ItsGeekToMe.co

Q: I am a “digitally challenged” Senior Citizen, and I am totally in the dark (well, nearly) when it comes to making CD’s and DVD’s. Can you tell me what is the difference between CD- and CD+; DVD- and DVD+; CD+-RW; DVD+-RW and when it is best to use each disk?

– Franklin B.
Shalimar, FL

A: Before I do that Mr. B., let me congratulate you on being a “Senior Citizen” who uses a computer!  You may consider yourself “digitally challenged” but at least you’re out here trying.  Many seniors I know won’t even touch a computer, because they think if they didn’t grow up doing it, there’s no possible way they can learn now.  They’re missing out on so many of the wonders of the information age.

The timing of your question is rather coincidental, as the now ubiquitous compact disc just celebrated its 25^th birthday on August 17^th.  The answer, however, is far larger than I can fit in the column, so I’m going to point you to a website that I found that has a nice article explaining disc formats.  While I’m doing that, I’m going to teach you something else.  The Internet path to that article (or any other item on the web) is called its Uniform Resource Locator or URL.  This particular URL is 83 characters long, and would probably span at least two to three lines of my column.  That would look bad, and make it mighty hard for you to accurately type into your browser.  So, I’ve used a neat little free web service to convert it into this: http://tinyurl.com/8c70.  When you enter this URL, you will instantly be redirected to the article.  You can use this service yourself to create tiny URLs for use in e-mails or other situation where having a lengthy URL is inconvenient.  Just go to tinyurl.com and you’ll see how easy it is.

Q: I am using Hotmail as you can see. If I am on a website that lets me to click on a link to send e-mail, when I click it, Passport login tries to come up in the address bar but the screen says: “Fatal Login Error. hr=80041500, f=1” and gives a blank screen.  I used to be able to go to the links I want to access. What happened and how can I fix this?

– C. G.
Baker, FL

A: Although you didn’t say so in your e-mail, if I was a betting man (which I’m not) I would bet this problem started after you upgraded to Internet Explorer 7.  What you have here is an HTTP Authentication problem that is preventing Hotmail from establishing a connection.  Microsoft is aware of this problem, and has issued a patch, which you can obtain going to http://tinyurl.com/oznyq.  You’ll need to reboot your computer after installing the update.