Higher Learning

            I had some company from Sunday to Tuesday this week – two of whom were my younger cousins and they also brought one of their friends.  These boys are about 14 and 15.  As I had to finish up my PowerPoint I took them to the university with me.  How insightful they were about my PowerPoint and how they wish their teachers would do something that ‘cool’.  They were throwing ideas at me left, right, and center and were quite curious as to how my PowerPoint would work, who it would be for, and if I was really actually going to use it.  They thought I would be a really good teacher if I did.  As I was putting my voice recordings into my PowerPoint one of the boys was on another program where you can type things in and it will read it back to you.  I didn’t even know where he found it but I did some exploration of my own and it’s in the control panel under speech.  My computer only has one voice but I’m sure you could get others.  I thought it would be good to use for any of your students, especially if they were typing and had trouble spelling.  I know there is spell check but sometimes spell check gives you some pretty awful choices for the word you actually want.  This way they can hear if that is the word they want to use.

            Another thing that they taught me is how to change what starts up when you start your computer.  For the longest time I had this stupid error come up like “csrss.exe cannot be opened”.  It frustrated me because I was not trying to open it!  I guess it was included in my start programs list.  Now I know how to take those out!  My cousin also went on to say that I do not need all of the things to start up because it is fairly pointless, but I was scared to let him take any others off in fear that something I really did need would not work.  So I removed the csrss.exe from the start programs list and it is so nice to start my computer now!  To see which programs are started on your computer when you turn it on just:

§   click on start

§   choose run program

§   type in msconfig

§   click OK

§   click start up

            I don’t know if I would really change anything if I were you but that is how you can check it out so you at least know what I’m talking about.  He was very adamant about me not having MSN in the list to start running when I turn my computer on.  Then they all started to tell me that I was too old for MSN anyway!  That’s all I have for now.  Have you fellow bloggers learned anything new or interesting about computers this past week?

~Linsey~