ItsGeekToMe.co

Happy Halloween all you Geeks!  I hope you have found a technologically sufficient way to celebrate the occasion!  For me, this marks the start of Christmas Light Show season.  The latest wave is already beginning to appear in some of the big box stores, and it will only get better as the season goes on.  For those of you in the Fort Walton Beach metro area, The Geek Lights On the Corner will be back again this year, with everything you’ve come to know and love, and more.  For those of you who can’t make it out to catch a show, I can be of service for all your technology-related Christmas decorating questions.  Ask away!  In the mean time…

Q: My DVD player on my desktop no longer playes DVD’s. It will work with cd’s and plays sound. I pull up the properties and it says it’s ful and zero memory left available. Is there a way to fix this?

– Adrian W.
Crestview, Fla

A: Your question made me smile, Adrian, because you’re not looking at what you think you’re looking at, and your description makes it sound like your DVD drive has become so clogged with data that it can’t fit any more inside.  Let’s handle that part first.  The “Properties” you are looking at are not for the device, but rather for the disc that happens to be inside it.  The “ROM” in CD-ROM stands for “Read-only Memory” – in other words, the disk can only be read, and never written to.  Therefore, by definition, it must have zero space available for data to be written.  Assuming your drive has the ability to write to disks as well as read them, you could “fix” the problem by merely putting in new, blank, writeable disc media.  As for the part where it won’t play DVDs anymore, I actually answered your original e-mail in my Sept 12^th column.  You can find it online by visiting tinyURL.com/GeekToMe, and going back a few issues.

Q: I keep getting this pop-up screen every time  I click on a new program, or operation, “ JSDVWSDK.DLL Cannot find this file.”  Its driving me nuts.

– Ed I.
Miramar Beach, Fla

A: All “Can’t find xxxxxx.dll” problems have the same basic root cause.  Windows has been told that it needs the specified file in order to run a program, but the file has become corrupt or deleted from where it is supposed to be.  The solution is to either repair or restore the file, or somehow remove the dependence on the file altogether.  In your case, the .dll file you specified is part of a program called eFax Messenger Plus.  It is extremely likely that this software came pre-installed on your system when it was new, and hopefully your computer came with a restore partition that you can use to repair it.  This would be my recommendation, and is a far superior option than what follows.  If you absolutely can’t repair the installation, you must remove the dependence on the file.  Normally, the easy way to do that is to uninstall the software, but the uninstaller will fail because of the missing file (nice catch-22, Bill!).  That is when you must turn to the registry to try to break the linkage.  Unfortunately, there is no way for any registry cleaner to know the impact to your system of deleting any particular .dll links, so the process isn’t 100% automated.  If the registry cleaners you’ve tried so far haven’t done the trick for you, all I can say is try another one until it works, or find a Geek-friend who knows how to safely traverse the Windows registry without damaging it who can go in and make the fixes for you.