Archive for October, 2005
Read email in text
What do you do if you receive an email that you are not sure about but want to check the contents to see if it is safe? Most email clients will give you the option of reading a message in pure text format. By using text only you prevent any nasties from executing. No HTML [...]
How to say “No to all”
When doing an operation that involves many files, you will sometimes encounter a message like the one shown in the figure below. Although it has a button “Yes to All”, there is a no button for “No to All”. For example, you may want to copy all the files in a folder to a backup [...]
Too many tweaks
The Internet is full of suggested tweaks to Windows. Many of these get repeated over and over by various sites without anybody actually testing them. They also appear in books. They then assume some sort of canonical status without having much actual foundation. In fact, I have found many of them to be pretty useless [...]
How to repair Outlook Express
Tom Koch is a leading expert on the inner workings of the Windows email client Outlook Express (OE). A very useful article that he has written outlines the steps to take if OE starts to act up. Here is the link for his article, An Outlook Express basic repair kit
Put Your PC in Your Pocket
Forgive me for reminiscing like the old man that I am but I can’t help but think back to the days when I was using the Univac I. It and all its peripherals took up all the space in a very large room. All the memory capacity was a tiny fraction of what is on [...]
How to add special characters to email and other documents
Did you ever want to put a special character like the cent sign (¢) or the British pound sign (£) into a document or email? Or use the correct symbols for Spanish or other languages? Regular users of word processing programs like Microsoft Word probably already know how to do this but many average PC [...]
A more convenient place for Outlook Express mail
For many PC users, some of the most important personal data on their computers are their saved email messages. In the widely used Windows XP email client Outlook Express, each email folder and its contents are stored as a binary file in a proprietary format with extension DBX. If you ever want to back up [...]
Registry cleaners
Back in the days of Windows 95, it was an essential part of routine maintenance to keep the Registry cleaned up. Windows 98 was a little more stable but the Registry still required looking after. A variety of software programs became available just for Registry cleaning. Some were free; some were not. Some were effective; [...]
Large hard drive support
Hard drives keep getting bigger and 200+ GB drives are now common. However, if you have an older computer, you may not want to rush out and buy a big hard drive. Older systems may have trouble recognizing drives that are over 137 GB. The original design specification for the ATA interface only provided 28-bits [...]
Finding a lost mouse pointer
When I am using a laptop with a pointing stick or a touch pad, I sometimes lose the pointer because it goes somewhere off the screen. The pointer can also get obscured when using certain graphics programs. Windows XP has a mouse locator setting that can be useful in these situations. Go to Control Panel-Printers [...]
File corruption in Outlook Express
The Windows email client Outlook Express stores email in a proprietary format. Tom Koch has an interesting and useful article at Microsoft about this peculiar format and how your email can get lost through corruption of the DBX files that are used. One thing that he says may raise some eyebrows but I agree [...]
