October 2002 Volume 20, Issue 10

Kokomo PC

Users Group

October 2002

A Message from the President:

Nothing like a quick cold snap to make you feel like snuggling up in front of your computer for a long evening of surfing, writing and conquering the world.

I had a good reception at the Tipton Airstream Campers Jamboree. I had an audience of about thirty people attend my presentation on Microsoft Excel. I covered many of the same items I have covered at our regular meetings.

The presentation was even interesting for me because the Excel version for Windows XP has a helper agent that is so smart it always seemed to be doing something to help me do things I didn’t want done. At one point I was showing how to drag formulas from one line down to the next. I did this about three times. On the third time the system did the drag for me. I couldn’t figure out how to stop it. I finally gave up.

If you have an idea for a meeting presentation that you think the group would enjoy please let me know. We work hard to get you the finest presentations available. Richard and Gene have done a very good job of getting people to come out and present for the Group. So if you have a desire to see something that interests you, let us know and we will try to get it set up for one of our upcoming meetings.

We have had a suggestion to take a road trip for one of our upcoming meetings. What would you think of that? In the past we have had successful road trips to places like the IUK Library. There is a new computer training center down in Tipton and they are giving free tours. Would this be a program that would make your day or make you stay home? I would like to know. Your feedback will help us to decide which way to go on this program.

If you have had an interesting experience using or fixing your computer please write up a story for our newsletter. We can all learn from your experiences. It is a good opportunity to express yourself and contribute to the success of the Group.

Mark Pendergast

Da Prez

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My Stupid CD Burner

I am having problems with my stupid CD burner. It is probably my own fault because I didn’t burn any CDs when I first got it. Now that I want to burn some, it doesn’t work and Dell is giving me the run around.

It started about a month ago when I bought some blank CDs and decided to use my CD burner. Actually it is my family’s computer. If it was mine, I probably would have used all the features fairly quickly after I bought it. As it is, I only use it occasionally.

I fired up the Roxio CD copy software and plopped in a nice CD. It was M.C. Hammer’s You can’t touch this. (A rap CD from the time before rap was gangsta rap.) I selected this because it was my oldest CD and I heard that some of the new CDs have copy protection.

The software read all the tracks and ejected the CD asking me to insert a blank one. Then it burned about one and a half tracks before locking up for five minutes and ejecting the disk with a buffer under-run error.

Well, I selected a Saturday when I had nothing else planned. I read through the error messages on Windows XP and started doing what they recommended. I turned off my screen saver. I turned off power management. I defragmented my hard drive. I used msconfig to kill off all my background programs. I had already killed off my virus protection because it was such a memory hog.

Then I tried it again. I got the same result. Another beautiful silver drink coaster.

I decided that windows XP was sucking up all the physical memory in the system so I ordered a new RAM module. I was running 128MB in the system. I added another 256MB for a total of 384MB. This seemed to be plenty to run the system. The Windows XP boot was about 10 times as fast.

I tried again to burn a CD. Another silver Frisbee.

At this point I looked through the Dell support web page looking for ideas. They had two ideas I had not tried. The first was to turn off DMA on the IDE card on the CD Burner. I went through the Device manager and turned off DMA on my CD Burner. No change.

The second was to try a different brand of disks. I went to Wal-Mart and got three different brands of disks. None of the disks worked. Although some produced different errors than others.

At this point I decided to call Dell support and talk to a human being. My first representative was Michelle. She seemed to know a great deal and walked me through all the stuff I had already done from the error messages and web page. She then suggested that I reload the Roxio software. We went in and deleted it. Then When I tried to find my disk to reinstall, I could not find it. She suggested calling customer service the next Monday and ordering another one. She said she would call me later in the week to see how things were going.

Eventually my son found the Roxio disk in with his game disks. It looked nothing like a Roxio disk. It was a generic blue disk that said applications on it. In fine print it mentioned that it had the Roxio software on it.

I reloaded the software and tried again. No luck - another silver Frisbee.

I called Dell support again and got another Michelle. She did not seem to know which end of the computer was up. She had me redo a number of the things I had already done. Then we tried a new disk copy. We got a ‘new’ error message that I had not seen before. (I suspect that it was because the Maxell disks did not get along with the Burner.) Due to this error Michelle decided that she was off the hook and the problem was that my Windows XP operating system software was screwed up. I would have to go to the pay support line. How nice. She transferred me to the Software pay support line.

I got cut off during the transfer and had to call in again. The system made me put in a credit card number before it would even connect me to a human. Chase was kind enough to take my credit card number again and bill me $29.95 for the privilege. He gave me an order number and transferred me to the Software Support group.

I got to talk to Ellis in the Software support group. He explained that the Operating System Group charges $29.95 for calls and the regular application software group charges $29. This meant that I had been transferred to the wrong group. He transferred me back to the Operating System support group.

The Operating System support group number prompted me for my credit card number again. No I got to talk to Carl. He asked me what I wanted and when I told him about my CD burner problem he promptly told me I was in the wring place and needed the Software support group. He issued a credit for my $29.95 and transferred me back to Software support.

The software support line asked me for my credit card number again. Then I got to talk to Chase again. He took my credit card number billed me $29 and gave me another order number. He apologized for the misdirection the first time around. He transferred me to the Software support department again.

This time I got to talk to Anita. I told her about my problems with Roxio and my CD Burner. She asked me a few questions and told me the Roxio was fine. She suggested I download a new driver for my CD Burner. (I paid $29 to be told to download a driver? I made a mental note to get a refund.) She said she would call or send an email to see how I was doing later in the week.

I logged on to the Dell support Web page and started looking for drivers. The dell page is very nice because you can put in your systems "Service Tag" number and the page gets customized to show only the things that apply to your computer. Well the screen did not show a driver for a NEC CD Burner no matter how I looked at it. I gave up and decided to call tech support again.

I got Errol on the support line. He mentioned that there was no new driver for my CD Burner. He then proceeded to try to fix my problem. He had me uninstall the Roxio Software again. This time we also went into the registry editor and made sure it was dead. We made a copy of the registry - just in case - and deleted all the entries for Adaptec and Roxio. Then we restarted the computer and reloaded Roxio.

Then we tried to burn a CD. Junk! Next we tried the full blown Roxio Easy CD creator. (Up to this time I had been using the very simple Roxio CD copy utility program. We tried to copy just one track of the CD as a project. It died too.

I must have mentioned at some point that I had added memory to the system because he suggested checking the virtual memory settings on the system. We went to my computer > properties > advanced > performance > Virtual memory. Dell had overridden the default value of ‘let Windows figure it out’ and hard coded the initial and max swap file sizes. Errol had me set the new values to three times and five times the amount of physical memory I had in the system. We burned another disk. Another dud.

Errol suggested that he talk to his supervisor and peers and try to work something out. He would call me.

A week went by - nobody called.

The next Saturday I decided to take another crack at it. I sat down and tried everything I knew how to do. I disabled the last of my background programs. I opened the case of the computer and reseated all the cables to the CD Burner. I defragged the hard drive.

I remembered I had a CD drive cleaner CD somewhere and went to look for it. Twenty minutes later I found it mixed in with my kids game CDs. I ran it for 30 seconds to clean out any gunk in the drive. I tried to burn a CD and got junk again - buffer underrun error.

I decided to call Dell support again. I got Ervin. I gave him my tale of woe and told him I had tried everything, and then some. I told him it was my personal opinion that the hardware was not working and that software and setup had nothing to do with the problem. Ervin was intrigued. He had me enter the Help and Support center located in the Start Menu. (I don’t know if this is a Dell thing or a Microsoft thing. I suspect it is a Microsoft thing.) I typed "burn a CD" in the search window. It came back with a page on how to burn a CD from Windows directly.

I stuck in a Blank CD and followed the instructions. I got an error message - "D:\ is not accessible - incorrect function" . Ervin said "this is a hardware error. I need to send you a new drive". He got my shipping information and said it would ship out Monday.

I am waiting for the drive to arrive. I hope this does the trick. (If not the next stop is reload Windows and then, if that doesn’t work, a new mother board. Yikes!)

A last minute update. I called Dell Customer Service about my refund on the $29 software support that didn’t provide much support. They had no record of it. So I asked if the Software Support group kept their own set of books. Yes, indeed they did. I told them that I considered this a problem and they said thanks and call again.

I called the Software group again. I talked to Ed. He said he couldn’t help me, but he would pass me up to his supervisor. The supervisor, Jeff, listened to my tale of woe again. He commented that Anita had actually provided support to me - told me to clean my hard drive, reload the software etc. I explained that the call lasted two minutes and that I had already done everything she told me to do in the six hours I had already spent on the phone with tech support. He must have had access to my file, because he agreed that I had probably done everything in the world to my PC at that point and that Anita probably didn’t know much about drivers. He was also impressed that I had new hardware on order. He issued me my refund. (I like these Dell guys!)

Stay tuned for more developments on this story.

Mark Pendergast

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Excel Tip-o-the-day

When you construct a spreadsheet that has complicated formulas it is nice to show intermediate results and then the final result. For example labor cost times hours per day is daily cost times days per month is monthly cost times months per year is annual cost. If you just want to present the monthly and annual costs this can be messy.

Select the columns that are not required for the summary and use the Format > Columns > Hide command from the main menu bar.

This will hide the columns you don’t need. Later you can select the columns on either side of the hidden ones and use Format > Columns > Unhide to get them back again.

Mark Pendergast

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