André asked what the best free AV software was.
Well, I’ve used two.
1) AVG Free – v7 was very good, but I’ve found v8 to be a little clunky; it slows down my machine and recently corrupted itself on Amanda’s, so we’ve moved over to…
2) Avast, on Chris‘ recommendation. As well as its awesome piratical name, it has a smaller footprint (so runs faster), and seems to work well. You do need to register, which is slightly tedious, but has been worth it so far.
You may need a firewall as well, to keep properly secure, but you’ll have to research those yourself for now…
So, when you try to do a screen grab from Windows media player in Windows XP it goes all wonky. Not sure of the exact reason for this (some driver/acceleration issue), but if you:
1) Get your display settings up (right click on desktop / display settings)
2) Go to the “Display Settings” tab
3) Click ‘advanced’
4) Click the ‘troubleshoot’ tab
5) Drag the slider for graphics acceleration down to zero
6) Hit apply
7) Then run the video and hit ‘alt-print screen’ to capture the content of the media player window…
…and it should work! Don’t forget to drag the slider back up after you’re done or you may get some slowdown / display glitches.
In the 4 weeks since I wrote the post ‘How to fix the cannot connect to Itunes store problem‘ post it has risen to the first page of Google* for the error code that comes up when Itunes has its little hiccup and I’ve had quite a few comments (loads, by this website’s standards) of people that have found it helpful.
So… I’m happy to make it a recurring feature. If people need help on how to beat Windows into submission and make it do the things you want it to, ask me, and I’ll oblige if I can. It’s not just Jack Schofield that is a font of knowledge of these things (I imagine even Jack has to look the odd thing up on the Web), so I’ll help out if I can, and if you get me interesting requests. I’ll imagine I get fewer emails than Jack on this, so if I get interesting questions from around the office they might provide secondary food for thought…
So what are you waiting for? Ask Armand. I’ll do one post a week minimum, assuming I get enough questions…
* I’m amongst other things, a digital PR consultant, so I know that the relative recency of this post helps with its height in the organic rankings. But I’ve seen the traffic and comments come in and seem to have helped a few people with this, so am buying that it’ll stay high for a while — especially as Apple still hasn’t posted the workaround on its own site.
Armand David's personal weblog: dadhood, technology, running, media, food, stuff and nonsense.
