johngie

I cracked it - more more by luck and intuition than anything else. I clicked on the Sync drop-down and selected "Refresh Devices". hey presto - sound! I hope this might help someone else.

It is, although I have tried the others too with no success. I've also compared settings and the codec list with another computer on which everything works - they are identical.

I recently found that WMP10 would not play audio - either from audio only files (.wav or mp3) or the audio from video files (avi, .wmv). It won't play CD's either. Other media applications (Real Player, Winamp and VLC media Player) work fine in all modes, as do the "windows sounds". Obviously, the sound card is OK and not muted etc, and all channels of the windows mixer are "up". Neither is the mute button in WMP checked. I upgraded WMP10 to WMP11, hoping that a fresh install would cure the problem, but it hasn't. If I play an audio file with WMP, the visualisation is active but no sound. Other media apps still work fine. I can also confirm that mplayer2.exe works. There are no error messages. Device Manager shows no issues at all. OS is XPHome, SP3. SP3 has been installed for some time and everything worked fine, so I don't think it's the cause of this. Help!!!!

I don't think it's anything to do with the age of the history; sometimes I'm losing history of sites visited only minutes before. It does seem to be connected to changing the History Sort. Johngie

From time to time I seem to lose all IE History; nothing to do with the "days to keep..." since it can lose history from even moments before. It seems to happen when I try to change the 'View' criteria from the default 'by date'. I suddenly find that the history I had been looking at moments before has vanished. It's no longer in the History folder either. I'm using IE6 in WinXP Home SP2. Has anyone come across this? Regards, Johngie

I have three individually named USB external drives that I connect to my computer. The fixed drives are A, C, D and E so the first available drive letter is F. When I plug in the drive that I've assigned to F (using Disk Management) it takes that letter and all is well. When I first started doing this, unplugging the drive would make that letter (F) available again, so if I plugged in that drive it would take the letter F again. Now it doesn't do that. Each time I plug in again, it increments by one so it becomes G, then H and so on. It no longer "releases" its previous drive letter for re-use. Rebooting the computer resets it back to F but the same behaviour then repeats, i.e. incrementing each time. I get exactly the same behaviour from all other USB drives and from a memory card reader, so it's not a function of the drive hardware. Someone previously suggested deleting the entire data from HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\MountedDevices] but that seems very drastic. If I do delete all the data from that key, what will happen? Am I likely to have an unusable computer? johngie

My "main" PC is XP Home with a USB connected external drive I use for backups. My second PC is a Win98 laptop and I want to back up this one to the same external drive. So in the main PC I set the external drive for sharing, the laptop can see it and all's well. But each time I reboot the main PC, the sharing properties for the external drive have disappeared and I have to reset them again. How can I make them "sticky"? johngie

Brilliant advice - thank you very much. I've gone with WinBackup. Once I've got used to it I'll ditch Microsoft Backup completely. Johngie

I have a Win98 (first edition) laptop networked to a WinXP desktop. I want to back up the laptop over the network to an external drive connected to the desktop; that's set up for sharing and the laptop can see that drive OK. I've installed the Win98 backup applet. When I try to start the backup the only format it allows me to choose is QIC and it wants to format the media as a QIC tape. (That's even when I choose 'file' as the backup). This is quite different from the WinNT backup I use on the WinXP desktop. Is there a way round this? If not, can anyone recommend a third party backup solution for backing up to disk? It must be able to do differential backups. Regards

I'm trying to set a network to enable printer and file sharing. Johngie

I'm trying to set up home network for the first time. I have 2 PC's (WinXP Home desktop and Win98 laptop) both connected by their ethernet adapters to a Linksys DSL Gateway/4-port router. Both can access the internet without any problems via the DSL Router. Although dial-up modems are fitted to both PC's they are not used except in emergency ( i.e. DSL problems). I started the Network Setup Wizard on the XP PC and was surprised to get the message: The Wizard found a shared Internet connection on the computer "Unknown Internet Connection Sharing Device" and it recommended that I should use it. This didn't make sense to me (since I was expecting to chose "...connects through a residential gateway....") and, until I can determine why I get this odd message, I've taken the coward's way out and gone no further! I've no idea what this "unknown device" is, unless the Wizard is treating the Router itself as a computer. The other odd thing is that, after starting the Wizard, when I open Control Panel > Network Connections I see a "new" connection under Internet Gateway that shows a disabled Internet connection. Obvioulsy the "proper" connection is through the router. When I re-boot the PC, this "new" connection disappears from Network Connections and I'm just left with the active LAN connection. I would be really grateful if someone out there could help me on this one. Obviously I don't want to kill off what is a perfectly good Internet connection via the router. Regards, Johngie

Greetings from Wales, UK. I've been using computers for a long time (started with a Tandy TRS-80!) and OS's through DOS 3.3 upwards, taking Win286, 3.0, 3.1, 95, 98 on the way to XP Home. I'm no guru though! Regards / Cofion John Gruffydd (aka johngie)