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Search For The Manual You Need With Manuals Online: “

I used to keep all my owner manuals for everything. Starting with my original Nintendo Entertainment System way back when. Now I just mail in my warranty card and chuck the manual.

No I am not a mad man or a lunatic – it is simply a different time we live in than back then. Now almost anything can be found on the internet – and Manuals Online has you covered when it comes to owner manuals and user guides.

When you arrive at the site you will see something that looks like this:

To search for a product enter its name or model number into the search field. A generic search will give you LOTS of results and a model number will usually result in one or two items. I decided to search for a DustBuster. I typed in Dustbuster and hit Search.

I got back 4 items for four different models. You can download the manual as a PDF, save it to your folder on their website (requires registration), you can also view forum discussions about your item as well.

I got a little more specific and typed in Sony Play Station 2. I got a few results and chose the model I was looking for. I was then able to preview the owner manual and eventually downloaded it. I could also ask members for help or share information about the product.

You can see below the item’s additional product literature. In this case it looks like the quick start guide but it can vary from product to product.

Upon opening the document it will display the PDF in your browser. You can also save the file by right clicking on the link and choosing “save target as”.

Alright so who’s ready to go clean out their attic/filing cabinet? Do you have another slick trick when it comes to dealing with owners manuals? If so we would love to hear about it in the comments! Now I have to get back to some old school gaming

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

New on MakeUseOf ? Get cheat sheets and cool PDF guides @ www.makeuseof.com/makeuseof-downloads/

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So what is this new social media thing Twitter all about I hear you ask?

Well I have been on Twitter for about a year or so. It is a quick message writing service where you can publish notes that anyone can view. Kind of like a blog page but more like a ’status update’. Those who have used Facebook will know what I mean.

There has been a huge surge in popularity as more celebrity users come on board. Oprah did a special on it one day and the users doubled overnight or something.

Anyway – if you want a more comprehensive description of Twitter and how it works then it is off to YouTube which has loads of ‘How-To’ type videos about Twitter. The MakeUseOf blog has compiled a list of 7 good choices to start.

Check them out: Top 7 Twitter Tutorials on YouTube

If you do succumb to the Twitter phase then I have 2 suggestions.

1. Follow me @Noblejoker, and
2. Give Tweetdeck a try – it is the best desktop Twitter software I have used

Romey has a question for us:

Hi Matt. I have some teaching CDs I want to make a copy of. When I copy them my computer won’t play them as it asks for the original disc. Is there a program that will override this problem? Thanks if you can help.

Copying game or program CDs and DVDs is more complicated than copying music CDs as you need an exact copy not just a rewrite of the data
Some commercial discs have copy protection built in so if the burned copy isn’t an exact replica the burned disc might not work correctly – I suspect this is what is happening to you.

Obviously there are copyright issues to consider here
Some people make back-up copies of discs they own to protect the originals from scratches and damage and that seems fair to me

Do you have access to the originals discs?
So to copy them successfully you need to do so in a particular way that makes a bit by bit copy of the disc
Usually the easy way is to make an exact ‘image’ of the disc and then burn that image to another disc. This is similar to the discussion we have had about using Acronis True Image and other ways to Back-up your system

There are specialised programs for making images. I Like ImgBurn and Daemon Tools

According to their website:

ImgBurn is a lightweight CD / DVD / HD DVD / Blu-ray burning application that everyone should have in their toolkit!

 

It has several ‘Modes’, each one for performing a different task:

• Read – Read a disc to an image file
• Build – Create an image file from files on your computer or network – or you can write the files directly to a disc
• Write – Write an image file to a disc

So you can use this free program to copy a disc to your computer as an image file and then write the image to another disc as a backup. It is a very powerful program and the ‘deep geeks’ swear by it. But is is easy enough to use for beginners and the help and user forums are available too. Did I mention ImgBurn is small to download an free!

Here is tutorial on how to make an image using ImgBurn copied from www.ehow.com 
How to Build an Image File With ImgBurn

Step1 – Download and install ImgBurn from its official website. You can choose from a variety of download sites, and the installation file’s relatively small, so it shouldn’t take long to save.

Step2 – Launch ImgBurn. Unless you changed its installation settings, you can find ImgBurn shortcuts on your desktop, in its Start Menu "Programs" folder or in the Quick Launch menu.

Step3 – Choose either "Create Image File from Disc" or "Create Image File from Files and Folders" from the opening screen of options. Pick the first if you’re building an image from a DVD and the second if you’re building one from video files on your hard drive.

Step4 – Pick the drive holding your DVD from the "Source" drop-down menu. ImgBurn automatically chooses what it thinks is the right one, but if you’ve got more than one, you may need to manually pick the drive.

Step5 – Click the folder icon next to the "Destination" field and choose where ImgBurn will save the finished image file.

Step6 – Press the big button showing two DVD discs to read the DVD and begin building the image file.

Burning an image file to disc is just as easy. For more tutorials & guides refer to the  ImgBurn Forum

The only thing that ImgBurn doesn’t do is ‘mount’ an image to your PC. Mounting an image is basically a way to ‘trick’ your PC with software into thinking that the image file is actually a physical Disc in an extra CD/DVD drive. The extra drive with a new drive letter will pop up and interact with Windows in the same way your physical CD/DVD drive does. Using images and mounting them is actually a good way to store Discs you access regularly as it is much faster than waiting for the CD to spin in your physical drive.

I have recently started using Daemon Tools lite which is very good and free
http://www.daemon-tools.cc
Download
http://www.daemon-tools.cc/downloads

 

You can use Daemon Tools to make an image file, or you can stick with ImgBurn for creation. Once you have an image file use Daemon Tools to mount the image. Basically just run the program and click File-Open and select your image file. If you open My Computer you will find your ‘new’ drive ready to go.

So hopefully that answers Romey’s question. Does anyone use the programs above or some alternatives. Have you had any success making image files in the past? Would you like to know more? Then leave us a comment on the site using our brand new comment section. Thanks

Phil writes:

I am having a problem when I open AVI files that I create from the video camera. When I select them I get a message that reads ‘ Dr Watson Postmorten Debugger ‘ you have a problem’. When I click the box to close it, it locks up the computer and I have to do a soft boot.
Sometimes it brings up the Microsoft error reporting message that you have a problem and closing you down. I click on don’t send message and I go back to the desk top.
I opened [Windows file folder for error message debugging]. There is a lot of files in the folder telling me what has been done.

I also am getting the Window Explorer message, when I click on a AVI file and when I click don’t send message it closes me back to the desk top.

Do you know what might be happening.

I know Phil does a lot of video editing and makes some great photo and video keepsakes for his family. Like most of us he has tried a few different programs and Windows being the complicated software that it is he has in the past had some trouble with file formats and such. So I was thinking that this might be another recurrence of your old problems.

But a little bit of research reveals some more info. Once again the sheer volume of help available from Google is mindboggling – you just have to know how to search.

I found this discussion thread at a forum called MovieCodec.com. The details here are exactly the problem Phil is having.

Windows has a default habit of offering you a preview of multimedia files when you are searching through Windows Explorer. You know how when you open My Videos or whatever and select a video and Windows wants to show you a little preview copy – that’s what I mean. Ok so what happens is Windows (well Windows Explorer actually) takes control of the file and then when you try to access it the file is ‘in use’ and Explorer locks up and requires a restart which a lot of the times will mean restarting your whole system. This lock up triggers the Windows error reporting messages and Dr Watson which is Windows debugging program.

What the linked info suggests doing is to de-register the Windows settings, specifically a DLL file, that do the preview function. By so doing it can avoid this lock up problem altogether

The easiest way is to run a command through the ‘Run’ setting or to save the settings as a Batch file. A batch file is just a plain text file but with the extension changed from txt to bat. Running a batch file is like double-clicking a program file – the simple code written in the file will run. For that reason some antivirus programs will rightly try to block batch files. More Info on Batch files  is available here at Wikipedia

To help out I have made the batch text files for you and you can download them below. There are 2 files – one turns the setting off as described and the other turns it back on.So if changing it didn’t help or you wanted to go back to having the preview you just run the On file.

WinShellMediaOff – turns OFF the Windows Shell Media Handling

WinShellMediaOn– turns ON the Windows Shell Media Handling

Click and save the file somewhere like your Desktop. Once saved right click and choose Rename and change the extension (the bit after the dot) from name.txt to name.bat. Then double click the bat file to run it. If you want to see the contents of these files just open the Text file and read before you change the names to bat or read the website.

So give this a go Phil – I reckon it will work and shouldn’t do any harm if not. Other people on the site say that downloading the newest DivX codec solved their problem.So if this fix doesn’t work that would be my next suggestion. The latest version is always available at DivX.com

Let us know how you go

Fishing the net is some articles of interest I have found whilst trawling newsletters and internet sites. Here you go:

Tips for Better Portraits

5 tips for taking better portrait photos with your digital camera

A brief history of Computers as told via TV ads

If you have used computers for a while you will recognize some of these ads and the machines in them. Just goes to show how good Apple usually is at it’s marketing.

Bit of trivia – as a teenager I owned both a Tandy TRS80 and a Commodore 64. The C64 was an excellent machine for playing games – I still remember some

Backup Your Mozilla Profiles

For users of Firefox, Thunderbird, Flock and even (god forbid) SeaMonkey.

Did you know that all the customizations, cookies, bookmarks, and plug-ins you add to your programs can be backed up? You can save them in case of a problem, copy them to another PC and so on. This link gives you a howto tutorial using MozBackup

Ultimate Windows Tweaker – Tweak UI For Windows Vista

Ultimate Windows Tweaker is a Tweak UI Utility for tweaking and optimising Windows Vista. It is modelled after the TweakUI program that was an ‘unofficial’ Microsoft product available for Win XP but never released for Vista. The Win XP version is available here.

Details of Tweaks :

The tweaks are classified under seven categories and can be accessed through a common interface, just like your Windows Vista Control Panel.
1) Personalization,
2) User Accounts & UAC,
3) System & Performance,
4) Security,
5) Internet Explorer (IE7 / IE8)
6) Network Optimization
7) Additional Options

 

 

The Complete Guide To Speeding Up Your PC’s Startup

A good summary of tips from Lifehacker on how to make your PC start faster. Follow the tips to speed things up. You can also investigate switching off some of the services on your  PC, although this is probably for more advanced users. I have personally tried the startup Delayer program they recommend and pretty quickly stopped using it – your mileage may vary

28 Powerful Photoshop Lighting Effects

Some tricks and tips for adding fancy effects to your pics using Photoshop or similar editing programs

Learn Photoshop in One Week

Interested in all this digital photography editing and manipulation but have never used Photoshop? Well here is a beginners tutorial that may suit you

 

There you go – that’s a few tidbits to keep you reading over the weekend

Grant asked me a question a few weeks ago and I thought I would share the answer

Do you know of any good free apps that can convert DVD video to Xvid or DivX? I have a Media player (think it only supports DivX) that is filling up and I need to convert to smaller formats

I have tried a few different programs and I am not totally happy with any of them. Among the ones I have tried are

WinFF and MediaCoder and both are open source and thus free

WinFF is a simple program to change file types. A couple of clicks and you are done. It doesn’t really support whole DVDs or FLV video from websites (like YouTube). But it’s handy if you want a simple program to change say an Apple QuickTime MOV file to DivX or similar

MediaCoder is a much more sophisticated program with many, many options. For the casual or new user it can therefore be very complicated. However it is powerful and offers lots of options.

Both WinFF and MediaCoder use the FFmpeg engine for decoding and are free and open source.

For ripping DVD’s to alternative files like DivX I use DVDFab with the mobile option. It has lots of settings for converting DVDs to formats for your phone, iPod or portable device. It is also my program of choice for DVD copying and back-up. Unfortunately this program is not free. You should also be careful when dealing with copyrighted materials.

To back up my opinions and provide a few alternatives here’s a link to a newsletter I read a while ago
http://www.windowssecrets.com/2008/09/25/04-Converters-maximize-your-video-file-options

Windows Secrets newsletter is pretty good. There’s a free version or you can get the paid version for $1 US (or however much you want to pay). Highly recommended reading!

When you are converting files for a specific device or purpose be careful what codec you select for the conversion. Grant will probably find his media centre can play at least some version of Xvid and/or DivX codec but it may be an older version. I have 2 different brand DVD players that play DivX and they play Xvid too. You just need to experiment a bit with what version of the codec you rip/compress to so for best results convert to the format that the player supports. Read the manual for the media centre and download the DivX codec version it specifies for maximum compatibility.

Being able to play the compressed files directly is great as you can fit lots of files on a single disc and still watch them in good quality. I have whole seasons of a TV show on a single DVD. Obviously you need a special kind of DVD player for this but they are pretty common these days.

The next question arises – what if I have a pile of compressed video, maybe from your camcorder or TV shows you have recorded, and you want to watch them or share with friends who don’t have a special DVD player?

You need to turn them back into a DVD of course and I will give you a list of programs to try for this too in a separate post.

Joe asked me a question at the Mullies meeting this week.

Hi Matt

Further to our conversation at Mulligrubs, I have forwarded the email in question.

It was sent to me via Outlook Express and as you suggested this may not be suitable to on forward via Thunderbird. When I have sent this particular message previously in the same circumstances, the message follows the text as well as being sent as an attachment.

Joe’s email has an animated picture attached to it which is the punchline to a joke. The email is sent as html which is the same language that webpages are written in.  So just like webpages can have embedded graphics, animations and the like the email can too.

The problem comes when the person opening the email has a different program than the person who sent it. As I discussed with Joe in some instances Thunderbird doesn’t show the email the same as Outlook Express or Outlook would. This is the same sort of program difference that causes poorly written webpages to look different in Firefox and Internet Explorer.

One solution to Joe’s problem is to save the email as an external file and then attach that file to an email for forwarding. This is often a good idea as it gives you a brand new clean email to write in without forwarding all those friends addresses, maybe to a spammer or infected computer.

To get the file and details out of a html email the easy way is to save it as a html file. Just open the email – the original one maybe attached if it has been ‘forwarded as attachment’. Drill down to the message with the joke and then:

in Thunderbird click File Menu – Save as – File – Html

In Outlook or Outlook Express Click File – Save As – Choose HTML under the File type pull down

Now you can send the html file you saved to your computer as an attachment to an email or view it in your browser (Internet Explorer / Firefox)

One of the problems with the email Joe received is that the image is an animated GIF. It’s like a cartoon – a few different frames slightly changed that give the impression of movement/animation See more about GIFs here.

A lot of picture viewer programs won’t show the image moving even if you save/extract it right. If you extract it right you should always see it moving if you open it in your browser (Internet Explorer / Firefox)

Hope this was helpful

Oh and here is Joe’s picture for you 

Hi Matt

Can you help me with "grounding" I wish to add RAM to my computer but whilst reading up noticed numerous references to "grounding" I don’t want to stuff it up, what’s the easy way to eliminate the chance of a spike? Cheers Brian   

 

Hi Brian – good question! Whenever we stick our hands (or heads) inside a computer case we should be very cautious about the possibility of zapping the components with a static electricity discharge. Static electricity can cause quite a lot of damage to sensitive parts, such as ram, inside your computer.

Professional repair shops probably have specialised equipment for grounding themselves and the simplest of these is an ‘earthing strap’ which is basically a little wrist strap you put on your wrist and attach to the computer case. This basically levels out the static charge between you and the components so you don’t zap them. Really professional operations might have grounding mats and all sorts of other devices including temperature and dust controlled environments.

I have been fiddling with PC bits for years. I have never used a strap or other device and to my knowledge I have never stuffed anything. Just be aware of course that once you open your computer case you do need to be cautious. No only could you damage the components but there could be residual current and you could injure yourself. I have scratched and cut myself on sharp corners in there and your blood will do nothing to lubricate the performance of your PC!

The only precautions I ever take is to have clean hands and to touch the case and power supply before touching any other parts like the ram or motherboard. Unless you have been running on the carpet and rubbing a balloon on your tummy this should discharge any static electricity difference between you and the PC.

Below I have linked a couple of articles that may give you some more information on the topic. The first link is the Google search I did to find the other sites.

Of course you know that upgrading your ram will probably be like getting a whole new computer. Win XP struggles with less than 512mb of ram but will really fly with 1G or more. Vista needs at least 2Gb but that’s progress for you! Let us know how you go Brian

Google Search

What is the best way to ground myself to discharge static electricity?

Avoid Static Damage to Your PC

How To Upgrade Your RAM

How to Add Memory Modules To Your Computer To Boost Speed

I just read this article at LifeHacker.com It’s about the myths around what works and what doesn’t  work when trying to speed up Windows. You should check it out

http://lifehacker.com/5033518/debunking-common-windows-performance-tweaking-myths

Windows XP and Vista do a fair job of self maintenance, etc. A lot of these techniques originated back in the Win 95 & 98 days when users could squeeze a little more performance out of Windows with a few behind the scenes tricks. They simply don’t work much anymore.

Now I don’t agree with everything in the article. Here’s my thoughts:

Disabling QoS to Free Up 20% of Bandwidth

Yep – this has little to no effect for most people. Your connection rarely runs at 100%

Clean, Defrag and Boost Your RAM With SnakeOil Memory Optimizer

I absolutely agree. In every case I have seen these programs used they have made the situation worse not better. I think they may have had a use back in Windows 95 but even by Windows 98 they were useless

Cleaning the Registry Improves Performance

I disagree with this one. I think a good registry cleaner can make a noticeable difference. Just make sure you use a reputable program that makes registry back-ups. For a free product I find CCleaner very good.

Disabling Services to Speed Up the Computer

I disagree. Some services can be disabled and DO make a difference. Some programs install their services that don’t offer much functionality and can be disabled. For example iTunes installs a number of services including 1 to check for software updates, 1 to launch iTunes when you plug in your iPod, 1 to communicate across a network with iPods and iPhones and others. You don’t need all these processes running in the background and if you have a lot of unnecessary ones it will slow you down. So check out your running processes and carefully and selectively disable the ones you don’t need.

Refer this site for detailed information on each service BlackViper.com

OK so now we know how NOT to speed up our PC. Tomorrow I will send you my suggestions on what you can do that WILL speed up your PC.

If anyone has any suggestions or ideas please email me or leave them in the comments.