News for wibblers. Stuff that really doesn't matter. |
|
Save the teapot fund
New CSS web design for Wibble proudly provided by Kelv. Please contact the webmaster with any questions or concerns.
Wibble - Official definition
wibble [UK] 1. n.,v. Commonly used to describe chatter, content-free remarks or other essentially meaningless contributions to threads in newsgroups. "Oh, rspence is wibbling again". Compare humma. 2. One of the preferred metasyntactic variables in the UK, forming a series with `wobble', `wubble', and `flob' (attributed to the hilarious historical comedy "Blackadder"). The other definitionwibble (wib'l), adj., n., v.,-bled, -bling. -adj. a state of frenzied and irrational behaviour, often compared to that of headless chickens or similarly decapitated fowl. -n. gibberish, nonsensical, of bizarre and unusual nature. -v. to act in such a manner. |
Using a DVD-RAM drive in Windows XPAlright, this isn't a Wibbly article (well, XP is a bit wibbly sometimes) but I spent far too much spare time trying to get my DVD-RAM drive to work and hopefully this'll help others.The advantage of a DVD-RAM over convential DVD-R(W)s is that they can be written and accessed just like a regular drive, you can think of them as a floppy disk but with several thousand times more capcity.·· DVD support is something of a hit and miss exercise in Windows XP. As you can see from the image, XP seems to think my DVD burner is actually a CD burner.·· It usually reports DVD-ROMs as CDs as well. DVDs have been around a very long time now so there's no excuse for this. Even Windows Media Player 10 has really crappy DVD playback capabilities (thank goodness for PowerDVD). Documentation for getting a DVD-RAM drive to work in Windows XP is pretty scarce and as far as Microsoft are concerned it should "just work". It doesn't just work and the main reason is the built in CD writing support getting in the way. Here are the simple steps necessary to get a DVD-RAM drive to work properly.· Turn of XP's built in CD writing I used this horrible feature once, and vowed never to use it again. It's slow, crap and interferes with DVD-RAMs! If you want to write CDs or DVDs use something like Nero. As of Service Pack 2 XP still initially treats DVD-RAM disks as CD-RW's, attempts to erase them, gets all confused and gives up.··· Turning off the built in CD writing will set things straight. So, in My Computer, right click on your DVD-RAM Drive icon, left click on Properties and then go to the Recording tab. Uncheck the Enable CD recording on this drive checkbox and click OK. There, wasn't that easy?
Once you're done, it's probably a good idea to reboot.· Format the DVD-RAM media I'm assuming everyone knows how to format a disk without pretty pictures. If you don't you should really consider taking the computer back to the store and asking for a refund. Formatting a DVD-RAM disk takes a considerable amount of time (about 45 minutes for a 4.7Gb disk) so go do something worthwhile whilst you wait. Clicking on one of the banner ads is a nice gesture that your humble webmaster would appreciate. Once it's formatted the disk will appear and work as another drive in My Computer. |
