FAQS! FACTS! FAX!  297 (22/01/02)

Q

I'm determined to keep my contacts free of unsolicited spam and viruses so I have never maintained an Outlook Express Address Book.  Instead I enter all e-mail addresses manually from a hand-written address book. Now I find, having upgraded to Windows ME and Outlook Express 6 that some of my regular contacts are turning up in the Address Book without my prior knowledge or consent and are spontaneously generated in the "To:" box of the New Mail window before I have finished entering.

One wonders if this intrusive feature might have been part of some US Government underhand deal with Microsoft arising from their recent battles in court on the lines of "make your programs more spy friendly or else we'll clobber you".  One does wonder, especially as I tried to ask Microsoft's on-line "help" first and was asked to provide personal details that are none of their business before they would accept my query. 

Please tell me how can I switch off this annoying feature of automatic entries in the e-mail Address Book in order to preserve my contacts' anonymity from virus originators and the many spies, each with a sneaky agenda of their own, that seem to infest the Internet?  If I can't, it seems best to give up using the Internet altogether.

Graham Vine

A

I feel your conspiracy theory may be a touch dramatic, this is simply a case of someone trying to be helpful by enabling potentially useful features that were previously left to the user to switch on. You can switch off both automatic address logging and address ‘autocomplete’ from Options on the Tools menu. Click on the Send tab and deselect ‘Automatically put people I reply to in my Address Book’ and ‘Automatically complete email addresses when composing’.

Q

I have run Microsoft Office 2000 on my relatively new PC for some time. I suddenly find that I cannot open Word 2000. When I try to open any file the Word 2000 title page comes up but then freezes my whole computer.  Messages come up saying the computer is dangerously low on resources and do I want to shut down various programs. It is not short on resources and nothing I do can unfreeze it. The actual Word files are OK and I can copy them to floppy or CD and process on my laptop. All of the other Office 2000 programmes (Excel/Access/PowerPoint) work OK.  I have tried deleting and reloading Word 2000 but to no avail.
Terry March

A

The usual culprit is a corrupt 'normal.dot' document template file. The simplest thing to do is exit Word and use Windows Explorer to rename it to something like normal.old. This will force Word back into its default condition (a new normal.dot will be created). In Windows 9x normal.dot usually lives in c:\windows\application data\microsoft\templates, Windows XP keeps it in c:\documents and settings\yourname\templates, otherwise you can find it using Search/Find on the Start menu.

Q

A mystery, trivial perhaps, but very niggling. Windows games includes FreeCell; on my computer it just does not want to play. Each time I open it and go to New Game, I get the white error message with the 'Close or Ignore' instruction. Clicking either of these results in the appearance of the familiar Illegal Operation, which means the program closes.

I copied the games programs, FreeCell, Hearts, Minesweeper and Solitaire, from our downstairs computer to a floppy. All four have the format.lnk and all work fine on the downstairs computer. When I try to run the games from the floppy on this computer all but FreeCell run from the shortcut on the floppy. FreeCell however, produced the error message "The drive or network connection that the shortcut 'FrreCell.lnk" refers to is unavailable. Make sure the disk is properly inserted ... etc."
Lionel Kent, Altrincham, Cheshire

A

The FreeCell program on your ‘upstairs’ computer are probably damaged so try uninstalling it and then re-install from your Windows CD-ROM. Go to Add/Remove Programs in Control Panel, select the Windows tab, scroll down the list to Games, double click, deselect Classic Games, click OK and follow the instructions.

Q

I now use a floppy as interim data storage and when it's full, change to a Zip drive. I then format ('quick-erase') the floppy and start again. The trouble is 1.44mb doesn't go far but I am sure I read sometime ago in F!F!F! that Windows can double the floppy disk's capacity. Can you help?

Keith Griffiths

A

The utility you’re referring to is DriveSpace, which is included with all versions of Windows 9x, SE and ME, though not always installed by default. The first job is to see if it’s on your computer. If it is you’ll find it in Start > Programs > Accessories > System Tools. If not go to Add/Remove Programs in Control Panels, click the Windows tab and select it from the list under System Tools and follow the on-screen prompts. Once installed all you have to do is insert a blank floppy, open DriveSpace and select drive A: instead of Drive C:, as the drive to be compressed and follow the instructions. It won’t actually double the disc’s capacity but it should increase it to around 2.6Mb.

Q

I am unable to e-mail my son who has an Apple Mac lap top computer, I have Microsoft Windows 98, are they incompatible?  The Mail Delivery Service said that there was a virus protection at work - on mine or my son's - and suggested that I compressed it into a zip file.

Beryl Saville

A

As far as plain text messages are concerned it makes no difference what make or type of computers you and your son are using. Problems can arise when sending formatted emails, pictures and attachments to devices other than PCs – mobile phones, pocket organisers etc. -- but that’s clearly not the case in this instance.

Assuming that you are both using standard email programs like Outlook Express and Netscape and subscribe to normal POP3 type email services there could be any number of reasons it’s not working but here are a few things to try that should help to isolate the problem.  The first thing to do is establish whether or not you and your son are sending and receiving emails normally. If so try sending each other simple text messages by switching off any HTML formatting (in Outlook Express go to Tools > Options > Send and check ‘Plain Text’ under mail sending format. You can also check to see if your (or your son’s) ISP and email programs are correctly receiving and downloading email by using a web-based email server like www.mail2web.com, which will let you check the contents of your POP3 email boxes from any Internet PC simply by entering your email address and password.