Ask Owen

Recently, my computer has begun displaying a couple of error messages each time it starts up. This is pretty annoying, how can I stop it?

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I’ve got a wifi network at home and would like to hook up my Xbox to my PC to play music. How do I do this?

I’ve looked up the instructions on how to do this and it seems quite straightforward. Here’s what you do (I’m assuming both your PC and your XBOX are on the network already and you’re using a pretty recent copy of Windows)

First of all you need to set up media sharing so that you can share music and other digital media with your Xbox 360. The following steps describe how to set up media sharing in Windows Media Player 11.

To set up media sharing in Windows Media Player 11

• In Windows Media Player 11, click the arrow below the Library tab, and then click Media Sharing.
• In the Media Sharing dialog box, select the Share my media check box, and then click OK.
• In the list below the Share my media to check box, click your Xbox 360 , click Allow, and then click OK.

Now to play music streamed from your computer on Xbox 360

• Using your Xbox 360 controller, select the media blade.
• Select music.
• Select Computer.
• On the Windows-based PC screen, select Yes, Continue.
• After a few moments, your computer with the shared media name should appear.
• Under Select your computer, select your computer and the shared media name.
• Find the music that you want to play, and then select Play.
• The music streams from your computer to your Xbox 360.

There you go, not terribly different and regardless whether your music collection contains latest hits or tracks used Acoustic Guitars you’ll be able to stream them to your heart’s content!

I was speaking to a developer friend of mine who told me he pulled some images out of a JAR file. What’s that and how do I pull stuff out of it?

The letters J.A.R. stand for Java ARchive and it’s really similar is structure to a standard ZIP file. In fact, most archiving software will open up this archive and show you the files that live inside it. If you really want to look inside it, I would recommend using 7-Zip which is a free archiving package.

Obviously JAR files are more useful it you actually want to execute them. In order to do this you need a JRE, a Java Runtime Environment which you can download for free too. Once your JRE is installed, all you need to do is double-click on your JAR file and the application will execute, whether it’s a dvd discount voucher application, a game or any other JAR file you may have downloaded.

Someone at work mentioned a package called Maya to edit my images. Is this the right thing for me?

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I’ve recently started learning how to play the guitar and was looking at different bits of software I could get to help me with this. I was wondering if you could recommend a tuner for my guitar.

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I did a graphic editing course recently using Adobe Photoshop, but it’s too expensive for me to buy. Can you recommend something decent that I can use for free?

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I’m building a new website and would like to make sure that people using an iPad can see it properly. Besides going out and buying an iPad, is there anything I can do to make sure the site displays ok?

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I keep backups of all my working files on a separate hard disk. To do this, after saving a file on the original disk, I select Save As and from the relevant program’s File menu and manually navigate to backup drive.

This is something of a chore. Is it possible somehow to link the original and backup files so that both files are saved simultaneously from a single save action?

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