How to recover and read data from scratched CDs

Most of us might have had trouble with a scratched CD. In the case of data CDs (CD-ROM), the drive cannot properly read the CD, giving rise to reading errors. In the case of audio CDs, the CD skips when we play it.

The first thing to do when coming across a CD with a read error is to clean it, to check whether it the error is not being caused by a dirty surface. You can even wash the CD gently with a little detergent, using your fingers to clean it (avoid sponges, since they can scratch the CD). If the error persists, try reading or playing the CD on another drive. If another drive (or CD player, in the case of audio CDs) gives the same result (read error or skipping, in the case of audio CDs), it will mean that the CD is scratched.

Looking against the light, the recording surface (the flip side of the label) of a CD with this kind of trouble will allow you to easily see one or more existing scratches. A CD's data is recorded on a metal layer inside it, a silvered layer on commercial CDs, which is usually golden on CD-Rs. This metal layer is inset in a transparent plastic covering (polycarbonate), used to protect the CD's metal layer and allow printing a label on the side not used for reading.

A CD-ROM drive or CD player utilizes a laser beam to read the metal layer. This laser beam crosses the plastic layer and reads the metal layer. If the plastic layer is scratched, the beam will be unable to pass through it, resulting in a read error or skipping the music. In other words, the data to be read are still in the CD, the trouble lies in the layer of plastic.

As the CD's contents are preserved, a scratched CD can be recovered by polishing its plastic surface. If, after carrying out the above cleansing, the CD persists in giving reading errors, just polish the CD with toothpaste. That's right, toothpaste. It works wonders, and you won't spend a fortune buying professional cleaning kits. Polish the scratches with a cotton swab, rubbing gently the paste-imbued swab over the scratches until they disappear or until you notice that you have removed them as far as possible. Sometimes the paste may cause new scratching, but it will be merely superficial and easily removed. After clearing the scratches, wash the CD in water.

If there are still scratches that the toothpaste has not managed to removed, use a metal polish (Brasso) in the same way as described above. Finally, rub Vaseline on the CD, very gently (do not press hard), from moving out from the centre to the rim.

The last step will be testing the CD. If it starts working properly, great. If not, repeat the above procedure, looking for the scratch that is causing the error and concentrating your polishing efforts on it.

Originally at http://www.hardwaresecrets.com/article/77

Convert (encode) and Play any media file for Free

SUPER (Simplified Universal Player Encoder & Renderer) is a free utility tool that provides a simple, yet very efficient GUI to convert to and from almost all media files and plays them too. It is a easy to use Multimedia Encoder and a Multimedia Player.
More from their website -
SUPER © "The Player" surpasses any known player by supporting just any Multimedia file format. SUPER © plays files that cannot be played with WMP or even other libavcodec-based players like MPC and VLC.
SUPER © also plays and saves Internet Media Streams of different protocols ( mms:// rtsp:// http://).
SUPER © "The Encoder" is the fastest and simplest tool to encode full length movies to any other format without any time or function limitation.
The best thing about SUPER is it is free to download and user. No trial or evaluation versions. SUPER © does NOT require any additional external codec to be installed, absolutely nothing. Necessary codecs are built in!
Few more converters are given at this link

Free up some space on your computer's Hard disk running Windows Vista

I've Windows Vista Home Premium OS on my laptop. I was trying to find some space to copy a big file on any partition on my Laptop's drives when I noticed that C:/ drive is left with almost no space despite being a 25 GB partition and no secondary software (other than default OS software) installed on it. Neither it has any big media file or anything else.
I was wondering what could it be eating all the space on C:/ drive! When I started looking for help at several forums, got some tips, tried and was able to free up around 25% of space on C:/ drive. Here is what I tried and worked for me -

Tip 1 - Use 'Disk Cleanup'. A utility that comes bundled with the Windows. In Vista, click on start, type Disk, select Disk Cleanup from the filtered list and select option to clean for all users.

Tip 2 - Use 'vsp1cln.exe' utility , If you have SP1 installed. Typically You can find it under C:/Windows/System32 folder, or else you can go to Start->Run, type 'vsp1cln.exe'. It will do the rest for you.

Tip 3 - Disable Hibernate option, using the Disk Cleanup utility. It might free up at least 1 GB of space.

Tip 4 - Regularly cleanup the 'Temporary Internet Files' and 'Cache and Cookies' in your browser. (Tools->Internet options)

Download books and copy text from Google Books

Google books provides thousands of of books, magazines, and journal titles from various authors for online reading.
Great if it could be possible to download them for offline reading, printing or copy text to use somewhere else as a reference. That's really possible however not all of the books on google books could be downloaded or pinted.
Here is how to find out whether you can download/print/copy text from a book available for online reading at google books.
Step 1 - Go to Advanced Book Search option in google book search
Step 2 - On the Advanced Book Search page, select 'Full view only' option (it's a radio button) as 'Search'.

Check this example.

Step 3 - As a search result after step 2, you should see this in the right pane of your browser's window displaying the book.



Step 4 - Go ahead and download or view full text to copy and use the book.

Cheers Web Developers! HTML5 is here

Introduced and owned by WHATWG (Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group) HTML incorporates WebForms 2.0 .
If you are kind of new Web developer who has been struggling to create a neat and nice looking web page or blog or website, or a advanced developer looking for an easy and nice way to properly place and manage your web page's page elements, HTML 5 is going to make your life a lot easier.
With introduction to new elements and attributes like

, <header>, <footer> etc., it is going to save us a lot of life while keeping the HTML clean as well.
Also, from it's previous version HTML 4.01, few elements have been either dropped or deprecated like, <font>, <center> etc. These are going to be handled b use of CSS going forward.

Few new elements (as taken from wikipedia) -
- New elements – section, video, progress, nav, meter, time, aside, canvas
- New input attributes – dates and times, email, url
- New attributes – ping, charset, async
- Global attributes (that can be applied for every element) – id, tabindex, repeat

However, this version of HTML 5 has not been officially released yet and still at the draft stage. We could expect few more changes in the final draft.

Download videos from Youtube in your preferred format

Youtube has an excellent collection of videos ranging from movie songs to speeches by Warren Buffet, Bill Gates and so on. If you have been wondering how you could see them offline and if it is possible to convert them in your preferred format like .mpg, .avi, .wmv etc from that strange looking .flv extension. There are many options available over the Internet but few are very straight forward and really easy to use.

One of these website that enable you to download videos not only from Youtube but from other video hosting websites like Google Video, iFilm (now known as Spike) etc, is Video Downloader. It gives you all three solutions to your requirement of downloading, converting and viewing offline it on a media player like Windows Media Player or VLC.
All you need to do is provide the url of the song you want to download and select the website from the drop down box provided, from where you are trying to download the video.

Few other good website are Download Youtube Videos (only Youtube) and http://www.videodl.org/

Another interesting website is OUIDEO that lets you even search for Youtube videos, play and download too as .mp4 file.
One more great website is FilePop that saves you one step for converting the video from .flv to your choice of format. You can simply provide the url of the youtube video and choose what format you want to download it as, and it gets you the video in that format.

Activate Administrator Account in Windows Vista

There were couple of reasons which forced me to enable and activate the administrator account in Windows Vista (Home Premium) otherwise generally it is advisable not to use the administrator account for each and every activity on your computer as it make your computer more prone to virus attack.
1st reason was installation of Anti Virus which required a true Administrator account log on.
2nd reason was annoying (yet useful alerts) UAC (User Access Control) pop ups when you run any executable.
3rd reason was that you don't have to run most of the programs by selecting 'Run as Administrator'.
And there may be more reasons as well.
Now coming back to 'How to enable, show, activate, use, logon to a true Windows Vista administrator account' -

Step 1 - Log on as a normal user to you vista
Step 2 - Click on Start and then Search for cmd.
Step 3 - In the search result pane, right click on cmd and select 'Run As Administrator'.
Step 4 - In the command prompt window, type this command

net user administrator pa$$word

Note: a) This command will set the pa$$word as your login password for administrator account
b) You can type any other password instead of pas$$word that you want
c) If you want to use a blank password you can skip this step # 4 and directly go to step # 5

Step 5 - Type the following command and press Enter to activate and enable Administrator account:

net user administrator /active:yes

It should display the following message

The command completed successfully

If no success message is displayed, repeat the process from Step # 1 again.
Step 6 - Logout from Windows Vista by choosing restart or switch user
Step 7 - Voila! you get an extra icon for Administrator on the login screen
Step 8 - Click on Administrator icon and logon with the password you have mentioned in Step # 4 above

You are done!