FAQS! FACTS! FAX!  205 (30/03/00)

HOT SPOT

With reference to 'F!F!F!' 16th March, your directions for installing Hotmail accounts on OE5 don't appear to work on my PC. When installing I do not receive a check box for ' I already have an e-mail address ' and when I have entered my Hotmail address the e-mail server boxes remain blank. Any suggestions?

Tim & Clare Hilditch

Several readers wrote in saying they had problems with this tip. It turns out that there is an early version of OE5 that doesn’t support Hotmail. Fortunately it can be easily upgraded from the Hotmail Web site, the link can be found by clicking on Hot News under Subscription on your Hotmail inbox page, then Hot Tips and look for the item ‘Use Hotmail offline with Outlook Express’.

Others had difficulty with the configuration, caused we suspect by hangovers from previous email accounts, the solution is also on the ‘Use Hotmail offline…’ section on the Hotmail website, here’s a summary of what to do. As before select Accounts from the Tools menu, click on Mail and Next then type in your Hotmail address. Click Next again and on the menu item ‘My incoming mail server is’, select HTTP (if you don’t see it you have the older version of OE5), and under ‘My HTTP mail service provider is’ choose Hotmail or Other. In the Incoming Mail Server field type: ‘http://services.msn.com/svcs/hotmail/httpmail.asp’

Enter your Hotmail account name (leaving off the @hotmail.com part) and password, click Next and Finish

TIMELY HELP

In F!F!F! March 16th one of your correspondents enquired about means of setting his PC clock. ‘About Time’ is an excellent ‘Careware’ tool, which enables the clock to be set directly over the web; this is available from www.arachnoid.com. It allows various on-line timing sources to be accessed, and even gives an indication of web delays (usually much less than a second) encountered in the process. 

Gerald Lessnof

My PC connects to the Dimension 4 web site automatically whenever I go on line and it updates the time setting.  You can find it at: http://www.thinkman.com/~thinkman/

I don't know if this is atomic but it is very convenient and is freeware.
Barbara Bailey

Most PC TV adaptor cards have the facility to synchronise the Teletext clock with the PC's clock.
Mark Francis

May I draw to your attention my free software MSF.COM, which locks the PC's clock to the National Physical Laboratory's transmission from Rugby.  MSF.COM can be downloaded from my web site (www.rtrussell.co.uk) and a suitable receiver module is available from Maplin as order code MK68Y (www.maplin.co.uk).
Richard Russell

Many thanks to everyone who responded to this query. Incidentally in exchange for the ‘careware’ utility mentioned by Gerald Lessnof you have to simply promise to stop ‘whining’ about how hard you life is, sounds like a good deal…

QUICK DOS

In Introducing MSDOS Part 2 (Boot Camp March 9th) Rick Maybury suggested a means of starting a computer in DOS mode by pressing the F8 key between the POST sequence and the "Starting Windows ..." message.  A 

difficulty in doing this is that I have to press F8 at exactly the right moment; a further shortcoming is that I need to do every time I want to start in DOS. I believe that in F!F!F! A little while ago there was a tip on how to change the Windows 98 settings so that it would not start automatically every time, but I have been unable to track this down in the Connected Archive.

Julian Lee 

Use Notepad (Start > Programs > Accessories) to open ‘msdos.sys’ in the root directory of your C: drive and look for the line BootGUI=1, change that to BootGUI=0, save and close and Windows will now boot to the C: prompt. To start Windows just type ‘win’. (You may have to uncheck its Read Only attribute by right clicking on the msdos.sys file icon in Windows Explorer).

GARDENWARE

I am a member of a village garden society and wish to computerise the results of our annual show. In a column of results, in the form of points gained, there is no difficulty in picking out the first prize winner, but how do I go about selecting second and third places?

W.V.Holden

This is would be a simple job for a spreadsheet but past experience has shown that someone somewhere is bound to have written a specialist program, and usually F!F!F! readers know exactly where to find it, so suggestions please.

RUN FUN

I tried your auto-run help entitled 'Run Out' dated March 16 but, however, had no success. I have had tremendous difficulty and have tried many options yet it still will not Autorun music, or software, CD's. This is most frustrating, please help.

James Tunstall

The most likely explanation is an incorrect entry in the Windows Registry, which as regular readers will know is the large and constantly changing configuration file that controls how Windows operates. The remedy is actually quite simple but as always we have to warn you that tampering with the Registry can be dangerous, so don’t try it unless you are confident of your abilities and willing to accept the consequences.

The first step is to make a self-installing backup of the Registry, in case something goes wrong. Go to Run on the Start menu and type ‘regedit’ to start the Registry Editor. On the Registry drop down menu select Export Registry File, choose a location and call the exported file ‘regbak’ and click Save. This will create a file called regbak.reg, if you run into problems with the Registry, click on regbak.reg and it will automatically replace the damaged Registry file.

With the Registry editor still open drill down through the following list of entries by clicking on the ‘+’ signs next to the file folders:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\

Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\Explorer

The entry in the right hand window after ‘NoDriveTypeAutoRun’ should

read 95 00 00 00, however the chances are another value will be shown, in which case right-click on the icon and select Modify and change the value to 0000 95 00 00 00, exit the Registry Editor and restart your PC. 

CHECK OUT

Do you have you any ideas how I can create 'check' boxes within a Word 97
document?
Rita McCulloch

Right click into an empty area next to the toolbars at the top of the screen and select Forms from the drop-down menu. A small toolbox appears with a checkbox item, position the cursor in the document where you want it to go and click on the icon or icons. When you have finished your layout click on the padlock icon on the Forms toolbar, to activate the check boxes, and ‘lock’ the document, so that it cannot be changed by whoever is filling it in.

AUTO ERASE

How does one delete obsolete AutoText entries from Word 97?

Euan Allen

On the Insert menu select AutoText, then AutoText and the AutoText tab, highlight the entry you wish to remove and click the Delete button.