If you experience problems (e.g. no dial tone) using your Voip phone after installing a new router (where you will get a new IP address from your Internet service provider), the following may help resolve the issue.

Disconnecting and reconnecting the phone adapter (ATA) may not solve the problem. In this case, you need to log in to the ATA (find the IP address of the ATA from the router’s local network status page). The password may very likely be ‘admin’. Go through the details of the configuration to see if anything is suspicious. Finally reboot the ATA from the configuration tab. You may notice your ATA will now be assigned a different IP address by the router. Hopefully your Voip phone should work again after performing the above steps.

Sometimes, malicious and other potentially unwanted software, including rootkits, try to install themselves on your PC. This can happen when you connect to the Internet or install some programs from a CD, DVD, or other media. Once on your PC, this software might run immediately, or it might run at unexpected times. Windows Defender Offline can help remove such hard to find malicious and potentially unwanted programs using definitions that recognize threats. Definitions are files that provide an encyclopedia of potential software threats. Because new threats appear daily, it’s important to always have the most up-to-date definitions installed in Windows Defender Offline. Armed with definition files, Windows Defender Offline can detect malicious and potentially unwanted software, and then notify you of the risks.

Read the full story and download the free tool here.

Whoever said nothing in this world is free hasn’t spent a lot of time at Google Play, the online store with more than 600,000 apps for Android devices — many of which can be downloaded at no cost or close to it.

Now, Toronto’s Clickfree – a company best-known for its external hard drives that back-up your computer’s important files – has launched a free app called Clickfree Automatic Backup . As the name suggests, it can make a secure back-up of your Android smartphone or tablet, just in case something happens to your portable device. And no PC is required. …………(read the whole story)

At first glance, it may look like Microsoft disabled recording of internal—or “what you hear”—sounds in Windows 7. Well, they didn’t. It’s a little trickier, granted, but this is (often) a quick fix.

To enable it:

1. Right click on the speaker icon in the system tray (bottom right).
2. Choose Recording Devices
3. In the empty white space, right-click and choose Show Disabled Devices. You should see Stereo Mix appear in the list.
4. Right click on Stereo Mix and choose Enable.
5. Right click on Stereo Mix again, and choose Set as Default Device.

Now you can record anything you hear through your speakers.

If your USB keyboard does not work when plugged in a USB port, it is logical to think there could be a problem with the port itself since wired USB keyboard is such a simple and universal device. Upon careful examination, evidences often point to a different direction. First of all, the keyboard actually works when the system is booting up (or in BISO setup); the problem only surfaces after Windows takes over. Secondly you may find that the keyboard is not working no matter which USB port it is plugged in. The chance of having all ports fail at the same time is not impossible but very slim.

By this time, you are almost certain this is a driver issue. This is what happened: when a keyboard, wired or wireless (via its receiving adapter), is plugged into a USB port, Windows will automatically install the following drivers under Human Interface Devices after the device is recognized:

USB Human Interface Device and HID-compliant device

You will need to update the driver for HID-compliant device and force it to be a HID Keyboard Device (don’t let Windows automatically install the driver; instead, choose yourself and select a compatible driver to install). Once the driver is successfully installed, the keyboard would start to work even without restarting the system.

The MP3 encoder that comes with Windows Media Player (since version 10) has problems ripping certain CDs. The tracks may play perfectly in the media player; but you may experience skipping or other problems when playing the ripped MP3s, especially for CDs with less-than-perfect physical conditions.

The audio quality of the encoded MP3 is also not up to par with other MP3 encoders (free or commercially available). If you are concerned with the above-mentioned issues, look for other replacement MP3 encoders such as this one from Cyberlink.

With more than a million downloads of the Windows 8 Consumer Preview there must be some who want to use a virtual machine for getting some firsthand experience with Microsoft’s latest.

Installing Windows 8 into an existing virtual machine running Windows 7 or the Windows 8 Developer Preview is straightforward, quick, and uneventful.

VMware Player is a popular virtual machine, but even the latest update (Feb 2012 to version 4.0.2 build-591240) does not yet know about Windows 8, so installing Windows 8 as a new machine is a bit tricky. (read the whole story………..this is a very helpful write-up)

If you are into the serious business (or interests) of editing meta data for digital pictures, you may want to take a look at this tool called ExifTool. This free software basically can do anything about the “tags” of digital pictures, copying, renaming, standardizing and what not. This is a powerful tool with all kinds of parameters and built-in flexibility. It is not for everyone, though, as using it does require some computer knowledge especially for its advanced features. Do give it a try if you run out of options.

There are so many different codecs these days, supporting different formats of videos and audio. And there are also software trying to overwrite each other during its installation on your computer. It is not uncommon to find out one day, when you try to play a video file in certain format, the computer complains a specific codec is missing.

Normally you can reinstall the software that supports the missing codec and the problem should be fixed. In this case that I would like to talk about, the missing codec is the Windows Media Series 9 codec (WMV3).  The codec is included when you install Windows Media Player. Alternately the codec is downloaded from the Microsoft site when a video file of this format is first played.

In some rare cases, Windows Media Player cannot and will not automatically download the codec. And there is no common software you can install to get the WMV3 codec. A solution is to uninstall the current version of Windows Media Player (in this case, version 11) and rollback to the previous version. When the old version plays the first file with WMV3 codec, it will download the codec from the Microsoft site. Once that’s done, you can upgrade the media player back to the current version.

When using ‘Upload Applet’ to upload pictures to Gallery2, broken thumbnails may occur unpredictably. A maintenance will need to done to rebuild all thumbnails. The problem may be resolved by changing the priority of which graphic toolkit to use in the Administrator’s Site Admin page.

If NetPBM is the highest on the list, try lower it down below Gd. ImageMagick is not activated in this case. (Note: the hosting service provider is 1and1.)