My new external speakers are not working on my Mac Book Pro!!

Today I had a customer who owns a Mac Book Pro come in to the store today after buying a set of speakers from me last week. They are USB powered and plug into the headphone jack.

Mac's have a safety feature that sometimes turns your volume down when you plug in a set of headphones. When you plug in a set of external speakers, the Mac sees them as a set of headphones and can turn down the volume which make it appear as if the speakers are not working.

Unplug the speakers and you can hear your music again, plug in the speakers and oh no!, no sound again.

Do not fear. With the speakers plugged in, turn up the volume. You can do this by hitting the volume up button on the keyboard (F12).

No problem.

Have a good day.

Word 2000 not responding

Word 2000 not responding? Unistall Microsoft Office Live AddIn and blamo, all systems ago!!

Windows XP mode in Windows 7 Pro, Enterprise and Ultimate

So you have an old 98 application that worked in Windows XP but will not work in Windows 7 32 or 64 bit. What do you do? Jump off a bridge? Take back the new computer? Buy a new POS? No, it is as simple as 2 downloads.

Microsoft has a very easy walk through to follow.

Click here for the walkthrough

Thats it.

Enjoy.

Kyle

Windows 7 and Email

So you buy a new computer, get it home, setup Windows 7 and start looking for Outlook Express or Windows Mail and can not seem to find it. Well that's because it is not there. Stop looking.

I am not completely clear on why Microsoft in its infinite wisdom decided not to include an email program with Windows 7, but it didn't. Do not fret, Windows Live Mail is only a download away.

You can download Windows Live Mail here.

http://download.live.com/wlmail

You will find it quite different from Outlook Express and some what different from Windows Mail that came out with Vista.

A few Key things to note are:

1. Send and Receive is now called Sync.
This is because you can have multiple emails come into WLM. Gmail, Hotmail, your regular mail etc. and you can view all of your new mail in the first Inbox or view them individually from each of thier own sub folders below.
2. Address Book is now called Contacts and can be accessed near the bottom of the page on the left hand side.
3. There is now a calander that can be accessed online if you open a live.ca account or have an existing hotmail account.

You could also download Thunderbird from Mozilla or Incredimail and use their client as well.

--kc

Quicken 2000 and Windows 7

C: "Oh, there is one more thing I want transferred."
K: "Sure what is it?"
C: "My Quicken 2000."
K: "Oh, Let me try."

I then said to myself, remember when we tried to install Quicken on Vista, how long it took to find work a rounds, and even then it did not always work.

I pop in the disk, and I get the W7 warning that it may not be compatible. I say so what lets try anyways.

I click install and it starts to install, and behold it finishes too. I select restore from backup and bingo it is working as it should.

WOW, something written in 1999 worked in 7 natively. NICE.

--KC

QuickBooks and Windows 7

Yesterday as I was setting up a customers new Windows 7 Professional Systems the client informs me that he has 3 years of QB's to install. 2007, 2008 and 2009. I put on my confident face and said sure no problem, but the truth was I was unsure if 2007 would work correctly.

It took some effort to find all of the disks and licenses etc, but once we started it went fairly well. The key was to do a new backup up each onto my thumb drive first. When I tried to transfer the data it we nearly impossible.

After a couple of hours and many software updates, all three years worked perfectly.

It was a a relief and the client was happy. QB 2007 Pro was nothing but headaches on Vista but it looks like MS may have gotten more then a few things right in 7.

--KC

Where are my Games in Windows 7??

So you have just purchased a PC with Windows 7, or upgraded an existing one, go to play Spider Solitaire and "OMG Where did my games go??"

Do not fret, for some reason the games are not enabled. This may be a numbers things. Maybe less people play then don't play. We can easily enable the games.

Click on the start button.
In the Search text area type "features". This will open the the Programs and Features applet.
Click on the "Turn Windows features on or off" option.
Click on the check box for "Games" and hit apply.

There you go, all of your beloved Windows games are back.

--KC