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I received an email recently from a reader who was having problems with Outlook Express. As I have written several times recently, when you delete emails, they’re not really deleted — even if you “empty the deleted emails folder.” Your email program still has the email in its data file — it has only marked the email as deleted. The next time you compact the email folders, the folder would be rewritten without the deleted email. Yury, though, was having difficulties compacting one of his email folders:

Terry,

I can not compact my Sent folder. By the end of the compacting process I am getting an error message “The folder is currently in use by Outlook Express or another application”. After closing the message the whole computer slows down, and some times I have to reboot it. I have an impression, that something is running in the background. Also, lately when I am trying to back up my e-mail on the external drive, the process running continuously 2 or 3 times and volume is in gigabytes. It all indicates, that I have old unerased messages sitting somewhere in my computer. As a result, I have problems sending e-mails. The e-mail seemingly does not leave Outbox, but in fact Outlook keeps continuously send it out, and the e-mail never shows-up in the Send folder. I had this problem before, and it always because there are to many unerased e-mails in my system. Except before I was able easily to fix it by deleting and compacting files.

Please, advise. Thank you very much for your time and consideration.

Yury Ferkelman

I wrote back to Yury to tell him how to proceed:

Continue reading Outlook Express - Problem Compacting Email Folders

If you need to identify which program opens a particular file type, you can do that, and a lot more, using the Folder Options functions in Windows Explorer.

To find Folder Options, open Windows Explorer (right-click on Start, select Explore). Then, on its menu bar, select Tools and then Folder Options…

On the File Types tab, we see a large, scrollable box that lists file types. As we scroll down the list, we see various file extensions (such as JPG and DOC) along with a text description of the file type.

Continue reading HOWTO: Identifying and Changing Default File Type / Program Associations

Microsoft Excel, like most spreadsheets, has a really convenient feature. When you copy any given cell into another cell, Excel will automatically adjust the formula references to other cells so refer to cells in the same relative position.

First, a look at Relative Addressing

In the example below, I copied thte formula in cell C2 into cells C3 through C8.

Excel automatically adjusted the formulas so that each formula referenced cells in the corresponding locations (columns a and b — it changed the row numbers) to the cells referenced by the cell that I was copying.

Continue reading HOWTO: Using Excel - How To Use Absolute Addressing

This week, I received a query from a reader about a warning message he was receiving:

Hi Terry , I was wondering if perhaps you can help me , I have this very annoying adware that occurs EVERYTIME at startup …. not-a-virus:Adware.Win32.BHO.cr Now althugh this doesn’t appeato be causing any problem on my PC and I get delete it , it is still annoying to do this everytime . Is there anything you can suggest to REMOVE this adware from startup . Pls note : I am not computer savvy and my experience is limited , so I would need exact steps If you could help me , it would be greatly appreciated Regards

I’m not familiar with this particular message, but a little quick searching via Google showed that a number of people had posted similar questions on forums — and they all seemed to use

Continue reading Adware Ties into Internet Explorer

My call one Monday evening to Dell Support was met with the ubiquitous automatic answering system, with the standard message that said something like “We are experiencing heavy call volume right now. The best time to call is Monday through Friday, 9am to 5pm.” Of course, since this was the tech support group for Dell’s Home & Home Office group, I don’t imagine that very many of those customers call during that time.

That message was the only downside to the whole tech support and repair process!

As I expected and was warned, I waited on hold for a little bit, perhaps 10-15 minutes. It didn’t bother me. I’ve waited longer on hold in earlier years.

Continue reading My Dell Notebook Repair Experience