Aunty Virus 23rd May 2012

Wed, 23 May 2012 06:10:25 GMT

Robert from Torrevieja asks:
Dear Aunty. I am new to computers so I am confused to say the least. My problem is I have downloaded some music & everything is copied twice. How can I remove or delete it? My music is on a USB stick and Windows Media Player. I have the book “Computing for dummies” but I cannot find an answer.
Aunty Says:
Hello Robert. What I have seen happen frequently is when you copy a load of MP3 music files from one place to another you end up with two sets of the same (the copy on the USB stick and the original in your download or My Music folder). You can delete any duplicated MP3’s by using the right mouse button and ‘delete’ and the best way to avoid this in the future is to ‘cut’ or ‘move’ the MP3 files from one folder and ‘paste’ to another using the right mouse button. One very confusing thing about Media Player (and iTunes etc) is the way they create ‘libraries’ of all your music. You should think of a library as simply a list of tunes that points to the actual MP3 files you have downloaded. For example, you could manually create a new Media Player library called ‘Jazz’ and point it to all of your jazz music regardless of whether it is on your computer, an external drive called E: or a USB memory stick called F:.

Lorna via email asks:
Hello Aunty. During the 1960's to the 1980's it was normal to take 35mm photographic transparencies instead of photos but the unfortunate drawback was that it meant that storage in boxes quickly became a problem. I have eight boxes, so about 800 of happy memories but so much space is now being taken up and I want to find another way of being able to view my collection & send copies to my friends. Do you have any knowledge of how I can transfer these transparencies on to say, a memory stick or similar? I know it’s going to be a long job but I am willing to undertake it as I need the space. I have contacted friends but they have not tackled this themselves, although they like the idea. Thanks a lot for any information you can give me.
Aunty Says:
Hi Lorna. This was a disastrous project my poor deluded Brother decided to undertake on the vast family photo collection, and he unfortunately enlisted the services of a local greedy Kodak shop. He got to about 2000 slides (and £800) before he realised one can buy a simple device for around £60 that’ll pretty much do everything. I think it was by a company called Veho, and it was bought from Amazon or Ebay. It was only a small device that could write to a flash SD memory card or connect via USB to a computer.

Ray via email asks:
Dear Aunty. Could you please advise how to delete items (ntuser.dat.LOG1 and several others) from my Docs. I have 7 of these and just do not understand where they come from.
Aunty Says:
They are Windows generated system files that are associated with the user account profiles. You can cause all kinds of problems by deleting them Ray, so unless you know for certain how to recover from some serious Windows problems, leave them be.

Del via email asks:
Dear Aunty, Help! Suddenly my USB ports are not working. Well sorry, two are and these ones are connected to a USB hub. One to my printer and the other to a webcam and the others accept my flash drives, camera and kindle, but no window is showing on my screen. I've tried installing and reinstalling from device manager as per Windows troubleshooting but no joy. I must confess my laptop will be celebrating its 6th birthday next month , could it be old age? One more thing, I have a separate mouse which works fine in every port.
Aunty Says:
From your description Del it doesn’t sound like you have a problem with the actual USB ports, rather the ‘autoplay’ popup service that normally comes up when a USB memory stick is plugged in. I’m assuming you have XP so you can fix this using the Microsoft repair wizard. Go to www.microsoft.com and type “XP autoplay repair” into the search box. (without the quotes) You should see a list of downloads and the top one is the one you want. The rest is fairly self explanatory, but if you have any problems then let me know.

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