IT Queries: Computer problems answered

What is the setting on Macs & PCs To make jpg files readable when transferred by email?

Both Macs and Windows systems should be able to read JPG image files. If you have any problems, then two good image readers are Irfranview and Picasa which are free and have some editing capacities.

When ever I try to open anything in windows media player it freezes the computer and the only way to do make it respond is to shut down computer with power button on computer.

The first thing to do is clean up your computer as it may well be something lurking in your temporary files which is upsetting Media Player.

Should the problem continue, you may have to reinstall Windows Media Player. Open the Control Panel and click Add/Remove Programs, or Programs in Windows Vista, and select Internet Explorer.

To right of the selection there are two buttons; change and remove. Click the Change button and follow the wizard to repair the existing installation.

When trying to watch a news or lifestyle video or Youtube it goes for a few seconds and then stops for quite a few seconds, then starts again. It is virually impossible to comprehend what it is about. very frustrating. What is the cause of this?

Your Internet connection  isn’t moving data to your computer fast enough for the videos to play smoothly. The computer has to stop and wait for more data to be loaded from the server.

The problem is you simply need a faster Internet connection and you should talk to your ISP about moving up a plan or considering moving your service elsewhere.

For the moment though you can fix the problem by pausing the clip once it starts playing. Flash based clips will continue to download and if you wait a few minutes you should be able to watch the full clip without interruption.

You can also change the buffer settings which control how much video data your computer will download by right clicking one of the clips you want to play and choose settings.

In the Flash Player settings you then choose the yellow folder icon and move the Local Storage setting to the far right which is unlimited. This means the entire clip will be downloaded while you wait.

Waiting for clips to download and increasing buffers won’t fix your underlying problem that your Internet connection is simply too slow, so you’ll still have to see about getting a better plan.

If I view a particular website does the website or by any means does it get downloaded to my machine.eg is i am visiting youtube or yahoo, do the videos get downloaded to my machine?

In general yes, it’s called caching and the ideas is by storing data on the computer, the web browser or media player can show the site or play the clip faster.

Sometimes you’ll find the clip plays faster than your Internet connection can store the information and so you’ll see a message telling you the clip is being buffered.

Sometimes browsers and media players don’t clean up after themselves and the caches become too big which can slow your computer and clog your hard drive. This is why it’s good to regularly clean up your computer.

I’m using Word 2003 which won’t open docx files. Could either tell me how to fix, or point me to answer somewhere.

Docx files are Word documents created in the newer Office 2007 system. To read them you’ll have to download and install the Microsoft Office Compatibility Pack as we describe in our I can’t read Office 2007 documents post.

Once you’ve installed the compatibility pack you’ll be able to read Word and Excel 2007 files.

what is a set of eight binary digits (bits that are either 0 or 1 that represent a letter, number or symbol? (01000011)

A quick Google comes up with the Tekmom website which has a handy table converting the alphabet into ACSII binary codes.

Good luck

Occasionally my computer, Fred freezes – Is there a simple technique to sort it out?

One of the least simple things in maintaining computers is dealing with “occasional” problems as it’s usually time consuming to figure out exactly what is causing the freezing.

The most common and simplest cause of freezing is a full hard drive. If that’s the case, our speeding up a computer advice will help you. Although if you are seriously short of space then a visit to your local computer tech is in order.

Sometimes the freezing is due to data errors on the hard drive, we have instructions for fixing this at our checking for data errors post.

Finally, if the freezing continues you need to note exactly what you are doing just before the system freezes. It could be a website, a software package or something wrong with your system’s hardware and the repair could be something simple from reinstalling a program right through to replacing your computer.

Should it be something more serious, have a computer tech look at the system before you spend a lot of money on repairs as it could simply be an older computer that has reached the end of its days.

I have just realised that my laptop has been downloading video files from my camera as Quicktime files.  They always used to be windows media player and I’m not sure why it suddenly changed but maybe some change in settings I was unaware of.

I have changed back to WMP as default however I now have the problem that many of the video files I’ve already downloaded are in quicktime and I have deleted the orginals off the camera memory card.  I edit these videos using Studio 11 and it won’t allow me to load quicktime files for editing.

I found some freeware that converts quicktime to WMP but some of them I couldn’t get to work at all and those that did led to a large reduction in quality in the WMP file.

Do you have any other suggestions?  I use Windows Vista as my OS.  Camera is a canon IXUS.  If there are no freewares that do this, are there any I can purchase that keep the quality?  I am hoping to find freeware though as not working at the moment!!

You’ll find the villain in this was QuickTime. It has a habit of hijacking settings and making itself the default media player. To irritate people further, it’s usually bundled with other Apple updates, particularly iTunes.

There are a number of free programs to handle converting QuickTime files to Windows Media Player. Two of the easiest programs are MOV to WMV and Free Video Convertor.

Super and MediaCoder are two other options but they are a bit more complex to use.

As you’ve found, c>onverting files to WMV is always a bit hit and miss as the Windows Media File CODECS are a bit tricky for programs to deal with, so you often end up with flaky results. You may need to try a few  different settings to get the best results.

Given you’ve wiped the original files, it’s absolutely critical you make backups of those QuickTime files so they can’t be damaged in the copying process.

My problem is  with Windows XP sp3 and the Firefox web browser. The problem has become worse over last few days.

When I download attachments from Yahoo emails & software programmes the file extensions are not there. Can’t open them on my pc even when try the “Open with…” tab. Files show as “_auto_file”.  All of them show up under the Windows Media Player symbol which is wrong so file type is unrecognised and unable to open.

Tried using Internet Explorer as web browser, but it wouldn’t even let me download.  Yesterday, was able to download one of the Mozilla files (opened using Adobe Reader) from the Mozilla help chat line.  Why could I receive that one file ok when none of the others will?

It sounds like something has messed up your file associations so the computer doesn’t know what to do with the files once you have downloaded them.

It’s an irritating problem we’ve covered before in our Cannot Open Programs post.

Another problem that can affect downloads is not having enough space on your hard drive. This will stop programs downloading and installing properly.

We detail how to free up space on your hard drive at our speeding up a computer post. Follow those instructions to make sure you have space on your system.

Hi, I have Microsoft Publisher on my computer and I run on Windows Vista.

I have a 2GB memory, This message comes up anytime I attempt to open anything from the internet. How can I fix this?

The problem is Publisher can’t convert the webpage into a format it can work with, so it throws out an obscure and misleading error.

If you insist on using Microsoft Publisher, it’s unlikely you’ll be able to resolve it as Publisher is notorious for compatibility problems although you may want to try re-installing the program to see if a damaged installation is the culprit.

Otherwise, you might want to try copying the website into another program such as Microsoft Word or Open Office Writer, saving it and then trying to import into Publisher.

Generally though you’ll struggle with using different formats in Publisher as it is simply isn’t designed for sharing with other programs.