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FAQS! FACTS! FAX! 554 (27/02/07)
Q. What is the best medium
for long-term storage of digital photo's CD, DVD, or flash memory?
Peter P.
A. None of the above…
Strange as it may seem the best chance of preserving your digital
photographs for future generations is to print them out on acid free photo
paper or copy to photographic film. The point is magnetic and electronic
storage devices and optical media all have limited life expectancies, both
physically and in terms of the equipment being available to read them in 50 or
even as little as 20 years time.
Historically recording media
come and go in 25-year cycles but it’s getting shorter and nowadays, with data
storage, it can take as little as 10 years for a format to become obsolete.
It’s happening all the time, 5,25 floppies, Zip drives, tape cartridges, even
the venerable 3.5 in Floppy have all but disappeared. Unless you can ensure
that your images are routinely copied to the popular media of the day they will
either deteriorate or become unreadable in just a few decades.
If I had to pick one from the
list I would say a recording on DVD has the best chance of still being readable
in 25 years time because next generation Blu-Ray and HD-DVD players are all
backwards compatible with DVD, but after that, it’s anyone’s guess.
Q. When I try to restore my PC (running XP
Home SP2) it runs through the sequence and reboots as normal. The Restore
message appears but says no changes have been made. Is there anything I can do
to make System Restore work as it used to?
Des Bloor, via email
A.
Are there any Norton products installed on your PC? If so you then it is
possible they are interfering with it and there are some solutions in this
Norton Knowledge
Base article.
Otherwise your options
are a limited as System Restore has few controls, but one thing you should
check is that it is switched on and properly indexing all of your drives. Open
System Properties by pressing Winkey + Break (or go to System in Control
Panel), select the System Restore tab then make sure that ‘Turn off System
Restore… ‘ is not checked. Select the
drives one at a time on the list below (if you have more than one drive). Click
the Settings button, ensure the drive hasn’t been deselected and set the ‘Disk
Space To Use’ slider to around 10 percent.
The last thing you can
try is a System Restore in Safe Mode. At switch on press the F8 key repeatedly
until the Boot Menu appears, select Safe Mode from the list and follow the
prompts. Switching off System Restore and rebooting the PC has also been known
to spur it back into action but all previous Restore Points will be lost.
Q. I expect you will have
a simple answer to a snag that has fooled me for a while.
My Address Book contains one long
list of names, which I would prefer to split up (i.e. Business, People met
on Holidays, Golf club etc.). I have created Groups for this and managed
to copy addresses across - but then, when I delete them from the main list they
disappear from the Group as well. Is there a way, without typing them all
out again, to transfer and then be able to reduce the size of my main list?
Howard Stokes, Redbourn
A. Paradoxically this is by design; it is supposed to
be helpful, and provide you with a safety net. For example, you might want to
have the same contact in several groups, clearly this would be difficult if
their entry had been removed from the main list. It also works as a backup, so
even if you accidentally delete an entry in a Group, or even an entire Group,
you still have the original list to restore the entries.
Q. I have recently
purchased a Dell laptop with a built-in wireless adaptor and I want to use it
with a wireless router, which is connected to my Windows XP desktop, which has
a broadband connection. The problem is I cannot connect the laptop to the
Internet, even though I have a good signal and have entered the correct network
key. I get the message on the laptop 'limited access'. Could you please advise?
Colum Conway, via email
A. It is quite very common problem and there may be
nothing wrong at all. The very first thing you should do after setting up or
adding a new component to a wireless network is reboot everything. Switch
everything off then in the following order, power up the modem (if it is a
network type) the router is next, then your desktop PC and when you have
checked that Internet access is okay you can fire up the laptop.
If that doesn’t work enter
the wireless router’s configuration menu from your main PC and temporarily
switch off encryption and reboot everything. If you still can’t get connected,
there is a chance the Wi-Fi connections on the laptop have become jammed. The
quickest way to unstick them is to use a command line utility called ipconfig.
However, this is not very user friendly and you may be better off with a little
program called Wntipcfg. This is part of the Windows 2000 Resource kit (it’s
compatible with XP), it’s free and can be downloaded from the Microsoft website. Once it is
installed open the program then click the Release All followed by the Renew All
buttons, and try again.
Q. A while ago, you mentioned a free
version of MS PowerPoint, which I've now lost. Can you refresh my memory
please?
Richard Pearce
A. There’s no such
thing as a free version of PowerPoint but there are free alternatives, that are
compatible with PowerPoint and one of the best known is Impress, which is part
of the equally excellent OpenOffice
suite of programs.
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© R. Maybury 2007 1802
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