Helping Consumers - Technology problems

Hi everybody!
To try and reach various groups of people, I'll be trying to answer computer and consumer questions. Inspired by a lot of bloggers, I decided to have a shot at it...
So, instead of forcing people to come up with questions (some are really stupid) I've been scouting the net for some questions that aren’t out of my league. (I'm obviously not saying that questions are stupid, but if you email and ask what a shortcut is, I'll be fucking pissed).
So, after spending a couple of hours just randomly searching the Google for computer questions, I came across this one:

• My cable bill is pretty expensive, and I've been meaning to try out something new. I've been living with TiVo for quite a while now. Don't get me wrong, I really enjoy it but I've read on the internet that apple has a product which allows you to watch TV shows on your TV, totally synced with the computer. Is that true, and in that case, what should I buy, and would I save money?

What you’re talking about is something called Apple TV. The basic idea behind it is – You buy content of the iTunes store, like TV shows, movies and or music videos, downloading the content onto your computer, and then streaming it from your computer to the box. Pretty much as a transmitter. It doesn’t have a DVD player nor a fully functional USB port ( people have hacked the ATP in order to get it working), so if you’re planning on stripping down your home entertainment system, and to replace everything with an aTV, then you’re pretty much forced to set up a home media server for all your content. I’ll explain how to do that in a later blog post.
The purpose of the media server is, you store all your media files, including ripped and converted DVD films, so that you don’t waste computer power and hard drive space on that.
The other thing you should be thinking of – How much TV do you watch? If you watch like 2 -3 shows per night, it’ll cost you a whole lot. One TV show on iTunes costs approximately two dollars. Which according to my math, correct me if I’m wrong ends up at a rate of 6 dollars per day.
Do not fear my child. You have – AMAZON. Yes, you can buy TV shows of Amazon.com. Unfortunately it does not come pre encoded for the Apple TV, but you have Google to find free converters. There are more of these sorts of things, but apple seems to be the easiest to set up.

• · I recently purchased a computer. Everything worked fine until the first reboot.
  It keeps on saying that an ACPI device is found, but it couldn’t find any drivers for it.
  It even says it has found something called ATi Smbus. What is that? Could it be a virus? Should I format my hard drive?
  

I find it very weird that the computer says it can’t find drivers for the ACPI. ACPI basically stands for “advanced configuration power interface”. Simplified -> How your computer is going to use the power more sufficiently. Like if your computer is set to “high performance” in the control panel. It will use more power to feed the components. These things may have occurred when windows vista (?) updated itself and the drivers were outdated. (A driver is a code which lets the operating system talk to a thing in your computer. Sometimes these drivers can be poorly written, and often buggy.) I suggest you going to your motherboard manufacturers website and download the latest drivers.
ATi smbus… It’s a tough one. From my experience it a PCI card that allows you to send S-Video or HDMI from your computer to your TV-set. Basically the same issue here. Poorly written driver, or just plain simple incompatibility from Microsoft’s side. You have an ATI card, so what you need to do is that you need to go to the control panel, click on the “add and remove programs”. Double click on everything that has ATI in front of it and install the new drivers. If you’re feeling insecure about these things, call the store that sold you these things. They should be held responsible if anything goes wrong ( which is highly unlikely)

• Sometimes when I start my computer, it says “BOOT DISK FAILURE”! What should I do?

There isn’t much to than to return the hard drive and demand a new one because the one that you were sold is broken. However, if you’ve had it for years… that’s a typical thing to happen. What the computer basically is saying –“I CAN’T BOOT FROM THIS DEVICE! PLEASE TURN ME OF AND PUT IN A HARD DRIVE THAT WILL ALLOW ME TO START UP”. Booting up means to start up! A computer needs something to boot of of, in order to function. I recommend you to buy a hard drive fan. And, you know what works for me? I turn of the computer’s power supply – pull out the power cable that goes from the computer to the hard drive and switch it with the CD-Rom. So It goes – Former HDD cable goes to CD-ROM, and CD-ROM cable to Hard drive. (That is if you have IDE). If you have a SATA or a E-sata, you have no other choice than to try to back up your data and return the drive or buy a new one because the current one won’t hold.

got any questions? Mail them to bani.free@gmail.com