FAQS! FACTS! FAX! 089 (23/12 /97)

THE FAMILY WAY

I have just purchased a P200 multimedia PC for Christmas, with the intention that it will be used by the whole family. I will use it for accounts and letter-writing, and the children, aged nine and sixteen, want it for games and their school-work. I have been given conflicting advice about which printer to buy, I’ll be waiting for the January Sales, to get the best price. The shop where I brought the PC suggest a colour inkjet but colleagues at work recommended buying a laser printer, the sort we use in the office, which gives superior results. Which type do you favour?

Alfred L. Howe, Crawley, Surrey

A

It’s horses for courses. Laser printers are faster than inkjets and top models can produce crisper-looking documents, but inkjet printers are catching up fast. They’re better for graphics and they’re often a lot cheaper, both to buy, and to run. The performance of colour inkjet printers has improved enormously over the past couple of years and some models are capable of near photographic-quality results from digital still cameras -- you might not own one now, but prices are dropping fast! Colour printers often come bundled with free software, that can be used to create colourful greetings cards, invitations, banners and signs.

SCROLL CONTROL

I have P133 with 32Mb of RAM and a 1.7Mb hard drive. All was well until I  replaced the original video card with a 2Mb card made by Video Excel. It has made a noticeable improvement to the speed of some video games but created an unexpected problems in Microsoft Word 6. There has been a huge increase in scrolling speed. It’s most acute when dragging and dropping a block of highlighted text; more often than not it goes sailing past the place I want it to go, to the top or bottom of the document. I’ve searched though all of the control panels and menu options in Word, to find a way of slowing it down, but without success. Do you have any suggestions?

R. L. West, Littlehampton, Sussex

A

It has more to do with Windows than Word. Right click on My Computer, then ‘properties’, select ‘performance’ then the ‘graphics’ tab. If the acceleration slider is set to ‘full’, move it to ‘none’. This is only a temporary fix though, and you will have to move it back when you want to play games. If your mouse has it’s own utility software you may find there’s an acceleration control; the one in control panel won’t make any difference. A longer-term solution would be to get a ‘wheel’ mouse, such as those made by Microsoft, Logitech and Trust. The Trust Ami Mouse 97 is the cheapest, at around £25.00. The wheel is usually located between the right and left buttons, it is operated by the index finger and allows the user to scroll through a document, dragging and dropping copy, at any speed.

IMMOVABLE ICON?

How can I get rid of an icon on the Desktop? I installed PsiWin with my Psion 5, but found a previous versions of PsiWin conflicted with Windows 95, so I deleted the programme using the Remove facility. However, I cannot get rid of the icon on Desktop. If I right click on the icon and go to Properties, it says there are none. Is there some way to get rid of it?

Mr G. Alis

A

The PsiWin icon isn’t protected so normally you should be able to remove it by dragging it to the recycle bin, or highlighting it, with a single, mouse click, and pressing the delete key. Occasionally icons simply refuse to go, in which case go into Explorer, open the Windows directory, then the Desktop folder, and manually delete the relevant shortcut file.

BACKTRACK

In several recent movies, hackers, spooks and action heroes are shown plotting the location of an internet user, wherever in the world they happen to be. Is that sort of thing possible?  

Mike Dooley, Selsdon, Kent

A

Probably. You can do something similar -- though not quite so visually dramatic -- if you have Windows 95 and internet access. Tucked away inside Win 95 there’s an interesting little program called Trace Route, that automatically logs the path of an internet connection, as it passes around the web, through other computers, via high-speed links and satellites, to the destination server. Open the MS-DOS window in Programs on the Start menu and at the ‘C’ prompt type ‘tracert’, then an internet address, (i.e. tracert www.bootlog.co.uk), press return and watch it go! 

CARD SHARING

Reading M G Rogers letter in F!F!F! December 9 prompts me to ask you another scanner question. I have a PC, Windows 95, 64Mb RAM. I wish to use two scanners: an HP PhotoSmart for slides and negatives and an HP 5P for large images or books etc. The PhotoSmart scanner is up and running, but the 5P obstinately refuses to work. They both are in chain with the 5P at the end using the same HP SCSI board. The 5P software is apparently loaded but I am unable

to get a command to load the driver software for the 5P.

Richard Morris

A

HP scanners come with their own individually configured SCSI cards, the solution is to use both cards. If there is a conflict you will find a dial on the backside of the 5P, to change the address.