The Need: To be able to use Microsoft Office Picture Manager to edit pictures or photos.

The Problem: Microsoft Office Picture Manager showed the license expired pop up every time the program is opened.

The Solution: Installed the Microsoft Office 2007 Service Pack 2.

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Yesterday, a coworker of mine asked me to help her. She usually uses Microsoft Office Picture Manager to edit photos and pictures. She is using Microsoft Office 2007 Small Business Edition which should include the Microsoft Office Picture Manager. Lately though, every time she opened the program to edit something, the trial license expired window always pops up.

It was strange because as far as I know, the Microsoft Office Picture Manager is available as an add-on tool that can be used for free with a purchase of a licensed Microsoft Office Suite. Another one of my coworker which is using Microsoft Office 2003 Small Business can use hers without any problem, so I am sure that the problem lies with the Microsoft Office 2007. Read the rest of this entry »

Lately I was having some problems with Facebook, especially after the update that split the feeds into two categories which, in my opinion makes it confusing to read updates from your network and friends. There is also some problems with writing comments. I found out that I cannot add comments to any updates that I receive, but it was fixed after I cleared the browser’s cache and restarted it.

I also heard that some of my friends had their default language changed, one even had status update that wasn’t her own posting. The latter case could be because she didn’t put enough attention to security while accessing the site through public computers such as internet cafes. In the end I offered to help reorganize and return her settings to what it was before.

In the end I changed the password to her Facebook and e-mail account since they shared the same password. It was no standard password so I was quite positive that she got her password stolen at an internet cafe, probably through a keylogger program. I told her to be careful the next time she access her accounts through public means, using Windows built-in On-Screen Keyboard as a precaution. Read the rest of this entry »

It has been more than a year since I got transferred to the IT department at my office. There’s many ups and downs, but overall I really love what I am doing for a living right now. I love computers, I am fascinated by it and doing computer related stuff for a living is fun.

I have been learning a lot this past year, although I never wrote anything here about it before. I decided to change it a little bit and try to write down what I’ve learned so that other people could benefit from my experience also. I might not write all about it, but I will try to write about the things that I thought will be useful for those who read my postings.

My companies mainly uses Windows XP for the PCs, mainly because we decided that Vista is too resource hungry to be utilized effectively on our PCs. Now that Windows 7 is set to be released in less than two months and considering the fact that Microsoft won’t be giving Windows XP support starting next year, perhaps we need to start considering using Windows 7 for our next OS of choice.

For our latest PCs we choose the HP dc5800 with Windows XP as the OS, although we have the option of installing Vista also. It was equipped with Intel Dual Core E5200 Processor, 1GB of DDR2 PC6400 and an Integrated Intel GMA 3100. It was more than enough to run Windows XP, but will it be enough to run Windows 7? I believe so, but I still want to test it out.

Yesterday we received another delivery of HP dc5800 PC with Windows Vista preinstalled. Before I downgraded it to XP, I tried to test it with Vista. If it could run Windows Vista nicely, it surely will run Windows 7 also. So I decided to run the Windows Experience Index test, and below are the result.

dc5800 Windows Vista Experience Index

It was a good enough result and I have to admit that Vista runs quite nicely on it. So I guess upgrading to Windows 7 will most likely produce the same, if no better result. We’ll just have to see then.

I have always wanted to play several of my movie collection on my old DVD player, too bad the collection is on an unplayable (.AVI) format because my old DVD player only plays DVD movies. I made a mental note to try to find a way to convert those collection to playable DVD movies, but I haven’t really tried looking yet.

Last month, my old DVD player broke down after around 18 months of use. All it said is “NO DISC” even though there is a DVD movie disc inside it. I tried opening the case and cleaning the optical lens with alcohol and it managed to play a couple of DVDs that I tried before it broke down again.

A week ago, I bought a new player which have the same brand as the old player (I’ll write more on this later), but it is a new model that also have the capabilities to play DivX movie formats, either on DVD media or on removable media (it has a built-in USB slot) such as a flash or thumb drive. I tried asking the salesperson what kind of DivX format that the player support, but unfortunately he is as clueless as I am, if not more. Read the rest of this entry »

It happen a couple of days ago. It has been a while since I recorded anything on my LiteOn DVD Writer optical drive, so I was surprised and a little bit annoyed that it failed to record my data to a Sony DVD+R discs. And to make matters worse, it failed on me three times!

You can imagine how annoying it could be! I tried two burning softwares; the first one is ImgBurn, which is a freeware DVD/CD burning solution that I just tried. I forget what exactly the error was, but it just won’t burn my data. Since it was my first time trying the software, I tried using another software just to make sure.

The second software that I tried was Nero 7 Express which comes bundled with my DVD drive. As it happened, Nero failed me too, so I was starting to think that the problem was not with the software. Fortunately, this time I remember to take note of the problem which is “DMA-driver error, CRC error” in Nero. Read the rest of this entry »