FAQS! FACTS! FAX!  412 (27/04/04)

Q

Two months ago I accidentally acquired one of those accursed premium rate telephone dialler programs! This resulted in a surprise £24 addition to my phone bill -- not too bad by some standards, so I have heard! Of course I got rid of it straight away. My question is - I am not on broadband and can always hear the tones of my modem when it operates - so if I keep the volume fairly high, will the pirate dialler also be heard so that I can literally pull the telephone plug before it completes? Assuming that I am in attendance of course. Is this a reliable and foolproof safeguard, which we could all employ?

Ray Ridgwell, via email

A

We’ll be looking at this and related nuisances in detail in Boot Camp in a couple of weeks time but in the meantime the best strategy is to avoid downloading these programs in the first place. If whilst browsing the web a box appears asking if you want to download a ‘plug in’ or Active X component, and it won’t go away when you click the ‘X’ exit icon, close your browser, if necessary by pressing Ctrl + Alt + Delete and ‘End Task’ the program. Never, ever, click the OK button, close any open programs and shut the PC down if necessary. You can keep your PC free of diallers by regularly running freeware cleaner utilities like AdAware (www.lavasoftusa.com) and Spybot (http://www.safer-networking.org/) at least once a week.

Q

Recently I've been getting Spam about American Share offers. It is no problem to deal with. I always look up the originating addresses and inform the abuse departments. I've noticed, however that most of the Spam messages have seemingly random lists of words either at the beginning or at the end, or both. What, if any, is the purpose or significance of these random word lists?

Chris Brown, Peterborough

A

The random words are an attempt to defeat email filtering software and systems that uses so-called Bayesian processing. This is a form of statistical analysis, used to identify Spam messages by their content. Put simply lots of serious or  important-sounding words at the beginning of the message are supposed to fool Spam filters into accepting the email as genuine…

Q

I read with interest a recent reply to a query concerning storing photographs on CD-R. Have you heard anything about the life-expectancy of these images? I have been doing just as you advise with some old photographs people have lent me but someone told me that after four or five years they may well become corrupt. What do you think?
Mrs G. M. Brown, via email

A

Most manufacturers seem to agree that CD-R media, if stored properly, in a library case, in cool dark conditions and away from excessive humidity or atmospheric pollutants should last at least 25 years and possibly a lot longer but the real question is, will you still have the equipment to play them on in a quarter of a century’s time?  Probably not if the past is anything to go by, and you might want to start thinking about what you are going to do with any treasured recordings on VHS, VHS-C and 8mm tapes and audio cassettes. The only long term solution is to copy your important data to the prevailing format or medium of the day and remembering to repeat the exercise every ten years or so.

Q

Whilst on holiday my digital camera fell from my shoulder as I got out of a car and the batteries fell out. I replaced them and the camera worked normally. All the pictures on the SmartMedia card are visible on the camera’s display screen but when I try to download them on to my laptop an error message appears. Could the fall have affected the camera's ability to communicate with the PC?

Doug Fairgrieve, via email

A

Digital cameras tend not to bounce and it is highly likely that it was damaged in the fall. It sounds as though you were lucky, though and the fault is confined to the USB socket. The quick-fix solution is to buy a memory card reader – get a multi-format type -- that plugs into the USB socket on your laptop, so you can continue to use your camera. Unless the camera is still covered by the manufacturer’s warranty or holiday insurance you will probably find that having it repaired is uneconomical.

Q

I have recently bought a new laptop but two applications are causing an intermittent problem. Occasionally when I type an email using Outlook Express there is a lag before the letters appear on the screen. This has only recently started happening. Also, I am using an AutoCAD program and sometimes there is a similar delay between moving the mouse and the cursor on screen moving. This also does not happen all the time. But both these problems happen often enough to be a problem. The laptop has plenty of memory so that should not be an issue.

Roger Curry

A

Usually, when a PC starts to slow down it's either low on memory, there are too many processes or programs running in the background or the hard drive is very badly defragmented, so try that first if you haven’t run Defrag for a while. You say you have enough physical RAM but this can be easily used up by so-called 'memory leaks', when programs don't release the memory they’ve been using after they've been shut down. This is likely to be the case if the slowdown occurs after the PC has been running for some time and you have been using a number of programs. You can keep an eye on your PC’s memory usage, and free up lost memory with a freeware utility like MaxMem, which you can download from:

http://www.analogx.com/contents/

download/system/maxmem.htm

Programs and processes running in the background can be a big problem, press Ctrl + Alt + Delete to see what's happening behind the scenes, and use msconfig (type that in Run on the Start menu and select the Startup tab) to disable any programs that launch with Windows, that you are not using. In fact you really only need your firewall, virus checker and any must-have utilities, the rest are almost certainly sapping your memory and CPU power.