North Dakota State University Extension Service - Burke County |
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Tips and Tricks For Your PC |
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February 16, 2005
Forwarding Emails with Pictures Have you tried to forward emails with pictures and all the recipient of your email sees are the little boxes with red x’s? If this is happening to you try forwarding the email as an attachment. I normally discourage people from forwarding emails this way but it is a possible solution to your problem. A better solution, although a bit more complicated and time consuming is to save the pictures in the original email to your hard drive and then attach them into a new email. Remember, even though the pictures may appear to be directly in the email they are actually attachments.
Barely Readable Fonts in Webpages? Are you plagued by ugly or barely readable fonts in webpages? It may be the font the page was designed in or it may be the font setting in your browser. If a webpage designer does not specify a font your browser will show any text in the font setting of your browser. If you use Internet Explorer, open it, go to “Tools, then “Internet Options”. At the bottom of the “General” page you will see a “Fonts” button. Click on it to open the “Fonts” window. For easy readability, make sure you have “Times New Roman” or “Arial” selected in the webpage font category.
Can’t Find The Right Font? Can’t find quite the right font? You’ve found some that look almost right. If you go into your “control panel” and click on the “Fonts” folder, then click on “View” you can select “List fonts by similarity. In the drop down menu select the one you think is “almost” right. The fonts in the main window will then be listed in order from most similar to least similar. Just double click on the similar ones to see examples. When you’ve found the one you want just go to your word processor and you will know which one to select.
Seasonal Wallpaper If you want different computer wallpaper for each month try this site. http://www.worldstart.com/month-wallpaper-calendar.htm?12
Backup, backup, backup! I got lucky! Backing up files on a computer is a lesson many people learn the hard way. Losing data from a computer or photos from a digital camera is a demoralizing experience. Very few of us really do a good job of backing up all of our files. I thought I did a good job of backing up critical files by writing them to floppies, cd’s or other computers. I learned this weekend how important it is to do it often! I have an Olympus C-700 digital camera with a 128 mb removable memory card. That card will hold about 165 photos on the standard setting. The first six months I had the camera I downloaded all the pictures onto one or more computer hard drives and burned them to a cd regularly. The last six months I’ve only downloaded the ones I wanted to print or use right away. Bad move! Saturday morning I sat down to save all the pics from the camera to my computer and intended to burn cd’s with all of my 2004 photos. I figured I would then reformat my 128 card and start fresh for the new year. Much to my surprise my computer said the card was empty! All the Thanksgiving and Christmas photos we had looked at Friday night at my in-law’s were gone! I put the card back in the camera and set it to “play” and the lcd screen said “no pictures”. I tried fresh batteries and a couple of other things and gave thinking I had lost everything. Monday morning I got on the internet and started looking for information about why my camera was deleting everything. I didn’t find what I was looking for but I found some amazing software called PhotoRescue. The company claimed it would recover deleted photos from camera memory cards or other storage media. They offered a free demo version to try. The downside was that you couldn’t save recovered photos with the demo version except as a special file which could be read only by the fully licensed version. I figured it was worth a try. What a relief when it pulled up 124 photos and I viewed thumbnails of the pictures I wanted the most. I saved them in the special format and gladly dug out the credit card to spend $29.95 for the full version. The company RegSoft.com offered a secure web site for purchasing online and within a couple of minutes I got to a page saying my order was being processed and that I should check my email in about 20 minutes. I checked my email and, sure enough, there was an email with a link to the full version of PhotoRescue PC. I double clicked on it to download it. In less than a minute I was installing it. A couple of more minutes and I was copying photos that I had previously thought were gone for good. Now, if only that would work for some photos and negatives that disappeared in the mail a few years back. If you ever accidently delete photos from your cameras memory card I would highly recommend trying PhotoRescue PC or PhotoRescue (for Macs). PS. I still don’t know why my camera keeps deleting all the images on the card every time I switch it to “play” but now I can reformat the card and try a few other things before I break down and mail the camera to Olympus. Space Saving Tip Are you running out of space on your Windows XP computer? If your hard drive is filled up with photos and music there is not much you can do other than burning them to a cd and removing them from the hard drive. However, if you have a lot of Word documents or spreadsheet files you might consider archiving the older or seldom used ones into a compressed folder. In Windows XP, right click in a vacant area of your desktop. In the menu which pops up, place your mouse pointer on “new” then select “compressed folder”. This will create a new compressed folder on your desktop. The icon will be a folder with a zipper on it. Double click on the compressed folder to open it. Dragging files into that folder will compress them. If you look at the details of files in a compressed folder you can view the original file size, the compressed file size and the compression ratio. Word documents and spreadsheets can often be compressed 85 to 89%. If you have photos or pictures in a .bmp format you can compress them, however, most pictures will be in a .jpeg format which is already compressed. Putting jpeg files into a compressed folder will gain only 1 to 3%.
Windows XP Pro or XP Home A serious reason you may want to use XP Home at home and XP Pro at the office is the Remote Desktop feature. This allows you to access your office computer running XP Pro from a home computer running XP Home. This feature does not work the other way around. The XP Home controls the XP Pro, the XP Pro cannot control the XP Home.
Update Horrors Have you ever ran Microsoft Windows Update or an update for some other program only to find your computer doesn’t work correctly afterward? Microsoft Windows XP Service Pack 2 (SP2) is one of the worst culprits. Microsoft actually maintains a webpage with a list of software programs which may not work correctly after installing Windows XP SP2. The website explains how to fix some of the problems. For some they only supply a link to the developer of the software which has the conflict. Often the developer of the affected software has had to create their own upgrade to fix the problem caused by SP2. Some other upgrade problems are not as serious but can be just as frustrating. Two weeks ago Peggy and I suddenly lost the ability to print to the printer attached to Jenn’s computer. Usually when that type of thing happens, it is caused by a poor network connection or a corrupted printer driver or a problem with the printer itself. Peggy noticed the problem first. We checked her internet connection – OK. Checked the Laserjet printer for error message – none. Printed a test page from Jenn’s computer – OK. Tried to print from my computer – didn’t work. Uninstalled the printer from my computer – could not re-install it. Checked the network connection from my computer to Jenn’s – her computer showed on the network but I could not access any of her files or her printer. Checked the network connections on her computer – I was able to access the shared files on my computer and Peggy’s. That led me to believe that the problem must be related to the network settings on Jenn’s computer. I discovered the anti-virus firewall security settings had been set up to the highest security settings and would not allow access to shared files or shared printers. Checked the exception boxes to allow both and everything worked again. Jenn had upgraded the anti-virus program and the update process had reset the default settings to the highest security level. Sometimes the problems don’t show up right away. In the case I just told you about we discovered the problem when Peggy tried to print to Jenn’s printer. Since Peggy and I don’t have printers on our computers, we usually print to Jenn’s printer almost everyday. A similar anti-virus/firewall problem which I recently had was a couple months between the cause and the discovery of the problem. Jenn now does most of the changes and additions to the Burke County and Bowbells websites. A few weeks ago I attempted to make an addition to the Bowbells website and my FTP program would not connect. It took me a couple of hours to discover that my anti-virus security setting was blocking FTP file transfer. It had been a couple of months since I had upgraded to the newest version of MacAfee Anti-virus. The FTP blocking was not part of the old version. Another thing that often happens is the changing of file associations. File association is the method Windows uses to identify which program to open when you click on a file in an email, a website or in your “My Documents” or “My Pictures” folder. Unexpected file association changes often happen when installing new printers, scanners or digital camera software. Almost all computers have multiple programs which can be used to view or edit photos. Most digital photos are in either a .bmp or a .jpg format. Microsoft Picture It is a common photo editing program. If you use “Picture It”, file association means that if you click on a picture file or a picture attached to an email, the picture will be opened in “Picture It”. If you buy a new camera or colored printer and install the software which comes with them, they will often change the file association so when you click on a picture file or thumbnail it will open in the program you just installed instead of “Picture It” or whatever program you are used to using. If you decide you like the new program better that’s great. If you prefer your old program you can click on a file or thumbnail using your right mouse button. The small window which pops up will have an option that says “Open with”. Click on “Open with” and then select the program you want to use. If you want to permanently change the file associations look for a small box titled “always use this program for this file type”. Click on the box to check it. Dan Folske |
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