FAQS! FACTS! FAX!  564 (08/05/07)

Q. My in-laws want to upgrade their aging PC to a laptop that they can also take to their house in France where they spend about 5 months a year. They also want to move to a wireless broadband connection both here and start one in France where they have no PC at present. Do you know of any ISPs that might allow this?

P. Read, via email

A. Unfortunately not (though if anyone does know of one please let me know and I’ll pass it on). The problems is that unlike a dial-up connection, which you can use on any telephone line, each broadband connection is uniquely associated with a single telephone line, so your in-laws will need to open separate accounts with UK and French ISPs. 

Dealing with French broadband companies can be awkward (it’s the same the world over…), but especially if their French is a bit rusty. However, at least one company, Teleconnect is on the ball and has created a specialist ‘AngloPack’ service aimed at ex-pats, costing 29.90 euros per month. It has an English-language Helpline and unlike most French broadband deals it has a 30-day termination clause, so they will not be tied in to a long-term contract. They will be able to continue to use their existing email address, simply by reconfiguring the SMPT setting in Outlook or Outlook Express to the server address that will be provided by their new ISP.

Q. My desktop has recently been infected with ‘Spylock’, which I gather is a rogue anti-spyware program.  I have never used it but its window comes up whenever I boot up.   Checking with Google there is a bewildering selection of programs offering to remove it.  Could you recommend the best way?  My OS is Windows XP Home edition.

Walter Eggert, via email

A. Spylock, also known as Spywarelocked, can be a tricky customer and has become a real nuisance lately. It is catching a lot of PC users, mainly through infected audio downloads from file-sharing sites, so be careful where you get your music!

It’s wise to be cautious about downloading programs that purport to remove malware from the Internet and there is a risk that you’ll make matters even worse by installing something even more malicious.

As a rule the removal procedures and tools featured on the well-known anti-virus software company websites (i.e. Symantec, McAfee etc.), are safe to use, though they can sometimes be rather technical, long-winded and difficult to follow. If you don’t fancy the idea of fiddling with system files then an automated removal tool is the best bet but sorting the wheat from the chaff can be difficult. The trick is to Google ‘spylock removal’ and trawl through a few forums to find out how fellow suffers have fixed the problem. Quite often you will see the same solution turning up time and again, and more often than not one site becomes a kind of clearing house for fixes. In this case it’s the usually very reliable bleepingcomputer.com, which has easy to follow instructions for both manual and automatic removal of Spylock.

Q. I have got a problem staying connected to the Internet and I'm regularly cut off after 5 minutes. I have AVG, AdAware and ZoneAlarm running and if it is a bug I can't find it. I've restored the Registry to a pre-problem date but to no avail. Is there a solution to this, short of reformatting or similar drastic actions?

Keith Lycett, via email

A. Such a regular interruption suggests that something on your PC is ‘timing-out’. Assuming that you have no third-party Internet timer utilities on your PC – and you would remember installing such a program -- then it is likely to be one that is buried deep in your modem’s configuration settings, but I have no idea how it was enabled.

To switch it off go to Internet Options in Control Panel. Select the Connection tab and click to highlight your connection in the Dial-up and Virtual Private Network Settings box. Click Settings then the Advanced button and deselect ‘Disconnect if Idle…’ and ‘Disconnect when connection may no longer be needed’ then OK. You should also click the Properties button then the Configure button and the Connection tab and make sure that ‘Disconnect if idle…’ is unchecked under Call Preferences.

Q. I use Windows XP and when I start up it takes about 10 minutes before I can begin using the computer. When I go to Start > Run and type ‘misconfig’ I get a message as follows: 'Windows cannot find misconfig'. I searched through files and folders with no luck. Where do I go to get misconfig please?

L. J.Lines, via email

A. You are on the right lines and the place to start when faced with an excessively slow boot up is the Microsoft Configuration utility, which controls the programs and ‘services’ that launch with Windows, and these are largely responsible for this type of problem (see Boot Camps 355 -357 in The Telegraph.co.uk Archive).

However, I suspect that you are falling at the first hurdle because the correct command for this utility is ‘msconfig’, not misconfig. In case there was a typing error in your email and you really were entering msconfig then there’s another problem.

There are a couple of possibilities; either the msconfig.exe file is missing or corrupted, or it has been blocked or deleted by a virus or worm. Check the latter first with a full virus and malware scan (try AdAware or Spybot, and both are free). If you get the all clear then you can try installing a new copy of msconfig.exe, and the easiest way to do that is copy it from another XP computer. You will find it in: C:\Windows\System32; it’s a small file, only around 150kb, so it fits easily on a floppy or pen drive. At a pinch you can also use the slightly simpler version in Windows 98, which lives in: C:\Windows\System.

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© R. Maybury 2007 3004