Q. I have a digital camera that supports SD/MMC (Secure Digital/MultiMedia cards) cards. I can read an SD card on my machine but not an MMC. What is the difference between them? A. Other than ‘one works, one doesn’t’ no one could come up with an explanation. It was suggested that you might look for help in the ‘Photo Equipment’ chat board on eBay. Q. I have a digital camera that has a memory card, and a card reader,but I don’t know how to get the image from the camera into the computer. A. When you connect the USB card reader to the PC, it will be be detected and assigned a drive letter - usually the next letter after your CD ROM drive. Open up a copy of Windows Explorer, minimize My Documents (or Desktop) and expand “My Computer”. Minimize drive C by clicking he ‘-’ next to it. You should now have a list of drives - including one for the card reader - it will have ‘Removable Media’ as a label. Double-click it - you should see a folder in the right window of Windows Explorer named DCIM (Digital Camera Images). Open it. You should now see a folder with the brand of your camera. Open it, and you will see your images as files or thumbnails, depending upon your folder options. With most image editing software you can then drag-and-drop the file(s) into the editing window of the program. The reason for the DCIM is that you may also use the media card on some other device, such as a smart phone or music device. Q. Any comments on the latest flaw in Internet Explorer? A. After a bit of a discussion trying to identify which flaw you meant, it was determined that you were talking about the various ‘spoof’ trojans that claim to be ‘the latest update’ from Microsoft. Microsoft does not ship updates, or include them in e-mails, etc. Your best course of action is to frequently do a Windows Update and download the fixes from there. Note that many of the frauds look very seductive - they link to Microsoft sites, etc. but the ‘payload’ often is a site that if you look closely comes from eastern Europe. If you subscribe to Microsoft Security Alerts, (and you know who you are) then you will be familiar with their delivery mechanism. Q. We are using QuickBooks - Multi-User. Is it possible to set it up so that only a single user has access to the checkbook in Windows? A. It is not a function of Windows - it must be activated within QuickBooks. If you aren’t set up to ask for an account and password from within QuickBooks, then you must start there. Q. I am looking at a Centrino notebook, one at Staples looks interesting, is about $200 less than other machines that I’ve looked at, but only has 256MB of RAM. I don’t want to purchase over the internet. Comments? A. 256MB is a bit small. You should check to see that it has stuff on it that you might have assumed is there - for example, does it have a floppy drive, does it have a parallel port - or do you need a port replicator to get these capabilities? Also, have you compared bundled software? Q. I upgraded to Windows XP and now my HP printer doesn’t have all of the functionalilty that it had previously. What happened? A. The drivers that are bundled in XP are somewhat generic - they support common features across families of printers, but don’t get into the higher functionality. For those you need to go to the manufacturer’s web-site and download the correct driver. HP is very good about providing drivers for printers up to about 5 years old or so. Not all manufacturers do so - Epson, for example, did not provide Windows 2000 drivers for the Color Stylus 600 printer that I had that was less than a year old. The Microsoft driver would not support any paper sizes other than standard. During the RA session we went to the HP site, support, and found the driver. It was a self-extracting .EXE file that would expand itself and create the files for the driver install. There usually is a ‘SETUP’ or ‘INSTALL’ program. It is recommended that you download the file from the site into a folder ‘DOWNLOADS’ and a sub-folder named for the device. |
| Bruce Preston is president of West Mountain Systems, a consultancy in Ridgefield, CT specializing in database applications. A DACS director, Bruce also leads the Access SIG. Members may send tech queries to Bruce at askdacs@dacs.org. |
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