Q. I need help with getting computers to automatically play CDs when I insert them. On three computers over the past few years, Windows has lost its ability to auto-start a CD. It happened on two drives of a Micron with Windows 95, then one drive of a Dell desktop with Windows ME.
Months later the second drive of the Dell failed to self-start CDs. The same has now happened on my Dell laptop with Windows XP. This has impacted many CDs. I must click Start/Run, browse to the appropriate file and click.
It seems that every CD drive on every computer eventually stops self-starting CDs. Can this problem be fixed? I want my auto-start feature back.
Bill Lane, Las Vegas
A. Windows operating systems always have been vulnerable to this glitch because the software includes modules to let a user turn off that AutoPlay feature you want, Mr. L.
Furthermore, some kind of gremlin that surfaced right along with Windows 95 makes some computers automatically change those AutoPlay settings. Some speculate that when softwaremakers try to add AutoPlay features to their installation discs, the process disables the automatic play feature that is a Windows module.
Almost always a fix is as simple as finding the AutoPlay setting and restoring it. In XP, open the My Computer folder and right-click on the icon for your CD drive and select Properties.
The box that appears includes an AutoPlay tab that lets users restore defaults or change the settings for whether AutoPlay is invoked for various types of discs, such as music, movies and data.
Other versions include a check box for switching AutoPlay on or off.
Should all these steps fail, your problem can be solved by reloading the CD drive’s underlying software drivers or updating them. In Windows XP, right-click on the My Computer icon and select the Hardware tab and then go to the Device Manager.
Other versions of Windows have the Device Manager on the My Computer menu.
Scroll down to the listing for CD drives, select the errant drive and right-click, and then select Properties. There you will find command buttons to update the drivers and to remove them. Do the update first. If that doesn’t work, you can remove the drivers and then reboot the computer.
Q. Our son, who is entering high school in the fall, has been diagnosed with a reading disorder. We have used Books on Tape for some of his school textbooks, but we understand there are software programs that read word texts.
Do they work well with text that is scanned into the computer? We have a PC. Any suggestions?
David and Sarah, [email protected]
A. You folks are living with this situation, so you know better than I do about how much time you can spare for this goal of converting school materials into computerized speech. I can tell you that the real roadblock you face is the amount of time you’ll need to spend scanning school material into your computer.
The rest is something of a cakewalk.
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Blessedly, there are many ways of getting modern PCs to read text aloud. The technology has reached the point where the computer sounds pretty human.
It’s too bad you don’t have a Mac instead of a PC, because Apple has built an instantly accessible text reader into its operating systems from nearly the beginning. But PC software now abounds in the text-to-talk arena.
Point your PC’s browser to www.readingmadeeasy.com and you’ll be able to download a free text-converter called E-Text Reader and learn about other options that cost money but deliver much to those who need this kind of assistance.
The Web site and E-Text Reader comes from Premier Assistive Technology Inc. of Dewitt, Miss., which offers software designed to do exactly what you want to accomplish. In addition, the company offers a $149 scan-to-speech product that handles the whole process, from controlling your scanner to converting text to reading it aloud.
This premium product employs far more sophisticated technology than the free E-Text Reader, which uses rudimentary pronunciation and default voices built into Windows, such as Microsoft Sam, Microsoft Mary and Microsoft Mike.
You will quickly find that it takes a frustrating amount of time to scan each page of school material. Figure on 30 seconds or a minute per page to scan in the text and run the optical character-recognition software that comes with a great many scanners. At that point E-Text Reader will do a bang-up job of reading aloud the text file your OCR software creates. It does so in limited and stilted voices.
The free software works great, but it also works wonders to whet one’s appetite for the paid products. You will find demos of the better-sounding voices on the Web site.
The operating system will sense the CD drive and install the drivers it needs.
Q. I am just wondering whether DVD+/-RW means it can be used as a floppy disk by just dragging and dropping the files into the drive? I recently purchased a DVD burner, and all it has is Sonic burner software.
I didn’t see any option for the RW. The CD burner that I have has InCD, which allows me to do that for CD-RW media. I was expecting the similar thing from a DVD burner.
Mahesh [email protected].
A. Software for burning DVDs and CDs generally does not differentiate between what kind of disc is in a drive as long as it is correctly formatted, and so your answer is not to spin your discs fretting over it.
You will find that if you purchase one of the relatively costly rewritable DVDs (in either the plus or minus configuration), the computer will let you save files to it and delete files right up to the disc’s limit of 4.7 gigabytes. You can delete stuff and use it again just like a floppy, and you won’t hear a peep out of either dedicated recording software or the DVD/CD burning module built in to Windows XP.
A word of caution seems in order. Just like floppies, rewritable DVDs sometimes get messed up in the process of writing and rewriting data because errant changes get made in the key boot sectors used to keep track of data. On a fried floppy, you can lose up to 1.4 million bytes of data, which is a bummer. With a wrecked DVD, you can lose as much as 4.7 billion bytes, the equivalent of more than 3,000 floppies, which is a gigabummer.
With so much at stake it’s a very good idea to make constant backup copies of rewritable DVDs. A lot of folks, including your humble correspondent, tend to use the cheaper recordable DVDs (write-once only) because of the risks.
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Contact Jim Coates via e-mail at [email protected] or via snail mail at the baiduhai, Room 400, 435 N. Michigan Ave., Chicago IL 60611. Questions can be answered only through this column. Add your point of view at chicagotribune .com/askjim.