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Ask the Doctor: Windex Worries

The Maximum PC Staff — Mon, 10 Nov 2008 11:00:00 -0600

A couple weeks ago I received a Dell Inspiron 6400 from a friend of mine. I was told that he used Windex directly on the screen, which dripped into the bottom of the LCD (between the screen and the housing). It now has a small, permanent “white fire” pattern on the bottom-center of the LCD screen. It appears not to be a physical effect, as I cannot see it when the laptop is off, but I can see it even when the backlight is turned off.
What should I do to fix my display?

—Jason Wesley

Check out Jason's answer, after the jump!

Second Opinion: DVR Video over FireWire

The Maximum PC Staff — Fri, 26 Sep 2008 11:00:00 -0500

Second Opinion is where readers respond to the Doctor, share their wisdom, correct him if he's wrong, and generally show the world what smart, beautiful people you are.

I can’t agree more with the Doctor regarding his advice to Michael Collins (June 2008) on a TiVo as the best option to extend your DVRing capabilities, especially for transferring recorded programs to a computer. The TiVoToGo feature is great. However, the Doctor’s advice regarding the FireWire ports of most cable DVRs is, as Dwight Schrute would say, “False!”

More after the jump.

Disappearing DVD

The Maximum PC Staff — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 17:00:00 -0500

In your June 2008 issue, Frank Buttell mentioned a problem with a disappearing hard drive. I have also had that problem with Vista Ultimate, except my disappearing drive was my DVD +/- RW with LightScribe. I am dual-booting with XP Pro x64 edition and Vista Ultimate (32 bit). The drive is fine in XP, but in Vista, it will randomly disappear. A restart or sometimes a disconnect and reconnect of the SATA cable will solve the problem. So something must be up. What’s going on?

—Joshua Parnell

Don't disappear; hope remains after the jump.

Backing Up My Games

The Maximum PC Staff — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 14:00:00 -0500

My question regards backing up games using tools like ImgBurn and Daemon Tools. I use ImgBurn to create the ISO from a disk and Daemon Tools to mount the ISO. But for some reason, with half of my games I get the message “Please insert the original disk” when I try to run the game from the ISO. My method works with older games but not newer ones. I understand that some of these games might have some kind of protection on them preventing me from running them off an ISO, but I paid for these games and I should be able to create backups of them. Do you know how I can back up my games so they actually work?

—Sgt. Christopher Basquit

Gotta go forward to go back, Christopher - hit the jump for the answer.

A Steamy Issue

The Maximum PC Staff — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 11:00:00 -0500

I downloaded BioShock through Steam a couple weeks ago and have had trouble getting it to run. Sometimes it will randomly crash and send me back to the desktop with a message that tells me the display driver stopped working and has recovered successfully. I have to restart the program through Task Manager to get it to run again, but I can only play 5 to 10 minutes at a time. I have an Nvidia GeForce 8600M GT in a MacBook Pro running Vista 32-bit.

—Sean Thomas

Steaming-hot solutions, after the jump!

The Cloning Wars

The Maximum PC Staff — Mon, 15 Sep 2008 18:35:51 -0500

I’m trying to upgrade my boot disc drive, which uses XP as the OS. I’d failed twice and hen turned to Norton Ghost 12 to copy my C drive to my new disc. During the clone, everything seemed to be working until about 70 percent of the way through the procedure. At that point, a message appeared stating that my computer was trying to communicate with Microsoft. After about two minutes another message appeared stating that the attempt to communicate failed. Then the computer crashed.

I had some difficulty rebooting and then found that XP failed to recognize the new disc drive. It took me some time to figure out that this drive had to be reformatted. I’ve upgraded discs before but never encountered difficulties like this. I called Microsoft and they suggested I buy a copy of Vista and rebuild from scratch. I don’t want to do this. Am I missing something?

—Marvin Burke

Begun, the Clone Wars have. Answers after the jump.

Pop-Up Problem

The Maximum PC Staff — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 09:00:00 -0500

I am currently running Windows XP Pro. Every time I start my computer, the first thing that appears on my desktop is a pop-up error screen. It’s a rectangular box with “system.exe -Application Error” at the top. On the bottom of the window is a red circle with a white X through it and this message: “The application failed to initialize properly (0xc0000022). Click OK to terminate the application.” I don’t know what this means.

—Evan Jones

Evan's answer, after the jump!

Raiding The Raptors

The Maximum PC Staff — Tue, 09 Sep 2008 16:47:48 -0500

I have a brand-new rig that sports two WD Raptors in a mirrored array. I wanted the speed of the Raptors and the convenience of a mirrored array. But I wonder if a mirrored or striped array (1+0, 0+1, or some other RAID number) using four 7,200rpm drives would be faster than the above array. And how would the price compare?

—David Thiel

Delicious, speedy answers for David after the jump.