So you are ready to pop in that new release DVD that you bought or rented but as soon as you put it in, lo and behold there is no sound. This is a problem that plagues many a person but before you go ahead tearing apart your computer looking for a solution the first thing you want to do is ensure that your speakers aren't set to mute, this usually solves 90% of the sound problems.

If you fall into the category of the other 10%, then more than likely you are missing an audio codec for your dvd player. Alot of people lose these codecs when they reinstall their OS for instance. Regardless of whatever you did to lose the codec, one thing remains. You need to get it back! Unfortunately the majority of these codecs are not free because of copyright/licensing issues. One program that has worked for me though is power dvd, look it up on google.

Off from Hiatus

Hey everyone:

It's been awhile since I've posted anything on here. School and work tends to limit the amount of tie I have avaiable to post. Thankfully I haven't completely forgotten about my blog so without further ado let us start with a new post.

Now a days you'd be hard pressed to find anyone without an ipod, whether it be an old nano or shuffle or the new nano generation ipods. As great as they are, people often have trouble setting up certain features on the ipod. Today we are going to discuss transferring music from your ipod to your computer.

Because of copyright issues, the ipod doesn't readily allow for the transfer of music back to your PC. Thankfully as with most technology there is always a workaround for this. If your ipod is connected to your computer go ahead and search for it on your computer. Once you've found it open up the folders in it until you find one called "ipod control" if you cant readily see it, it is set to hidden, to make it visible, go to control panel--> folder options-->view---->files and folders--->show hidden files and folders.

Once you've done this the ipod control folder will show up. Inside this folder, under music all your music files will be stored here. You will notice that they will be named with odd names but essentially it is the music on your ipod. From here it's a matter of simply copying , pasting and moving the music files wherever you want them on your computer, voila you're set!

Stay tuned for the next post as we will be showing you how to charge your ipod with gatorade and an onion

Check to see what's taking up your harddrive space

So you peruse through your computer one day and you notice that for some odd reason you hard drive space has shrunk tremendously. What could possibly be causing this shortage of precious space? There are quite a number of things that could actually be causing this, of course if you have alot of programs, videos and picture on your computer then your question to this problem is already answered. However, for most of us the answer to this question is not so easy to come by. Spyware often is the cause of this as it silently sneaks on to your computer and installs unwanted software. Even the most sophisticated anti spyware software sometimes lets spyware through.

If you want to get an idea of what is actually taking up your hard drive space I would recommend a little piece of software called Windir Stat. It scans your computer files and displays them as blocks, the larger the block the larger the file and as you guessed it the more hard drive space it takes up. It will even tell you the location of the file. In many cases, the file can be deleted, saving you some much needed hard drive space. I freed up 2 gigs of space. You can also check the location of any spyware that might have been installed.

All in all I think this is a must have for anyone, its a great analysis tool that lets you see the big picture on your hard drive, it also helps that it is free too!