Into Tomorrow Quickies

 Tammy in Hot Springs, California listens on KTIP 1450AM and asked: I purchased an Acer laptop. I booted it up and it won’t let me enter a password. It doesn’t even give me a blinking light. What do I do?   What do you mean it doesn’t even give you a blinking light? If you mean it won’t even as much as turn on, let alone let you type in a password, then there’s something wrong enough with the computer that you’re better off sending it back if it’s new. It sounds like you’re trying to get it to turn on, but it’s not even doing that. If it just wasn’t letting you type in a password it may have been a problem with the keyboard, or even some software issue, but your comment about the blinking light is more troubling. It sounds like you’re trying to get it to turn on, but it’s not even doing that. If that’s the case, you can troubleshoot and find out where the laptop is failing, but if you bought it recently, you shouldn’t have to do that, just get it replaced by one that works as it’s supposed to.

Jack said: “I’m having a problem with my laptop that I think may be due to the hardware. I’ve downloaded a lot of things to look at malware and antivirus and it doesn’t seem to do anything. It’s slowed dramatically. and I’m wondering if there’s any software that will allow me to test the various hardware components; the motherboard, memory, etc. I did download one thing that would test the hard drive and it comes up perfectly. Looking to see if there’s anything for like the motherboard that might tell me what’s wrong and what I might be able to do about it.”   There are several diagnostics tools you can try to get an idea of what could be going wrong. You can try AIDA64, it’s been around for a long time, and it will give you information about your system and run test on it. It is not free, it costs $40, but it may be worth considering. HWMonitor has also been around a long time and it won’t exactly run tests, but it will monitor and report on your different hardware components. Speccy will do a similar job, and it may support more devices. BurnInTest will try to stress the system, including CPU, HDDs, SSDs, graphics cards, and even network ports. BurnInTest does offer a paid version, but you can see if the free version is good enough for what you need. Hardware tests are always tricky, it may take some work to figure out where the fault is, or even if there is a problem at all. Good luck, Jack! But let us suggest that it might not be something wrong But let us suggest that it might not be something wrong, unless of course performance has fallen off a cliff suddenly. Laptop hard drives are slow, both in transfer rate and rotational speed. They’re designed to balance performance needs against having a low power drain to let the battery run long. This is true for both Windows and Mac, by the way. Over time, they simply slow down. The best thing you can do for a laptop, any laptop, is replace the internal hard drive with an SSD (solid state drive). And while you have the cover apart, we’d recommend doubling your RAM (unless, of course, you were already at 16GB). If you’ve had a sudden drop in performance and not a gradual decline, then it’s likely not something natural. But sometimes we don’t recognize the gradual decline until it hits a critical mass.

Michael asked: “I’m still watching the old Tube TVs. I watch mostly Netflix through my Wii. Whenever I watch movies, the music is very loud, but when people are talking, it’s very low. Do you have any suggestions?”   Two things may be happening here, you may have a problem with your sound settings, or you may be picking movies that are not mixed for home use. If the distributor has sent Netflix theater-mixed movies, then you’ll hear really loud ambient sounds and not so loud dialogue, there’s not much you can do about that, the person in charge of sending Netflix their content is just incompetent and sent the wrong mix. However, you say this problem is happening whenever you watch movies, so it’s probably not the problem. Your sound issues probably come from the Wii’s sound settings Your sound issues probably come from the Wii’s sound settings, the Wii offers mono, stereo, and surround, but it doesn’t directly support surround sound, it only has stereo outputs. That means that you’d need to have a surround sound system set up that you can run your Wii’s audio through to get any real surround sound. If you don’t have a system like that, even Nintendo recommends that you use the stereo setting. It may seem like a worse setting to you, but what really matters is that it will sound better with your audio setup. Just go to the Wii’s settings, then sound, and then change your audio output to “stereo,” and movies should start sounding better. The tech reasons behind this And if you’re wondering about the tech-speak explanation for this, it’s that dialog occupies the center channel on a surround sound system, along with the very low tones destined for the subwoofer. They use a crossover to send the correct frequencies to each device. The voices in the remaining stereo mix are really just ambient sound designed to make them sound full and natural, to give them some stereo separation. As Chris said, configuring your Wii for stereo instead of surround sound SHOULD take care of this volume discrepancy for you.

Shaun Murphy, Founder – Sndr.com –  You can text, email, share files and use social media all from one app.

Dave talks to Frank Abagnale, Leading Security Expert at AARP  about tips and information to keep consumers safe from forgery, embezzlement and un-secure documents

Dave talks to Kate Reddy, CEO of DreamScreen about their universal HDMI solution for responsive television backlighting.

Tom asked: “I found a couple apps I like: YouTube & Google Maps. With Google Maps, there’s new capabilities where you can zoom in and change the angle, it might be Google Earth. But when I get close, the buildings tend to crumble up and bridges fall flat on the roads and stuff. I saw an a cable news network that when they do the same thing on their computers, the buildings look nice and solid. I’m pretty sure they have a more powerful computer than me. I have a 9 year old iMac.”   Tom, there are two ways to use Google Earth on your Mac: You can install it as a standalone program, or you can view it on your browser. We suspect that your problem is that you’re trying to view the map on your browser without the Google Earth plugin, in which case you’d just be accessing the regular, flat Google Maps. If you go to earth.google.com and click on “web” you should be able to download and use the plugin. Your computer is not new, but they don’t really require all that much for the plugin to work, so you’ll probably be able to. Just install the plugin and zoom into a city that is 3D enabled (not all cities are), and you should be good to go. If you’ve managed to keep your computer up to date and you’re running the latest 10.11.6 El Capitan version of Mac OS X, then you should be fine. If you prefer, you can download the program from the same site and just open it when you want to explore the world. If you do, make sure you check the “3D buildings” checkbox, otherwise you’ll only get the flat map. And since your iMac is 9 years old, you may find out that you’re going to have issues with running older versions of Mac OS X and Safari. If you’ve managed to keep your computer up to date and you’re running the latest 10.11.6 El Capitan version of Mac OS X, then you should be fine. But if you, like many other owners of old Macs, decided to hop off the upgrade train at some point, you might find that the software needed for this to all work properly isn’t on your computer, or won’t install because of old system software. Good luck!

Bill in Bethpage, Tennessee listens on Supertalk WTN 99.7 and asked: I am trying to download Windows 10 to my laptop and everytime I do it, it gets hung up at 99%. I’ve let it sit there for hours with no results. I’m looking for suggestions on how I can get Windows 10 to replace Windows 7.   If your download is what’s failing, you might be able to download Windows 10 as a disk image file in ISO format and use Microsoft’s Media Creation Tool to make a thumb drive or DVD for installation. You can have a look at the Software Download page at Microsoft where you can get both Windows 10 and the Media Creation Tool. According to Microsoft, as long as you aren’t running an Enterprise version of Windows, you should still be able to perform an upgrade install. Be sure to note your current Windows product key, however, in case you’re asked for it. Marge in Fairbanks, Alaska listens on NewsRadio 970 KFBX asked: As a Mac user,I use Quicken 15 from Intuit with VMware Fusion emulation program  which is only in Windows format now, Intuit  publishes TurboTax in dual format but not Quicken.  Why am I unable to print the check registers on either of my HP 6200 or 6830 Officejet  Pro printers?  I have tried repeatedly. Any suggestions?   Marge, the first thing we should mention is that Intuit still makes Quicken for Mac, you can buy it for slightly less than the price of the VMware Fusion you’re using, and for a lot less than VMware Fusion + a copy of Quicken for Windows. You can find it on Intuit’s own Quicken for Mac page. As for why your printers are not working, there can be many different causes from operating system issues to VMwares. If they are USB printers, the first thing to check would be that VMware thinks they’re connected. As far as Windows is concerned, it’s running on it’s own real computer and if you don’t tell VMware to pretend someone plugged a USB cable into that computer, Windows may not know the printer is there. Check under USB devices and see if the printers are marked as being “plugged in.” If they are, or if they’re network printers or connected via VMware’s ThinPrint, the list of potential problems unfortunately gets longer, and it can also get a little confusing. For example, sometimes you should connect the printer via the USB settings, sometimes you need to make sure it’s not connected that way. VMware’s has a long page for dealing with printer problems, your solution may be waiting for you there.

Greg asked: “Trying to see how to turn off the automatically playing videos on Facebook. Upgraded the OS on my phone and now all the videos start playing when I go past them. Wondering how to change the setting and if you’ve ever heard about getting a virus from those videos that automatically run on your phone from Facebook.”   Disabling the videos should be easy enough. Within the app, find the button that open the menu, it should just look 3 horizontal lines, then go to App Setting, and you should be able to change the options for Video Autoplay from there. If you’re worried about data usage, one of the options will let you turn autoplay on just while you’re on WiFi, but you can turn the feature off altogether. We have heard about virus infections from ads on websites, and sometimes those can be animated. About getting viruses from videos that play automatically, we’ve caught rage from them, and the desire to never, ever visit that site again, but we haven’t heard from viruses transferring through those videos. We have heard about virus infections from ads on websites though, and sometimes those can be animated. There’s actually a name for that. It hasn’t caught on too much, but it’s called Malvertising and most of the time the ad delivery networks, and the websites the ads are displayed on, don’t know there’s anything wrong at all and are not complicit. That is definitely something to watch out for, but you probably won’t be having any of those issues from Facebook’s autoplay videos.

Darren asked: “Is the Chromecast worth the money?”   If you want to watch streaming video on your TV and don’t mind using your phone to do it, it probably is. It depends on what media you consume, and how much you mind using your phone as the gateway to your TV, but a Chromecast is a fairly inexpensive device at $35 and it does what it promises. You will still have to pay for any streaming services that are not free, and you won’t be able to grab your TV’s remote and do it all fromt here, but Chromecast devices are easy to use, and work well. If you don’t mind paying a little more there are options like the Roku and Amazon Fire sticks that may offer you more options, but there’s nothing wrong with a Chromecast.

Ralph asked: “Is there a way that I can have Wi-Fi in my car? I know they are making cars with Wi-Fi, but is there a way to take that technology and add it to an existing car? I want to buy a newer car with the theater system inside it to watch movies and I’d love to be able to have wi-fi in there to pick up Netflix and other streaming movies inside my vehicle.”   There are a few ways to get WiFi in your car without it being put there by the manufacturer. The simplest one would be to just use your phone’s hotspot. Alternatively, you could buy a MiFi device, they’re still around and this seems like a good use for them. The big problem won’t be the device though, it will be the plan. If you happen to be on T-Mobile, they have something called Binge On that allows it users to stream music and video from many sites (including Netflix) without it counting against their plan. Having said that, if you’re with any other company, it will probably cost you a great deal of money to stream video if you go over your data plan and video is very data hungry. Also keep in mind that if you’re moving fast the quality of your connection may change rapidly. You may drive in areas with poorer coverage and your video streaming may suffer. If possible, downloading the video first will still give you the best quality and you won’t have to worry about data caps. However, if you want to stick with streaming, your phone or a MiFi unit will do the job. Remember that the reason the built in WiFi works so well in modern cars is that they use the body of the car as an antenna   Also remember that the reason the built in WiFi works so well in modern cars is that they use the body of the car as an antenna. Your smartphone also limits the amount of power it uses to transmit back to the cell tower because you might have it pressed up to your head. An integrated car system has no such issues. However, the integrated systems come with very small data plans. Although they are popular with the remote office crowd who needs to check email from their pickup truck when they’re parked in the official middle of nowhere, they aren’t very practical for streaming lots of media, especially video. We are also compelled to point out that you should never watch videos while you are driving. We’re sure all of you know that, but it still must always be said.

Consumer Reports joined Into Tomorrow this week to tell us about QLED: The next big thing TV technology could be something called QLED, according to Samsung. Should we be excited about it? Consumer Reports electronics spokesman James McQueen is here to explain. When it comes to TVs, it’s interesting to look beyond what’s available to see which technologies may be on the horizon. OLED TVs are state-of-the-art in display hardware—and they top our TV Ratings in several larger screen size categories. But reports out of Korea suggest that Samsung may be leapfrogging those TVs in favor of an emerging technology called QLED, which relies on self-illuminating quantum dots. Even if QLED technology proves successful, you won’t be shopping for QLED sets before 2020 or so. But the technology should intrigue anyone who laments the demise of beautiful plasma TVs while resisting the high prices of OLED TVs. LG is the only brand making OLED TVs. There was some speculation earlier this year that Samsung was investing in a version of that technology, but newer reports in the Korean press suggest that Samsung may be shifting away from it toward QLEDs, or quantum dot LED TVs. These TVs would have many of the same advantages as OLED TVs—rich deep blacks, accurate colors, and nearly unlimited viewing angles – but could be much cheaper. For more info on this story, visit ConsumerReports.org. For Into Tomorrow, James McQueen – Consumer Reports

Jon said: “I wanted to tell you about some new technology that might help blind or visually impaired individuals. It’s called Buzz Clip. It clips onto a person’s lapel and sends out an ultrasonic beam in a cone shape. When the device senses an obstacle within 2 meters, it vibrates to alert the person that they’re approaching an object that may be dangerous. It is a product that is being produced in Toronto, Canada. Wondered what you thought about the device. i thought it might be helpful for me.”   Jon, Buzz Clip is an Indiegogo project, it looks like it’s fully funded and then some. Buzz Clip promises to send alerts when it senses objects either within a 2 meter or 1 meter radius, depending on whether the device is set to near mode or far more. The company expected to deliver the product to backers around March or April 2016. It looks like they haven’t yet, but they claim that’s only because the UL and CE certification processes are taking longer than expected, but that they are making progress and still expect to deliver. We wouldn’t endorse the product for now since it’s not really available yet We wouldn’t endorse the product for now since it’s not really available yet, but it does look interesting and worth keeping in mind. We’re in radio so we have plenty of visually impaired and fully blind listeners and it certainly seems like a device some of them may be able to benefit from when it’s available to the general public. If our visually impaired listeners are feeling brave, they can pre-order for $200 at iMerciv.com.

Dave talks to Miguel Valenzuela, Inventor of PancakeBot about the world’s first food printer capable of printing pancakes

Dave talks to Chris Holbert, CEO of SecuraTrac about their mobile, location-based technology and state-of-the-art, cloud-based platforms to improve senior and employee health and safety.