Driven Insane By IT Trivialities

Argh!

Okay, I enjoy the fact that I usually have free time at work (when all is going well). I don't mind spending some of it trying to fix things that are minor and irrelevant to work. It ticks me off, however, to find that I've been searching/experimenting for over two hours without any success.

In this case, the trivial little thing is an inability to burn CDs using Windows Media Player - pull up the Burn option and it says "No CD or DVD burner has been detected." This is is a minor issue because there's other CD-burning software on the workstations that functions just fine for anything work-related. Our Advertising Manager, however, prefers the way Media Player organizes files for selection. Whee.

This problem shows up all over. Plenty of forum posts here and there. Solutions, though, are slim. Is the CD-RW drive on the approved Windows list? Yes. Is it installed correctly? Yes. Does it show up as recordable in Windows? Yes. Change this... tweak that... None of the solutions seem to take into account that other software is fine with the drive, just not Media Player. WMP will even read from the drive fine, but not burn to it.

Why hasn't it been fixed? Why don't people understand the problem is WMP-specific?

Why am I taking time to worry over something like this?

Comments

  1. alynnwellsFebruary 10, 2006 at 3:15 PM

    For what it's worth, sometimes one burning application will hijack certain burning functions so they're unavailable to certain other applications. Why? On a guess, because he's the Advertising Manager. Though that's just a guess.

    ReplyDelete
  2. marinredwolfFebruary 10, 2006 at 4:22 PM

    *chuckles* Okay, yeah, were it a 'rank and file' employee, I'd have brushed off such requests long ago. Hmm... it could be a software conflict between Media Player and the Roxio software that came with these workstations. But then, I've glanced at a couple computers we've purchased since that have different hardware and different pre-installed CD-writing software, and Media Player acts the same way there. I don't even have a control for my experiments, just "Well, it works on my home computer." My thought: "Gee, great. Use your home computer." ;)

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