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Why won’t Pcmark 10 benchmark my PC?
QIdownloaded Pcmark 10 (Issue 506, page 18) because I wanted to know how my PC was coping. Not very well appears to be the answer, because the program simply states ‘No Matching Benchmarks Found’ when I try to run a test. My PC is old (it has an AMD Phenom II X6 1090T Processor with 8GB RAM and a Geforce GT 240 graphics card), but I was still expecting something. Any advice?
Athebad news is your PC is too old for the program. To run a benchmark test in Pcmark 10 your PC must have a graphics card that’s Opengl 4.3 compatible – which is a fancy way of saying it must be capable of displaying the complex 2D and 3D graphics that Pcmark uses in its test.
Opengl 4.3 was released in 2012 and is supported by Nvidia Geforce 400 and AMD Radeon HD 5000 graphics cards (or newer), as well as Intel Haswell processors (or newer). Unfortunately, your Geforce 240 card is older than these and works only with anything up to Opengl 3.2). Incidentally, as of 31 July we’re now up to Opengl 4.6.
The good news is that there are other benchmarking tools you can use instead. User ben chm ark(www. user benchmark. com), for example, doesn’t have such demanding requirements and should be able to test your PC. Click Free Download to download it, then double-click the User benchmark. exefile.B ea ware, this isn’t an installer, but the tool itself. Run the file and you’ll see videos and graphics, but this is nothing to worry about. Once the test is completed a Performance Results screen will open in your browser (see screenshot below left). Scroll down to see information about your computer (PC Status, Processor, etc) then scroll down further to see details of how your PC performed in the test.
Where are the new songs I added to Musicbee?
Qi’vebeen looking for a program to replace itunes for a while (not Groove Music, which is even worse) and Musicbee (Issue 507, page 55) is just the job. My only problem is that I can’t seem to rip a CD I recently bought to my Library using Musicbee’s Rip CD tool. I just see an error message that says ‘Encoding failed – no MP3 encoder enabled’. Why would this happen?
Athishappens because, by default, Musicbee doesn’t contain an MP3 encoder (an instruction file that lets it create MP3S from the tracks on your CD). You have two options: either change the file format Musicbee creates from MP3 to something like FLAC (which actually produces better sounding digital audio files) or install an MP3 converter.
To change to FLAC, press Alt+r on your keyboard to open the Rip CD tool, then click Settings (top right). When the settings menu opens, click the ‘encode as’ dropdown menu (top left), choose FLAC (see screenshot above right), then click Save. Now go back to the Rip CD tool, click Start Rip and you should find you can rip your CD without problems.
If you prefer to play MP3S (perhaps because you have an older portable music player that doesn’t support FLAC), you’ll need to download MP3 encoder LAME. Go to www. snipca.com/25169, click the ‘Lame_v 3.99.3_ for_ windows. exe’ link, then double-click the downloaded file and install it. Return to Musicbee’s Rip CD tool, click Settings, Encoder Settings, the three dots to the right of LAME.EXE, then navigate to the C:\program Files (x86)\lame For Audacity folder. Double-click Lame.exe, click Apply, then Save. In the CD Rip Settings menu, choose MP3 from the ‘encode as’ dropdown menu, then click Save. Finally, click Start Rip to rip the tracks on your CD as MP3S.
Is Cooltweak resizing my images correctly?
QIhave just downloaded Cooltweak (Issue 506, page 40), but I’m not sure it’s working properly. I have tried to resize a photo to 1600 pixels, but it doesn’t appear to be any larger when I open it in the Cooltweak folder. How can I compare it to the original image?
Acooltweakonly puts images into the Cooltweak folder if it has successfully processed them, so the fact you see images there suggests you are using the software correctly. To check that it’s working properly, open the Cooltweak folder, right-click an image, click Properties, then the Details tab. If the image was correctly processed the first dimension (the width) in the Dimension field should be 1600 pixels because of the settings you’re using.