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I want to protect my laptop data from being accessed if my computer is stolen. What can I do to protect my laptop running Windows?

Before you non-laptop owners blaze by this because you think it might not apply to you, read on - protecting your personal information stored in Windows requires a similar procedure whether your computer is a laptop, desktop, tablet, or any other form factor. Portable computers are more likely to be stolen than their desktop counterparts because we take them in public and are easier to transport quickly.

This doesn't mean you shouldn't protect yourself if your computer sits under a desk. At the very minimum, disabling Windows autologon, forcing you to type in a password each time you login to Windows will slow down novice data thieves. I talked about disk encryption when I featured TrueCrypt awhile ago. Recognizing encryption as a valuable safety mechanism is a good first step, but you also need to be aware of what you should encrypt. Beyond encryption, you need to be aware of all the places Windows leaves your personal information exposed, so you can have a comprehensive protection strategy.

According to Time Magazine, 591,000 laptops were reported stolen in 2001. I haven't been able to find an updated report, but latop and tablet sales continuing to grow, tt's safe to assume that number went up over the past 10 year. In December 2004, Margita Thompson, Press Secretary to Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, had a laptop stolen from her home. More recently, a laptop containing Social Security numbers and personal information of 98,369 UCal Berkeley alums was stolen. While I cite two high profile thefts here, presumably most of the 591k people from the Time article are normal people like you and me. There are ways, including the drive encryption I mentioned earler, to protect yourself.

Windows Media Player is causing me problems. I added some unrecognized songs to my music library. I attempted to use the Find Album Info feature of Windows Media Player to rename the files, find the album art, and do all the other basic stuff to get track info for my new songs. Instead of finding the names and info for my songs, WMP gives me an error message instead. No matter what I do I can't make the error go away. Not sure if this helps, but the error says:

An Error has occured in the script on this page

Line: 1
Char: 243
Error: Automation server can't create object
Code: 0
URL: http://fai.music.metaservices.microsoft.com/FAI/scripts/default.js

Do you want to continue running scripts on this page?

How can I fix this? I tried removing Windows Media Player and adding it back. I checked to see if Windows had any updates. Nothing seems to work.

You certainly tried the most obvious solutions to the problem, but the likely cause of the error is something in Internet Explorer, which isn't as obvious. Read on for the steps you need to fix your automation server can't create object error.

Brian writes, "I have a problem that I need help with. After years of ripping my CDs with Windows Media Player, I recently acquired a new iPhone. From what I can tell, my iPhone will not allow me to play the WMA files created when I used Windows Media Player. Is there anything I can do to convert WMA to MP3 or M4A? I really don't want to have to re-rip more than 600 CDs."

I personally prefer to avoid converting a compressed audio format like WMA to another compressed audio format like MP3, because both formats throw some audio data away when you create the file. When you ripped your CD to WMA format, you lost some of the audio in the process. When you convert an audio file from WMA to MP3, you take a file that already had some missing information, interpret it as a new file format, and potentially lose even more information. In theory, the audio information you lose is inaudible to humans, but sometimes making that generational transition from one format to another causes the changes to be audible. If you have the original CD, you'll get a better sounding MP3 file by re-ripping the tracks. I do understand that ripping 600 CDs (or even 100) sounds like a daunting task best to be avoided. What's the best way to convert WMA files to MP3?

It's been more than seven years since I first wrote about Digital Media Converter as a video conversion solution. The product has evolved nicely over time and adapted to various changes in video formats, adding features as customers and power users like me requested them. What started out as a simple way to batch convert your DivX AVI files and MPG files into something you could play on an iPod has become a great video conversion suite with two distinct versions, depending on your specific needs. The original version does batch processing and converts most common file formats, but lacks some of the more advanced features. Digital Media Converter Pro fills in the rest of the gaps. So how do you know which version of Digital Media Converter is right for you?

When we got our Honda Pilot before our daughter was born one of the primary features we wanted was enough seating for eight people. While eight seats sound huge, the idea was to find enough room so that we wouldn't need two cars when various family members visit from out of state. What I hadn't counted on was how much I'd love having a backup camera to see behind the car when driving in reverse.

Several months earlier, I was backing out of a parking space in the Suzuki I've had almost as long as I've been writing tech articles. The parking lot had an odd slope to it and I couldn't see the car in a space behind me also backing out. We backed into each other. Thankfully at the rolling rate I was leaving the space, no one was injured. It sticks in my mind that the viewing area of the camera in our Honda Pilot would have prevented the minor collision because I could have seen everything in the blind spot created by the slope. I won't go so far as to say backing cameras should be a required safety feature in every car, but I do think many people can benefit. So what should you look for if you want to add an aftermarket backup camera to your car?

I have five different computers I use regularly. While five computers is probably more than most people, I know many people who have at least two computers in their home. Those computers need to be backed up. It would be a tragedy to lose family photos, video clips, or all the time and effort you put into things like personal finance programs or genealogy projects. More importantly, they need to be backed up to an online solution, because a local backup is almost as prone to failure as the drive in your computer. While there are a bunch of online backup solutions, many of them fall short because they make managing more than one computer complicated or they simply don't offer the right features. For example, I keep many large video files around, most of which I may never touch again, but I want to have access if I need them. Many of the backup solutions limit the size of files they will backup, so I instantly rule them out. But there are some good online backup solutions out there.

"Is there a way I can stream live video direct from my cell phone to the Internet?"

A number of services are springing up to allow you to stream video using the data connection and video camera on your cell phone. Several years ago, Nokia made a limited introduction of this functionality, but the N series camera phones were expensive and very few people owned them. Android phones and Apple's iPhone have blown the market wide open for streaming video from your cell phone, with solid applications that stream your video through free subscription-based video streaming sites. While there are several choices, I will cover my favorite service.

Yahoo! annouced the sale of the Delicious bookmarking service to AVOS, which means all those bookmarks you archived will soon have a new home. You can transition your Delicious account to the AVOS version, but you might want to consider making a backup copy before you do. I moved all my Delicious bookmarks to Pinboard, but also wanted to make a personal archive. If you want to archive all the bookmarks and tags you accumulated over the years, Evernote is one of the best places to export your Delicious bookmarks. Thankfully Evernote makes it easy to import them with a tool that grabs your Delicious bookmarks and imports them, along with tags and the timestamp of when you created them.

"Can you burn a file and have that file locked to the CD so no one can then make a copy of the file on the CD?"

If your goal is to send someone a CD and give them access to the files on it, there is not a good way to lock a CD from being copied by the recipient. Hollywood has tried unsuccessfully to prevent copying of their materials and most of us don't have their budget for copy protection. On the other hand, if you are creating a file archive, you can encrypt the contents of the disk so that a password is required to access them.

"Is there any software that can do autotune for Windows? I want to autotune like T-Pain does in his songs."

Auto-tune is basically a pitch correction that changes notes that are slightly off pitch to being on pitch. In other words, auto-tune is a way to correct your pitch if you aren't a professional trained singer. It also comes in handy if you simply want to add electronic effects to your vocal tracks. There are a number of Windows apps that can perform auto-tune pitch correction with varying degrees of complexity.