Tag Archives: Windows XP

Compatibility issues with Windows 7

Posted on by
Reply
Adobe Dreamweaver

Image via Wikipedia

Okay, so I have had Macromedia Dreamweaver 4 for a long time and it worked beautifully until I installed Windows 7. Now it is behaving very strangely. I went onto a Dreamweaver forum, now owned by Adobe, and asked questions about why certain things were not working in Dreamweaver. They all said “Get a later version” and “It’s a wonder it has worked for this long”. Well, I’m not rich, so what now. I’ll have to learn HTML and XHTML afterall. Maybe I’ll download NVU, an open source program said to be like Dreamweaver.

A lot of programs that I have will not be compatible with Windows 7. Apparently, if your Windows 7 is 64 bit, then nothing much will be compatible, but the 32 bit version may be nicer to you. To find out whether your version of Windows 7 is 32 bit  or 64 bit go to Start>Control Panel>System Security>System

I know most items these days are made to be obsolescent in a couple of years, but I don’t think this was the case with computer programs which used to be okay in their time. The makers would not have been aware that computers and Bill Gates would have such amazing operating systems in the future. I mean Windows 7 is better than the security ridden XP OS.

So what do you do as a home programmer in the way of software which becomes outdated?

Enhanced by Zemanta

The nightmare of the new hard disc drive

Posted on by
Samsung HD400LD hard disk drive (400 GB storag...
Image via Wikipedia

Okay, so I found that I couldn’t reformat my old hard drive because it was corrupted.

I backed everything up on an external drive. Backing up emails is easy, but restoring them is less so.

I bought a new 1 TB Sata hard drive over the internet.  Sata HDDs are much more common now that IDE drives and much easier to connect. As I installed it, I took photos of the old one within the case so I would remember how the wires went. I can’t find them this minute, because these photos are untitled.

I inserted everything correctly finding where the cables went.   I started installing Windows XP and pressed F2 to see Set up or BIOS. I saw that the new Hard drive was there. I changed the boot up sequence so that the computer would boot up from the Windows disc.

At a certain point the Windows disk would stop and it would say “no hard disc detected”. Installation has failed. I tried every combination of BIOs settings and boot sequences. No luck.

Finally, I rang a tech company and when the guy came out, all was well, except that my version of Windows did not contain the drives necessary for the motherboard and new HDD. So off it went to the factory and 3 days later at came back all fixed.

I’m restoring everything now. Thank God for the password reminders on web sites, because of all the folders in my outlook email account guess which one didn’t restore. My passwords!!

It’s very nice to see updated software from the web though.

So, if your motherboard is old and that only means a few years, then your search on the internet for how to change a HDD (which is easy) won’t bear fruit. If it is newer, it is a synch really.

Related articles
Enhanced by Zemanta

How to make a screen capture tutorial video

Posted on by
4
CamStudio
Image via Wikipedia

What do you need

1. A video device. In this case I used a video screen capture program called CamStudio. This is free.

2. A microphone of good quality, if not broadcast quality. I now use a headset with microphone and listen back over the headset.

3. A computer which runs at least XP and has at least 80gbs of memory. Movies are big files.

4. A movie maker program. In my case I used Windows Movie Maker which comes with XP service pack 2.

( I heard on the news that Microsoft has lost its court appeal in the EU over abusing competition rules concerning the fact that Windows Media Player comes with XP. It no longer comes with Windows Vista. I’m wondering about the future of Windows Movie Maker because this also comes with XP)

I decided on my topic and practiced a lot. CamStudio for tutorials on the computer is best set to a small region, rather than the whole screen. The final video makes everything look smaller so the more detail you can capture with the region of screen setting, the better.

You need to speak very clearly, loudly and without spitting too much into the microphone. I fall down here.

It’s okay to make a few jokes or to have the viewer hear how you react as you demonstrate the tutorial. Swear words are not a good idea however.

I have much to learn about using a microphone and about feedback too. Turn off your speakers when using a microphone. Speak into it in as soundproofed a room as possible. Speak clearly. I have an Australian accent and I have been to America twice. They often DO NOT understand you and your audience will be mostly American. We have an ugly accent at times too. After 6 weeks of hearing only American accents, when you arrive at the airport to come home and hear those Australian voices, you feel both at home but also embarrassed by our tones and accents. Not that the American accent couldn’t do with some improving.

Speak more slowly than usual but not too slow.

It helps having been a teacher in the instruction stakes. Assume your audience knows nothing and make sure you do not miss essential steps in your tutorial.

Practice and good luck. If you want to buy a video recording program I recommend Camtasia.

Here is my first attempt. I have bought a microphone since and will be making another tutorial soon.

Related articles by Zemanta
Reblog this post [with Zemanta]

How to make a screen capture video

Posted on by
1

I have been struggling along trying to make the best of free software to make a decent video tutorial using a screen capture utility.

I use CamStudio which is free and a microphone attached to my sound card. The microphone I began with was something I bought years ago and it just didn’t give a good enough sound output, but I practiced with it anyway. I have now bought a new microphone which is also one to plug into my sound card, with a headset. It is slightly better. It is not radio quality. Some people who are using camcorders, video recorders and so on, plug a radio standard microphone into their recorders, not the sound card.
With CamStudio, I set the region to pan over a specified area of the screen. Capturing the full screen produces a video that no-one can see.

I muck around on the computer talking about the tutorial I’m making. The first one was simply about how to download psp tubes into PSP and how to make an avatar out of a tube and then how to make that an image with a transparent background.

After I have made the video which is in AVI format, I open Windows Movie Maker, which comes with Windows XP 2. I import the video I have made, fiddle around with it: that’s called editing, and save the movie as a .wmv file. There is no free software that I can find that will convert that to SWF or FLA, which are better formats because they keep the size of the movie more stable.

I then save that to my computer (takes an age) and those files are huge and upload them to YouTube and Idea 22. You can see the one I’ve done at YouTube, but the one at Idea 22 is currently being improved with the new microphone. Look back later!

Another method of saving the movie is to save to the DVD drive with a DVD recordable disk. Make sure you get the correct format here too. +R type is what my computer requires, but my other computer requires -R. This is for newer computers.

Related articles
Enhanced by Zemanta