2007 April

ie7-installation-turn-off-antivirus

April 25, 2007 By Terry Stockdale

To install, the IE team recommends temporarily disabling your anti-spyware, anti-adware and anti-virus applications.

One of my subscribers asked “My question is how do I do this ?”

Filed Under: Anti-virus, IE, Security Fixes, Terry's Computer Tips, Web browsing, Windows XP

HOWTO: Change Your Default Printer

April 22, 2007 By Terry Stockdale

In all versions of Windows, whether you have one printer or more, only one of those printers is set as the “Default Printer”.

The default printer is the printer on which many programs will print, if you click their Print icon. Most programs also have a Print option under their File menu, which will display a print dialog box — which will let you choose between multiple printers.

Microsoft Word, Excel and Powerpoint are three examples of programs that have a Print icon that immediately prints to the default printer.

Filed Under: Operating System, Printers, Terry's Computer Tips, Windows XP

Problems with Pre-loaded Software

April 16, 2007 By Terry Stockdale

We’re all used to our computer manufacturers preloading Windows, Windows Media Player, AOL and a couple other dial-up services, anti-virus trials, Microsoft Office trials and a bunch of other stuff.

I usually delete the junk quickly. Whether it’s a trial version of an antivirus I don’t want or a trial of Microsoft Office, I want the software that I pick — and from the vendor of my choice. Those preinstall “deals” often seem to be at list price.

I recently ran into a client’s computer that would not communicate on his network or access the Internet. Guess what?

It was the pre-installed, partially activated Norton Internet Security that was causing the problem. Since it was installed but not activated, it was blocking everything!

Filed Under: Bug Fixes, Patches, Performance Tweaks, Pre-installed Software, Registry repair, Security Fixes, Security Issues, Terry's Computer Tips, Windows XP

Compacting Email Folders

April 9, 2007 By Terry Stockdale

There is a little trick to the way POP3 email program like Outlook, Outlook Express, Eudora and Thunderbird store the email messages you receive. A “deleted message” is not really deleted! Did you know that?

All your email program does is to rewrite a few characters in the file in order to tell itself that a particular email has been “deleted.”

One particular marking in the file indicates that the email has been deleted, so the program shows it in the Trash folder. A different marking shows it has been deleted from the Trash folder. But, it really has not been removed from the big email.

ActiveX or No ActiveX

April 6, 2007 By Terry Stockdale

I received a question from a subscriber who asked:

A number of times I have seen you refer disparagingly of “Active-x controls”.
I have seen downloads that require Active X to run properly. I have read the definition of the program, but, I guess I am just dense. What is this thing, and why do you consider it so insidious?
Admittedly, I’m technical-challenged, but can this program be explained?
What does one do as an alternative, if the program you want to download, requires Active-X to run?

Active-X controls are downloadable programs that have full capabilities to do anything on your computer. I’m not sure why Microsoft chose such the innocuous word “control” for a program that originally had few or no security constraints imposed upon it.

Switching Users in Windows XP

April 1, 2007 By Terry Stockdale

I received a question from subscriber Joseph Baker who was having problems with his Windows computer. For some reason, his “Switch User” button wasn’t working.

The Switch User function (Start Logoff) is a powerful feature of Windows XP that allows multiple different IDs to use the computer– which would allow his wife to switch the active user from him to her without logging him off

Unfortunately, while I could think of a couple possible reasons for his problem, I didn’t have anything definitive:

1. Windows may have been hung — it happens
2. Swapping users takes a lot of memory if you had a number of programs open. Sometimes, when Windows is swapping real memory to the hard drive(called “pagiing” to “virtual memory”) and vice versa, Windows will seem hung but isn’t really,
3. The program in your user session may have crashed — and needed a Control-Alt-Delete to pull up task manager to close it Undoubtedly there are other possibiliites. If the problem happens again or routinely, look into it. If it was just this once, blame it on the phase of the moon or Bill Gates’ Revenge.

Read the rest of the story in Switching Users in Windows XP

Filed Under: Operating System, Performance Tweaks, Registry repair, Services, Speed Tweaks, Terry's Computer Tips, Windows XP