Consuela, there's usually a hole in the bottom of a DVD player that will let you manually open the drawer.
'Time Bomb'
Buffistechnology 2: You Made Her So She Growls?
Got a question about technology? Ask it here. Discussion of hardware, software, TiVos, multi-region DVDs, Windows, Macs, LINUX, hand-helds, iPods, anything tech related. Better than any helpdesk!
Ooof, Consuela, my sympathies. My DVD player died last weekend. I think there is a Murphy's Law for the pre-Christmas gift-buying season.
Mine was only a cheap Cyberhome I got from Best Buy four years ago, and I have to admit I got my money's worth from it. Never had any hint of trouble with it until suddenly the only thing that worked was the power-on light. It still had one of my Firefly DVDs in it, and it did not have a manual release hole.
The few parts that now remain don't even make a decent doorstop.
Disassembling the machine was actually kinda fun, and I got my DVD back okay, but I noticed that the manual release mechanism worked just fine -- all that was missing was a simple little hole in the right place on the case.
Grrr.
Office Depot's clearance section online includes a couple of Apex DVD players for under $18. [link]
Manual release hole? Awesome! I shall try it.
You usually have to stick a pen or a pin in and move the gears yourself.
My tool of choice is an unbent paper clip, the answer to many of life's dilemmas.
The unbent paper clip opens many doors.
Unbent paper clip
My simple key, always there
Opens many doors
If I wanted to paste in some ASCII art here, what would be the easiest way?
The <pre> tag would work, but the font is too narrow. Maybe a <pre> tag inside a <code> tag?
eta:
<pre> and the courier font?
test:
Here's a possibly very dumb computer question (please, bear with the techno-illiterate):
I want to configure my Gmail account to open in Outlook on my laptop. When I'm using the desktop, though, will the mail still be available in Gmail itself? I see there's an option to keep the messages in the Gmail inbox.
But there wouldn't be a way to have it configured for Outlook in both computers, right? Or I am thinking about it wrong? Is that the computer I'm using will place the mail where I tell it to, and it doesn't have as much to do with Gmail itself?