packman

Peter, Many thanks for your response. The second point you made was the key to the mystery! Like you say, a backup copy is made only when you re-open a file. I've just run another test to check for that. As for Fast Save, I already had that turned off. So, hey, that's something else I've learnt. Hope I'll remember that, in the future. Am now not sure what to do about the original glitch in MS Word. Attempting a Repair of it is likely to introduce more problems than it'll solve, owing to various service packs and bugfixes having been applied to Office over the years. I'm not sure if I've recovered all lost doc files. I've certainly recovered the last main file I was working on but, of course, with several dozens of files saved in Word when Word decided to malfunction, I can't know which others might have been lost. I do partition backups to an external drive from time to time, but not every day, and therefore restoring from there wouldn't help. Anyway, thanks again for your help. Much appreciated.

I'd be inclined to stay with the current HD and to try to discover exactly why you're achieving only 50% usage, if I were you. If you change the HD (especially if you use a new HD that's of a different manufacturer or a new capacity), the Windows Activation step (at the end of the XP installation process) might flag an objection, as it might think you're trying to run that same edition of XP on a second machine. Not the end of the world in itself, but you could in theory get caught up with Microsoft over that. Quite apart from the large amount of work involved in first backing up your personal and other files, it'd be quite a long job to install XP and all your programs on a new HD. If you're sure that the existing HD doesn't have a hardware fault with it or is otherwise on its way out, it may be better to retain it, rather than replace it, and in the WinXP Setup choose to format the HD before XP itself is installed. Bear in mind that a 40GB HD won't provide exactly 40GB of space by the time it's formatted; it'll be several GB less. The same with all HDs, of all capacities.

I've been thinking of going wireless, as regards mouse, and have been toying with the idea of getting a Logitech MX Revolution, albeit that I don't actually need most of the functions on it. The MX has had exceptional reviews, seems especially good for photo-editing, and looks a comfortable, elegant mouse, with good battery life. Aesthetically, it'd also fit in with my keyboard, monitor and other desktop paraphenalia, since they're all black. Does anyone know if this mouse's huge chunk of software is compatible with Windows 2000? The Logitech website doesn't say, one way or the other, and it seems impossible to get in touch with Logitech, to ask them. You see, I run a dualboot machine, of Windows 2000 with Windows XP. I know next to nothing about Bluetooth and my five-year-old self-built PC embodies no wireless functionality at all, to date, though it has plenty of USB ports. At Logitech's website support section, mention is made of 'SetPoint' software and I presume that to be the name of the aforementioned software. Is that the case, or is Setpoint something else? There are apparently two versions of SetPoint - Bluetooth and non-Bluetooth - and I therefore presume I'd need to use the non-Bluetooth version. Right? For transmit/receive, I gather that the MX is partnered by a USB 'dongle' that plugs into a spare USB port on the PC.

I currently operate two USB colour printers and a parallel-ported HP Laserjet on my PC. Late next year, I plan to obtain a Mac and add that to the (wired) home Ethernet network that the PC and my Internet router shares. I've been wondering how best to share the printers between the PC and the Mac. The PC runs WinXP and the Mac will be running OSX Tiger or Leopard. Now, whilst the HP Laserjet has only a parallel dataport and therefore no USB connectivity, it does have an Ethernet UTP port, so could be directly put on the local network. As I understand it, though, Macs these days don't have parallel printer ports, only USB ports. So, how best should I connect all these together, so that both the PC and the Mac can readily access the printers? Using Microsoft printer sharing, that's built into WinXP, and the print-sharing features built into OSX? Or instead to get myself a print server and attach all three printers to the server and always print via that? I've identified an affordable and impressive print server from Edimax that has one parallel printer port and two usb2.0 printer ports. See: http://www.edimax.co.uk/en/produce_detail.php?pd_id=53&pl1_id=7&pl2_id=34 Would I be wasting my money getting the server? Can printing be done just as easily, using the native features in the PC and the Mac? In short, has anyone any hands-on experience at doing this and who'd be willing to advise? I'm particularly concerned about getting the security right, as I'm all too well aware that 'File & Printer Sharing' in Windows machines is a regular target for virus-writers. A good many trojan viruses these days arrive in browser-borne spyware.

With respect, you haven't actually addressed the question in hand, being that, on a local home network, is it easier and any more secure to use simple peer-to-peer printing, using the sharing features found in Windows and Mac OSX, or is it always better to use a separate print server? This is not the situation of a corporate LAN or of any remotely-accessed printer(s). Neither does the scenario include printers with built-in server ports. The fundamental problem I have, in later introducing the Mac, is that the Laserjet has only a parallel interface (plus Ethernet), whilst the photo-printers are USB only and have no provision for built-in server or built-in Ethernet port. There are several different hardware configurations that one could devise to share the three printers, with or without a specific server such as the Edimax. The Laserjet is a 4M Plus and I'm not even sure whether the Mac would have a driver for it, so even if I were to put the Laserjet directly on to the Ethernet hub, the Mac might not be able to address it. Obviously, I could leave all three printers on the Windows PC and configure things to effectively make the PC into a server for the Mac, but I'd have the fag of always needing to turn the PC on when printing from the Mac. Get me?

Success, Philipp! Thanks for that suggestion about Format/Encoding, as changing to "Western European (Windows)" makes it work. I'd point out that I also went into Tools/Options of OE and made sure that the encoding for fonts, in a couple of the tabs there, were also set to "Western European (Windows)", and made it the default. I'll now need to check that my Mac contact and my other contacts in Canada and the USA receive the symbol correctly. BTW, it's actually Righthand Alt + 4. Lefthand Alt + 4 does not give the Euro symbol onscreen at all.

I've already got the Format set to "Western European ISO". Of the limited choice available, surely that would be the most appropriate, especially as I recently e-mailed a Mac user with the Euro symbol included? I'll try changing it to "Western European (Windows)".

Eh? The additional symbol on the 4 key is most definitely the Euro symbol. Alt + e simply invokes the Edit function in the menu bar. Any Alt + 4 seems to produce the Euro symbol correctly on the screen but Outlook Express simply doesn't send it as that symbol; it sends it either as a question-mark or as a pair of non-text symbols.

I've just updated to IE7 and encountered the Cleartype option in the final bit of the Setup. Having complained so much to website administrators in the past about the poor legibility of webpage fonts on large screens (ntcompatible.com has been an excellent site in this regard), I was glad to see this option now included in IE. But despite Microsoft saying that the change wouldn't affect the Desktop or ordinary program windows, I've found that it has. At the same time, the new IE modified some of my Appearance settings and I've had to re-apply mine. Additionally, it now appears that the colours on webpages are no longer adhering to the sRGB standard but have been modified in some arbitrary way. Webpage colours appear washed out. Has anyone else noticed this? If I can find the Microsoft Cleartype webpage again, would it be possible to re-run the adjustment? Would it, in fact, be better to download the utility that was mentioned and which could be used offline? Does this utility allow continuously variable adjustment, or is it still in abrupt steps? I definitely want to get the webpage colours back to accurate ones but as far as the fonts are concerned, they just need a bit of fine-tuning. On the whole, I regard the change to Cleartype as being a distinct improvement.

Thanks for the feedback. Just how buggy is Spybot S & D, though? When I looked at the Spybot forums, I was really put off by the numbers of different bugs it seemed to give rise to. Does Spybot fully support IE7, for example? Spybot would ne nice to have, since it's free, but by all accounts it seems to miss a lot of important spyware. So, I keep wondering whether it'd be better to BUY a package - like Webroot Sweeper or Spyware Doctor - which would give more extensive cover. Can Spybot scan in ANY part of the PC? I find that the free version of AVG Antivirus, for example, does not scan ALL areas of the hard drive, even if you point it to specific areas. It won't scan for folders in My Network Places, and that's where some nasty spyware can lurk. Thus, whatever I use for antispyware will need to be able to scan in all folders and subfolders of My Network Places, beside all the usual places.

Am not sure whether the Pro version of XP suffers from it as well but there's a known issue with the initial graphics card driver in XP. Hitherto, previous versions of Windows would initially install with a basic VGA 800X600 screen. However, with XP, a Microsoft default full-screen graphics driver is automatically installed and this is one designed for VGA operation only. In some cases, this will switch the graphics card's output permanently to VGA mode and prevent the use of digital mode. Hence, a black screen. Obviously, I don't know the details of your monitor/graphics card setup but if this is what you're experiencing, then the way around the problem is to initially connect the card to the monitor in VGA mode (so as to allow something to be displayed), then go to the driver of the graphics card in Device Manager and use 'Update Driver'. You'd update with a known good driver for your graphics card, which you'd previously installed into an appropriate folder, pointing the update process to the location of that new driver. Then reboot with the appropriate video cable/connection.

Yeh, I've sometimes had that notification. I do a fair amount of e-mailing using OE6 (under winXP SP2) and it pops up about once a week. I therefore don't consider it much of an annoyance. I simply agree to it doing the compacting and it does it, all within just a few seconds. You might be right, that there's a way of stopping it coming up, but I don't recall any such setting. Somewhere like the Advanced tab of Tools/Internet Options (in IE) would be the place to look. If you're getting it coming up quite often, then it might help to defragment your XP partition. Compared to Win2K, I'm finding that WinXP's partition requires defragmenting far more often.

Would appreciate if someone could point me to fixing a recurring site certification problem I've encountered, under WinXP. Whenever I visit one specific webpage (of a popular ISP's website), instead of getting the webpage immediately I now get a Windows security alert caption that says: Information you exchange with this site cannot be viewed or changed by others. However, there's a problem with the site's security certificate: The security certificate is from a trusted certification authority. The security certificate has expired or is not yet valid. The certificate has a valid name matching the name of the page you're trying to view. Do you want to proceed? I respond 'Yes' and the page then displays, but not all of it. I then get a further Windows warning caption that says: This page contains both secure and non-secure items. Do you want to display the non-secure items? I respond 'Yes' and the remainder of the page then displays. This page is one I've visited for years and, in its present guise, is probably benign. These warnings are something to do with the SSL settings, I think, but I can't find where to configure Internet Explorer so as to avoid them. I've searched in Internet Options, but can't find anything there. Anyone know how to stop these alerts?

Sorry, none of your suggestions were of any help. But I'm pleased to report that I've finally found the cause and it was indeed a configuration problem. It was in Internet Options/Security tab. For the Medium Internet zone setting, Display Mixed Content should have been enabled.

I tried that. Didn't make any difference. Am loath to switch to Firefox. I've Firefox before and it was nothing but trouble, and there were constant updates to do to it. The problem doesn't occur, I've found, in Win2K, even though both WinXP and Win2K are using IE6. So, it's clearly something to do with how XP specifically treats secure/non-secure website material.

I cleared all my temporary Internet files. The hard drive went mad for about a minute, then settled down. It's made no difference whatever to the tiscali problem, though. I'm convinced it's something to do with personal security settings, but which one and why is a mystery.

Yup, could try that but, if I do, I'll lose all the other URLs in my dropdown menu and will have to type them all in again. In the Content tab of Internet Options, I've just noticed the button 'Clear SSL State'. What would using that do, precisely?

It's www.tiscali.co.uk. However, the problem doesn't show itself on that homepage, it shows on any variant of www.tiscali.co.uk/lifestyle/newage/horoscopes/daily_<starsign>.html.

Am just wondering if anyone's had any problems at all with the multi-iconed Google toolbar for Internet Explorer, that's widely available? I myself don't have the Google toolbar at present and am thinking of perhaps installing it. What do all those extras in the Google toolbar give you? Anything genuinely useful, or are they just annoyances? Also, any known bugs? My current edition of IE is IE6. OS is WinXP SP2.

Ah, that's a thought. I don't usually use bookmarks in IE.

Well, if I DID install it, it'd save me having to always go to the address box in IE and pull down the menu, to search for www.google.com. To get into my gmail, I also currently have to do that. But if the Google toolbar does other nasty things, I'll totally reconsider installing it. I'll hang back from installing it for a while, till perhaps more users have given their opinions. The Google add-in in Firefox was simple and troublefree. I gave up using Firefox some while ago, though, as that browser had become simply too buggy and slow.

Thanks for your comment, Johni. What I was wondering was whether a whole horizontal bar for it, at the head of IE6, was wasteful or not. I very much doubt whether I'd use more than the simple Google box. Can components of the Google toolbar be individually moved into one of IE's toolbars? A shortcut to gmail would be handy, as I do use gmail. One other thing I've been worrying about is whether Google's pop-up blocker will interfere with IE6's own pop-up blocker. Does it? Are you using IE6/IE7?

I currently run a dualboot setup of Win2K and WinXP, both using the NT file system. Win2K is on partition C, there are two logical partitions D and E, and WinXP is on partition F. I now want to format (not delete, format) partition C, using the Win2K Setup on the Win2K installation CD. The idea is to eradicate all that I currently have on partition C and to reinstall Win2K and some of my apps on C again. WinXP and the two logical partitions will remain unaltered. So, in the Setup for Win2K, it'll be easy enough to format C but, in so doing. will the driveletters of the Win2K and WinXP partitions change? Bear in mind that we'd still be in the Setup for Win2K and that therefore we wouldn't have rebooted with the new Win2K yet. I'm simply wondering if, while still in the Setup, C might become F, and F might become C. Will it? The sequence would be: format C, install Win2K on C, before then booting back into Win2k. It seems to me that, if the driveletters do get swapped over, there'll be no way of changing them back (I don't want to involve any third-party utilities). Or would the fact that I would be formatting the C partition - and specifically not deleting it - preserve the original order of the driveletters? In other words, does deleting only cause the driveletters to change?

As things stand at present, the system is dualbooting with Win2K as the system partition. Why can't I open Windows in 2K or XP and then, in Windows Explorer, cut and paste the NTLDR, NTDETECT.COM and BOOT.INI files from 2K to XP. Then, in Disk Management, 'mark the WinXP partition as active', then reboot? Why won't that work? Why won't that give C as WinXP and F as Win2K?

Bootcfg only works on WinXP, not on Win2K. I tried it on Win2K (and it's confirmed in a Microsoft KB article). The problem, as I see it, is that if I delete the C partition in Win2K Setup, yes, WinXP will probably then take its place but it won't contain those bootloader files (or will it?), and because at that point WinXP won't be bootable, how would I be able to edit boot.ini?