Ask A Geek

Q: I have a Mac and want to mange several email accounts using one program. Is this possible?

A: The easiest way to set up your Mac to receive email from multiple accounts is to configure them all using Mail.app. Since Mail.app ships with OS X, you won’t need to download any additional applications. You also do not need to have a .Mac subscription to use Mail.app, so you won’t have to pay for any additional services. If you follow the tutorial on setting up multiple accounts in Mail.app, you will be able to check your mail from multiple locations using one application. Before you begin you will need the usernames and passwords for your accounts, your ISP’s SMTP address, and the addresses of the mail servers for each of your accounts.

Q: I just bought a Maxtor Personal Storage 3200 external 500GB drive for my Toshiba Tecra laptop. I’m seeing mixed reviews on this product. Was it a good purchase?

A: The Maxtor Personal Storage 3200 External USB drive is one of many easy to use backup solutions for the average PC user. Since you purchased the 500GB model, you should have enough space to backup information from multiple PCs or backup your entire hard drive regularly. Maxtor is known for making reliable internal and external storage solutions, and if you search you may be able to find more information from other users about their experience with the drive. Pricegrabber.com has several reviews of this device, and multiple people have complained that it lacks a power button, which is an inconvenience. Other than that there aren’t a lot of negative comments about the device.

In the future you can use Pricegrabber.com, Consumer Reports, and Amazon.com to read reviews about devices before you purchase them. If you receive a device and you are unhappy with it within the first few days of buying it, take advantage of the company’s buyer’s remorse policy and return it for a refund before you get stuck with it.

Q: I have a problem with playing videos on my computer. I can hear the audio but fail to see any picture. I have tried most players like wpm, VLC, RealPlayer, Divx and all seem to have the same problem. I believe it’s a codec problem and have tried uninstalling the codec’s on my pc and reinstalling from some of the Codec packs I have found online, I even used Codec Sniper to eliminate any broken codec’s it found and still no luck. Please Help!

A: Since the video display problems you are describing are affecting playback in all of the applications you are using, the problem may be your video driver itself. Go to your PC manufacturer’s web site and find the newest video driver available for your PC. Once you have downloaded and installed the new driver, try playing the video again. Try a variety of video types to find out whether or not the new video drivers have resolved the problem. It is possible that some videos may have encoding problems and may not play smoothly on any PC.