OK. Help. A few songs in my music folder are going around saying they're something called 'DAT file's. They should be MP3s. They open with Windows Media Player and play, but I can't have them in my Media Player library; have to manually open them each time. Very annoying- is there some way to make Windows or WMP or whatever is at fault treat them like normal music?
(winXP home...umm....WMP 9...?)
Windows likes to associate files to programs by their extensions. Have you tried changing their extensions to 'mp3'?
That should fix it.
Thing is, because it hides file extensions, I don't know how to change them...
Folder options in the Control Panel.
Under the 'view' tab, uncheck "Hide file extensions for known file types".
Simply changing the extension, though, may not work.
It seems a bit strange... but hey... it worked! I'm not gonna question it.
Stupid Windows.
and why dont you download iTunes for XP while your at it ... its sooooo much better than WMP for music ...
http://www.apple.com/itunes/download/
TOM
iTunes for Windows: Slow, crappy, weird interface(windows bits tacked on in all the wrong places)... pointless.
Seriously... it takes 15 seconds to load on a 2.5GHz Celeron- pathetic.
...and not all PCers are willing to upgrade to the bloat that is Xp.
My personal fave for playing mp3s on my PC is Winamp 2.X. It can be found, along with a lot of other good proggies, at oldversion.com. Slim and fast music. Even ran with acceptable speed on our old 133 MHz Compaq mp3 station at work (which has since been replaced by a PM 7600 running Grayamp).
it also runs on 2000 ... but i suppose that isnt much less of a bloat ... but at least it dosent look like a fisher-price creation
TOM
I ran WA 2.x on a P-90 laptop with 98SE and only 24mb of RAM. It had lagging video issues if I tried to scroll too fast, but it kept on playing without skipping. I have yet to try it with the 40MB I now have.
On XP being bloated- while it runs strikingly fast on a new computer(well my Dell at least)... anyone ever tried doing anything with it on a 333MHz Pentium II, 128MB Optima box? If not, I suggest you give it a go.
(that's exactly what you're forced to do at my old school- somebody stole the funding for the new batch of Dells, so they got 4 Dimension 2350s and just stuck XP on all the remaining Optima POSes.)
Im running XP (stipped) on a P3 750mhz machine. iTunes loads in a few seconds...
Odd
Hey ,it is not true that XP runs slow on older computers !I ran't ti for a year on my Apricot 550 (K6 266Mhz with 96Mb RAM)
It runed super just as fast Millenium ran on the same computer when I bought it.But however there was something strange with the instalation disk when I tried to install it on my newer computer 700Mhz Duron it didn't wanted to start after installation.
ME? I'm surprised it ran at all.....
Actiolly it ran slower that the XP after it.
And if XP running on 266 mhz suprises you you just wait whe you see this - XP running on 20Mhz *not kidding* http://www.winhistory.de/more/386/xpmini.htm See for yourself.
Hope you sprech deutsch
My wife can't tell the difference between XP on my p4 3.0ghz with a gig of ram and a fast drive and my XP1800 (1.5ghz) box with 512 megs of ram on the same fast drive (7200 40 gigger).
She is running the same set of applications on each (the p4 was a replacment for the xp1800) and she says that she can't tell the difference for look and feel. She uses various office applications, the browser (just plain ole IE), Windows Movie Maker 2, and a few other "office" style applications.
Now I can tell a huge difference when I play games but thats the nature of games. But for office and just interfacing with the GUI, quite often you just can't tell that there is an appreciabile difference between new highspeed boxes and older midrange boxes.
On an old box (like 500mhz-900mhz) there is a big difference though. Lots of memory helps. My 750mhz laptop is fairly zippy since i have 1/2 gig of ram in it. My 1.2 ghz p3 laptop can seem slower since it only has 256megs of ram in it.
I use WMP almost exclusively (in order to sync my collection onto my PPC) and can attest to it's abysmal preformance and interface. I have a PII, 128 MB RAM and a 233 MHZ processor, so I don't appreciate the bloat.
PIII 500, 256 MB RAM, XP Home...
iTunes is quite zippy...
It also depends on how big of an mp3 collection one has. I have close to 19000 mp3's so itunes does take a while to open.