Ask A Geek

Q: I have a dell inspiron 531 and I am having problems ripping audio files from my e: drive to WMP 11. When I go into the control panel to manually bring up an audio file from a cd the drive is only classified as a DVD drive. I tried a reboot to clear and then reinstall the drivers using the factory provided disks but it didn’t work. What should I do?

Q: I have Windows XP media edition. I use window media player for storing my music. I then sync it to my Creative ZEN MP3 player. The weird problem I am having is that when I sync up and it transfers my music to the ZEN, some of the album art does not match the artist! It is correct on my computer in Windows Media Player. Is this a problem with my ZEN or Media player? Or has anyone ever heard of this problem?

Q: I have Windows XP and Windows media player. I believe that I am doing everything right because sometimes it will work and other times it will not. Here’s the problem, I am on the copy to CD or device screen and I select the playlist and click on copy. It will say ready to copy and then the playlist will turn brown for a few seconds like it is getting ready to convert and then it will say coping in progress to the right of my playlist and after about 2 seconds it stops.

Everything on the playlist turns back to white and says ready to copy and the same process just repeats itself. It has only worked 3 times out of a whole bunch. I don’t understand because I am not doing anything different. It acts like it is going to copy for 2 seconds then just says ready to copy. I tried looking online at the media player website, but apparently no one else has this problem but me!

Q: I want to play video clips like AVI on Windows Media Player v11 but I cannot. It just plays WMV clips, help?

Q: I prepared a PowerPoint presentation that had a sound file in it (the presentation was prepared using Microsoft 2003 PowerPoint and the sound file was a song from a CD copied to Windows Media Player). The PP ran fine on my computer and played the song. When I ran the PP on another laptop (that had Windows Media Player and PowerPoint installed ) the PP ran, but not the song – I tried it using both a CD rom and a data stick. I know it played on my computer because that is where the original sound file is. How do I get a PP with a sound file to play on a computer that doesn’t have the original file on it?

Q: I have a new HP laptop with Vista. I can not get my media player to burn CD’s or burn a DVD!

Q: How do you remove HighMAT off of Windows Media Player 10? I can’t record a audio CDs because of this.

Q: I have a Dell Optiplex GX100 PC and it runs Windows XP Pro. It has Windows Media Player 10 and every time I try to sync music to my mp3 a bow pops up stating the media is write protected. How do I get past that to record music?

Q: Can someone help me get my Windows Media Player working?

I have tried versions, 9, 10, and 11 and they all do the same thing. On my home build computer running Windows XP Home with SP2 all versions of WMP become unresponsive within 20 seconds of opening it. At the top after WMP it say’s (not responding). Then I have to close the program and do a End Task to get it off the screen. WMP just freezes and I can’t do anything with it except close it.

I’m trying to load songs on WMP so I can sync them to my Sandisk Sansa c250 player I just got but WMP won’t work long enough for me to do anything. I need to load my songs in WMP then sync them to my player, which I’m told I must use WMP to sync my songs. The Gold medal goes to the person who can help me get my WMP to stop responding.