A world without sound is boring. The same goes to computers. Imagine playing quake with the beeps from the PC speaker. The sound card is a piece of hardware to generate high quality sound. It enables your to listen to your CD, record voices with the microphone and playing your sound files.

Don't Throw Away Your Old RAM

If you have and old PC that utilizes old 32 bit RAM, don't throw it away. If you have and AWE (advance wavetable effect) sound card, with empty memory slots, you may plug it into your soundcard to load more instruments. Very useful. If you want, you can go to computer junkyards or dealer with old computers to find some old 32 bit RAM. You can get it for almost nothing.

More, more!

If you are using an AWE soundcard, you might want to get more voices or instruments. Go to your manufacturer's website and search for sound fonts. Like fonts, they are the same instruments but produces different sounds. The amount of sound fonts you can load at a time depends entirely on how much memory you have.

No Sound From Mike

An ageing sound card probably doesn't supply the DC voltage needed to power a new electrets microphone-the kind with a mini-stereo (ring-tip-sleeve) plug on the cable. If so, you'll need either an inline battery pack to power the new microphone, or an older dynamic microphone that doesn't need DC power. But the best bet is to throw it away and get a new one.

Hardware problems are quite difficult to tackle, worse if under Windows. There was once when installing a software, I accidentally inserted the Audio hardware diskette. Thinking it was harmless, I went on, thinking I can always "undo" everything again. How wrong was I. The next moment I restarted Windows, I got the blue screen of death. Yeah, Windows is very nasty when it comes to hardware.

Find The Culprit

Always calm down. Try to solve the problem yourself before resolving to formatting or sending to your computer dealer. First, know what's happening and the cause of it. In my case, the installation must have overwrite my old setting and replaced the wrong file. There must be a reason why Windows is acting improperly.

Logging Back On

First, try to log back on. If you can't log into Windows, don't panic. Restart the computer. When the text "Starting Windows 98..." appears, press F8. A menu will appear. Choose "Safe Mode" to continue. Safe mode will take some time to load. When you are in Windows, go to Control Panel, System. Click on the Device Manager tab. Find the faulty hardware driver and delete it. Open autoexec.bat and config.sys (both are hidden files in your root directory) with notepad. If the hardware is a CD-ROM or sound card, it will probably write add some lines. Check whether there are backup file (autoexec.bak, autoexec.b~k e.g.) since most installation will back up the 2 important files. If there is, simply replace them with the backup files. If there isn't, put "REM " in front of every line that loads the hardware.

Repairing

When you restart, your computer is probably ok, since you have deleted all instances of the hardware drivers. But the hardware isn't functioning. re-install the hardware drivers, restart and you're done! If the problem persists, your probably have a system conflict go to the next page for more.

To add items when you right-click on the Start Button:

1. Start Regedit

2. Go to HKey_Classes_Root / Directory / Shell

3. Right-click on Shell and select New / Key

4. Type in the name of the key and press the Enter key

5. In the Default name that shows in the right hand panel, you can add a title with a & character in front of the letter for a shortcut

6. Right-click on the key you just created and create another key under it called command

7. For the value of this command, enter the full path and program you want to execute

8. Now when you right click on the Start Button, your new program will show up. You do not need to reboot first.

9. For example, if you wanted WinWord, you would add that as the first key, the default in the right panel would be &WinWord so when you right click on the Start Button, the W would be underlined and you could just press that key. The command would be something like C:\MSOFFICE\WINWORD\WINWORD.EXE

Changes in Windows Server 2003
What are the changes in default behavior in Windows Server 2003?

The Windows security initiative, launched in the spring of 2002, has the goal of further strengthening the security of Windows operating systems for servers. During the early phases of this initiative, the Windows Server team examined the entire Windows Server 2003 code base, developed threat models to uncover security weaknesses in the product, and created design changes to mitigate those threats.

In the time between the release of Windows 2000 Server and the release of Windows Server 2003, numerous design changes were made to the product as a result of the Windows security initiative. Some of these design changes represent changes to the default configuration of a newly created or upgraded server.

Traditionally, each new Windows server operating system release is designed with default configuration settings that support the protocols, services, and applications currently running on the previous releases, without requiring these protocols, services, and applications to be reconfigured.

As part of the security initiative, Microsoft has chosen to change this policy so that the server product is secure “out of the box.” Administrators who reconfigure their server configurations to restore previous defaults should consider whether these changes enhance or reduce the security of their servers and network.

A high-level overview of design changes that were made to the Microsoft Windows Server 2003 family of operating systems. This document can assist developers and IT professionals who migrate their servers to Windows Server 2003 or developers who create or modify applications and scripts to run on Windows Server 2003. This document is intended to help this audience understand why the design changes were made, the implications of the changes, and any options that can be used to revert to the previous default settings, if desired.

Better View of Worksheet

Ever wish you had a bigger monitor? Well, maybe you don't really need a bigger monitor--what you need is a bigger view of your worksheet. Just choose View, Full Screen. Excel will display only your worksheet and the menu bar--everything else has been neatly tucked away out of view. That means you can see more of your work. When you're ready to return to the normal view, choose Close Full Screen from the small floating toolbar that Excel displays during Full Screen view. Or simply deselect Full Screen on the View menu.

Understanding Date Arithmetic
Most applications store dates as an integer and time as a decimal value. As a result, you can use simple calculations to produce date- and time-specific values. For instance, to learn the number of days between two dates, you could use the simple formula

enddate - startdate

In a similar manner, you could return a date in the future by adding a value to a date in the form

startdate + days

Since one of your formula references contains a date, you may need to format the cell containing the above formula as a Number cell to display the actual value.

If you find yourself typing long words again and again, you should consider setting up typing shortcuts, so you only need to type in part of the word and Word fills in the rest. For example, if I need to type New Smyrna Beach (the town where I live), I just type NSB; then I press the SPACEBAR, Word automatically spells out all the words.

Here's how I set up this shortcut:

1. On the Tools menu, click AutoCorrect. Select the Replace text as you type check box.

2. In the Replace box, type an abbreviation you will remember—for example, NSB.

3. In the With box, type the complete spelling of the word—for example, New Smyrna Beach.

4. Click Add.

5. Repeat steps 2 and 3 to add additional terms, then click OK.

You can also use this tip to quickly type people's names, technical terms—anything you want. And once you add a term to your AutoCorrect list, it also works in PowerPoint and Outlook—if you use Word as your default e-mail editor.

If your copy of Word 2000 seems to have a few unexplainable bugs, a last-resort solution to your problems might be to check for installation errors. Word 2000 comes with a module for checking its own integrity. (Ah, what a feature--wouldn't it be nice if our politicians came with such capabilities?) First, shut down any other running programs, then choose Help, Detect And Repair. Click the Start button, and Word will give your installation a look to see whether it finds any problem. Be warned that this process takes at least 20 minutes to complete, so don't run the Detect And Repair option if you're in the middle of something important.

Does your web browser toolbar include buttons you never need? How would you like to slim down your buttons? Or maybe you want to add some buttons for commonly used functions such as "Full Screen" or "Print Preview"? Well, today I'm going to show you how.

With Internet Explorer all you need to do is right click an empty area of the toolbar at the top of your browser and select "Customize".

You'll find a list of options you can add on the left and ones currently there that you can remove on the right.

To add a button simply highlight it on the left-hand list and click the "Add" button.

To remove a button, highlight it on the right-side list and click "Remove".

You can also change the order that buttons appear by moving them up and down the list.

With Firefox you do the same thing: right click the toolbar and choose "Customize".

You'll get a list of items that can be added to the toolbar.

Just click and drag the items you want to where you want them on the toolbar.

Play around with the possibilities. If you mess up, just click the "Restore Default Settings" button to put it all back the way it was.

It's so nice to have control over the look of my browser.