Ask the Doctor
66 MA XIMUMPC SEPTEMBER 2006
how 2 IMPROVING YOUR PC EXPERIENCE, ONE STEP AT A TIME
Just as some medical doctors are obsessed with curing diseases,
Maximum PC’s Doctor is a certifi ed fanatic when it comes to resolving
readers’ thorniest computer problems. Send your questions—and your
obsessions—to [email protected].SECOND OPINION
I recently encountered a problem very
similar to one Carlos Conrique described
in your June column (“Ghost Drive”). After
returning two Western Digital SATA drives
in a row that my Asus K8V SE mother-
board refused to recognize, I bought a
Maxtor unit—which my motherboard
also refused to recognize. While reading
Maxtor’s instruction manual, I discovered
the source of my problem. Although both
the Western Digital and the Maxtor SATA
drives are considered “jumperless,” they
both have jumpers to set their interface
speed to either 150MB/s or 300MB/s. The
default setting for both drives is jumper-off,
to set the interface speed to 300MB/s—a
speed that the Via chipset on my Asus
motherboard does not support. As soon
as I installed the jumper, the drive worked
fi ne. Because Carlos’ Abit VT7 mother-
board also uses a Via chipset, I bet this
solution would work for him, too.
—Ed AchesonCALL OF THE BLUE SCREEN
My PC crashes with a fatal blue screen after play-
ing Call of Duty 2 for 15 to 20 minutes; the screen
doesn’t stay up long enough for me to read what
it says. I’m running a Gigabyte GA-K8N51GMF-9
mobo with an AMD Athlon 64 3200+ CPU, 1GB of
RAM, and an EVGA GeForce 6800 GS videocard. I
took the rig to my local geek shop, and they rec-
ommended I get a more powerful power supply. I
upgraded to a 620-watt model, but it didn’t solve
the problem. Gigabyte’s and EVGA’s tech support
people have both said the problem is a hardware
conflict, but neither has a real solution for me.
Can you help?
—Patrick PattonThe problem you describe typically results
from excessively aggressive overclocking.
If you’re overclocking the videocard, stop; if
you’re overclocking the CPU, stop. The power
supply is another of the usual suspects; but
because you’ve already upgraded, it’s prob-
ably not the source of your trouble unless you
bought one of very low quality. You should also
review the thermal conditions inside your case.
Open the case and point a room fan at it. If the
system stops crashing, you’ve found the cul-
prit. You might need a more powerful heatsink
on your CPU, new thermal grease, or additional
fans to bring down your components’ temps.
If that still doesn’t fix the problem, test your
memory using memtest86+, which you can
download from http://www.memtest.org.CATCH-22: THE MUSICAL
DRM issues with legally downloaded “Plays4Sure”
music are tempting me to cross over to the dark
side. Many of the songs I’ve purchased will no lon-
ger play because their DRM licenses have become
corrupted. I also have DRM-protected tracks on
my MP3 player that will play on that device, but
won’t transfer to my computer. As I understand it,
the end user is solely responsible for safeguarding
downloaded music, but it seems that the end user
has very little power to actually do this. This quote
is from Microsoft’s support website: “The license
issuer, such as the online store where you bought
the protected file, determines whether you are per-
mitted to back up a specific license. Therefore, you
may not be able to back up all your licenses. If you
cannot back up the license for aparticular file, you cannot restore that license.... If
you cannot restore a license, you cannot play the
protected file.” Does this mean I’m screwed when
it comes to the music I’ve paid for?
—Matthew ThorntonIn a word, yes. If your licenses have already
been corrupted, and you don’t have a backup
copy, or your service provider doesn’t allow
you to make one, there’s not much you can
do about it. The record industry endorses
DRM because it’s convinced the technology
protects their property rights. In reality, this
form of protection—which tramples all over
consumers’ fair-use rights—can be easily
defeated by digitally recording the music in
real time. The Doctor’s prescription? Buy the
music you really care about in the form of
unencrypted CDs, so you can back it up, port
it to other devices, and sell or trade it if you
ever do grow tired of it (do the right thing and
delete any ripped copies, first). If you don’t
have the budget to amass a huge library of
music as rapidly as you’d like, check out one
of the online music “rental” services, such as
Rhapsody. Several have subscription models
that allow you to transfer music to a portable
player. If those licenses get corrupted, you
need only download
the music again at no
additional expense
other than your sub-
scription fee.MICROSOFT BROKE MY TOOL
I’d been using Microsoft’s System File
Checker to resolve problems with two PCs
that have Windows XP Media Center Edition
installed on them. But after I installed Service
Pack 2, SFC’s scans are interrupted by a
message instructing me to install the SP2
CD—which doesn’t exist because I installed
SP2 over the Internet. I ordered the SP2 disc
from Microsoft, but now I get an error mes-
sage that I’ve inserted the wrong CD.
—Rudy NicholsThe problem is that System File Checker
must verify the SP2 files against the
originally installed files, but the program
doesn’t recognize either of the Windows
discs you have. There are two solutions: You
can either create a new Windows install disc
with SP2 slipstreamed into it, or you can edit
the registry to point to the SP2 setup files. To
do the latter, run Regedit (click the Start menu,
choose Run, and type regedit in the window)
and modify the following entry: Microsoft\
Windows\CurrentVersion\Setup.
In the right-hand pane, right-click
ServicePackSourcePath, click Modify, type
%windir%\ServicePackFiles, and click
OK. Reboot when you’re finished.We understand the need to protect prop-
erty rights, but today’s half-assed DRM
schemes seem destined to screw consum-
ers. Our advice: Rent—but don’t buy—
DRM-protected music.