 O’Reilly & Associates, Inc. All rights reserved.

appendix

Appendix A

a

Setting Up a PC

If you already own a PC, you don’t need this appendix—save it for when you buy your next computer. But if you’re staring at a new PC inside a large shipping carton or two, this appendix is for you. It explains how to remove the PC from its packaging, set it up in an appropriate spot, adjust the monitor, and plug in all the cables and connectors. You’ll also learn about what to do when you’re ready to dispose of an old PC.

Removing Your PC from Its Box Whether you’ve picked up your new baby from the store or a delivery van dropped it off, most PCs enter homes in two giant shipping boxes. The PC lives inside the heaviest box; the other box contains the monitor. Both items come wedged inside a protective layer of molded Styrofoam. To begin liberating your machine, pull out each box’s packing staples with a pair of pliers so the sharp edges don’t scratch anything. Then fetch a pair of scissors— they let you cut neat slits in the plastic wrapping to remove cables, keyboards, and other parts. Try not to damage the Styrofoam when extracting your PC—you may need to put it back inside if you ever need to return your computer or monitor. Receipts, packing lists, and other important-looking papers come in handy for reference and tech support calls, so grab a large manila envelope to store them before they disappear beneath oceans of foam and plastic.

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Choosing Your PC’s Location

Note: If you return the PC for a refund, someone at the store will inspect the box, the Styrofoam, and other packaging for damage. She’ll also make sure all the original CDs and manuals are neatly in place, and in their wrappers. Don’t be surprised if the clerk removes the PC’s case to take inventory of any removable parts: the video adapter, CPU, hard drive, and memory.

Choosing Your PC’s Location The monitor goes on the desk; that’s the easy part. But you can place the PC either beneath the desk, atop it, or even on an adjacent shelf, if the cables reach far enough. Keep these considerations in mind when deciding where to plunk down that big box: • Easy access. You’ll be pushing CDs and DVDs in and out of your PC’s drive, and plugging in iPods, USB flash drives, and digital cameras. If your PC’s USB ports reside in the back, make sure you can reach them fairly easily. Even better, buy a USB hub (see page 39): a small box with a long cable that plugs into one USB port, letting the box perch atop your desk or PC, and putting four or more ports within arm’s reach. WORKAROUND WORKSHOP

Moving into a New PC The easiest way to move your old PC’s information—its files, programs, and settings—onto your new computer is to perform a hard drive transplant: extract your old PC’s hard drive and install it into your new PC (see page 262 for details). That moves over everything: your operating system, your applications, your cute desktop picture, and so on. But that’s like putting parts from an old car into a new one. Your new machine will constantly be throttled by the slow speed of your old hard drive. Instead, consider making the transfer by resorting to a method that requires a little spare time and a bit of thumbtwiddling. First, install your old programs onto your new PC using their original CDs. Next, use Windows XP’s Files and Settings Transfer wizard (see page 441) to pack up your old PC’s files and settings

and move them to your new PC. The wizard creates a huge backpack of files and settings. You can make the transfer, either by linking the two machines in a two-PC network (see page 448), or by copying the file package to an external hard drive (see page 266) and then moving that drive to your new machine. Complete the move by running the wizard again on your new PC to unpack the old PC’s files and settings, placing them in their proper places. The wizard’s not the only data-moving van on the block. Detto’s $49.95 IntelliMover (www.detto.com) can also transport your files, and Alohabob’s PC Relocator $29.95 (www.alohabob.com) claims to pack up not only your data but your programs, as well.

• Ventilation. Those noisy fans inside your PC constantly suck cool air through your PC’s vents, and then push the hot air out through that round hole in the back. Without that flow of air, your PC overheats like a jammed toaster.

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Find the vents on your PC’s case; they’re often rows of small holes in the case’s side or front. Then make sure the vents aren’t pushed flat against the side of a desk or a wall. The vents need an inch or two of clearance for the air to flow in; leave at least six inches of breathing room between the back of your PC and the wall.

Plugging In Accessories

• Sunlight. Keep your monitor out of the glare of nearby windows. Sometimes tilting your display an inch to the right or left, away from the window, makes all the difference. When your desk’s location makes glare unavoidable, drop by the computer store and pick up a glare filter—a thin film that hangs in front of your monitor’s screen to reduce or eliminate the glare.

Plugging In Accessories If you plan on sticking your PC beneath your desk, first position it on the floor in front of your desk so it’s easier to plug in your monitor, mouse, and other devices. That saves you from having to perform advanced yoga stretches as you try to plug the right cord into the right port.

Your Chair and Your Posture There’s no one perfect way to work in front of a computer. Some people feel comfortable only when perched in a fully adjustable, $800 Herman Miller Aeron chair. Others like rocking on a huge, inflatable fitness ball. Most settle for the standard office-style swivel chair. Ergonomics professors advise sitting upright like a “stick person,” with all vertical or horizontal lines. Keep your torso straight, for instance, with your thighs and forearms jutting out at 90 degree angles, and your feet flat on the floor. Relax your shoulders. That’s your starting point, from which you should begin adjusting everything a little higher or lower until you find your own sweet spot.

Monitor Start by positioning the top of the monitor’s screen at or just below your eye level. If your monitor doesn’t come with an adjustable (up or down) base, and adjusting your chair’s height makes you feel uncomfortable, temporarily stack some books beneath the monitor, adding or subtracting from the stack to find that perfect viewing angle. Once you’re comfortable with your seated posture and the monitor’s height, measure the stack of books beneath it. Then head to the office supply store and look for the right-sized monitor stand—a handy little open-ended box that also serves as a parking garage for your keyboard.

Appendix A: Setting Up a PC PCs: The Missing Manual, eMatter Edition Copyright © 2008 O’Reilly & Associates, Inc. All rights reserved.

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Plugging In Accessories

If your neck or shoulders still feel sore, make sure you’re not scrunching them up as you type. Then show this next paragraph to your boss: Take frequent breaks, standing up and moving around every half hour or so.

If your wrists, hands, or fingers feel sore, drop by the computer or office supply store and put your hands on an ergonomic or “natural” tilted keyboard (see page 61). Some people find them more comfortable for typing. Tip: Your best protection for a comfortable work area is having adjustable components—especially your chair. A fine-tuneable chair lets you sit the way you like and makes everything else conform to you, rather than the other way around.

For complete instructions on plugging in and fine-tuning an LCD (flat panel) monitor, see page 85; for CRT monitors (the old school models with hefty backsides), see page 87.

Power Strip Once you plug in your PC and the monitor, you’ve probably hogged the only outlet on the wall. Where do you plug in the speakers? Your cell phone? The digital camera battery charger? Or even that desk lamp? A power strip—a long, power outlet-filled box—plugs into one outlet to add six or eight more, enough to handle your extension cords and power supplies (the black “bricks” that drive power to many devices). The good power strips include built-in surge protectors that commit suicide instead of letting that dangerous power surge flow through to your PC. (The best power strips include a light that lets you know when they’ve committed suicide, so you know when to buy a new one.) Tip: Power supplies tend to hog so much space that they frequently cover up the adjacent outlet. To avoid that, buy a power strip with parallel slots. That lets plugged-in power supplies dangle over the power strip’s edge, rather than covering an adjacent outlet.

Uninterruptible Power Supply (UPS) An Uninterruptible Power Supply (UPS) provides protection from power outages, but not in the way you might think. When the power goes down, don’t expect to start composing your complaint letter to the utility company. Instead, a UPS is meant to protect your PC when the electricity fails, giving you enough time for a grateful exit. Save your work, and shut down your PC (Start ➝ Turn Off Computer ➝ Turn Off), letting Windows close normally. Don’t think of a UPS as a generator. It’s protecting only the information you’re currently working on. Plug your UPS straight into the wall outlet—not the power strip. Then connect your PC directly to the UPS. Don’t plug anything else into your UPS if you can help it. Plugging in nonessential items cuts down on the amount of stored electricity you have available during an outage.

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Plug your nonessential items—your lamp, cell phone charger, printer, and so on— into your power strip.

Plugging In Accessories

Mouse and Keyboard Most mice and keyboards plug straight into a USB port (see page 34). Normally, each one wants its own USB port. If you’re running out of USB ports, pick up a USB hub—a little box stuffed with extra USB ports. One cable on the hub plugs into a wall outlet for power; the other plugs into a USB port. Some keyboards sport a USB port or two, situated along one side for plugging in a mouse. That not only extends the reach of your mouse cable, but saves one of your PC’s precious USB ports for a different goodie. If you bought a wireless mouse or keyboard, remember they come in two pieces. Plug the mouse or keyboard’s wireless transmitter into your PC’s USB port. Then install batteries into the mouse and/or keyboard. For complete instructions on installing mice, see page 75; for keyboards, see page 69.

Telephone Cable Almost all PCs come with a phone jack for a modem. It’s always a good idea to hook up the modem, even if your PC connects with a broadband connection. Dialup modems come in handy for several reasons: • They let you connect to the Internet on those rare occasions when your broadband connection goes down. • They let you send and receive faxes using Windows XP’s built-in fax software (covered in the online appendix, “Other Cool Things You Can Do Online,” available on the “Missing CD” page at www.missingmanuals.com). • They let your laptop go online during a power outage. Your laptop can always run off its battery. And while a power outage will keep a broadband modem from running, dial-up lines usually stay up when the power dies. Connect a standard phone cable between the PC’s jack and the wall’s phone jack (see page 42).

Ethernet Cable Most new PCs come with a built-in Ethernet port, which resembles a fat phone port. Your PC needs that Ethernet port, also known as a network port, to connect with a network or broadband modem. Most new PCs come with an Ethernet cable tossed in, but if yours didn’t, the cables are easy to find at any PC store. You’ll find complete instructions for buying Ethernet cables and plugging them into broadband modems and routers on page 413.

Appendix A: Setting Up a PC PCs: The Missing Manual, eMatter Edition Copyright © 2008 O’Reilly & Associates, Inc. All rights reserved.

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Activating Your PC and Windows Update

Speakers Your PC sends its sound through a 1/8-inch stereo jack, just like your tiny iPod. The hardest part is finding that tiny hole—it’s one of a row of several identical jacks on the back of your PC. You’ll find instructions and identification clues in Chapter 1 (see page 47). Once you’ve plugged in your speaker cable, position the speakers on your desk, one on each side of your monitor (unless they’re built into the monitor itself, of course). For some reason, most manufacturers don’t label their speakers as “Left” and “Right,” giving you a 50 percent chance of choosing the right positions. Test your guess by playing a song in Windows Media Player. While listening, slide the mixer’s balance lever (page 220) from the left to the right side and see if the sound from your speakers matches. If not, reverse the speakers.

Printer Plug your printer’s power cord into the power strip, and then plug the printer’s other cable into your PC. Most printers plug into the USB port. You’ll find complete instructions for installing a printer on page 119. Don’t forget to add paper.

Activating Your PC and Windows Update When you turn on a new PC for the very first time, Windows XP appears in its welcoming mode, leading you through the process of creating a new user account, where you’ll choose a name so Windows XP recognizes you when you visit your PC. You also need the following items when running Windows XP for the very first time on a new PC: • Product key. This series of 25 numbers and letters, usually printed on a sticker affixed to the paper or cardboard sleeve holding your Windows XP CD, is your ticket to Windows XP. If you install Windows XP onto a PC yourself, Windows will ask you to type this key into an onscreen box the first time you start up the PC. If you ever reinstall Windows, you’ll need to type in the key yet again. Put that product key in a safe place. If your PC came with Windows XP preinstalled, you don’t need to worry about the product key. Tip: If you don’t know your product key—and your PC’s up and running—download a copy of KeyFinder from Magical Jelly Bean Software (www.magicaljellybeansoftware.com/keyfinder). The software quickly peeks into Windows XP’s hiding place, grabs the key, and displays it on the screen. Write it down and stash it in a safe place for emergencies.

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• Pen or pencil and paper. You’ll probably want to write down settings, passwords, and other items for safekeeping. It’s a good idea to save this information somewhere in the real world—as opposed to, say, in a document on your PC— in case your computer’s not working when you need to retrieve it.

Activating Your PC and Windows Update

• Activation. Windows XP’s copy protection, called activation (page 519), keeps people from installing the same copy of Windows XP on more than one PC. If Windows XP came preinstalled on your PC, then the manufacturer probably already took care of the activation task, locking your copy of Windows XP to your newly purchased PC. But if you install Windows XP yourself on a PC, you must activate it within 30 days, which entails a simple procedure of clicking a button once you’re connected to the Internet (see page 519). • Windows Update. Once you install Windows XP, head straight for Windows Update (www.windowsupdate.com) and install any patches marked “Critical.” (See page 478 for more details on Windows Update.) This important step fixes any of the program’s security problems before you expose your machine to the dark forces of the Internet for too long. FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS

Disposing of Your Old PC What do I do with my old PC? An old PC’s full of new opportunities. You can create a network (see page 404), which lets you turn your old PC’s drives into extra storage tanks. If your old PC has a floppy drive and your new PC doesn’t, “share” your old PC’s floppy drive on the network (see page 446). Or you might want to add a Webcam to your old PC (see page 176) and let it upload photos to your Web site all day.

an old PC, especially if your machine’s in good condition. Check the site’s “wanted” ads as well; perhaps a charity is looking for a PC and you can pocket a tax credit. • eBay (www.ebay.com). You can auction it off on eBay, but that entails packing your beast up and charging extra for shipping costs.

Or start scavenging. Rip out the old PC’s hard drive, put it in your new PC (see page 263), repartition and reformat it (see page 270), and then save files to it directly. Add the old PC’s monitor and video card to your new PC to double the size of your desktop (see page 89). Or add its CD or DVD drives (see page 308) to your new PC.

• FreeCycle (www.freecycle.org). If nobody wants to pay for the old thing, drop by FreeCycle, a novel site for “recycling” your old goods. List your unwanted PC, and, if somebody wants it, they come over and haul it away. You may be able to put your old PC in the hands of a needy student and boost your karma to boot.

But if you just want to get rid of the old clunker, you have several options:

Before getting rid of your PC, be sure to erase all your old data to keep your information secure (see page 277).

• Craig’s List (www.craigslist.com). This increasingly popular classified ad site is a great place to list

Appendix A: Setting Up a PC PCs: The Missing Manual, eMatter Edition Copyright © 2008 O’Reilly & Associates, Inc. All rights reserved.

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PCs: The Missing Manual, eMatter Edition Copyright © 2008 O’Reilly & Associates, Inc. All rights reserved.

Index

Symbols - (minus sign), eliminating words in Google searches, 391 £ (pounds sterling) symbol, 67 ® (trademark) symbol, 67 © (copyright) symbol, typing, 67

Numbers 100BaseT cables, 413 104-key keyboards, 57 3G (Third Generation) cell phone provider, Internet connection through, 338 4.1 (surround sound), 208 4uonly (password manager), 384 5.1 sound, 208 6.1 sound, 208 7.1 sound, 208 802.11b wireless standard, 319, 408 802.11g wireless standard, 408 wireless router, 411 802.11n wireless standard, 408

A AAC files, 215 Absolute Software, 481 Accelerated Graphics Port (see AGP) Access Manager, 384 Accessibility Web site, 63

Acrobat Reader, 383 Acronis TrueImage Backup, 466 activating Windows XP, 519, 548 ActiveX controls, 257 not supported by Firefox, 381 support by Internet Explorer, 377 ad hoc (wireless connections), 450–452 adapters RCA-jack-to-1/8-inch-stereo port cable, 210 for USB ports, 40 Ad-Aware SE, 489 ad-blocking, Web browsers, 376, 387 Firefox, 381, 382 ADC (Analog-to-Digital Converter), 87, 209 Add Hardware Wizard, 32, 503, 520 troubleshooting drivers, 505–508 Add or Remove Programs wizard, 259 uninstalling unwanted programs, 519 Add Printer Wizard, 123–125 shared network printer, 439 add-ons, Web browsers, 376 Firefox, 382 Address Book addressing email messages, 356 backing up, 466 exporting to a different program, 371 managing, 368–370 transferring information to iPod, 236 administrator account for your PC, forgotten password, 502

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Index

Adobe Acrobat, displaying content using in Firefox, 382 Gamma utility, 104 Photoshop Elements, 154, 158 PostScript printer language, 114 Reader program, 15 ads, showing up as result of malware infection, 485 Advanced Audio Coding (see AAC files) Advanced Technology eXtended (ATX), 18 power supplies, 50 advertising companies, use of cookies, 379 adware, 484 causing pop-ups even with pop-up blocking, 387 removing, 487 AGP (Accelerated Graphics Port) Bus specifications, 108 buying right video card for the slot, 108 verifying slot type, 111 video slots, 27, 109 air flow for PC case vents, 15 alarm for laptops, 481 all-in-one printers, 113, 117 benefits and disadvantages, 118 media card readers to print photos, 118 scanner, 184 Alohabob’s PC Relocator, 544 Alt code for symbols, 67 Alt key accessing window menus, 66 Alt+PrtScr, 62 Alt+Spacebar, 67 Alt+Tab, 66 Amazon consumer electronics stores, 252 lefthanded numeric keypad plug-in, 59 network cards, 413 preamps, 211 record player sales, 210 reviews of DVD drives, 308 AMD CPUs, 16 Intel CPUs vs., 19 America Online (AOL), 328 setting up PC-based email programs to work with, 352 American Megatrends, 523 analog camcorders, 166 analog controllers, 80 analog monitors, 34, 87 (see also CRT monitors) analog ports, 209 subwoofer, 207

552

PCs: The Missing Manual

Analog-to-Digital Converter (ADC), 87, 209 AnaPod, 238 AND and OR in Google searches, 391 Antenna port (on televisions), 97 antivirus programs, 486 free, 486 antivirus programs with spam management, 373 Apple, 383 AAC format for iPod, 215 iPod (see iPod) iTunes (see iTunes) QuickTime, 383 Application key, 64 right-clicking with, 67 Archos media players, 225 arrow keys (see cursor keys) arrow notations, 4 Ask Jeeves, 391 Athlon 64 CPU (AMD), 16 ATI, 513 TV tuners for PCs, 100 attachments to email, 360 forwarding email message as, 365 opening and saving, 367 attachments, scanners, 185 ATX (Advanced Technology eXtended), 18 power supplies, 50 Audigy 2 ZS Notebook PC card, 200 Audigy 2 ZS sound card, 203 audio PC, playing through TV speakers, 98 Audio In ports PCs, 209 TVs, 98 audio software, 217 Audio/Music layer, Movie Maker, 173 dragging music files onto, 174 Auto button, monitor adjustments with, 104 AutoComplete, Internet Explorer, 382, 384 automatic synchronization, Media Player, 243 Automatic Update, 478 turning off, 479 AutoPlay for CDs, 282 Aux In port, 209 Aux port, 205 average seek time (hard drives), 265 Avery labels, 132 Avery Wizard software, 133 AVG Antivirus, 487 Award Software, 523 Axis Communications, network Webcam, 178

PCs: The Missing Manual, eMatter Edition Copyright © 2008 O’Reilly & Associates, Inc. All rights reserved.

B back door into the BIOS, 529 back doors, 484 backgrounds, turning off for Web page printing, 142 backing up your computer, 463, 518 Backup program, using, 466–473 automating the backup, 471 backup type, destination, and name, 468–470 deciding what to back up, 467 restore feature, 473–475 individual items, 464–466 laptops, 467 Backup, 466–473 automating your backup, 471 choosing backup type, destination, and name, 468–470 deciding what to back up, 467 installing on Windows XP Home, 473 restoring with, 473–475 Backup program deciding what to back up all information on the computer, 468 choosing what you want to back up, 468 everyone’s documents and settings option, 468 my documents and settings option, 467 using floppy disks for, 278 backups Web browser settings, 376 Internet Explorer, 380 Basic Input Output System (see BIOS) batteries digital cameras, extending life of, 162 repalcing for PC motherboard, 54 replacement rate for wireless mice, 73 replacing in laptops, 55 bays, 11, 13 BCC: field, 371 Beige Book (Photo CD) standard, 290 BIOS editing settings, 525–532 changing boot drive order, 531 changing password, 528–530 disabling onboard motherboard circuits, 530 disabling silent boot, 528 entering settings, 526 exiting the BIOS, 532 navigating menu screens, 527 numeric keypad, 531 upgrading firmware, 530

editing to change your drive’s boot order, 524 hard drive cylinders, heads, and sectors, 266 laptops, 525 main varieties of, 526 password for, 524 password protection, 478 Power-On Self Test (POST), 522–525 updating from bootable CD, 301 version, 523 BIOS area, 32 Onboard Video setting, 90 BIOS boot strings, 18 black and white picture or text scans, 191 BlazeAudio, 211 blocking offensive email senders, 374 blog, photo (Fotolog), 162 blogs RSS support, 402 Blue Book (Enhanced CD, CD+G, and CDPlus) standard, 290 Bluejacking/Bluecasting, 454 Bluetooth, 61, 452–458 connecting PCs with a Bluetooth device, 453–456 connecting to Bluetooth printer, 124 getting PC online with Bluetooth cell phone, 458 inserting Bluetooth adapter into PC USB port, 453 security, 454 transferring and receiving files, 456 wireless mouse communication through, 73 Bluetooth File Transfer Wizard, 456 BMP (bitmap images), 193 bookmarks backing up, 465 backing up in Firefox, 384 Firefox, 388 transferring to Internet Explorer on another PC, 380 boot disk, floppy disks as, 277 Boot Mode (Windows XP), 502 boot order, changing in BIOS, 531 bootable CD or floppy disk, creating, 503 bootable CDs, 301 booting from external drive, 267 Break key, 64 bridging networks, 449 Briefcase, 444–446 broadband Internet connections, 317, 321– 323 availability of, 322 disadvantages of, 322 free dial-up access when traveling, 322

Index

Index

553

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Index

broadband Internet connections (continued) setting up cable or DSL modem, 325–327 setting up in New Connection Wizard, 333 using dial-up when traveling, 338 (see also wireless Internet connections) broadband modems connection to router, 415 Broadband Reports, 329 browsing the Web, 388–400 downloading files, 399–400 finding sites, 390 forwarding sites, 396–399 Home page, 388 menus and buttons on browsers, 389 printing sites, 391 saving information text snippets from Web page, 392 saving information from sites, 391 photos, 392 saving Web pages, 392 saving Web site parts for offline reading, 393–396 viewing RSS feeds, 401 bubblejet printers (see inkjet printers) buffer size, hard drives, 265 bug fixes for Windows programs, 479 Bug Me Not Web site, 387 bumps on the base of keyboard “F” and “J” keys, 58 burning CDs, 289–298 avoiding skips or errors, 312 data CDs, 291, 292–294 labels, 299 music CDs, 292, 294–297 with Media Player, 294–296 speed of, 8 video CDs, 292, 298 burning DVDs, 305–306 avoiding skips or errors, 312 software for, 302 burning ISO image, 301 business centers offering Internet access, 318 buttons game controller, programming, 81 mouse, 73 adjusting, 77 BuyPrinters (supplies for older printers), 118

C C drive inability to change letter, 274 replacing, 263

554

cable adapters, 210 cable Internet connections, 322 cable modems, 322 connecting to router, 415 plugged into router, 409 setting up, 325 cable ties or tubes, 61 cables for adapting USB ports, 40 camera connection to computer, 148 connecting floppy drives, 279 connecting internal hard drive, 270 connecting Line Out or Speaker port to TV Audio In RCA ports, 99 digital, for LCD monitors with DVI ports, 86 Ethernet, 413 FireWire, connector sizes, 42 monitor checking for bent pins, 102 network, 42 scanner, connecting to PC, 186 testing by connecting to another PC, 536 USB, problems with, 36 video, installing, 89 calculator controlling from numeric keypad, 59 calendar backing up, 465 calendar information, transferring from Outlook to iPod, 236 calendars, printing from your photos, 161 calibrating game controllers, 81 camcorders, 164–176 analog, 166 converting images to digital, 166 capturing old movies, 180 digital, converting analog camcorder images with, 166 editing video with Movie Maker 2, 167–175 FireWire port, 40 hot-swapping and, 42 as Webcams, 177 cameras (see camcorders; digital cameras; Webcams) Canon printers online site for parts, 146 capacity of CDs, 286 capacity of hard drives, 265 car stereo, connecting digital music player to, 252 card readers, 150 moving pictures to a PC, 152 cards, 12 adding a FireWire card, 41 installing expansion cards, 25–32

PCs: The Missing Manual PCs: The Missing Manual, eMatter Edition Copyright © 2008 O’Reilly & Associates, Inc. All rights reserved.

ports on, 33 testing in another PC, 536 cards contain musician-level features, 216 cases, PC, 10 choosing, 16 closing after installing new parts, 15 opening, 12–15 openings for cards, 29 overheating, troubleshooting, 15 power supply that fits, 50 Casio printers, 133 Cat 5, Cat 5e, or Category 5 cables, 413 catalog files for content indexer, 258 Cathode Ray Tube monitors (see CRT monitors) CaveoAntitheft, 481 CD drives, 254, 281–300 burning CDs, 289–298 data CDs, 292–294 music CDs, 294–297 video CDs (VCD), 298 buying, 307 buying the right blank CDs, 283–286 minutes/capacity, 286 writing speed, 284 duplicating CDs, 298 erasing CDs, 299 fitting into bay in PC case, 13 installing, 308–311 introduction to CDs, 281 playing CDs, 282 reading and writing speed, 8 ripping CDs, 286–289 with iTunes, 289 with Windows Media Player, 286–289 troubleshooting, 312–315 avoiding skips or errors when burning CDs, 312 codec problems, 314 extracting stuck disks, 313 volume control, 221 CD Freaks, 308 CD In (Compact Disc In) connector, 205 CD labels, printing, 133 CD SPDIF (Sony-Philips Digital Interface) connector, 205 CD Writing Wizard, 294 CDA files, 213 CD-R (CD-Recordable), 283 deleting files, 299 CD-RW (CD-Read/Write), 283 deleting files, 299

CDs bootable, 503 burning files to and reripping them, 250 burning WAV files to, 212 copying records to, 209 data, music, and video, 281 ISO image, 301 ripping to your PC with iTunes, 229 standards for storing information, 290 (see also CD drives) Celeron CPU (Intel), 16 cell phone (Bluetooth-enabled), getting PC online with, 458 cell phone providers (3G), Internet connection through, 338 Central Processing Units (see CPUs) chain mails, not forwarding, 370 chairs for PCs, 545 channels (TV), switching between on PCs, 100 Character Map Font box, 68 Character Map program, 67 cheap keyboards, 60 chipsets, 18 Cineplay DVD Decoder, 302 ClamWin, 487 cleaning PC vents, 15 clicking underlined or highlighted words on Web page, 389 ClickLock, 78 clips, video creating with Movie Maker, 170 dragging onto Storyboard in movie order, 172 flip and slide transitions, 176 transitions between, 174 trimming in Movie Maker, 173 clock cycles, 16 clock speed of CPUs, 8 CMOS (Complementary Metal-OxideSemiconductors), 524 codecs, 302 DivX codec, 305 MPEG-2 codec for DVD movies, 302 problems with, 314 coffee mugs, printing your photos on, 161 collating printer copies, 130 Collection area (Movie Maker), 171 color automatically adjusting for photos with Picasa 2, 157 inkjet printers, 115 laser printers, 117 scanners, 185

Index PCs: The Missing Manual, eMatter Edition Copyright © 2008 O’Reilly & Associates, Inc. All rights reserved.

Index

555

Index

color laser printers, paper for, 126 color picture scans, 191 COM1 port, 124 command-line mode, using Pause/Break key in, 64 Compact Disc Digital Audio logo, 290 compact disc drives, 8 Compass Micro, Inc. (printer parts seller), 146 compatibility, Web browsers, 375 COmpress DECompress (codec), 302 compressed music file formats, 213 AAC files, 215 MIDI files, 215 MP3, 214 WMA files, 214 compressing old files, 258 CompuCage, 481 Computer Associates, 486 computer problems, Web sites for, 535 computers serial numbers, 9 connectors FireWire jacks and cables, 42 internal hard drive, 263 RJ-45 connectors, 413 sound, 205 sound devices, 45 (see also ports) contact information backing up, 465 backing up Outlook Express Address Book, 466 transferring from Outlook to iPod, 236 contacts cleaning on cards, 32 cleaning on memory chip, 25 context sensitive (F1 key), 59 contrast automatic adjustments for photos with Picasa 2, 157 contrast ratio (monitors), 84 Control Panel Add or Remove Programs wizard, 259 switching from Category View to Classic View, 4 controllers, game, 80 analog vs. digital, 80 converters Analog to Digital Converter (ADC), 209 Digital to Analog Converter (DAC), 209 converters for PC and TV ports, 97

556

PCs: The Missing Manual

cookie managers, 379 cookies, 379, 484 backing up in Internet Explorer, 380 transferring to Internet Explorer on another PC, 380 copy machine all-in-one printers as, 117 copy protection for digital music, 243 CDs ripped by Media Player, 287 copy protection for DVDs, 305 copy protection for music files, 249 copy protection for Windows XP, 519, 549 copying CDs, 298 copyright symbol, 67 copyrights on photos, photo developers and, 138 cordless keyboards, 61 cordless mice, 73 CPUs (Central Processing Units), 8, 16 AMD vs. Intel, 19 Craig’s List, 549 crashes caused by malware, 485 Creative Labs, 513 laptop sound card, 200 PC sound card, Audigy 2 ZS, 203 Creative media players, 225 credits, adding with Movie Maker, 174 cropping photos, 140, 158 Picasa 2, using, 157 crossover cable (Ethernet), 449 cross-over Ethernet cables, 413 CRT (Cathode Ray Tube) monitors, 84, 87 adjusting, 103 cleaning, 101 digital information converted to analog, 87 disposing or recycling, 89 installing, 88 making letters large enough to read, 107 toxins contained in, 88 Ctrl+Alt+Del, 65, 497 Ctrl+End, 59 Ctrl+Home, 59 Ctrl+P (print) command, 63 Ctrl+S (Save), 464 Ctrl+V (paste) command, 63 currency symbols, 67 Cursor Blink Rate option (keyboard), 70 cursor keys, 58, 59 laptop keyboard, 60 CyberAngel, 481 cybercafes, 318

PCs: The Missing Manual, eMatter Edition Copyright © 2008 O’Reilly & Associates, Inc. All rights reserved.

D DAC (Digital to Analog Converter), 209 Daisy (parts and supplies, daisy wheel printers), 119 daisy wheel printers, 119 Darik’s Boot and Nuke (DBAN), 277 data CDs, 291 burning, 292–294 data DVDs, 301, 305 date and time setting (digital cameras), 163 daughterboards, 205 dBpower MC, 215 dedicated keys, 58, 59 troubleshooting, 71 default programs, controlling, 378 defragmenting files on hard disk, 261 defragmenting hard disks, 312, 519 dekstop Webcams, 177 deleted files, retrieving, 495 Deleted Items folder, 363, 365 deleting files on networked PCs, 440 Dell, 9 Dell computers, nonstandard power supplies, 50 Desktop Search program (Google), 257 Detto’s IntelliMover, 544 Device Manager, 18 installing or updating a driver, 514 rolling back new driver that isn’t working, 516–518 working with drivers, 508–513 devices you disabled, 511 duplicate entries, 511 red X next to a device, 510 too many devices, 511 Device Mnager working with drivers yellow exclamation mark (!), 512 diagnostic programs for hard drives, 274 diagnostic tool, Sandra, 12 dialers, 484 dial-up Internet connections, 323 busy signals, 340 connecting from anywhere, 338 dialing into the Internet, 335–338 disconnecting, 337 starting a connection, 335–337 entering phone number in New Connection Wizard, 333 networks and, 412 dial-up modems sending faxes, 323 setting up, 325

dial-up modems, connecting to the Internet, 317 Diamond Cut, 211 digital camcorders (see camcorders) digital cameras, 148–163 choosing, 163 detail settings, 140 editing photos on the PC, 153, 157 moving pictures from camera to computer, 148–152 moving pictures from card reader to a PC, 152 posting photos on a sharing site, 160–162 rotating photos, 155 scanners as, 188 sending photos through email, 158 sizes for printed photos, 140 troubleshooting problems, 162 viewing photos on the PC, 155 digital controllers, 80 digital monitors, 34, 87 (see also LCD monitors) digital music players, 223–252 choosing a player, 223–226 music file formats, 225 player sizes, 224 connecting to PCs, 226 iPod and iTunes, 227–239 adding music to iTunes, 228–231 MP3 players, 250 playing through your car’s stereo, 252 troubleshooting, 247–252 digital rights management, 249 iPod shared between two PCs, 248 iPod’s “Do Not Disconnect” message, 248 making PC notice the player, 248 PC crashes, 251 problem tags, 250 reformatting player hard drive, 248 Windows Media Player, 239–246 digital music stores (see music stores, online) Digital Photography Review, 163 digital ports, 34, 209 subwoofer, 207 digital projectors, 93 Digital Rights Management, 243 CDs ripped by Media Player, 287 Digital Subscriber Line (see DSL Internet connections) Digital Versatile Disc (see DVD drives; DVDs) Digital Video Disc (see DVD drives; DVDs) Digital Visual Interface (see DVI port) digitizing movies, 180 DirecWay, 323

Index

Index

557

PCs: The Missing Manual, eMatter Edition Copyright © 2008 O’Reilly & Associates, Inc. All rights reserved.

Index

disabled devices (indicated by red X), 510 discoverable setting, Bluetooth devices, 454 Disk Cleanup program, 256–260, 442 automatic emptying of Recycle Bin, 496 freeing up space with, 519 freezing up, 258 More Options tab, 259 Disk Defragmenter, 261 Disk Manager, 270 disk testers, 274 Display Adapter (see video cards) disposing of old PCs, 549 DivX codec, 315 DivX Create Bundle, 305 docking bays for floppy drives, 279 for hard drives, 262 DocMemory, 24 document’s first or last word, moving to, 59 Doom9.net, 305 dot matrix printers, 119 Dots Per Inch (DPI) setting, 107 double-clicking adjusting speed, 78 Double-Density CDs, 290 Doug’s Windows Tweaks and Tips, 535 downloaded program files, removing from hard drive, 257 downloaded programs, backing up, 465 downloading Web files, 399–400 Downloads folder, 400 Drafts folder, 365 drafts, paper for printing, 128 drive letter, changing, 271–274 DriverGuide, 514 drivers game controller, 81 motherboard built-in parts, 542 mouse, 75 access and troubleshooting, 80 for multifunction keyboards, 62 overview of, 504 printer, 124, 439 required by cards, 30 scanner, 195 sound card, troubleshooting, 221 troubleshooting, 503–518 finding a new driver, 513 installing or updating drivers, 514–516 new driver not working, 516–518 with Add Hardware Wizard, 505–508 with Device Manager, 508–513 updating for video cards, 110 USB devices, 36 Webcam, 181

558

PCs: The Missing Manual

drives, 11, 253–280 CD drives, 281–300 DVD drives, 300–306 floppy drives, 277–280 hard drives, 255–276 inspection by BIOS, 524 mapping network drives, 446 overview of PC drives, 253–255 drop-down menus accessing from underlined letter in menu options, 66 DSL Internet connections, 322 DSL modems, 322 connecting to router, 415 plugged into router, 409 setting up, 327 DualDiscs, 304 Dualview feature (Windows XP), 89 conflicts caused by dual-port video cards, 93 identifying, positioning, and assigning monitors, 91–92 using with digital projector, 93 duplexing feature, printers, 131 duplicate entries in Device Manager, 511 duplicating CDs, 298 dust, removing from PC vents, 15 DV Passthrough mode, 167 DVD Audio, 304 DVD burners, 281 DVD drives, 255, 300–306 burning DVDs, 305–306 buying the right blank DVDs, 302–304 choosing, 307 installing, 308–311 introduction to DVDs, 300 playing DVD movies, 301 reading and writing speed, 9 ripping DVDs, 305 special disc formats, 304 troubleshooting, 312–315 avoiding skips or errors when burning DVDs, 312 extracting stuck disks, 313 region codes, 313 trouleshooting codec problems, 314 DVD XPack, 302 DVD+R DL (Double Layer), 303 DVD-R, DVD+R (Read), 302 DVD-RAM (Random Access Memory), 303 DVD-RW, DVD+RW (Read Write), 303 DVDs 5.1 sound, 208 burner/player software, 302

PCs: The Missing Manual, eMatter Edition Copyright © 2008 O’Reilly & Associates, Inc. All rights reserved.

copy protection, 305 format for storing video (MPEG), 26 transferring films to, 180 video quality, 170 (see also DVD drives) DVI (Digital Visual Interface) port, 85, 88 on HDTV, 98 Dvorak keyboards, 63

E Earth 911, 89 EasyShare Gallery, 161 eavesdroppers on Bluetooth devices, 454 eBay record player sales, 210 eJamming Web site, 217 electrical interference, speakers using USB port, 206 electrical shock, avoding from power supplies, 48 email, 343–374 accessing with public PCs, 318 attaching files in Outlook Express, 360 backing up Outlook, 465 backing up Outlook Express, 466 blocking offensive senders in Outlook Express, 374 choosing email program, 343–348 Eudora, 345 Outlook Express, 344–345 Thunderbird, 346–348 composing and sending in Outlook Express, 355–360 addressing the message, 356 automatic signature, 359 CC: and BCC: fields, 356 choosing format, 358–360 sending the message, 360 Subject: field, 358 typing the message, 360 etiquette, 370–372 exporting Outlook Express Address Book to another program, 371 free Internet-based email services, 323 managing Address Book in Outlook Express, 368–370 phishing, 481 reading and processing in Outlook Express, 362–368 deleting email, 363 forwarding email, 364 opening and saving attachments, 367 previewing a message, 362 printing email, 367

replying to email, 364 sorting and filing email, 365–367 viewing a message in its own window, 363 viewing images in messages, 363 resizing photos for, 157 sending photos, 158 setting up Outlook Express, 352–355 spell checking in Outlook Express, 361 stopping spam, 373 troubleshooting, 372 user name and password, 328 Web-based, 348–352 accessing in PC-based program, 352 advantages, 348 disadvantages, 350 Gmail service, 350 Hotmail service, 351 Yahoo, 351 encryption enabling for wireless signal, 426 Powerline adapters, 434 encryption technology, wireless keyboard/ mouse, 62 End key, 59 English layout for keyboards, 68 enhancing photos with Picasa 2, 157 envelopes, printing, 131 sizes of envelopes, 132 ephPod, 238 Epson Paper Finder, 127 Epson printers, 133 online site for parts, 146 erasing CDs, 299 ergonomic keyboards, 60 ergonomics, 545 Esc (Escape) key, 64 Ethernet, 404 Ethernet cables, 413, 547 buying recommendation, 414 crossover cable, networking two PCs, 448 length of, 414 security of, 425 Ethernet ports, 42 confusing with phone jack, 43 connecting two PCs, 436 etiquette of email, 370–372 etiquette, Internet, 398 Eudora, 345 advantages, 346 disadvantages, 346 EXIF data rotating photos without erasing, 155 viewing for photos, 154

Index PCs: The Missing Manual, eMatter Edition Copyright © 2008 O’Reilly & Associates, Inc. All rights reserved.

Index

559

Index

expansion cards, installing, 25–32 adding or removing a card, 29–30 identifying cards and slots, 27 troubleshooting problems, 30 extensions Thunderbird, 347 Web browsers, 376 Firefox, 382 external CD drives, 307 external DVD drives, 307 external floppy drives, 278 external hard drives, 254, 266–268 booting from, 267 installing, 262, 267 reasons to use, 266 using for backups, 466

F F1 key, 58 Factory Reset option (LCD monitors), 104 fans main fan for power supply, 47 overheating problems and, 16 replacing to quiet a PC, 49 video card, checking for problems, 110 FAT32 filesystem 4 GB file size error, 175 converting to NTFS, 275 Favorites (Internet Explorer), 388 backing up, 380, 465 importing into Firefox, 382 fax machines in all-in-one printers, 117 shown as available printer, 129 faxes broadband modems and, 323 sending and receiving with modems, 42 FedCo Electronics, 55 FedEx Kinko’s, PC rental from, 318 Fentek (ergonomic keyboards), 60 File Allocation Table (see FAT32 filesystem) file format for scan contents, 192 File menu, Print command, 129 file name (Webcam image), 180 file searches, index for, 258 files backing up, 465 deleted, undeleting, 495 mailing to Web-based email account for quick backup, 464 printing without opening file, 131 restoring with Backup, 475 sharing on a network, 423, 439–447

560

Files and Settings Transfer Wizard, 441–444 mapping network drives, 446 sharing additional folders, 440 viewing, copying, and moving files on other PCs, 440 Windows Briefcase, 444–446 transferring and receiving with Bluetooth, 456 Files and Settings Transfer Wizard, 441–444, 544 film, scanning, 185 Filmstrip view, 155 film-to-DVD transfer services, 180 filters for DSL Internet connections, 327 financial records, backing up, 465 fingerprint reader, 477 Firefox, 380–384 advantages, 382 autofilling forms, 385 bookmarks backing up, 384, 465 cookie management, 379 disadvantages, 382 downloading Web files, 400 features, 380–382 extensions, 382 finding word on a Web page, 381 quick searches, 381 RSS support, 382 security, 381 Navigation toolbar, 389 password settings, 476 printing Web pages, 391 privacy controls, 382 resistance to spyware and adware, 488 RSS reader, built-in, 401 saving Web pages, 392 saving Web site parts for offline viewing, 393 searching for word or phrase on Web pages, 391 setting up, 382 fire-resistant cable, 413 firewalls, 411, 490–494 built into routers, 414 built-in, Windows XP, 418 hardware firewalls, 490 software firewalls, 491 testing your firewall, 494 third-party, conflicts with XP’s firewall, 425 Windows Firewall, 491–494

PCs: The Missing Manual PCs: The Missing Manual, eMatter Edition Copyright © 2008 O’Reilly & Associates, Inc. All rights reserved.

FireWire ports, 25, 40–42 connecting between digital camcorder and PC, 167 connecting external hard drives, 268 connecting two PCs, 436 music players connected to, 226 networking computers on-the-fly, 40 networking two PCs with FireWire cable, 449 SB 1394 port, 205 scanners, 185 scanners connected to, 186 sizes, 41 sound circuitry plug-in box, 203 troubleshooting problems, 40 firmware replacing, 533 updating from bootable CD, 301 updating from floppy disk, 278 upgrading for BIOS, 530 first word, moving to, 59 First-Party and Third-Party cookies, blocking, 379 Fix Your Own Printers Web site, 146 Flash content using, displaying in Firefox, 382 flash card readers (see card readers) flash drives, 255 flash memory, 224 flash problems (digital cameras), 163 flatbed scanners, 184 detachable document feeders, 185 Flickr photo sharing, 161 RSS support, 402 floppy disks as boot disk, 277 bootable, 503 formatting, 278 uses of, 278 floppy drives, 253, 277–280 deleted files, restoring, 278 formatting floppy disks, 278 installing, 278–280 letters assigned to, 274 reasons to use, 277 Fn key (laptops), 60 folders backing up, 465 created on Web space, 180 restoring with Backup, 475 foot pedals, 45 foreign language menus (LCD monitors), 104 foreign languages, keyboards for, 68

form factor (motherboards), 18 forms, managing, 384–387 autofilling forms in Firefox, 385 autofilling forms in Internet Explorer, 384 forwarding Web sites, 396–399 Fotolog, 162 frame rate, old movies vs. digital camcorders, 180 frames, printing, 142 Free avast! 4 Home Edition, 487 Free Codecs, 315 Free memtest86, 24 free space on your hard drive, 8 FreeCycle, 549 freeing up hard disk space, 256–260 FreeUndelete, 496 frozen PC resuscitating, 48 frozen programs, quitting, 65, 497 Fujitsu’s ATA Diagnostic Tool, 274 Function keys, 58

Index

G game controllers, 80 analog and digital controls, 80 calibrating, 81 game pads, 45 game port, 45 games speaker configurations for sound, 208 Gamma utility (Adobe), adjusting monitors with, 104 Gateway, 9 gateway (host PC Internet connection), 436 Ghostscript, 114 GHz (gigahertz), 8, 16 GIF images, 193 gigabytes, 265 glossy photo paper, 128 Gmail (see Google, Gmail) Google Desktop Search program, 257 Gmail, 323, 350 setting up PC-based email programs to work with, 352 mail site, 69 News, 388 Picasa photo-editing program, 157 searches, 390 ANDS and ORs, 391 eliminating unwanted words with (minus sign), 391 quotes around search strings, 390 searches sent by Firefox, 381

Index PCs: The Missing Manual, eMatter Edition Copyright © 2008 O’Reilly & Associates, Inc. All rights reserved.

561

Index

Google (continued) searching for clues to computer problems, 534 searching for drivers, 513 GPS (Global Positioning System) information on a photo, 154 graphics cards (see video cards) Graphics Interchange Format (GIF), 193 graphics programs, controlling scanner from, 187 grayscale picture scans, 191 Green Book (CD-i) standard, 290 greeting cards, printing, 133 Griffin Technology, 252 grinding noise while scanning, 197

H Hackercheck, 494 hard disks (see hard drives) hard drives, 8, 254, 255–276 backups on external hard drive, 466 bay in PC case, 13 changing drive letter, 271–274 defragmenting, 312, 519 erasing information from, 277 FAT32 and NTFS filesystems, 175 finding available space, 256 freeing up space, 313 identifying internal drive’s interface, 263 installing, 262 external hard drive, 262 internal hard drive, 263 replacing dead C drive, 263 upgrading to larger drive, 263 installing external drive, 266–268 installing internal drive, 268–271 memory vs., 18–19 mirror image, sending to external drive for backup, 466 music players, 224 not enough space to save edited video, 176 reformatting on digital music player, 248 removing unused programs and files, 256– 260 catalog files for content indexer, 258 compressing old files, 258 downloaded program files, 257 installed programs, 259 offline Web pages, 257 Recycle Bin, 258 setup log files, 258 System Restore, 259 temporary files, 258 temporary Internet files, 257

562

WebClient/Publisher temporary files, 258 Windows components, 259 size measurements, 261 specifications, 265 speeding up, 260–262 troubleshooting, 274–276 checking hard drive health, 275 concerting from FAT32 to NTFS filesystem, 275 disk testers, 274 upgrading for laptops, 266 hardware Add Hardware Wizard, 32 devices for access to sites, 477 firewalls, 490 networking hardware, 409–414 Ethernet cables, 413 network adapters, 412 routers, 409–412 problems with, 522 Tom’s Hardware Guide, 308 Hardware tab (mouse), 80 Hardware Update wizard, 515 Hauppauge, TV tuners for PCs, 100 HDTV (High-Definition TV) ports, 98 headset microphones with attached earphones, 205 heavy weight papers, 127 Hewlett Packard CD drives, 133 Printer Command (or Control) Language, 114 hibernation, turning off, 472 High-Definition TV ports, 98 highlighted words on Web page, clicking, 389 highlighting items character by character, 59 hijackers, 484 hoaxes, not forwarding, 370 home network, setting up, 403–461 choosing a network, 404 Network Setup Wizard, 419–425 networking hardware, 409–414 Ethernet cables, 413 network adapters, 412 routers, 409–412 networking two PCs, 448–458 Bluetooth, 452–458 Ethernet crossover cable, using, 448 FireWire cable, using, 449 Powerline adapters, using, 450 wireless, using, 450–452 securing the network, 425–435 sharing files, 439–447

PCs: The Missing Manual PCs: The Missing Manual, eMatter Edition Copyright © 2008 O’Reilly & Associates, Inc. All rights reserved.

Files and Settings Transfer Wizard, 441–444 mapping network drives, 446 sharing additional folders, 440 viewing, copying and moving files on other PCs, 440 Windows Briefcase, 444–446 sharing Internet connection, 435–436 sharing printers, 437–439 simple home network, 414–419 wired networks, 404–406 Ethernet, 404 Powerline (HomePlug), 405 wireless networks, 406–409 limitations of, 406–408 mixing with wired, 409 Home page, 388 Home, End, Page Up, or Page Down keys, 59 HomePlug standard, Powerline networks, 405 host address (Webcam Web site), 179 Hotmail, 351 setting up PC-based email programs to work with Plus Account, 352 hotspot detectors, 321 HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) format for email, 358, 359 Web pages, 375 Hybrid SACD (Super Audio CD), 304

I i.Link (see FireWire ports) IBM ThinkPads, Windows logo key and, 65 IBM/Hitachi Drive Fitness Test, 274 ICS (Internet Connection Sharing), 421, 435 ID3 tags, 250 ID3-TagIT, 251 IDE/ATA drives, 263 other names for, 264 IEEE 1394 (see FireWire ports) image file formats, 392 IMAP (Internet Mail Access Protocol) support by Web-based email services, 352 IMAP (Internet Message Access Protocol), 348, 349 Import/Export wizard, 380 Inbox folder, 365 Index Services, turning off, 258 infrared printers, installing, 123 ink cartridges (inkjets), high cost of, 115 inkjet printers, 113, 115 cleaning nozzles, 146 ink cartridges, 115 laser vs., 116

paper for, 126 photo, 116 photos printed by, longevity of, 135 printing CD labels, 133 printing digital photos, 138–141 choosing photo paper, 138 printer settings, 140 size and resolution of photos, 139 refilling ink cartridges, 145 replacing cartridges, 143 insertion point, 59 inside the PC finding out your PC’s power, 8 tasks requiring opening of PC, 7 installation CDs, avoiding use of, 503 installation software, scanners, 184 installing new devices, 503 connecting the part, 504 integrated audio, 200, 202 Intel CPUs, 16 AMD CPUs vs., 19 interactive CDs, 290 interfaces (hard drive), 263 interference in wireless networks, 408 internal CD drives, 307 internal DVD drives, 307 internal floppy drives, 279 internal hard drives, 254 identifying interfaces, 263 installing, 263, 268–271 Internet storage area for housing files, 179 Internet cafes, 318 Internet Connection Sharing (ICS), 421, 435 Internet Connection Wizard, 42 retrieving Web-based email in Outlook Express, 352 Internet connections, 317–341 Bluetooth cell phone, getting PC online with, 458 broadband (cable and DSL), 321–323 connecting from anywhere, 338 dial-up connection, 323 dialing into the Internet, 335–338 dial-up modems, using, 42 getting online without a PC, 318 network, 421 network, selecting connection method, 421 setting up, 330–335 ISP setup CD, 330 New Connection Wizard, 331–335 viewing or changing connections, 335 setting up a modem, 324–327 cable or DSL modem, 325–327 dial-up modem, 325

Index PCs: The Missing Manual, eMatter Edition Copyright © 2008 O’Reilly & Associates, Inc. All rights reserved.

Index

563

Index

Internet connections (continued) shared setting up in home network, 420 subscribing to an Internet service, 327–330 finding the best ISP, 329 regular ISP vs. online service, 328 troubleshooting, 339–341 busy signals, 340 stopping program or PC from connecting, 339 Web sites not answering, 340 ways to connect, 317–319 wireless, 319–321 Internet drive, mapping a folder on, 448 Internet etiquette, 398 Internet Explorer, 257, 376–380 Address bar, 389 advantages, 377 AutoComplete settings, 382 autofilling forms with AutoComplete, 384 backing up settings, 380 clearing history, 257 cookie management, 379 disadvantages, 377 disconnecting dial-up connection, 338 downloading Web files, 399 Favorites backing, 465 features, 377 Home page, changing, 388 Information bar, 389 Links bar, 389 Menu bar, 389 password assistance, 476 pop-up blocker, 387 printing frames, 142 printing Web pages, 391 saving photos from sites, 392 saving Web pages, 392 saving Web pages offline, 257 saving Web site parts for offline reading, 393–396 setting up, 379 standard buttons, 389 symptoms of malware infection, 485 toolbars, 389 turning off Web page backgrounds, 142 user names and passwords, managing, 385 Internet files (temporary), removing, 257 Iomega cartridges, backups on, 470 IP (Internet Protocol) addresses, 429 default, for popular router brands, 429

564

PCs: The Missing Manual

iPod, 215 AAC music file format, 225 accessories and software, 224 clearing the memory, 228 deleting items, 234 eBooks Creator, 238 evolution of, 227 iTunes and, 227–239 adding music to iTunes, 228–231 transferring contacts and calendar to iPod, 236 transferring data from PC to iPod, 234– 236 transferring notes, 238 transferring songs to iPod automatically, 231 transferring songs to iPod manually, 232–234 loading with songs, 224 media player, 224 Nano, 224 playing through your car stereo, 252 podcasts, 231 reformatting hard drive, 248 replacing iTunes with third-party programs, 238 saving music library from PC crashes, 251 sharing between two PCs, 248 Shuffle, 224 Updater software, 228 iron-on paper, printing, 133 ISA (Industry Standard Architecture) slots, 27 ISO files, 274 ISO image burning, 301 ISO Recorder, 301 ISP (Internet Service Provider), 319, 327–330 changing for better service, 341 entering name for New Connection Wizard, 333 finding the best, 329 Internet connection problems, 340 mail service support for POP3 or IMAP, 349 online service vs., 328 PPPoE (Point-to-Point Protocol over Ethernet), 418 setup CD, using, 330 spam filter for email, 373 iTunes, 224, 227–239 AAC file format, 225 adding music to, 228–231 buying music online, 229–231 importing PC’s existing music, 229

PCs: The Missing Manual, eMatter Edition Copyright © 2008 O’Reilly & Associates, Inc. All rights reserved.

burning music CDs, 296 converting MIDI to MP3, 215 podcasts, 231 replacing in iPod with third-party programs, 238 ripping CDs, 289 stopping iPod, 248 tags, problems with, 250 transferring contacts and calendar to iPod, 236 transferring songs to iPod automatically, 231 transferring songs to iPod manually, 232– 234

J jacks FireWire, sizes of, 41 musical instruments connected to PCs, 216 ports and, 96 for sound, 219 Jam Online, 217 Java, 383 Web content using, displaying in Firefox, 382 Java applets, 257 joysticks, 45 JPG (JPEG images), 193 JS Custom PCs, 49 jump drives, 255

K Kab Electro (record cleaners), 210 Kelly’s Korner, 535 Kensington Security Slot, 481 key loggers, 484 Keyboard Video Mouse (KVM) switch, 93, 448 keyboards, 57–71 cheap, 60 controlling Windows with mouse only, 74 controlling Windows without a mouse, 65– 67 Ctrl+Alt+Del keys, 65 cursor keys, 59 dedicated keys, 59 Dvorak and QWERTY layouts, 63 ergonomic, 60 Esc key, 64 four clusters of keys, 58 function keys, 58 installing, 69, 547 laptop, 60

multifunction, 62 numeric kepad, 59 PS/2 ports, 44 Scroll Lock key, 63 sensitivity, adjusting, 69 symbols, typing, 67 testing before buying, 62 testing by connecting to another PC, 536 troubleshooting, 70 dedicated keys, 71 typing area, 58 USB, 34 using in foreign countries, 68 Windows keys, 64 wireless or cordless, 61 keychain drives, 255 keychain drives, using as MP3 player, 225 killing frozen programs, 65 Knoppix, data grabs with, 538–542 Knowledge Base (see Microsoft Knowledge Base) Kodak EasyShare Gallery, 161 Kodak Picture Maker kiosks, 136 KVM (Keyboard Video Mouse) switch, 93, 448

Index

L labels, burning onto CDs, 299 LAN (Local Area Network), 415 Language Bar Dvorak keyboard and, 63 English layout, choosing, 68 laptops backing up, 467 batteries, replacing, 55 BIOS, 525 connecting to a PC already hooked up to a network, 449 Internet connections from anywhere, 338 keyboard, 60 memory upgrades, 22 mice, 74 opening up, 15 preventing theft of, 481 screen brightness, adjusting, 95 sound, 200 upgrading the hard drive, 266 wireless capability, 319 wireless networks within range, 416 laser printers, 113, 116 color, 117 inkjet vs., 116 LEDs instead of laser, 117

Index PCs: The Missing Manual, eMatter Edition Copyright © 2008 O’Reilly & Associates, Inc. All rights reserved.

565

Index

laser printers (continued) paper for, 126 repairing, online information about, 146 replacing toner cartridges, 144 lassoing scanned image, 192 last word, moving to, 59 LCD (Liquid Crystal Display) monitors, 84, 85–87 adjusting, 103 cleaning, 101 with DVI and VGA ports, 86 DVI (Digital Visual Interface) port, 85 installing, 88 problems with dead pixels, 86 upgrading with digital video card, 108 LEDs (Light-Emitting Diodes), 117 left-handed typists, numeric keypad plugin, 59 letter assigned to a drive, changing, 271–274 libraries, using for Internet connections, 318 licenses digital music, backing up, 464 licenses, Media Player files, 243 Light-Emitting Diodes (LEDs), 117 LightScribe, 299 LightScribe-compatible CDs, 286 LightSound, 210 Line In port, 204, 209 Line Out or Speaker port (on PCs), 98 links to Web files, 399 links, clicking on Web pages, 389 Linksys KVM switch, 94 WVC54g wireless Webcam, 178 Linux SysRq key, 63 Liquid Crystal Display (see LCD monitors) Local Disk (C:), 255 local printer, connecting to, 123 locking mechanism on scanners, 184 Login Recovery Web site, 503 Logitech QuickCam Express, 178 QuickCam Orbit, 179 lossless (music file formats), 213 lossy (music file formats), 213 LP Ripper, 211 LPT1 port, 124

M Macromedia Flash Player, 383 Magic Sound Restoration, 210 MAGIX Audio Cleaning Lab, 211

566

mail sites Web, English language, 68 Mailbox unavailable (email), 373 mailing labels printing for envelopes, 132 malware, 482–490 removal of, 486 symptoms produced on your PC, 485 types of, 484 manual synchronization, Media Player, 244– 246 manuals for laptops, 15 manufacturer and model number of hard drive, 264 manufacturer’s Web site, finding drivers on, 513 mapped network drives, 446 Internet drive, 448 master volume control, 221 matte paper, 128 Maxtor/Quantum’s PowerMax, 274 MB (megabytes), 8 megabits (Mbps) vs., 407 Mbps (megabits per second) megabytes (MB) vs., 407 McAfee, 486 virus removal tools (Stinger), 487 Mean Time Between Failures (MTBF), for power supplies, 50 mechanical mice, 72 Media Player (see Windows Media Player) media players, 224 competing to play music CDs, 285 switching to program of your choice, 378 MediaMonkey, 251 megabytes (MB), 8 megahertz (see MHz) megapixel rating (digital cameras), 163 memory adding or replacing, 21–25 leftover memory, 23 troubleshooting problems, 24–25 flash drives, 255 flash memory, use by music players, 224 hard drives vs., 18–19 inspection by BIOS, 524 not enough for scanned images, 197 RAM (Random Access Memory), 8 slots for plugging into motherboard, 11 memory chip contacts, cleaning, 25 memory testing programs, 24 menus accessing window menus, 66 closing with Esc key, 64 digital camera, returning to default settings, 163

PCs: The Missing Manual PCs: The Missing Manual, eMatter Edition Copyright © 2008 O’Reilly & Associates, Inc. All rights reserved.

MHz (megahertz), 8, 16 mice, 71–80 adjusting, 77 buttons, 77 ClickLock, 78 double-click speed, 78 pointer, 78 controlling Windows without, 65–67 controlling Windows without a keyboard, 74 Hardware tab, 80 installing, 547 installing USB or PS/2 mouse, 75 KVM (Keyboard Video Mouse) switch, 93 laptops, 74 mechanical, 72 mouse for people with hand tremors, 75 optical, 73 Pointer Options tab, 79 programmable, 73 PS/2 ports, 44 testing by connecting to another PC, 536 trackball, 73 troubleshooting, 76 cleaning mouse ball, 76 cleaning optical sensor, 76 plugging in all the way, 76 using two monitors on one PC, 91 Wheel tab, 79 wireless or cordless, 73 microphone port, 203 microphones, 204–206 headset microphones, 205 musician-level, 216 plugged into USB port, 205 plugging in, 44 uses of, 204 Microsoft Accessibility Web site, 63 antitrust settlement with Department of Justice, 378 Backup, 466–473 On-Screen Toolbar, 68 Outlook (see Outlook) Security Essentials site, 480 Timershot software, 179 Microsoft Excel Scroll Lock key, using, 63 Microsoft Knowledge Base, 536–538 Article number, 535 keywords, 538 Microsoft Word built-in envelope printer, 132 Print window, Zoom area, 130

printing labels and cards with Avery Wizard, 134 reformatting Web pages in, 142 MIDI, 45, 217 MIDI files, 215 Web sites for sharing, 217 milliseconds, 265 MIMO (Multiple-Input Multiple-Output) wireless gear, 408 Mini-Series A/B (USB ports and plugs), 37 minutes/capacity of CDs, 286 mirror image of your hard drive, sending to an external hard drive, 466 Missing Manuals Web site, 5, 130 mixer settings, 219–221 mnemonic phrases, using for passwords, 476 modems, 42 dial-up, connection to serial port, 46 drivers, 504 hooking up, 547 redialing on busy signal, 340 setting up, 324–327 cable or DSL modem, 325–327 dial-up modem, 325 verifying connection, 340 modules (memory), 20 Molex connectors, 52 monitors, 8, 83–111 adjusting CRT monitors, 103 adjusting LCD monitors, 103 analog and digital, 34, 87 cleaning, 101 contrast ratio, 84 CRT (Cathode Ray Tube), 87 disposal or recycling options for CRT monitors, 89 exiting programs when monitor dies, 67 installing, 88 laptop, adjusting screen birghtness, 95 LCD (Liquid Crystal Display), 85–87 making letter size legible, 107 pixels, 84 plugging two into one PC, 89–93 activating second monitor, 91 checking PC support for two monitors, 89 identifying, positioning, and assigning monitors, 91–93 installing second monitor, 90 plugging two PCs into one monitor, 93 positioning, 545 problems with, revealed at startup, 523 refresh rate, 84 resolution, 84 response time, 84

Index

Index

567

PCs: The Missing Manual, eMatter Edition Copyright © 2008 O’Reilly & Associates, Inc. All rights reserved.

Index

monitors (continued) screen size, 84 sharing, 447 testing by connecting to another PC, 536 troubleshooting, 100–104 no picture, 102 troubleshooting problems, 110 using TV sets as, 94 video cards, 104 viewing angle for LCD monitors, 85 motherboards, 11, 16 ATX size, 50 batteries, replacing, 54 built-in ports, 34 built-in video chips, 104 disabling onboard circuits, 530 identifying, 18 integrated audio, 200 manual for, 542 memory capacity, 25 ports built into, 32 slots, 27 video cards incompatible with, 110 motion-sensing PC Card, 481 mouse pads, 72 Movie Maker, 167–176 AutoMovie feature, 176 Capture Video, 168 automatic or manual capturing, 170 creating video clips, 170 video settings, 170 copying video from camcorder into a PC, 168 creating a slideshow, 171 editing with, 171–175 opening titles and credits, 174 saving your movie, 175 soundtrack, adding, 174 transitions between clips, 174 setting PC video capture to record live video stream, 167 troubleshooting, 175 movies codecs for, 314 digitizing, 180 DVD movies, playing, 301 Moving Picture Experts Group Audio Stream, Layer III (see MP3 files) moving windows, 67 Mozilla plug-ins for Web browsers, 383 Mozilla Foundation, 346 MP3 files, 212 codecs for, 314 converting MIDI to, 215

568

PCs: The Missing Manual

loss of quality, 296 played on USB plug-in keychain drives, 225 playing from CDs, 294 ripping CDs with Media Player 19, 287–289 tags, problems with, 250 MP3 players, 250 Mp3 Tag Tools, 251 MP3 tag utilities, 251 MPEG decoder card, 25 MPEG-2 codec, 302 MSN, 328, 391 MSN Groups, publishing photos to, 152 MTBF (Mean Time Between Failures), for power supplies, 50 multifunction keyboards, 62 multifunction printers (see all-in-one printers) multimedia keyboard, 61 multisession recording, CD-burning drives, 294 music adding to iTunes library, 228–231 buying music online, 229–231 importing PC’s existing music, 229 adding to Media Player, 240–243 backing up, 464 PC music for musicians, 215–218 MIDI, 217 sound cards, 216 music CDs, 281, 290, 292 AutoPlay and, 282 burning, 294–297 with iTunes, 296 with Media Player, 294–296 media players completing to play, 285 music files burning WAV files to a CD or converting to MP3, 212 choosing formats, 213–215 AAC files, 215 MIDI files, 215 MP3 files, 214 WAV files, 213 WMA files, 214 converting records to WAV files, 211 creating soundtrack in Movie Maker, 174 formats iTunes, file-ripping, 229 not working with music player, 249 formats, music players and, 225 importing into Movie Maker, 168, 171 music players plugging in, 44 music players (see digital music players) music stores, online, 224, 225

PCs: The Missing Manual, eMatter Edition Copyright © 2008 O’Reilly & Associates, Inc. All rights reserved.

iTunes Music Store, 228, 229 subscribing to podcasts, 231 Windows Media Player, 242 Musical Instrument Digital Interface (see MIDI; MIDI files) My Pictures folder, ordering professional photo prints from, 137

N narration, adding to Movie Maker slideshow, 171 NAT (Network Address Translation), 490 Natural Keyboard, 60 needles for record players, 210 Nero Burning ROM, 299 Netgear’s XE 102 Powerline adapters, 434 netiquette, 398 Netscape browser, 384 network adapters, 409, 412 built-in wired network adapter, 412 installing, 415 PC Card, 413 USB plug-in, 413 Network Address Translation (NAT), 490 network cables, 413 connecting PCs to your router, 415 hiding, 414 locking in place, 415 Network Connection Wizard, 42 launching on a PC, 420 preliminary steps before using, 421 selecting connection method, 421 Network Connections “Set up a home or small office network”, 420 dial-up Internet connection, 336 disconnecting dial-up Internet connection, 338 viewing or changing Internet connections, 335 network drives, 255 backing up to, 470 unused, eliminating, 519 Network Interface Card (NIC) (see network adapters) network Internet connections, 338 network ports, 34, 42, 547 network printer, connecting to, 124 network settings, putting in Taskbar, 425 Network Setup Disk, 424 Network Setup Wizard, 412, 419–425 creating Network Setup Disk for PCs running older Windows versions, 424 file and printer sharing, 423

finishing and starting over on next PC, 423 Internet Connection Sharing (ICS), 436 loading onto PCs with older Windows versions, 424 naming and describing PCs, 422 naming your network, 422 printer sharing, 437 reviewing and applying network settings, 423 running on each PC in new home network, 418 network Webcams, 177 Axis Communications, 178 networked drives changing drive letters, 274 networking dial-up connections and, 412 home network, setting up, 403–461 choosing a network, 404 Network Setup Wizard, 419–425 networking hardware, 409–414 networking two PCs, 448–458 securing the network, 425–435 sharing files, 439–447 sharing Internet connection, 435–436 sharing printers, 437–439 simple home network, 414–419 wired networks, 404–406 wireless networks, 406–409 troubleshooting problems, 458–461 general network problems, 458 wireless network problems, 459–461 networks bridging, 449 drive letter changes and, 272 Internet connections through, 319 speeds of different types, 407 New Connection Wizard broadband connections, 327 setting up Internet connection, 331–335 New Partition Wizard, 271 New Technology File System (see NTFS filesystem) news aggregator, 401 news feeds, 401 noisy PCs, quieting, 49 Nokia Test program, 103 Norton Ghost, 466 Norton’s Internet Security, 373 nozzles, cleaning on inkjet printers, 146 NTFS filesystem, 175 converting from FAT32 to, 275 numeric keypad, 58, 59 laptop keyboards, 60 option in BIOS, 531

Index PCs: The Missing Manual, eMatter Edition Copyright © 2008 O’Reilly & Associates, Inc. All rights reserved.

Index

569

Index

NumLock key, 59 laptop keyboard, 60 using with Alt key symbol codes, 67 Nvidia, 513 NVidia DVD Decoder, 302

O OCR (Optical Character Recognition), 188 office printouts, paper for, 128 Offline Favorite wizard, 394–396 Ofoto (photo-sharing site) (see Kodak, EasyShare Gallery) onboard video, 105 “one-touch” scanning, 197 onestop.mid file, 209 online manuals for laptops, 15 online music stores (see music stores, online) online service providers, 328 online wattage calculators, 49 On-Screen keyboard, 74 On-Screen Toolbar, 68 open source programs, 346 Firefox, 382 opening titles and credits, adding with Movie Maker, 174 Opera browser, 384 operating systems, 9 detection by BIOS, 524 distribution on bootable CDs, 301 Optical Character Recognition (OCR), 188 optical mice, 73 cleaning optical sensor, 76 OR in Google searches, 391 Orange Book (CD-R and CD-RW) standard, 290 Outbox folder, 365 outdoor Ethernet cable, 413 Outlook backing up, 465 Outlook 2003 or later, transferring contacts and calendar to iPod, 236 Outlook Express accessing Web-based email, 352 advantages of, 345 attaching files to email, 360 backing up, 466 blocking offensive senders, 374 composing and sending email, 355–360 addressing the message, 356 automatic signature, 359 CC: and BCC: fields, 356 choosing format, 358–360 sending the message, 360 Subject: field, 358

570

typing the message, 360 disadvantages of, 345 exporting Address Book to a different program, 371 managing Address Book, 368–370 reading and processing email, 362–368 deleting email, 363 forwarding email, 364 opening and saving attachments, 367 previewing a message, 362 printing email, 367 replying to email, 364 sorting and filing email, 365–367 viewing a message in its own window, 363 viewing images in messages, 363 sending copies of email from Web-based email sites, 348 setting up, 352–355 disabling automatic checking for email, 355 spell checking email, 361 transferring contacts to iPod, 236 overheating problems, 15

P Page Description Language (PDL) Page Up and Page Down keys, 59 paging file, 19 paired Bluetooth devices, 456 paper jams in printers, 142 paper, choosing for printers, 126–129 paper listing on printer Preferences menu, 128 photo paper for inkjet printers, 138 size and weight limitations, 127 parallel ports, 34, 46 parallel printers installing, 123 partitioning hard drive with Windows XP, 270 passphrase, 431 Password Agent, 384 Password Crackers, 530 password for Internet connections, 328, 334 password for your Web site, 180 password management programs, 477 password managers, 384 Password Recovery Disk, floppy disk as, 277 Password Reset Disk creating, 501 Password Safe, 477 password-protected wireless networks, 417, 419

PCs: The Missing Manual PCs: The Missing Manual, eMatter Edition Copyright © 2008 O’Reilly & Associates, Inc. All rights reserved.

passwords BIOS, 524 changing, 528–530 creating, 475–478 guidelines for good passwords, 476 managing for Web surfing, 384–387 Firefox browser, 385–387 managing with Internet Explorer, 385 PCs with wireless adapters, 426 Powerline networks, 432–435 resetting for Windows XP, 501–503 routers, 418 default, for popular brands, 429 turning on password protection, 429 wireless connection and Powerline adapter connection, 425 wireless network, entering into all wirelessly connected PCs, 431 wireless networks, 427 wireless routers, 426 paste command, 63 pasting Character Map symbols into documents, 67 Pause/Break key, 64 PC buying guide, 3 PC Card network adapters, 413 PC Magazine, 308 PC Power and Cooling, 49 PC World, 308 PCI (Peripheral Component Interconnect) Ethernet Fast card (see network adapters) PCI (Peripheral Component Interconnect) slots, 27 PCIe (Peripheral Connect Interface Express), 109 PCI-Express slots, 27, 108 PCL (Printer Command Language), 114 PCs cases, 10 choosing, 16 closing after part installation, 15 internal parts, 11 opening, 12–15 overheating, troubleshooting, 15 connecting to a home stereo, 212 serial numbers, getting specifications from, 9 setting up, 543–549 activating your PC and Windows Update, 548 choosing location for the PC, 544 plugging in accessories, 545–548 removing from box, 543

transferring files and settings from old PC, 544 system requirements, displayed by Windows XP, 9 tasks requiring opening of, 7 PC-To-TV converter, 97 PDF files, 15 PDL (Page Description Language), 114 Pentium 4 CPU (Intel), 16 phishing, 481 Phoenix Technologies, 523 phone jack (on PCs), 42 confusing with Ethernet port, 43 phone number for Internet connections entering in New Connection Wizard, 333 phone number from ISPs for Internet connection, 328 photo developers online, sending photos to, 152 photo copyrights and, 138 printing photos directly to their Web sites, 137 Web sites, 138 photo management tools, Picasa, 157 photo printers, 116 paper for, 127 photo printing all-in-one printers, 118 on inkjet printers, 138–141 choosing photo paper, 138 photo size and resolution, 139 printer settings, 140 panoramic mode pictures, 129 printing digital photos professionally, 135– 138 Kodak and Sony, in-store kiosks, 135 photo-printing Web sites, 136 photos backing up, 464 digitizing old photos with scanners, 194 displaying on music players, 224 editing on the PC, 153, 157 emailing, 361 importing into Movie Maker, 168, 171 posting on a sharing site, 160–162 printing, 128 publishing to a Web site, 152 rotating, 155 saving from Web sites, 392 sending through email, 158 showing VCD slideshows on TV, 298 stored on CDs, 290 viewing on the PC, 155 photo-sharing sites, 152

Index

Index

571

PCs: The Missing Manual, eMatter Edition Copyright © 2008 O’Reilly & Associates, Inc. All rights reserved.

Index

Photoshop Elements, 154, 158 physical size (power supply), 49 piano rolls MIDI and, 217 scanned and saved as MIDI files, 218 Picasa 2, 154, 157 cropping photos, 159 Picture and Fax viewer (Windows XP), 155 picture type, choosing for scanning, 191 PictureStation kiosks (Sony), 136 pixels, 84, 85 dead pixels on LCD monitors, 86 megapixel ratings for digital cameras, 163 Plain Text format for email, 358 Planet Security Firewall-Check, 494 plastic cable ties or tubes, 61 plastic-based fibers, printing on, 129 player software for DVDs, 302 playlists drive letter and, 271 iTunes, 233 Media Player, 243 creating new, 244, 245 PlaysForSure, 214 Plug ‘n’ Play (Universal), 461 Plug and Play technology, 33 USB devices, 36 plug-in box, sound circuitry, 201, 203 advantages of, 204 plug-ins for Web browsers, 383 plugs (USB) problems with, 36 sizes, 37 PNG images, 193 podcasts, 231 pointers changing appearance of, 78 controlling motion of, 79 POP3 (Post Office Protocol, version 3), 348, 349 support by Web-based email services, 352 pop-up blocking, Web browsers, 376 Firefox, 382 Internet Explorer, 377, 387 Portable Network Graphics (PNG), 193 ports, 10, 32–47 adding with expansion cards, 25 Audio In, 209 audio-related, 203 built into the motherboard, 32, 34, 201 on cards, 33 connection ports between PC and TV, 97 on digital cameras, 148 DVI (Digital Visual Interface), 85, 88 Ethernet, 42

572

PCs: The Missing Manual

FireWire, 40–42 jacks and, 96 joystick/game controller/MIDI port, 45 parallel port, 46 printers, 124 PS/2, 44 RCA port, 96 routers, 411 serial port, 46 shared by PC and TV, 95 sound, 44 sound cards, finding correct port, 218 S-Video, 96 USB, 34–39 VGA or DVI port for monitors, 90 video, 34 positioning hands on the keyboard, 58 POST (Power-On Self Test), 522–525 postcards, printing from your photos, 161 PostScript (language for printers), 114 posture while working on your PC, 545 POTS (Plain Old Telephone Service), 323 power for USB devices, 38 power scheme adjustments for monitors, 95 power strip, 546 power supplies, 47–54 failure of the fan, 48 finding correct wattage for replacement, 49 problems with, revealed at startup, 523 removing, avoiding electric shock, 48 replacing, 48 higher quality replacement, 50 installing new power supply, 52 removing old power supply, 51–52 size that fits PC case, 50 testing whether it’s really dead, 48 voltage and MTBF, 50 power supply, 11 PowerDVD, 302 powered USB hubs, 38 Powerline (HomePlug), 405 Powerline adapters, 405, 419 connecting PCs to your router, 415 connecting two PCs, 450 security, activating, 432–435 PPPoE (Point-to-Point Protocol over Ethernet), 418 preamp, 210, 211 amplifying microphones in music recordings, 216 inside your stereo, using, 212 preformatted floppies, 278 Pre-N wireless gear, 408 Preview area (Movie Maker), 172 primary monitor, 91

PCs: The Missing Manual, eMatter Edition Copyright © 2008 O’Reilly & Associates, Inc. All rights reserved.

Primera printers, 133 “Print this site” link, 391 print command, 63 Print command (File menus), 129 Printer Troubleshooter program, 125 printers, 113–146 adjusting settings, 129–131 copies, number of, 130 page range, 130 preferences or properties, 130 printing on both sides of paper, 131 selecting printer, 129 all-in-one, 117 bitmapped images, 114 choosing paper, 126–129 inkjet, 115 installing, 119–126 Add Printer Wizard, 123–125 default printer preferences, 126 parallel, serial, and infrared, 123 laser, 116 networked, 418 older technologies, 118 parallel port, 46 PCL (Printer Command Language), 114 PDL (Page Description Language), 114 plugging in, 548 PostScript language, 114 printing digital photos professionally, 135– 138 Kodak and Sony, in-store kiosks, 135 photo-printing Web sites, 136 printing envelopes, 131 printing on both sides of the paper, 131 printing specialized items, 132–135 printing Web pages, 141 sharing on a network, 423, 437–439 restrictions, working around, 439 testing by connecting to another PC, 536 troubleshooting, 142–146 cleaning inkjet nozzles, 146 cleaning printers, 146 paper jams, 142 replacing inkjet cartridges, 143 replacing laser printer toner cartridges, 144 types of, 113 vector graphic images, 114 printing Web sites, 391 prints of digital photos, 161 processors (see CPUs) Profiles (game settings), 81 program settings and data, backing up, 466 programmable mice, 73

programs backing up downloaded programs, 465 drive letter changes and, 271 frozen, killing, 65 hard disk space required by, 256 launching from keyboard, 66 malicious (malware), 482–490 reverting to older version, 535 setting program access and defaults, 378 temporary files, 258 uninstalling, 519 Project Gutenberg, 238 projecting old films, 180 projectors, digital, 93 Properties page, wireless network, 431 PrtScr key, 62 PS/2 keyboards, installing, 69 PS/2 mouse, installing, 75 PS/2 ports, 34 Purple Book (DDCD) standard, 290

Index

Q Qoop, 161 quality settings, digital camera photos, 162 quality settings, video in Movie Maker, 170 QuickCam Express, 178 QuickCam Orbit, 179 QuickTime, 383 Web content using, displaying in Firefox, 382 quieting noisy PCs, 49 quieting PCs by replacing fans, 49 quitting frozen programs, 497 quotation marks around Google search strings, 390 QWERTY keyboards, 63

R RAM (Random Access Memory), 8 adding or replacing, 21–25 hard drives vs., 18–19 RamElectronics, converters between PC ports and HDTV ports, 98 range of wireless signals, 321, 406, 408 raster images (bitmap), 114 RCA ports, 96 camcorder connections to TV, 166 on televisions, 97 TV audio in, 98 RCA-jack-to-1/8-inch-stereo port cable adapter, 210 Reader program (Adobe), 15

Index PCs: The Missing Manual, eMatter Edition Copyright © 2008 O’Reilly & Associates, Inc. All rights reserved.

573

Index

574

reading and writing speed CD drives, 8 DVD drives, 9 Real Media player Web content using, displaying in Firefox, 382 Real Simple Syndication (see RSS) RealNetworks RealPlayer, 383 record players, connecting to PCs, 210 recording CDs, speed of, 8 recording music, sound cards specialized for, 215 RecordNow, 299 records, copying to CDs and MP3s, 209–212 recovery CDs, 538 Recovery Console, 496 Recycle Bin files dumped from, retrieving, 496 lowering size of, 258 retrieving deleted files form, 495 recycling information for electronic equipment, 89 Red Book (CD Digital Audio) standard, 290 red-eye, removing Picasa 2 photo editor, 157 reducing space for temporary Internet files, 257 refresh rate (monitors), 84 region codes (DVD), 313 removal tools for viruses, 487 Repeat Delay option (keyboard), 70 Repeat Rate option (keyboard), 70 residential gateway (see routers) resizing photos for emailing, 157, 158 resolution, 84, 85 digital monitors, legibility and, 107 digital photos, 139 monitors and printers, 139 scanners, 185 list of options, 191 problems with, 197 setting, 190 response time (LCD monitors), 84 restarting the computer from keyboard only, 67 Restoration program, 278, 496 Restore Points, 259, 498 creating, 499, 500 creating before installing new devices, 504 deleting to prevent infection by virus, 501 restoring photos, 194 restoring your computer to an earlier time, 497–501 RF port (on televisions), 97 Rich Site Summary (see RSS)

right-clicking from the keyboard, 67 Rio MP3 players, 250 ripping CDs, 286–289 with iTunes, 289 with Windows Media Player, 286–289 avoding quality degradation, 287–289 disabling copy protection, 287 ripping DVDs, 305 Ritz/Wolf Camera & Image, 138 RJ-45 connectors, 413 Roll Scanning Web site, 218 rollers, cleaning on printers, 143 rotating photos, 155 routers, 409–412 acting as firewall, 490 blinking lights, 414 connecting broadband modem to, 415 connecting PCs to, 415 connection system for PC network adapters, 409 installing wireless router, 415 Internet connection through, 421 main settings page for wireless router, 429 password for, 418 password for wireless router, 426 renaming wireless network and adding password using setup menu, 428– 431 SSID, user name, password, and Web address for popular brands, 429 support for Wireless Network Setup Wizard, 426 switches vs., 412 UPnP (Universal Plug ‘n’ Play), 461 rows of pins on sound card, 205 Roxio’s RecordNow, 287 RSS (Real Simple Syndication) reader in Thunderbird, 347 support by Firefox, 382 RSS (Really Simple Syndication) viewing feeds, 401 RSS reader, 401

S S.M.A.R.T. (Self-Monitoring, Analysis, and Reporting Technology), 275 SACD (Super Audio CD) Hybrid SACD DVDs, 304 Safe Mode (Windows XP), 489, 502 Saitek P880 (game controller), 80 Sam’s Laser FAQ, 146 Sandra (diagnostic tool), 12 video slots, identifying, 108

PCs: The Missing Manual PCs: The Missing Manual, eMatter Edition Copyright © 2008 O’Reilly & Associates, Inc. All rights reserved.

S-ATA drives, 263 satellite Internet connections, 323 satellite speakers, 207 Scanner and Camera Wizard, 149–152, 186, 188 custom option for scanning, 189 file format matching scan contents, choosing, 192 naming scan and storing it, 193 picture type you’re scanning, 191 previewing and lassoing your image, 192 resolution setting for scan, 190 starting, 189 when it doesn’t appear, 150 scanners, 183–197 in all-in-on printers, 117 cleaning glass bed, 188 digitizing old photos and slides, 194 installing, 184–186 OCR (Optical Character Recognition), 188 parallel port, 46 Scanner and Camera Wizard, 188 scanning money, 194 terminology, 185 troubleshooting, 195 cleaning the glass, 195 commom scanning issues, 197 types of, 183 ways to scan an image, 186–188 built-in software, 188 Scanner and Camera Wizard, 186 TWAIN, 186 scanning area, 185 Scarlet Book (SACD) standard, 290 screen size, 84 screen, picture of current, 62 screws, PC cases, 14 Scroll Lock key, 63 scroll wheel, 73, 79 Seagate’s SeaTools Diagnostic Suite, 274 search engines, 391 (see also Google) searches, Firefox browser, 381 security, 463–494 adware, spyware, and other malicious programs, 482–490 backing up your computer, 463 individual items, 464–466 Microsoft Backup, using, 466–473 Bluetooth and, 454 email attachments in Outlook Express, 368 external hard drives, using, 267 Firefox browser, 381 firewalls, 490–494 hardware firewalls, 490

software firewalls, 491 testing your firewall, 494 Windows Firewall, 491–494 Internet Explorer, 377 open source email (Thunderbird), 347 passwords, creating, 475–478 phishing, 481 Powerline network, 432–435 prevent theft of computers and equipment, 481 routers and, 411 vulnerabilities of Outlook Express, 345 Web browsers, 376 Web-based email, 350 Windows Update, 478–479 Windows XP Service Packs, 480 wireless networks, 408, 418, 425–432 encryption password for PCs with wireless adapters, 426 naming network and adding password, 427 naming the network, 426 router password, 426 Security Center, alerts about unknown anitvirus programs, 487 Security Essential site (Microsoft), 480 Security Set Identifier (see SSID) Self-Monitoring, Analysis, and Reporting Technology (S.M.A.R.T.), 275 Sempron CPU (AMD), 16 sensitivity, adjusting for keyboards, 69 Sent Items folder, 365 Separated Video (S-Video), 96 serial numbers for computers, 9 serial ports, 34, 46 digital cameras connected through, 148 serial printers COM1 port, 124 installing, 123 Series A USB ports and plugs, 37 Series B USB ports and plugs, 37 Service Pack 1, 480 Service Pack 2, 480 Bluetooth support, 453 Internet Explorer pop-up blocker, 387 Movie Maker upgrade, 167 nullifying threats to Outlook Express, 345 security features for Internet Explorer, 377 Wireless Network Setup Wizard, 427 Service Packs, 9 session cookies, 379 “Set up a home or small office network”, 420 “Set up home or small office networking”, 424

Index

Index

575

PCs: The Missing Manual, eMatter Edition Copyright © 2008 O’Reilly & Associates, Inc. All rights reserved.

Index

Set Program Access and Defaults, 378 setting up a PC, 543–549 activating PC and Windows Update, 548 choosing location for the PC, 544 plugging in accessories, 545–548 removing from box, 543 transferring files and settings from old PC, 544 Setup Log Files, removing, 258 Setup or Installation CDs, 504 Shared Documents folder, 418, 439 shared Internet connections, 318, 338, 421 Shared Music folder, 439 Shared Photos folder, 439 sharing an Internet connection, 435–436 sharing files, 439–447 additional folders, 440 Files and Settings Transfer Wizard, 441–444 mapping network drives, 446 viewing, copying, and moving files on other PCs, 440 Windows Briefcase, 444–446 sharing monitors, 447 sharing printers, 437–439 sheet-fed scanners, 184 ShieldsUP, 494 shortcuts Windows logo key, 64 signal splitter, 100 signal strength, wireless networks, 417, 460 signals (wireless), picking up, 321 signature for email (Outlook Express), 359 signing up for new Internet connection, 319 silent booting, disabling in BIOS, 528 SiSoftware’s Sandra, 12 size changing for windows, 67 choosing for printed digital photos, 140 storage capacity of hard drive, 8 slides, film, and other oddly shaped items, scanning, 185 slideshows creating in Movie Maker, 171 using Windows Picture and Fax Viewer, 156 slots bad memory slots, 24 identifying for cards, 27 inspection by BIOS, 524 reseating memory modules in, 25 video card, identifying, 108 video cards, 28 slow PC, speeding up, 518 sluggishness of PC operation caused by malware, 485

576

PCs: The Missing Manual

SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol), 348, 349 Snap to option (pointer), 79 Snapfish (photo developer), 138 Snopes, 371 software bundled with musician-level sound cards, 217 system requirements, 8 version numbers, 9 software firewalls, 491 Sony PictureStation kiosks, 136 sound, 44 music file formats, choosing, 213–215 AAC files, 215 MIDI files, 215 MP3 files, 214 WAV files, 213 WMA files, 214 PC music for musicians, 215–218 MIDI, 217 sound cards, 216 playing PC audion through TV speakers, 98 sending into and out of a PC, 203–212 Audio In port, 209 copying records to CDs and MP3s, 209– 212 microphones, 204–206 speakers, 206–208 synthesizers, 208 troubleshooting, 218–221 drivers, 221 mixer settings, 219–221 ports, 218 volume levels, 221 sound adapters, 199–203 external, 204 integrated audio, 202 plug-in box, 203 sound cards, 202 types of, 200 sound cards, 199, 200 advantages of, 202 connecting PCs with a stereo, 212 converters, 209 digital and analog ports, 209 laptop, 200 musician-level, 215 (see also sound adapters) sound connectors, other, 205 sound files, importing into Movie Maker, 168

PCs: The Missing Manual, eMatter Edition Copyright © 2008 O’Reilly & Associates, Inc. All rights reserved.

sound ports analog and digital camcorders, connecting, 167 connecting PC to analog camcorder, 166 finding on digital camcorder, 166 sound, but no video (at startup), 523 soundtrack, adding with Movie Maker, 174 spam sent with zombie PCs, 485 spam, stopping, 373 spammers, targeting Outlook Express, 345 Speaker port (on PCs), 98 speakers, 206–208 common configurations, 208 plugging in, 44, 200, 548 subwoofer, 207 testing setup, 219 volume control, 221 speakers port, 204 specialty paper, 129 speed controlling for mouse pointers, 79 of CPUs, 8, 16 hard drives, 265 networks of different types, 407 video cards, comptibility with slot speed, 108 wireless networks, 408 speeding up slow PC, 518 SPI (Stateful Packet Inspection), 490 spilled beverages (on keyboards), 71 Spybot-S&D, 489 spyware, 484 causing pop-ups even with pop-up blocking, 387 causing slow PCs, 518 Internet Explorer add-on for, 377 removal of, 486 removing, 487 symptoms of PC infected with, 485 targeting Internet Explorer, 377 targeting Outlook Express, 345 thwarted by Firefox, 381 spyware scanning programs, 486 SSID (Security Set Identifier), 417, 427 changing on wireless router setup page, 429 default, for popular router brands, 429 entering into all wirelessly connected PCs on the network, 431 standard “letter-sized” #10 envelopes, 132 standard 104-key keyboards, 58 Start menu calling up with Windows logo key, 64 controlling programs that appear on, 378

Stateful Packet Inspection (SPI), 490 steering wheels, 45 stereo connecting PC to a home stereo, 212 stereo jacks, 44 stereo-to-PC adapters, 211 Steve’s Digital Camera Site, 163 stick-on labels, printing, 132 Stinger (virus removal program), 487 Storyboard (Movie Maker), 171 dragging clips onto in movie order, 172 straightening slanted horizons with Picasa 2, 157 subwoofer, 207 speaker configurations with, 208 sunlight, fading photos, 141 Super Audio CD (SACD) Hybrid SACD DVDs, 304 Super Audio CDs, 290 Super VGA monitors and video adapters, 8 surround sound, 207, 208 SVCD (Super VCD) format, 298 S-Video ports, 96 camcorder connections to TV, 166 on televisions, 97 S-Video/RCA converter, 97 swap file, 19 switches, network, 412, 436 Sygate Online Scan, 494 Symantec, 486 removal tools for viruses, 487 symbols, 67 Sync Lists (Media Player), editing, 244–246 synchronization partnership, Media Player, 244 synchronization, Media Player automatic, 243 fine-tuning settings, 247 manual, 244–246 synthesizers, 208 built-in, finding on your PC, 209 joystick/game controller/MIDI port, 45 MIDI files, 215 playing MIDI files on, 217 SysRq key, 63 System Devices, 18 System Information window, 12 System Properties, 64 system requirements, 8 locating for your PC, 9 System Restore, 259, 497–501 performing, 498 Restore Points, creating, 500 viruses and, 501

Index PCs: The Missing Manual, eMatter Edition Copyright © 2008 O’Reilly & Associates, Inc. All rights reserved.

Index

577

Index

T Tab key moving from one window to another, 66 tabbed browsing (Firefox), 380 TAD (Telephone Answering Device) port, 205 Tag&Rename, 251 Tagged Image File Format (TIF), 193 tags in song files, 241 MP3 tag utilities, 251 preventing Media Player from accessing, 242 problems with, 250 tape backup drives, 470 Task Manager, 65 ending frozen programs, 497 Taskbar, network settings in, 425 telecine, 180 Telephone Answering Device (TAD) port, 205 telephone wires, DSL Internet connections through, 322 television connection ports between PC and, 97 displaying PC video signal on, 95–98 media player slideshows on, 224 playing PC audio, 98 showing digital photos, 298 showing videos, 298 using as monitors, 94 Video In ports, 97 watching on a PC, 99–100 television signal, splitting, 100 temporary files, removing, 258 temporary Internet files, removing, 257 test page for printers, 125 Test Screens program, 103 Text File (*.txt), 393 text files, displaying in iPod, 238 text scans, 191 text snippets from Web page, saving, 392 theft prevention, 481 thermal printers, 119 “thinking” speed of CPUs, 16 Third Generation cell phone provider, Internet connection through, 338 Third-Party cookies, blocking, 379 thumb drives, 255 thumbnails, 155 viewing in linear timeline with Picasa 2, 157 thumbscrews, 14 Thunderbird, 346–348 advantages, 347 disadvantages, 348

578

TIF images, 193 timeline of thumbnails, 157 Timeline view, showing clip length, 173 Timershot software, 179 TinCam (Webcam software), 179 titles and credits, adding with Movie Maker, 174 T-Mobile service, 321 To: line (email), 356 Tom’s Hardware Guide, 308 toner (laser printers), 117 toner cartridges, laser printers replacing, 144 toolbar problems caused by malware, 485 Touchpad, 74 trackball mice, 73 tracking a stolen PC, 481 Trackpoint, 74 trademark symbol, 67 Transfer Mills, 180 transferring files and settings from one PC to another, 441–444 transitions adding between clips in Movie Maker, 174 between photos in Movie Maker slideshow, 171 between video clips flip and slide, 176 transparencies, printing, 133 Treasury Department rules for legally reproducing currency, 194 Trend Micro, 486 Trend Micro’s PC-cillin Internet Security, 373 Trojan horse, 484 troubleshooters, Windows, 520 troubleshooting advanced, 521–542 data grabs with Knoppix, 538–542 editing BIOS settings, 525–532 Microsoft Knowledge Base, 536–538 replacing firmware, 533 reverting to older version of a program, 535 searching for clues with Google, 534 swapping parts, 536 watching your PC start, 522–525 card problems, 30 CD and DVD drives, 312–315 digital cameras, 162 digital music players, 247–252 driver problems, 503–518 email, 372 FireWire problems, 40 hard drives, 274–276

PCs: The Missing Manual PCs: The Missing Manual, eMatter Edition Copyright © 2008 O’Reilly & Associates, Inc. All rights reserved.

Internet connections, 339–341 keyboards, 70 memory problems, 24–25 mice, 76 Hardware tab, 80 monitor problems, 110 monitors, 100–104 Movie Maker, 175 network problems, 458–461 general problems, 458 wireless networks, 459–461 overheating problems, 15 Printer Troubleshooter program, 125 printers, 142–146 scanners, 195 sound, 218–221 technical information about your PC, 12 USB problems, 36 Webcams, 181 tubes for cables, 61 Turntable Needles, 210 TV tuners, 100 video cards with built-in TV tuner, 108 TWAIN, 186 “twit filters”, 160 typing area (keyboards), 58

U U.S. National Archives and Records Administration, 195 undelete programs, 496 underlined letter in program menu options, 66 underlined words on Web page, clicking, 389 uninstalling unwanted programs, 519 Uninterrupted Power Supply (UPS), 48 Universal Serial Bus (see USB ports) unresponsive scanner, 197 unsecured networks, 417 unsecured wireless networks, 321 UPnP (Universal Plug ‘n’ Play), 461 UPS (Uninterruptible Power Supply), 546 URLs for Web sites main page, 340 USB 2.0 ports music players connected to, 226 sound circuitry plug-in box, 203 USB devices, 34 plug-in keychain drives as MP3 players, 225 Windows not recognizing, 38 USB drives, 255 USB Gear, 59 USB Gear (Web site), 40

USB hubs, 38 scanners plugged into, 195 USB keyboards, installing, 69 USB mouse installing, 75 USB ports, 25, 34, 34–39 1.1 vs. 2.0, 37 Bluetooth adapter in, 453 connecting digital camera cable to, 149 connecting external hard drive, 268 microphones plugged into, 205 network adapters, 413 scanners, 185 scanners connected to, 186 sizes, 37 speakers plugged into, 206 troubleshooting problems, 36 turning into a different port, 40 USB ports on keyboards, 62 user accounts, password protecting, 478 user name for Internet connections, 327, 334 user name for your Web site, 180 user names managing with Internet Explorer, 385 for routers, 418 routers default, for popular brands, 429 utilities that boot from a floppy, 278 UV protected coverings for photos, 141

Index

V value-priced keyboards, 60 VCD format (see video CDs) vector graphic images, 114 vents (PC case), maintaining, 15 version numbers, software, 9 VGA cards and ports conversion of digital information to analog, 87 VGA ports, 34 on HDTV, 98 on LCD monitors, 86 LCD monitors connected to, 85 plugging CRT monitors into, 88 video, 8 adjusting settings in Windows XP, 105–107 conversion to MPEG format, 26 displaying PC video signal on TV, 95–98 FireWire ports, 40 no video at startup, 523 watching TV on a PC, 99–100 (see also monitors) video adapter, 8 video cameras, Webcams as, 177

Index PCs: The Missing Manual, eMatter Edition Copyright © 2008 O’Reilly & Associates, Inc. All rights reserved.

579

Index

580

video capture devices, 166, 168 setting on PC to record live video stream, 167 video cards, 104 AGP slots, 27 built-in fans, checking for problems, 110 digital, 87 driver archives on manufacturer sites, 513 drivers, updating, 110 dual-port, conflicts with Dualview, 93 DVI port, 88 high performance, 105 installing for second PC monitor, 90 slots, 28 startup by BIOS, 523 upgrading, 107–110 buying right card for the slot, 108 identifying PC video slot, 108 inserting card into the slot, 110 video CDs, 281, 290, 292 burning, 298 video DVDs, 306 Video Graphics Array (see VGA ports) Video In ports finding on digital camcorder, 166 finding on TVs, 97 Video Out ports analog and digital camcorders, connecting, 167 locating on analog camcorder, 166 on PCs and laptops, 96 video ports, 34 video streams, 177 video-conversion services, 166 videos displaying on music players, 224 showing on TV, 298 viewer-controllable Webcams, 178 viewing angle (LCD monitors), 85 virtual memory, 19 viruses, 485 Bluetooth connections, 454 causing slowness in PCs, 518 Internet Explorer as target for, 377 protection from, 411 removal of, 486 removal tools for, 487 symptoms of PC infected with, 485 System Restore and, 501 viruses, targeting Outlook Express, 345 visibility, controlling for pointer, 79 voice recordings on the PC, 205 VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol), 204 voltage (power supply), 50 setting correctly for your country, 53

volume levels controlling on PC with mixer controls, 220 PC volume controls, 221

W Wal-Mart (photo developer Web site), 138 WAN (Wide Area Network), 415 warranties for hard drives, 265 wattage (power supply), 49 finding for replacement, 49 wattage calculators, 49 WAV files burning to a CD, 212 converting records to, 211 ripping songs from CDs directly to, 296 WAVeform audio files (see WAV files) weather forecasters (localized), adding in Firefox, 382 Web Archive, single file (*.mht), 393 Web browsers, 375–384 ad-blocking features, 387 adding plug-ins, 383 browsing the Web, 388–400 downloading files, 399–400 finding sites, 390 forwarding sites, 396–399 Home page, 388 menus and buttons, 389 printing sites, 391 saving information from sites, 391 saving parts of Web site offline, 393–396 saving photos, 392 differences in browsers, 375 Firefox, 380–384 advantages, 382 disadvantages, 382 features, 380–382 privacy controls, 382 setting up, 382 Internet Explorer, 376–380 advantages, 377 backing up settings, 380 disadvantages, 377 features, 377 setting up, 379 opening on new wireless network to change router settings, 428 Opera and Netscape, 384 remembering passwords for Web sites, 476 switching to browser of your choice, 378 Web Page, HTML only (htm;*.html), 393 Web pages offline, removing, 257 printing, 141 saving, 392

PCs: The Missing Manual PCs: The Missing Manual, eMatter Edition Copyright © 2008 O’Reilly & Associates, Inc. All rights reserved.

Web sites Accessibility, 63 Adobe, 15 Avery labels, 133 Axis Communications, 179 BuyPrinters, 118 bypassing sign-ups, 387 Daisy, 119 Digital Photography Review, 163 dumping small programs on your PC, 257 Earth 911, 89 Epson Paper Finder, 127 FedCo Electronics, 55 Fentek ergonomic keyboards, 61 Fix Your Own Printers, 146 Flickr, 161 for computer problems, 535 forwarding, 396–399 Fotolog, 162 Ghostscript, 114 Jam Online, 217 JS Custom PCs, 49 Kodak and Sony, 135 Kodak EasyShare Gallery, 161 LightSound, 210 Magic Sound Restoration, 210 Microsoft Timershot software, 179 Missing Manuals, 5, 130 O’Reilly Network Safari Bookshelf, 6 PC buying guide, 3 PC Power and Cooling, 49 photo developers, 136, 138 photo editors supporting EXIF, 154 photo-sharing, 160–162 Picasa 2, 157 PlaysForSure, 214 publishing photos to, 152 Qoop, 161 Ram Electronics, 98 Roll Scanning, 218 Rules For Use, 194 Sam’s Laser FAQ, 146 saving information from, 391 Steve’s Digital Camera Site, 163 TinCam (Webcam software), 179 Turntable Needles, 210 unresponsive, or not answering, 340 USB Gear, 40 Windows XP’s downloads area, 167 Web space, 179 Web-based email, 348–352 accessing in PC-based program, 352 advantages, 348 disadvantages, 350 Gmail, 350

Hotmail, 351 Yahoo, 351 Webcams, 176–181 installing on PCs, 177 Internet connection, Web site, and Web page, 179 troubleshooting, 181 as video cameras, 177 video capture software, 179 viewer-controllable, 178 wireless, 178 WebClient/Publisher Temporary Files, 258 weight, printing paper, 128 WEP (Wireless Equivalent Privacy), 429 Western Digital’s Data Lifeguard Diagnostic for Windows, 274 White Book (Video CD) standard, 290 WiFi, 319 (see also wireless Internet connections) WiFi adapters (see wireless network adapters) WiFi finders, 321 WiFi networks (see wireless networks) WiFi Protected Access (see WPA) WiFi-ready or WiFi-capable computers, 416 “Windows Connect Now” (wireless routers), 426 Windows Add Hardware Wizard, 32 Character Map program, 67 controlling from keyboard without mouse, 65–67 controlling with a mouse only, 74 Plug and Play technology, 33 removing unused components, 259 troubleshooters, 520 windows accessing menus, 66 moving from one to another with keyboard, 66 moving or changing size, 67 picture of current window, sending to Clipboard, 62 Windows 2000 drivers, 514 Windows 95, 98, or Windows Me on networked PCs, 423 shared network printers, 439 transferring files and settings to PC running Windows XP, 444 Windows Briefcase, 444–446 Windows Clipboard screen picture, 62 Windows Firewall, 491–494 Windows Help and Support, 520 Windows keys, 64

Index PCs: The Missing Manual, eMatter Edition Copyright © 2008 O’Reilly & Associates, Inc. All rights reserved.

Index

581

Index

Windows logo key, 64 holding down while pressing Break key, 64 IBM ThinkPads and, 65 shortcuts for common tasks, 64 Windows Media Audio (see WMA files) Windows Media Player, 239–246, 383 adding music, 240–243 buying music online, 242 importing your PC’s music, 240–242 automatic synchronization, 224 burning music CDs, 294–296 burning WAV files to a CD, 212 codecs for decompressing and creating MP3s, 314 codecs for movies, 315 copying songs to portable player, 243–246 automatically, 243 manually, 244–246 displaying Web content using in Firefox, 382 DVD movies, playing, 302 keychain drives, using with, 225 making the default media player, 285 problems with tags, 250 ripping CDs, 286–289 disabling copy protection, 287 lower quality, avoiding, 287–289 synchronization settings, fine-tuning, 247 transferring data to portable players, 246 version 10, 287 Windows Memory Diagnostic, 24 Windows Paint pasting Clipboard contents into, 63 Windows Picture and Fax Viewer viewing photos in, 156 Windows Picture and Fax viewer, 155 Windows Product Activation (WPA), 519 Windows Update, 478–479 activating, 549 asking permission befor downloading or installing updates, 479 Automatic setting, 478 choosing when to install updates, 479 printer driver, finding online, 124 setting to Automatic, 345 turning off Automatic Updates, 479 updated drivers, 505 Web site, 479 Windows Wireless Network Setup Wizard entering network password, 459 Windows XP adjusting video settings, 105–107 Bluetooth support, 453 copy protection, 519 Dualview feature, 89

582

PCs: The Missing Manual

DVDs and, 300 finding video card driver for new card, 110 game controllers, 80 hard drive size measurement, 261 Internet Connection Wizard, 42 juggling information between memory and hard drive, 19 mice, 75 Movie Maker (see Movie Maker) My Picture folder displaying photos, 155 Network Connection Wizard, 42 not recognizing familiar USB device, 38 not recognizing USB devices, 38 notifying before unplugging external drive, 268 ordering professional photo prints from My Pictures folder, 137 partitioning hard drive, 270 photo-editing tools, limitations of, 157 Recovery Console, 496 resetting passwords, 501–503 rotate feature, 155 Safe Mode, 489 Security Center, 487 Service Pack 2 Movie Maker upgrade, 167 Service Packs, 9, 480 speaker settings, 207 System Information window, 12 system requirements, 8 system requirements for your PC, 9 Task Manager, 65 Windows XP Home, installing Backup on, 473 Wingdings or Webdings, 68 wired network adapters, 412 wired networks, 404–406 Ethernet, 404 mixing with wireless, 409 Powerline (HomePlug), 405 wireless adapters compatibility with wireless routers, 413 wireless Internet connections, 318, 319–321, 338 network in range, 321 unsecured or open network, 321 wireless adapter, 319 wireless keyboards, 61 wireless mice, 73 wireless network adapters, 412 connecting two PCs, 436 installing, 416 Wireless Network Connection Properties window, 450

PCs: The Missing Manual, eMatter Edition Copyright © 2008 O’Reilly & Associates, Inc. All rights reserved.

Wireless Network Connection window, 416 Wireless Network Setup Wizard, 426, 427 entering network password into all wirelessly connected PCs, 431 wireless networks, 406–409 limitations of, 406–408 expense, 407 interference, 408 range, 406 security, 408 speed, 407 mixing with wired, 409 networking two PCs, 450–452 password-protected, 417 securing, 419, 425–432 encryption password on PCs with wireless adapters, 426 naming nework and adding password, 427 naming the network, 426 router password, 426 speeds of, 408 troubleshooting, 459–461 competing wireless software, 459 signal strength, 460 within range, 416 wireless routers, 409 buying recommendation, 411 compatibility with wireless routers, 413 installing, 415 wireless Webcams, 178 WireTracks, 414 WMA files, 214 copy protected, on CDs ripped by Media Player, 287 incompatibility with iPod, 226 word combinations, using for passwords, 476

word processor, reformatting Web pages in, 142 workgroup name, 422 worms, 485 removal program (Stinger), 487 worms, targeting Outlook Express, 345 WPA (WiFi Protected Access) and WPA 2, 430 WPA (WiFi Protected Access) encryption standard, 427 WPA (Windows Product Activation), 519 writing speed for CDs, 8, 284 translating x terms into minutes, 286 writing speed for DVDs, 9, 303 translating x terms to minutes, 304

Index

X “x” speed for CDs, translating to minutes, 286 “x” terms for DVD writing speed, translating to minutes, 304 XPlay 2, 238

Y Yahoo, 391 Yahoo mail, 68, 323, 351 setting up PC-based email programs to work with Plus Account, 352 Yellow Book (CD-ROM and CD-ROM XA) standard, 290 yellow exclamation mark (!), 512 YouSendIt, 361

Z Zip drives, 255 zombie PCs, 485

Index PCs: The Missing Manual, eMatter Edition Copyright © 2008 O’Reilly & Associates, Inc. All rights reserved.

583

Colophon Mary Brady was the production editor and the proofreader for PCs: The Missing Manual. Phil Dangler and Claire Cloutier provided quality control. Ellen Troutman Zaig wrote the index. The cover of this book is based on a series design by David Freedman. Karen Montgomery produced the cover layout with Adobe InDesign CS using Adobe’s Minion and Gill Sans fonts. David Futato designed the interior layout, based on a series design by Phil Simpson. This book was converted by Andrew Savikas and Keith Fahlgren to FrameMaker 5.5.6. The text font is Adobe Minion; the heading font is Adobe Formata Condensed; and the code font is LucasFont’s TheSans Mono Condensed. The illustrations that appear in the book were produced by Robert Romano, Jessamyn Read, and Lesley Borash using Macromedia FreeHand MX and Adobe Photoshop CS.