tidystorm

random techno-gab

Category Archives: Windows Shmindows

How I rip an online video and burn to audio cd for my car

I watch online videos that cover business and technical subjects. I don’t really need to watch the guy talk, so why not listen in the car instead?

I use Realplayer Free.

1.  Open the video in Google Chrome and start the video.

2. Click on the Realplayer “download this video” link.

3. Download several.

4. Open Realplayer library  

5. In this interface, you can choose “audio CD burner” and you can drag enough files to fill a CD or DVD. Realplayer will tell you how much room you have left.

6. Click “burn CD.” It will burn .cda files to the disk. They play on the computer and on the CD player in my Honda.

[Solved] Lenovo Ideapad Wireless Bug

Hung on the phone for a total of four hours with Lenovo, but heck I got an answer. My wireless was not talking to my Lenovo Ideapads any more, yet it was communicating just fine with my Dell and my Lenovo Thinkpad. All were running various versions of Windows 7.

Ralph, in the Philippines, determined that this is a Windows problem, but he hung with me the whole time to figure out a workaround.

Hopefully, Lenovo will dish out this answer in the first hour the next time someone calls, not the fourth hour, thanks to Ralph for figuring it out.

So here goes:

The problem

Linksys E3000 router always worked just fine with Lenovo desktops, Lenovo laptops, Lenovo Ideapads, and a Dell. Suddenly on December 12, the wireless on the four Ideapads seemed not to work any more. After a lot of mucking, the situation got worse, in that four of our Ideapads could not also connect by Ethernet. Now I had two doorstops, and two others that could only connect wired.

Curiously, my Verizon Wifi did work. This led me, and the Lenovo guy, to believe it’s not a hardware problem.

I tried

I tried everything I could find from a google search, but none of these worked:

  1. Uninstall Lenovo Ready Com 5
  2. System Restore
  3. One Key Recovery
  4. Update device driver
  5. Change encryption type
  6. Stopping and starting the WLAN services using services. msc
  7. Changing the router channels
  8. Flash bios
  9. Update Intel Chipset Driver (the wireless card is on the motherboard, so maybe this was not unreasonable)

A misleading event

The first time I tried a Lenovo OneKey Recovery, the wireless came back, not just on the one Ideapad on which I did the recovery, but all four. This made no sense. After more mucking, I lost the wireless again, and it did not come back after another OneKey Recovery. This was a spurious event.

A misleading solution

Windows allows a connection through the MAC address. A MAC address is used by games such as Playstation or Xbox. The MAC address of each laptop can be hard-coded into the router’s configuration. Doing so will override whatever the Windows 7 problem is. Lenovo could go no further, but they are to be applauded for taking it this far.

On one of the Ideapads, I did this:

  1. cmd->(admin mode)->ipconfig /all
  2. look for wireless lan
  3. find the physical address and write it down
  4. go into the control panel for the router
  5. choose the wireless tab, then wireless MAC filter
  6. under MAC Address Filter List, type in the MAC address
  7. repeat for the next laptop (find the MAC address, then type it into the router’s control panel)

Reboot everything

The wireless now worked. Ralph from Lenovo thinks that a MAC address can always be used. So even though it’s a workaround, it can be a long-term one.


But the next day…

The next day, the ideapads couldn’t see the wireless again. Lenovo was perplexed. So I decided to introduce a change by switching routers. I bought a NetGear N600. It worked. SOLVED

The autopsy

I noticed that the netgear suggested two different router names (SSID’s). One name is for the 2.4GHz and the other is for 5GHz. I hadn’t made the distinction before on the Linksys. So I went with netgear’s example, and assigned two different names.

Bang! The ideapads seem to only find the 2.4GHz connection, while the Thinkpad found both frequencies.

My theory as to what might have happened: On the Linksys, the 5GHz frequency was maybe not working? This is over my head, but I’m just using pure logic. it doesn’t explain some of the spurious events, though.

Oh and the Netgear was cheap. See the ad above.