Catching up

I haven’t had much time on the computer over the last couple of days because The Artist has needed it for Gallery work. Also the weather has been so changeable that I haven’t been able to get out and take any photos either. It’s midsummer and it feels more like March!

So I copied the .avi tutorials onto a DVD and booted up my laptop, intending to work downstairs, but I found that I had sound and no video – just like I had done when I first tried to run them on the Office desktop. That was a severe disappointment because there’s only one phone line and only one broadband modem – both attached to the Office desktop where The Artist was working. So I couldn’t even go to the T189 website, follow the link to download the codec that made the video work properly and resolve the problem.

Never mind, I thought, son is away and his computer is even MORE powerful that the Office desktop so I headed into his room, booted his computer … and got exactly the same result.  Now all three of these computers are running Windows XP Home SP2 and are updated to WMP 11 so I’m at a loss as to why they won’t run the .avi videos without downloading the extra codec. I tried Realplayer … no luck … the DVD players … still no luck … this was getting very frustrating…

In the end, the only way I could watch the Week 8 tutorials (yes, folks, I am behind with the course) was to get the original DVD supplied for T189 and try that on son’s computer. Fortunately, given the ‘oomph’ that his computer packs (he plays a lot of computer games) it made short work of the tutorials and I got to watch the first four all the way through without any glitches, out-of-synch problems or crashes.

But this only goes to show that the new video tutorials haven’t completely cracked the problems that some students experienced when trying to watch them.