Showing posts with label USB. Show all posts
Showing posts with label USB. Show all posts

Wednesday, April 27, 2016

Progress in DVD burners

After ten years of service, the DVD burner in Trusty Desktop stopped playing.  Something got jammed and the tray would no longer open.  Even after pulling the drive from Trusty Desktop and prying it open, I could not get to tray to move, at least not with the amount of force I dared apply. 
  So ho, for a new one.  A bit of internet research disclosed that the design of DVD burners changed a year after Trusty Desktop left the factory.  The DVD burner that came with him has an IDE connector, a parallel interface with 40 odd pins in the connector.  The new DVD burners have a serial interface (only four wires).  They haven't made the DVD burner that fit Trusty Desktop for the last ten years. 
  OK, so there is a salvation.  They now make USB DVD burners, USB is universal, Trusty Desktop has plenty of USB ports.  So I bought a Verbatim model down at Staples, only $50.  Very small, only 1/2 inch high, compared to old one and 1 1/2 inches high.  It's faster too.  Burns a 4.7 Gig DVD in about half the time the only one needed.

Wednesday, April 22, 2015

How do I get photos OFF the tracfone?

Let's see, I got the Tracfone (LG model 305c) to dial, keep a phone list, speak to the new router via WIFI, and snap a picture.  It's still flaky on answering an incoming call.  But I haven't found out how to get the photo OFF the cell phone.  My two computers won't talk to the phone on USB.  They don't see the phone in network neighborhood.  The phone offered to send the photos but all it offered for destination was telephone numbers.  My real telephone number is a plain old wired phone, which will not do anything with pictures except make funny noises in the earpiece. 
   The secret of connecting to the router is two fold.  Learning how to input an alpha password using the telephone keypad, and replacing the router with a new one to which I was sure I knew the password.  I might had changed the password on the old router and forgotten what it was.  Old router went belly up and refused to connect to the Internet, so I bought a new one and now two computers and one cell phone are talking on it, I think.
  Any suggestions are welcome. 

Wednesday, April 15, 2015

Pictures on the Tracfone

OK, I got the phone to take a still picture.  It's grainier and more pixelated than what my Canon point-n-shoot can do, but fair.  The test photo is still in the phone.  I tried plugging the USB cable into my computers, one an antique running XP, the other an up to date laptop running Win 8.  The computers noticed the USB plug in of the phone.  Neither of them had a device driver to talk to the LG phone.  Google did not turn up any LG device drivers on the net.  Best I found was a site that promised to download a driver checker, inspect ALL my drivers and replace any that it pleased.  That was too scary for me.  The drivers presently on the machines work, new drivers sometime don't work. 
  So then I thought I would introduce cell phone to my wifi router.  That did not go well.  The phone asked for the router's password but would not show the alpha key board to allow me to type in "Ridgecut".  All the other magic numbers from the router, which I had faithfully logged,  were mixed alpha-numeric, which I could not type in from the telephone style keypad offered. 
  So, the photo is still in the cell.