PC & Technical
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Free Office software from OpenOffice
PC file searching
comes of age
Ever seen those long web addresses and wished they were shorter?
Then try TinyURL
Ideal to send in emails
Download a small, fast, accurate PDF reader from FoxIT Software - I prefer it, and use it, over Acrobat!
Speed up the loading of Acrobat Reader - download the utility
Check here for a variety of free utility downloads (sent in by Barry Hicks)
What you can do about spyware and other unwanted software
from Microsoft
Computing & Technical Section
Do you require to work with the new 'OpenDocument' format documents?
The new standard for documentation throughout the commercial world is centred around the OpenDocument Format (ODF). Whilst the latest version of Open Office has this format as it's standard the new and current versions of Microsoft Office do not suppport this ODF format, but the Open Standards Forum have come up with a converter that is free to use.
To download an Add-in to Microsoft Word XP, 2003, & 2007, go to the Sourceforge web site and select the relevant file for download.
Alternatively you could download and install OpenOffice alongside or in place of Microsoft Office - see the right hand column to download OpenOffice. The choice is yours.
If you currently do not have an Office package, then why not try the free OpenOffice package? It does most of what you'll need in an office package and it's FREE!
Click the icon to the right to download the latest version ....... »»
Keeping your PC system running smoothly
I'm assuming you have the latest antivirus software and firewall updates installed which are a priority, along with additional spyware software like Adaware and Spybot - see right hand column for links etc. to these utilities.
Have you been keeping your system clear of rubbish and removing temporary and log files on a regular basis?
Have you been adding and/or removing software on your system?
Well if you've not been doing any sort of regular maintenance on your system you might not have noticed the possible reduction in performance and storage space on your system.
For starters, I would suggest you install ccleaner and remove all unnecessary 'junk' from your system like tmp and log files for instance and you can set the various parameters to suit your requirements. Experiment with the settings to suit your requirements as you might not want to remove all the cookies you have set up and so on.
Also think about installing HD Cleaner and exploring the various options open to you, but run the Registry Cleaner and dispose of the entries it shows as invalid etc. Do set it up to back up your registry before you delete anything so that if the worse comes to the worse ..... To date, fingers crossed, everything it's deleted for myself has not led to a registry reload, but you never know! Sod's Law and all that!
For further information and links to downloads, visit the websites;-
Finally, having done the above run Disk Defragment to finalise the tidying of your Hard Disk Drive.
The best advice here is to run these utilities about once a month, depending on how often you use your PC System.
Emails warning of viruses, etc.
When you get an email from someone warning of a virus, or trojan etc., then why not check it's not a hoax before sending it on to others?
Occasionally one gets an email or other form of message to warn of a virus or trojan or some other nasty doing the rounds.
Before sending it on to other friends and relatives, and maybe causing some panic amongst these people, why not check to see whether the warning is genuine or a hoax? This can be done quite easily and quickly and one such link to a site to check these against can be found in the left hand column here.
Why not take a look now and see how easy it is for yourself?
Open Office software (OOS)
As you may or may not know, the Office software is converging such that the output files will move towards the HTML (or XML) format, which is known as the Open Office Format. The idea behind this is that anyone should be able to read the documentation without necessarily having the original software and possible amend/modify accordingly.
There is currently a format where documents can be passed around and literally anyone with the suitable Acrobat reader can view it but not necessarily change/modify it and Acrobat is proprietary software rather than Open software.
Microsoft is to bring out it's new version of Office later in the year or early 2007, and as you might guess, they will use their own "open" standard. And as is their norm, the average user won't really be able to afford their charges!
So why not download the Open Office software, and as it's name suggests, it's free ware. The latest version is 2.0.2 and weighs in at 91Mb so a broadband connection is a must. If you don't have one you can order a copy of CD I believe so follow the link below for full details, or why not click on the PlusNet link above and get yourself a good Broadband connection now!!
To read more about the OpenOffice suite, click here now, or
To download the OpenOffice suite click on the following icon now!
PS! OpenOffice can currently save a document out to pdf format (Acrobat) whereas the current versions of MS Office don't.
Converting old camcorder films to DVD
Have you ever wondered what to do about your old camcorder footage, and keeping those old memories alive?
Just recently I was talking about this very subject with a friend of mine who wanted to capture his old holiday films across to DVD from the bulky old Video Cassettes (VCs) he'd got them on.
This set me thinking about an easy and cost effective way of transferring them. Realising that I'd got an analogue TV card in my PC I thought that I must be able to transfer them using this method. So I put a VC into the VDR, connected to my PC and lo and behold, the transfer was made.
I then told my friend about it and so I transferred his films to the Disk Drive (HDD) in my PC. This is only stage 1 as although some DVD players, connected to the TV, will play mpeg format files, ALL won't. So begins the long haul conversion to put the files into a format that virtually all DVD's will play.
I did this originally with Nero, but you can use any suitable software - your preference. Creator 8 from Roxio is another good product and I felt it was better than Nero, having had a play with that more recently. Other software will do the same, but what you have to remember is it is very time consuming, and the time also depends on the specification of the PC system you use. A typical film takes between 5 and 8 hrs to convert on my Dell PC, a 5yr old machine with a PIII, 933MHz processor but just about an hour or so on a PC with a dual core processor, 2Gb ram and a 512Mb Video card!
At this stage, all I have done is prove it works but as yet I have done no editing to either cut bits out or add titles etc. This is Phase 2! If anyone has moved to this stage and has any advice, then I look forward to hearing from you.
If you want to have a go yourselves, then you'll need either a suitable video card with the relevant analogue inputs or an ANALOGUE TV card minimum and some DVD burning software like Creator 8 or Video editing software like Pinnacle's Studio Plus or Adobe Premiere Elements for starters. There are many others out there so do some research and read what the various people say and have a go! You'll be pleasantly surprised with your results I'm quite sure.
Another alternative, if you have a modern digital camcorder with analogue input, is to use that as the input mechanism to get your film into the PC. Then you'll need some editing software as above, or more than likely, you'll have some that came with the camera!
If you want more information or would like to pass on your experiences, contact me and maybe we can develop this further.
A New year with Old Problems ...
It seems that the new year has started of with a rush of Spam/Phishing/Junk emails.
It appears that these emails are coming not just from the USA but also from the far east, with one of the latest originating from Vietnam, or so my email provider has told me.
Please be wary of any emails that you receive from any source you do not recognise. Some may purport to come from reliable sources like Apple, but not everything is as it seems!
With the likes of Outlook and Outlook Express we can find out header information from which your Internet Service Provider (ISP) can track where this email is coming from and I would suggest if you are bombarded with this type of email you try reporting it to them and set up filters in your email programme to reject these emails. By reading this information you can see for yourself where some of this is coming from. You may find some of this information useful in Blocking unwanted messages!
One thing to be aware of is that when you delete these emails you may be asked to let the sender know you have received the email.
UNDER NO CIRCUMSTANCES SHOULD YOU ACKNOWLEDGE RECIEPT OF THE EMAIL! By doing so the sender knows you exist and may then continue to bombard you with more of this unsolicited email and worse still, they will spread your address round to other persons who will then do the same!
Also, by opening or clicking on any of the links in the email you will most probably open up your machine to all sorts of nasties from viruses to spyware etc.
This is the response that I have just received from the British Banking Association;-
We advise never to respond or click on any links contained in these e-mails. Delete the email immediately. Never 'confirm' your bank details via any web site - a legitimate bank/financial institution would not ask you to do this. See this link to the Financial Services Authority web site giving warning of current financial scams.
Finally, at the risk of repeating myself, KEEP YOUR ANTI-VIRUS, FIREWALL AND INTRUSION SOFTWARE UP TO DATE!
Do you use, or thinking of subscribing to, eBay?
If you use, or are thinking of using eBay then the following information might prove to be a useful safeguard. These tips appeared on Channel 5's Gadget Show, currently shown on Monday evenings, at 7:15pm.
Suzie's tips for buy on eBay were:
- REALITY CHECK - If a bargain seems too good to be true, it probably is.
- FEEDBACK - Before you buy anything, check the feedback. Of course, positive feedback is good, but dig a little deeper. An easy way to build up an impeccable feedback rating is to buy lots of things, but this does not say much about what someone is like as a seller. Fraudsters can use a different ebay accounts to leave positive feedback on their own account to make it look as though they are genuine - look out for lots of feedback on the same day as the auction that is being left about. Also, look out for lots of identical feedback from different people, as this may also be suspect.
- PRIVACY - When starting on e-bay you need a username; don't use your real name or e-mail address. This is just giving away too much personal information. Most of the team who make The Gadget Show have a separate Hotmail account for using e-bay.
- STAY WITH IT - If you are serious about using e-bay, keep abreast of the latest scams. Google News seem to take a particular interest in that sort of stuff, so they are a good place to check.
Thinking of buying a new PC?
Now is a good time to buy as several companies are offering some good deals, amongst them Dell, so whether you're looking for a laptop, desktop, hand held or peripherals, then visit the Dell site now, by just clicking on any of the links on this page.
By linking to Dell via this site you are helping me to maintain a service to you, and you'll pay no more and in certain circumstances, by linking via this site you can actually make further savings!
If you are thinking of buying a new PC but don't know what to get or you're having difficulty in justifying spending so much monies, I know what you're thinking as I'm going through a similar situation and have taken to doing a bit of research and have come up with a few words that you might like to read on the subject.
I'd even welcome some responses and your thoughts on the subject.
Time to Switch from Microsoft's Internet Explorer (IE)?
Is it not time you moved from IE, with it's alleged security failings, according to CERT, a US Federal Funded Security Centre. They have been advocating we change from IE now for months due to the security flaws that plague IE. See the web sites of CERT and StopIE for details of the various reasons to change browsers.
Whilst Microsoft continue to release fixes and patches for their software there comes a time when they stop supporting the different releases so you could be left with a vulnerable browser.
One of the reasons that most people remain with IE is that it was the default loaded browser on the PC when they got it and another reason is that most companies have written their web pages around IE, which incidentally doesn't stick to the W3C standards for web design.
I know from experience that a fair few financial institutions have built their site around IE and their site doesn't work properly or fully under alternative sites which then gives users a problem.
What's really disturbing is that although these companies are well aware of the security problems with IE they PERSIST in using it! And they are supposed to be SECURITY CONSCIOUS!!!
Some alternative browsers are listed with their respective web links, on the Browsers page.
Windows XP - Moving the Shared Documents Folder
Have you ever tried to move the Shared Documents folders away from the system partition/drive, C:?.
Although the contents of this folder, by definition, are available to any user of the PC, including the guest account, many users prefer to keep data files on a different partition - it makes backing up a lot easier and, should the Windows partition get hopelessly damaged and need to be reformatted, the data is safe.
However, it's not easy to move this in the normal manner of "dragging & dropping" or changing the drive in properties etc and one has to resort to editing the Registry.
If you follow the advice given here, you can achieve the otherwise impossible.
Want to know more about free or cheap phone calls?
Skype is one company, possibly the market leader, that has enabled the prospect of free or cheap calls to be made from a PC.
To find out more read the article follow this link.
Skype supply you free software that will enable you to talk to people all round the world free from your PC. Visit their site for full details.
You need Windows 2000 or XP in order to use this software, along with a microphone and speakers along with minimum processor speeds etc., and sensibly a broadband connection.
Report Spam email
Are you suffering with Spam Email?
Just recently I have been getting more and more of this Junk mail and so decided to chase up the service providers from where the mail originated. One of them, Freenet, has finally taken action and asked that any further instances are also reported to them.
Before forwarding the email, find out as much as you can from the headers of these messages and then copy and paste this information into the email you forward to the companies. It's this information that enables them to trace the culprits and then take action against them.
In Outlook this information is obtained by right clicking on the mail and selecting Options then selecting and copying the text into the email you are sending. I do this as a matter of course when I get mail from sources I don't recognise and then delete as appropriate without opening the mail.
Where to send it to? I try sending it to support@company but with Hotmail then it needs to be 'report_spam@hotmail.com'.
It's only be reporting these instances that we'll get anything done.
Time to move to Broadband?
With the current situation where upgrades and security updates are done on-line maybe it's time you moved to broadband, as some of these files can be as long as 35Mbytes or more, with the typical sizes being around 5Mbytes or so.
If you're thinking of moving away from dial-up to Broadband then a very useful site to visit is the ADSL Guide site as it is totally independent and provides useful information on the different providers.
Before settling on any provider make sure you read the SMALL PRINT as there are limitations etc on the cheap deals so make sure it's what you want BEFORE you enter any agreements as the majority of the ISP's (Internet Service Providers) have a contract period of 12 months.
When you have decided on an ISP and if it's PlusNet sign on via this site and by so doing, you'll help me to provide a service to you! It costs no more than signing up directly! Scroll down the page for further details.
Excessive Fonts! Try pruning for efficiency.
Did you know that Windows 2000 & XP have no limit as to the number of fonts you can have, whereas Win9x & ME have a limit of approx 1000! Did you also know it's best to keep the numbers down as not only do they take up disk space but also slow down the boot up process!
Before deleting fonts, you need to know what's safe to delete. Anything with an A against it should NOT be deleted as it's a system font, along with marlett.ttf. It's also a good idea not to delete any fonts that were shipped with Windows.
How does one know what font shipped with what product, you may ask? If you go to the Microsoft typography page you can find out which fonts were shipped with different Microsoft products.
If you are trying to identify a font from a printed or screen sample then there's a resource from Identifont you can use.
By visiting the Microsoft Typography site one can immediately see what fonts are provided with what application.
Microsoft's wandering Knowledge base
Microsoft seem to move the support Knowledge base occasionally and the most recent redesigned search engine is currently located here.
Alternatively, you could use Google and there are two options available. Either go straight to the Google Microsoft search page or go to the Google Home page, choose Advanced Search and then in the new window, in the Domain section, opt to 'Only return results from the site or domain' and put 'microsoft.com' in the box. Make sure that 'KB' is in the 'All the words' section and fill in the rest depending on your search.
The latter version oddly enough is faster than the Microsoft search - there's a surprise!
Making backups - more simply and easily
Do you find backing up your data, email address, messages etc daunting or painful such that you don't even attempt to backup your precious work?
The new Maxtor OneTouch II Drive Raises the Bar In Consumer Backup as they bring Consumers the First External Backup Solution to Feature Simpler Backup, Added Security and More Powerful Restore Capabilities.
To read more on this new drive, click here and you'll be whisked in a flash to the relevant Maxtor page.
It's always best to keep your backups independent of the working PC and with the current doubt being cast on the life of CD's & DVD's then why not keep a copy on an external hard drive. This way you can always create a new CD or DVD if the need arises then as you have a master backup!
The major drawback for home users could be the price but then, "What price lost data?". Think of the effect of photos taken years ago that have been stored to CD/DVD and are now unreadable? You'd be devastated if you lost them so do ensure you have good backups.
If you stay with CDs as most of us will no doubt then make TWO copies minimum, as an insurance policy if nothing else. The cost of a CD is nothing compared to the data on there!
Tired of long url's (web addresses)?
Are you sick of posting URL's in emails only to have it break across lines when sent causing the recipient to have to cut and paste it back together? Wish you could shorten it? Well you can!
There are sites out there that will shorten it for you such that just by entering in a URL in the text field shown, they will create a tiny URL that will not break in email postings and never expires.
One such company is TinyURL.com.
I use TinyURL myself and I find it very good.
Why not give it a go?
Security Software
There is an increase in spying software being installed onto PCs and equally there are several ways of protecting yourself against them but this entails you installing some additional software unless of course you have bought some integrated Internet Protection package.
A Firewall will offer a fair deal of protection and will generally stop people from looking in at your PC and contents whilst on line hence affording some fair degree of protection. For the broadband users amongst us then one could argue it has more importance as we're on line for longer and hence give the opportunity hacker longer to attempt to "break in".
As a further word of warning to some of you out there that visit, occasionally or otherwise, "adult" sites then you need to be aware of the importance of keeping ALL security measures, anti-virus and firewall software up to date as these would appear, according to the security sites I receive information from, to be the major protagonists of infection etc.!
There are some free versions available to home users and you ought to give serious consideration to installing at least one of these versions as soon as possible for your own peace of mind.
There are other products out in the market place that offer total security packages that include anti-virus and firewall protection and may well be worth considering and you can find links to a couple of the more popular versions by clicking here. Others can be found by looking at supplier sites or doing a search of the web using a search engine like Google.
To install and keep up to date the following pieces of software;-
- AntiVirus
- Firewall
- Spyware, such as Ad-Aware SE from Lavasoft
There is quite a range of all products, both free or otherwise, available on the web as a search with your favourite search will show.
Some of the recognised free ones, for personal use, are Grisoft for virus protection; Zone Alarm for firewall and Ad-Aware & Spybot for Spyware. Links to these are detailed under Web Links page.
Home Computer Security
Have you heard of CERT?
Established in 1988, the CERT® Coordination Centre (CERT/CC) is a centre of Internet security expertise, located at the Software Engineering Institute, a federally funded research and development centre operated by Carnegie Mellon University.
The CERT/CC is a major reporting centre for Internet security problems. Staff members provide technical advice and coordinate responses to security compromises, identify trends in intruder activity, work with other security experts to identify solutions to security problems, and disseminate information to the broad community.
They publish some useful articles for securing your home PC beside other areas so click on Home Computer Security for further reading.
Why not visit the CERT home site for general security topics - you might just find something useful.
War rages over web mail's future
A virtual war is being waged in cyberspace that will benefit millions of internet users.
The battleground is e-mail, a service which, for many, virtually defines their online existence.
Digital Cameras and Resolution
Is having too many pixels bad for you? It's said that the more you have then the better quality the picture, but, the more you have means there's an increase in the image noise, so says Gordon Laing in July 2004, of PCW Magazine.
The number of magapixels is the figure which defines the amount of detail captured and hence it's become the primary measure of quality for digital cameras.
His article is very detailed, if not rather technical, and he concludes by saying that higher resolutions have become a marketing numbers game and are coming at the cost of greater noise. Besides looking for number of pixels in your next purchase, look carefully at the sensor size as megapixels aren't the be-all and end-all of image quality.
If you are about to buy a camera why not read his article first. It could save you some heartache at the end of the day, let alone cash!
Technology Site
Have you seen the BBC Technology programme, Click embedded into News 24 on BBC2 on a Saturday morning at 7:45 that lasts for a massive 10minutes? It covers topical issues along with details of technology items from current shows. Latest items include items on Virus Writers and other security developments. Well worth a visit! It's repeated on a Sunday afternoon around 4:30pm and for half an hour then!
In addition, there's the BBC Technology web page that's well worth a visit if you're interested in techy type stuff. Items covered in there are varied so click on the link and have a peruse and I'm sure you won't be disappointed.
This week's Technology page includes articles on E-mail provides Arctic Lifeline; Teen Confesses to Sasser Worm; Intel focuses on a new fast cooler chip through to Should we hand over PC security to Microsoft? I know my answer to the latter, but that's me!
New Virus Threats
A new option on the left entitled Security is where you'll find details of new virus & trojan threats as and when they appear. If you hear of any then please flag them up as I'd rather here about them several times rather than not at all. Remember it's important to keep your Anti-virus and Firewall software up to date! There are details of free versions of these software packages detailed within these pages so you have no excuse for not having any. Remember, it's other people's computers you put at risk besides your own!
File Formats
I've just been reading an article about file formats which asks some pertinent questions for the future. It does make one think and wonder what might happening the non too distant future when one considers the rates of change over the last few years!
Take photos and pictures in general. We tend to find the former tends to be stored in jpeg format (.jpg) and can be in various stages of compression etc. Tiff is another standard which is less popular, due maybe to the file sizes. It has advantages however when you want to process your pictures as it's a non-lossy format and maintains picture quality and resolution if you are continuously editing your pictures. The only way text will be truly compatible is in straight text format (.txt) although the Acrobat format (.pdf) might stand the test of time, but even that's not for sure.
At this moment in time though, there is NO standard that has been adopted etc to go forward into the future and so must therefore put a question mark over whether any of today's material will be read in some future time. Let's face it Microsoft has changed it's format virtually at each release of it's Office program, so what's to say these formats won't change over time. Has anyone defined the file format anywhere so that it could be used to read files in the future? As of yet it would appear that the answer is a big NO. Do we then need to keep hard paper copies of the pictures one stores on CD?
The future could be interesting, and at this moment in time it could be worth keeping an eye on what goes on and then maybe occasionally reload your photos &/or pictures etc and re-save them in the then current time's format, especially if the material is kept for the use of future generations!
Articles
You'll find some additional write-ups, accessible via Articles on the left Navigation bar, on Microsoft Office & Internet Tips amongst others. These two articles were originally compiled by Alan J Weston, an old colleague of mine. We trust you find them useful and any feedback would be appreciated. Others could be appearing as time marches on!
Interested in a Broadband Connection? Much faster downloads and upgrades. Microsoft and other companies now distribute their upgrades, updates and patches on line and some of these can be many Mb which takes an inordinate time via a standard 56k modem connection, and the cost of Broadband is lower than you might think. Click on the following graphic for further info! You know it makes sense!
