[marsee@oreilly.com: PC Hardware Annoyances Needed for New Book]

[Walt Mankowski <waltman@pobox.com>]

In case anyone's annoyed...

----- Forwarded message from Marsee Henon <marsee@oreilly.com> -----

From: Marsee Henon <marsee@oreilly.com>
To: waltman@pobox.com
Subject: PC Hardware Annoyances Needed for New Book
Date: Tue, 24 Feb 2004 18:06:16 -0800

Dear User Group Leader:

Thanks for the great response to our call, a few weeks ago, for
annoyances, gripes, and complaints about Excel. The email we got was
extremely useful and a lot of your members not only sent annoyances, but
fixes! So, a thousand thanks for the help.

As you might guess, we have another book in the wings--this one focusing
on PC hardware annoyances. We're not just talking about PCs and laptops
per se--we also talking about all the hardware that's inside and attached
to your computer, such as memory, motherboards, hard drives, printers,
scanners, home networks, DSL/cable, CD/DVD, and host of other annoying
hardware devices.


If any members of your group have PC hardware annoyances they'd like to
see solved, have them email me (marsee@oreilly.com) with "PC Hardware
Annoyances" in the subject. Just have them note what hardware is giving 
them grief (e.g. Dell Dimension 8100 with 1.3GHz P4; LaserJet 3150; 
Verbatim Producer 44 DVD+/-RW; etc.), and any relevant software that's 
involved (such as the OS, a driver, OCR software, etc.).


As thanks for sharing, we'll make sure to get copies of "PC Hardware 
Annoyances" sent to your group shortly after publication.

Thanks,

Marsee

***

An example:

Hardware Windows Setting Blocks DVD Upgrade

THE ANNOYANCE: I want to update the firmware for my Sony DRX510UL DVD
burner, and the site said to disable the DMA setting in Windows XP before
doing so. But it neglects to tell you how.

THE FIX: The Sony drive is terrificit burns DVD+R and DVD-R discs, and
uses both DVD-RW and DVD+RW rewritable media. But ask Sony for support,
and it responds with a virtual raspberryits online instructions are
complex and often impossible to understand. Luckily, fiddling with DMA
isn't difficult. Here's how to turn it off:

Windows XP/2000. Open the System control panel, choose the Hardware tab,
and click the Device Manager button. Double-click "IDE ATA/ATAPI
controllers" and double-click "Secondary IDE Channel" (your DVD drive is
most likely located on the secondary channel; if not, choose "Primary IDE
Channel"). Click the Advanced Settings tab, and under Device 0 (master) or
Device 1 (slave) (depending on how your drive is set up), select PIO Only
from the Transfer Mode drop-down menu. Click OK.

Windows 98/Me. Open the System control panel and choose the Device Manager
tab. Double-click CD-ROM, then double-click your drive. Select the
Settings tab, uncheck the DMA option, and click OK. Remember to reverse
the previous steps once your DVD drive's firmware is installed.

***





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