Q: I have a DVD of my young daughter playing piano at a concert.  Is there any way I can take the sound-track from the DVD and put it onto a CD so that she/we can listen to the music on a standard CD player?  I have the Nero software and have tried to figure out how to do this using this software but have had no success to date.

There are several programs that can achieve this. See: www.audioutilities.com/dvd-audio-ripper/dvd-audio-ripper.htm for a selection of shareware programs. If you would like to use entirely freeware programs but using a much more complicated method then see: www.area450.com/softwaremods/dvdtoaudiocd.html

Moving between partitions

Q: My hard drive is divided into C, D and E partitions. C and D have 40 GB of space each. I now want to move some of the free space in my D drive to my C drive. Is there any easy way to do so?

Unfortunately there is nothing in Windows that can resize partitions without deleting all data on the partitions. If they were created using software such as Partition Magic that already exists on one of the hard disks then using that software you can very easily alter the sizes of the partitions without any loss of data.

However, there is a tiny free program called Partition Resizer that can do what you need. It can be downloaded from: www.webtree.ca/newlife/partresizer_info.htm This program has received very good reports but I have not used it myself.

Do I need to keep cookies?

Q: I am still ‘old world’ in that I run Windows 98 with Internet Explorer and still access internet by  dial-up, and apart from emails, use the Net for transactions, bill payment, banking etc.. Regularly I delete Windows Temp files and also, at same time, go to Internet Explorer Tools menu and from Internet Options I then Delete Files. I have never deleted cookies - only because ‘somebody’ once told me “don’t delete cookies”. Should ‘Cookies’ be deleted from time to time, and what would happen if you hit “Delete Cookies”?

I am not sure if there is a correct answer to this question. Personally, I do not delete my cookies because some sites that I visit require cookies, and for a couple of other sites it speeds up my navigation because I have the prior cookies.

In my opinion, cookies are tiny harmless files and do not consume much disk space. However if you are running short of hard disk capacity then I suggest that you can delete all cookies. As a compromise solution you may consider deleting all cookies that are older than say six months.  In my case I do a substantial clean up on an annual basis. After creating full backups, including an image backup and as a part of the cleanup, I delete all temporally Internet files and all cookies that are older than 12 months. In this method I have never experienced any problems.

Q:When I install Adobe Premiere Pro, it comes up with "Your computer cannot run the installation because your processor does not support the SSE2 instruction set.  What does this mean and what can I do?

This means that your computer is too old to run a program that needs a fast CPU in order to be able to perform its task.

The SSE2 (Streaming SIMD Extensions 2) instruction set that is embedded in the silicon of the CPU (Central Processing Unit) and is designed to improve the performance of video manipulation by the CPU and therefore reduce the workload on the software. This instruction set is included with Intel Pentium 4 and later processors, and with AMD Athlon 64 and Opteron and later processors.

It is unlikely that your current motherboard can accommodate one of these later processors. The minimum hardware upgrade that you will need is a new motherboard, CPU and memory and possibly a new power supply. Realistically you should consider a new computer and I suggest that you look at the dual core CPUs from Intel or AMD as video editing requires very considerable resources. You will need at least one large and fast hard disk, but two physical hard disks are recommended for video editing.