Silicon Kid Website

Currently I am updating a manual I wrote 12 years ago. Many of the illustrations were composed in the then-current version of Paint. For the past 4 years I have used Windows 98 and its MS Paint accessory without problems. However recently, every time I start MS Paint the screen blacks out from the top down, followed by an message and I have to reboot the computer. All other programs appear to work normally and Norton Antivirus 2004 does not detect any problems.

When Windows loads, the dialup networking window appears and to stop the message appearing the choice is either to connect to the Internet or press the ‘Cancel’ button 16 times. Is there any way of preventing this annoying request for a dialup connection? A second problem occurs with a digital image editing program and a video editing program. When loading either program, the following message appears: ‘Brooktree Capture Driver. BtViD: Failure loading VxD driver’. I cancel this message about 5 times before the software will finish loading. When loading the video software, another message appears: ‘Failed to initialize the video capture plug-in. Another program may be using it or the file has been moved. Device is already in use’. Both applications seem to work OK in spite of this, but when I try to shut down the computer, the machine freezes at the ‘Windows is shutting down’ screen. The system has is a 1.8 GHz Celeron running and Windows 98 SE.

I have a Word 97 document which is pretty big (10 MB) and have created hyperlinks for quicker and easier navigation. After adding new information to the document I have found that the hyperlinks change to a different location. How can I prevent this occurring? Secondly, I understand that it is possible to convert Game Boy cartridges into ROMs which can be played on a computer. As I have quite a few Game Boy cartridges I would like to convert these to ROMs. Finally, I am attempting to backup VHS videos to my hard drive via a video capture card to prevent further deterioration of the video quality. However, when I view the captured video, the audio and video play at different speeds resulting in everything being out of sync. Can you help on these three issues? The computer is a Pentium 4 1.8 GHz with 256 MB RAM running Windows 98 SE.

Would you be able please to advise on packages which I could use to transfer LPs to CD? I believe some packages are able to remove scratches.

Whenever opening iTunes a message appears that ‘The iTunes Music Library file cannot be read because it does not appear to be a valid library file’. Reinstalling the application does not fix the problem. I do use other programs such as Windows Media Player and Winamp to play music, but am unsure if they could be the cause. The computer is a Pentium 1.6 GHz computer with 256 MB RAM running Windows XP Home Edition.