On grabbing audio from your desktop

This is something which is very useful. Often you have a stream of audio playing on your machine, maybe a radio station or from some website, which you want to capture. It is easy to do this using a very useful free toolbar program called Freecorder. Freecorder is completely free and captures everything going through your sound card. You can subsequently edit the captured audio using another great free product, Wavepad, which has numerous options for editing and modifying audio.

On recovering files from your non-booting Windows machine

Lets face it, the problem above is a very common one.

You have a machine that is your life and soul, as mine
is. Suddenly one morning it refuses to boot. One of
the most common reasons for this is a corruption of
the Windows registry, the most heavily accessed part
of your file system.

How do you recover the many files and other settings
like your favorites? The various options of Windows
itself, like recovery mode, will not work. Not unless
you are some kind of bit-level genius with metal-level
knowledge of ethernet and usb.

There is something called Knoppix, a Linux which
runs from cd. I have tried it and it is very very
difficult for non-Linux-geeks. Also, the ISO file
which you need to download and burn to create the
Knoppix system is a pain. It gets corrupted, and
whether your boot cd will work or not is a toss-up.

Welcome to the great Bart! This gent has been in
the business of creating boot freeware from the
DOS days. But now he has come up with arguably a
masterpiece - Bart's Preinstalled Environment (BartPE)
bootable live windows CD/DVD.

I will not delve into this at great length. Suffice
to say that normal humans can do this very easily
by spending about 10 minutes reading his instructions.
You will soon be able to boot your machine, and it
will come up with a familiar Windows graphical
environment with USB and net support. Just copy those
files off to wherever or whatever you want and say
thanks to Bart!

On the Nokia CA-42 data cable - II

Apropos the previous post, it is necessary to know
what to do if you have been messing around with the
knock-off cables and your system is now so screwed
up that following the steps laid out therein will
not work.

Ground zero. Uninstall Nokia PC Suite. Go into
Add/Remove Programs in Control Panel, and remove
PC connection software and CA-42 Connectivity Cable
driver. Uninstalling Nokia PC Suite does not get
rid of these two.

Then, if you have XP, do system restore to a date
well in the past, before you bought that cursed
knock-off cable. If you have some other OS, re-install it!

Once this is done, and after your machine reboots,
follow the steps for installing the genuine thing
as outlined in the previous post.

Now, if it still doesnt work, go into Nokia
Connection Manager from Control Panel and check
the settings for Serial Cable. It should point
to the correct COM port, the one on which the
newly installed Nokia CA-42 GSM USB modem has
been set. You may need to do trial and error here.

Thats about it. If you do not have a entry for
Nokia CA-42 USB GSM modem in your list of network
connectors, you are in deep doo-doo. Start from
scratch.

On the Nokia CA-42 data cable

Do not buy the local brands. They are liable to not work
with a large variety of Nokia models.

Do not spend hours, days, fortnights wandering the web
for solutions. Just buy the original cable and it will
all work quite magically.

And above all, to save a few bucks, do not believe any
of the "solutions" you may see on various forums. They
are not generic in nature, and are almost certainly
going to fail for your situation.

You have been warned!

So go out and buy the original. It is available for
Rs 1700 odd at Link Telecom on Camac Street, a Nokia
priority dealer. Most other NPDs in Kolkata dont keep
it.

The other important point is, do NOT plug the cable in
before installing the latest version of the Nokia PC
Suite. In fact, one should completely ignore the software
driver that comes with the cable. The correct sequence
of steps is, and there is no leeway for errors ...

1. Install Nokia PC Suite.
2. Make sure the phone is not locked
3. When prompted, plug in the cable and then attach the
business end to the phone, in that sequence.

The only other thing you may have to do is set the packet
data access point in the One Touch Access settings.
For airtel, use airtelgprs.com.

Have fun!