O sorry for the delay but you should have mail.

I've had a hard drive replacement and now I can't seem to make my CD's or DVD's auto play anymore.

For the CD player, for example, I've gone to the properties box of the drive and under Autoplay told it to open music files with Windows Media Player with no success.

On the DVD side, I cannot play movies anymore at all. They are vob format which I thought was supported by W M Player. Because of the autoplay problem I've used explorer to look at the individual files and double click on them to make them play but no luck.

I have just brought up my Dell 4700 with xphome sp2 and Norton 2004NT . When connecting to broadband the programme asked me to switch off the firewalls and anti - virus software. on doing this i saw that the firewall on norton was ON and the firewall for MS was OFF. I completed the broadband installation and then went back and turned on the antivirus Norton and the firewall on MS. later checking i noted the MS firewall was again turned off so i turned it back on again , switched off the computer , rebooted and now MS firewall seems to be on. Was Norton switching it off?. should i have both firewalls ON or only one? and if only one , which one? I read recently that the MS firewall should never be turned off,
thanks
On a second point i have an optical mouse and am having difficulty with it jumping and particularly offscreen when near the edges , any ideas to rectify this?

maddoctor

"On a second point i have an optical mouse and am having difficulty with it jumping and particularly offscreen when near the edges , any ideas to rectify this?"

Me too. Every so often my Medion optical mouse pointer jumps about 6". This happens at random intervals about 4 or 5 times. The most annoying thing is how sometimes when I am opening a new IE browser window from a link, the mouse pointer and the new window just freezes in the middle of loading. Then I have no alternative but to just switch off and re-boot. In doing so, I lose all of today's 'History' too. I run three monitors by the way.

I also would appreciate some ideas on fixing this.

docproc , talking to my local IT guys they said with optical mouses use a flat mat blue mouse mat , not a light colour and no writing. Got one this morning and looks like things are a bit better but early days.

Maddoctor

I'm not sure about this one but I'm puzzled why you had to switch off your firewalls to make the initial connection to the internet. I would not connect my machine for a second without a firewall.Everything is probably OK but it would not do any harm booting into safe mode and doing a virus scan and a scan with Spybot S&D.

There may well be an option in the Norton Setup regarding switching off the Windows firewall. Also, Norton had some early issues with SP2, which they quickly fixed, but they are well known for sending out old software. If you run Live Update it may well fix it.

I don't know whether the Norton firewall is better than the SP2 one but my advice would be to get yourself an ADSL router/firewall for around 80 and then the one on your machine is far less critical.

As regards your mouse, have you checked the manufacturers website for the latest drivers?

optimist was connecting to btyahoo and on the cd said switiching off firewalls and antivirus recommended - was not happy myself. no option to switch off the ms firewall in norton as far as i could see. have not got spybot yet but will run virus scan , thanks.
what about one firewall or two?

Maddoctor

If you have to have anything but a default configuration then two firewalls will be difficult to manage plus they will use CPU and system resources. My personal predudice would be to use the MS one but I doubt there is much in it.

Optimist , thanks

Docproc , blue mat working :- ))))

md

Noted with interest....

Let us know if it eventually fails, please.

I would like to fit an hard drive to a spare computer of mine, so I could give it to my grandchild.
Is it esy, can you fit more one hard drive?

AB, its pretty easy as long as the computer is relativeley recent. Yes you can fit more than one but it depends on the space available in the computer case and the nukmber of connectrors on the motherboard for hard disks. Normally you can fit at least 2 hard drives. You do need to think about how the second drive will be used as it might be better to dump the first and just put in a new one, depends why you want to add a hard drive.

With regards to my earlier post about cd & dvd not autoplaying (and other problems).

I've found some information that refers to GPEDIT.MSC to open Group Policy in the Microsoft Management Console. When I type it in (from the Run command) my pc informs me that the gpedit file is missing.

Is this file essential? If I haven't got it where can I load it from?

Group Policy applies to Domains so if your computer is stand alone then you may not have that facility.

Thanks O. Another dead end :-(

7thFloor

There is a similar user rights editor the the machine but I don't think it will help you. If you do suspect that the problem is user related then try creating a new Administrator user and running under that for a while.

I'm not able to try this out on my machine as I have Nero installed which seems to totaly take charge of the CD drive. Have you installed something similar?

O.

I haven't re-installed my cd burner on my drive yet (It's Pinnacle's Instant CD burner). Co-incedently I've just read, on another problem/bulletin board site on an un-related matter, how a burner can sometimes overide autoplay features.

7th floor, sorry i dont have time to look this up at the moment but there is a problem with it thats known about, try searching Microsoft.com, I had to do something similar recently.

Will look up for related problems at MS tomorrow. Have a bit of a do to go to soon and wife is looking a bit ..... y'know!

Thanks

Sorted! (I think)

I've deleted the Windows Media Player and re-installed an updated version from MS. That sorted the DVD Decoder error messages when running the WMP.

My new hard drive was part-configured at the manufacturers. Installing the Pinnacle CD/DVD burning program does disable the auto-run function. Pinnacle says that its to prevent conflicts when writing disks (Optimist - just like Nero then).