Many say that Windows 7 is Microsoft’s most impressive operating system yet. That does not mean, however, that the applications that Windows 7 provides are full-featured — or even desired. Read on for some ideas about how to make Windows better, at no cost, by using third-party replacement applications and how to get rid of features in Windows 7 that you don’t use.
Q: Windows Media Player in Windows 7 often hangs upon startup or fails to play songs after it crashes. I do have a large music collection on a drive attached to my computer by USB. Could this be the problem?
A: Windows Media Player is great when it works. But lockup problems such as the one you describe are common.
Windows Media Player stores information about your music and video collection in a series of database files on your local hard disk, and it accesses those database files upon startup. If your music and video collection is stored on a disk that’s not local — meaning one that is not physically located inside of your computer but rather attached by a relatively slow USB connection or by network — then there could be startup slowdowns as Windows Media Player accesses both its database files and tries to update that database by scanning your collection.
To solve the problem, you can try a couple of things. First, move your music and video collection to a locally-connected (internal) drive. Note that after moving your library of files, you should delete the Windows Media Player database and allow the program to rebuild it with the new location information. To delete the database, close Media Player. Then open the Start menu and type “folder options.” Click the Folder Options entry, and in the resulting Folder Options dialog box, click the View tab. From the list…