Receivers and Audio Components

My brother bought a Sony cd recorder which he was told it could be used with his cassette deck to transfer his cass. to Cd's. We hooked up his deck to the recorder with the in and out cables provided. Two came with it and put in a blank cd and a cassette in his Kenwood unit and push record but nothing happens.

Tech support at Sony was no good and say this can't even be done. Called the store and they say it can and were too busy to walk us through it all. Wondering what we are doing wrong.

Using CD-R by the way.

I would like to use my home theater system (samsung htq45) to play dvds, but without the surround sound on at times (there are times I want to use the surround speakers, other times I want to simply use the tv speakers), is this possible?

Helping a friend who has multiple speakers though out his home driven by Kenwood receiver.  Using a Y cord with  stereo  jack into PC  and 2 RCA jacks into rcvr. to play music stored in his PC. He also wants to be able to the use the  5.1 PC speakers too. Problem is: when they're connected, the gain on the rcvr drops considerably. The PC is a Dell with 6 jacks.  Can this be corrected? Thanks.