Monday, June 4, 2001		Dr Tribune

Q I have a Hewlett Packard Pavilion 8624 667 MHz P III running on Win ’98 second edition with 64 MB RAM and a 15 GB HDD. Files and buffers in the config.sys are ’95 and ’85 respectively. My problem is the system hangs quite often when I am surfing the Net or whenever I use Corel 10. When restarted, it sometimes even hangs on scandisk during the booting process. My reason for buying a branded and an expensive system was keeping the quality and performance on priority. A Hewlett Packard branded system should not have such problems. Please advice 

— Ande Dewan

A It appears that there is some problem in your hardware and most probably your hard disk has bad sectors. Please check your hard disk by running scan disk in through mode or run it at DOS mode. If scandisk shows bad sectors, then you must consult your hardware vendor for replacement.

Q I have a problem related to Windows media player/active movie player. My problem is that whenever I enter Windows media player to open a movie file, it gives the message "Beta Direct Draw. Please update." Is this update possible without reinstalling Windows ’98? If yes, please tell me the procedure.

Sukhjit Singh, Chandigarh

A Direct Draw is a component of Direct X. So, if you are using the Direct X drivers and have the beta version installed on your system, then you get this kind of errors. Thus make sure you have the proper version of the Direct Draw drivers installed for your particular display adapter. Direct Draw drivers may be downloaded from the display adapter manufacturer’s Internet site. You may also download and install Direct X 5.0 from the Microsoft Internet site.

Q I want to know about software that can compress the Web images quite dramatically and to a great extent reducing the size of the images. Also let me know about software that can compress animations used in Web sites.

— Amardeep Singh

A There are software, which can reduce the size of Web images and yet retain its sharpness. Some of this software are GIF Cruncher, JPEG Wizard. For more information about these software please visit http://www.webreference.com. Some other software are GIF Lube available at www.websitegarage.com. IWS Products at www.earthetc.com

Q I have computer with Celeron 533 MHz CPU, 10 GB hard disk and 64 MB RAM. The operating system is Windows ’98. My problem is that whenever I shut down the computer by giving shut down command, it restarts soon after shutting down completely. I checked the bootlog.txt file. The last line in it was not "EndTerminal =Kernel." After making this entry, the problem got solved but just for a few days. It appeared again after about 20 days. I checked the bootlog.txt file. This time the entry made by me at last line was not there and all "Terminal" and "EndTerminal" entries were also not there. Is this normal and why does restarting of computer occurs?

— Rishamdeep Singh, Amritsar

A This is a common problem of Windows ’98 SE. For solving this problem you can download a patch from Microsoft’s site and can also download user.exe available on the same site to solve this problem. However you can avoid this problem even otherwise by closing all open applications along with network connections and map drives.

Q I’m having P III processor with Window Me as the operating system. My problem is that my Yahoo! chat doesn’t load chat applet. It gives message "If the applet fails to load and the chat window above remains completely blank, try clicking here to load an alternate version. And sometimes a dialogue box opens that states "Security Warning — Do you want to install and run "Yahoo! Audio Conferencing" signed on 10/19/2000, 12:44 AM and distributed by Yahoo! Inc. What should I do?

— Aprajita Shukla

A As such there does not seem to be a problem in your system. Some messages and warnings have only academic value and they do not affect your computer’s performance in anyway. In your case you do not have Yahoo! Voice chat installed, whereas Yahoo! offers voice chat facility in its chat applet. Thus if, you accept the installation request by ignoring the warning, this problem will not occur again. Regarding your problem related to loading of chat applet. This could be because of several reasons. The most common reason is that you are using a browser, which is quite old. If this is the case, then switching over to an upgraded version will solve your problem. However, other possible errors could be due to low memory of your system. This you can rectify by freeing your disk and memory cache and also by increasing the paging file size. Third, if you have too many fonts, drivers, screen savers etc. installed, then in that case they take up a lot of your conventional memory and could create this kind of a problem. So, in order to solve this problem, consider these points.

Q I want to transfer a file of 2MB from one PC to other in 2 floppies of 1.4 MB capacity. How can I do it?

— Sunny, Panipat.

A The best method of storing a large file on a floppy is to zip it. However, if you wish to split it in two floppies, you can do so with the help of software called Fsplit. You can download it from http://computing.netscape.com/computing/download/shareware/main.tmpl or search for it on the Internet.