Chapter 8. Pictures, Movies, and Sounds
Windows XP is the most advanced version yet when it comes to playing and displaying multimedia files—photos, sounds, and movies. New features make it easier than ever for your PC to control your digital camera or scanner, play movies and sounds, and play radio stations from all over the world as you work on your PC (thanks to your Internet connection).
In this chapter, you’ll find guides to all of these features.
Digital Photos in XP
The new stability of XP is nice, and the new task pane can save you time. But if you have a digital camera, few of the new features in Windows XP are quite as useful as its ability to manage your digital photos. Microsoft has bent over backward to simplify and streamline a process that was once a chain of pain: transferring photos from your camera to the PC, and then trying to figure out what to do with them.
Hooking Up Your Camera
If your digital camera is less than a few years old, it probably came with a USB cable designed to plug into your PC. Fortunately, if your PC is young enough to run Windows XP, it probably has a USB jack, too.
Furthermore, Windows XP comes preloaded with drivers for hundreds of current camera models, generally sparing you the standard installation process described in Chapter 14. That’s why, for most people, the instructions for transferring photos from the camera to the PC are as follows:
Connect the camera to the PC, using the USB cable.
That’s it—there is no step 2. As shown in Figure ...
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