[Author’s note: again, here is a stretch of dry reading concerning school. To spice it up, I’ve tried to include a series of the most famous photos taken with the $18 Argus camera. All photos are generally in the Dania (DAY-nee-uh) Beach area.]
Here is the big beach tree near the abandoned pier. The tree is big enough to shade fifty people. That is the Atlantic Ocean in the background. It is not uncommon to see an entire soccer game going on under these branches.
This won’t mean much to many of you, but I’ve got to record it and I don’t have time to keep separate journals while I’m in school. Okay, MyComputer has some CD quirks. The default drivers work on most CD players and burners, but not that well. Unless a CD is in the tray, the properties show the disk as full, with zero bytes free and used. When a CD is copied, it also shows the disk as full when it is finalized, whether or not it is full to capacity. Also, for some reason you have to go into properties to get this information because clicking on the drive letter causes autorun. All of this is probably changeable, but beyond the average user. Why does Microsoft behave so badly?Also, there was a rumor that making your CD burner the slave works better. Let me lecture for a moment. When you are going to copy CDs, it is best to have one CD player and one CD burner installed internally on your computer. You should also have some easy to use software, such as Roxio [Later, I take that back. Roxio sucks because it can take up to 4 minutes to eject a disk], and learn to use the copy part of that software before proceeding. (Even if you have to read the manual.) The reason for the CD player and burner is simple – so you can use a feature called Direct to Disk [I take that back too, how typical of MS to pretend something that should have always been there is an added feature].
If you have only the CD burner, this device has to read the disk you intend to copy plus it has to burn the material on to a new blank CD. In between, it has to make an image of the copied material on you hard disk drive. You want to avoid that step because the material must be converted to a format that can be saved on your hard disk drive, and then converted back to a CD format when it is burned. The fact is, some things don’t convert very well or very fast.
When you have both a CD player and CD burner, the software does not have to create an image on your hard disk drive (HDD), but instead copies directly from your source disk to the target disk without involving your hard disk drive (Direct to Disk, right?). That is also the reason buying two CD burners is a waste of money. Only one of the CD drives has to be a burner. Inside the computer, one drive has to be designated the Master and the other drive is designated the Slave. It would seem natural to want to call your most ‘advanced’ CD drive, the CD burner, the Master. Wrong. I tried it and it does seem to work better when the CD player is the Master and the CD burner is the Slave. My guess is that either the software is just plain written better, or since most early CD burners were an add-on, the existing CD player was already designated as the Master. It is not only faster, but there are fewer pop-up windows and settings needed because you make fewer errors (depending on what software you use).
Further advice: unless you are so totally disorganized even burning a CD is a rush job for you, set your burning speed down to 16x or lower and go get a cup of tea. Even the fastest computers I’ve used can fill up the buffer to 100% on any faster settings, and filling your buffer is not a good idea [or, as it turns out, a bad idea either].
Later. That practice exam is something else. It is only 80 questions, but it is speckled with material we have not even talked about in class. [Nice try, there PC Professor.] A quarter of the questions are value judgments we are not trained to make, such as in such and such a situation, “Which cabling method is the cheapest?” There are a lot of printer questions that use terms we did not study and which do not start at logical points. The more reasonable among us would realize that even though the printing is a cycle, that cycle logically begins with something like the paper feed and ends with the paper eject. Frames are in the exam, and by coincidence just last class I was pointing out to Don (classmate) that frames are never defined in the textbook. Picture frame? Mafia frame?
I would never be able to assimilate this volume of information if I was working full time or even part time. It was a wise move to get this underway before the money ran out. I give credit and hold a grudge. While I’ve learned a lot about computers, it was not because of the course, but through independent research I had to do to pass the course. That was not part of the deal, I paid good money so that all that research would be spoon fed to me in a classroom in baby talk. That is not what happened with A+ “Computer Repair”. There is progress, for I can now approach a broken computer with a lot more confidence than before. But just the diagnosis. There is this disappointment because I do not have the practical skills to troubleshoot and fix that computer.
All I’ve got is a bunch of book-learning.
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