PC Doctor June 23, 2010

Have your computer questions answered here! Search the PC Doctor archive or submit a question of your own at info@athollibrary.org

Dear PC Doctor:

            I have some DVD disks that someone gave me.  Can I use those to save stuff on?  I have a CD ROM drive on my computer.

                        Mary

Dear Mary:

            I’m afraid you can’t.  If you had a DVD ROM drive, you could write to both CD and DVD disks, but you can’t write to DVD disks with a CD ROM drive.  This is mainly because the CD technology and drives are older and weren’t made with the thought that DVD technology would be coming along to replace it.  Sorry!

                                                            PC Doctor

Dear PC Doctor:

            Every time I put in a CD in my drive, a window pops up asking what action I want to take or it starts to automatically run.  It’s annoying.  Is there any way I can stop it from doing that?  I want to decide myself what I will be doing with that CD.  I have Windows XP if that makes any difference.

                                                            Chris

Dear Chris:

            What you are talking about is the Autorun feature which automatically initiates a program contained on the disk regardless of your feelings on the matter.  You may have different ideas about which program you would like to open the disk up with.

            To turn it off ‘in the moment’, as you are inserting the CD, just hold down the Shift key while you insert the CD.   A little awkward, but it does the trick.

            If you want to get rid of it totally, double click on the My Computer icon on your desktop.  Find your CD drive (which is usually D: ) and right click on it.  From the drop down menu choose Properties.  Click on the AutoPlay tab and under “Select a content type, then choose an action for Windows to perform automatically when that type is used in this device”, there is a box that will list the type of media such as Music files, Pictures and so on.   For each type of media you will click the radio button next to “Select an action to perform” and then scroll down to Take no action.  Click on it and click on the Apply button.  If you want to change any other media, do the same thing for each and finally click the OK button.

                                                PC Doctor

Until next time… happy computing!




 

Posted: to Athol Library News on Tue, Jun 22, 2010
Updated: Thu, Jun 24, 2010