IT Queries: Computer problems answered

I’m really worried about the latest warnings about Internet Explorer. What should I use instead of it?

You’re right to be worried about using Internet Explorer, the program has shown itself over the years to have some serious security flaws. We’ve recommended for a long time that users should use alternative programs.

Previously we’ve posted a list of the four main alternatives to Internet Explorer. These options include Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome, Opera and Apple Chrome.

Of the choices, Firefox is the most popular while Chrome is gaining fans because of its speed. The other two have their advantages as well and its best to download one and see if it meets your needs.

Don’t try to remove Internet Explorer as it is an important part of the Windows operating system and there’s quite a few sites that will only work properly on Internet Explorer.

So save IE for the sites that require it and use alternatives for your day-to-day web surfing.

I want to install Japanese version MSOffice 2007 or 2010 on my PC running with Windows 7 Home Basic. Will it work?

It will, but you may find various functions of Office may not work properly or require additional setup in Windows. You may also hit some font problems.

The most obvious problem is going to be the keyboard support which may not map correctly if you’re running a non Japanese keyboard.

A very good guide to running Japanese applications on Microsoft products is Declan Software’s Guide to Installing and Using Microsoft’s Japanese IME that looks at installing the various options available under the different versions of Windows.

If you’re looking at just using the English options, that should work subject to any validation quirks, however you may find the Japanese version lacks some of the proofing and formatting features of the English versions.

Social networks are great way of keeping in touch with friends, family and colleagues. With 500 million users, none is a more effective tool than Facebook.

Keeping in touch with friends and relatives though does have a downside, sometimes you might give away more than you intend to. When you share with friends on a social service, everyone in your network can see what you are doing.

To make things worse, many social media businesses will give away their customers’ private information to make a few dollars as the controversy over Facebook’s recent changes to their privacy settings and the company’s subsequent backdown shows .

Because this information is valuable, organisations are prepared to pay for it and the bad guys are eager to trick it out of you. Given the risks of identity theft, stalkers or all manner of Internet crazies finding you online, it’s important to guard this information.

Facebook don’t make it easy to protect yourself, but you can hide key information.

Take off personal data
The first, simple step to protecting yourself is to move as much data as possible off your profile – home address, phone number, relationships, sexual orientation, birth year – are a few things that simply don’t need to be online. Take off everything that could potentially cause problems, you may need to use some judgement on what you’re comfortable sharing with your online contacts.

Birthdays are a good example of where you should use that judgement. Facebook’s quite a good tool for reminding you of birthdays, but your birth date is also an important part of identity theft. If you do want to share a birthday, never put your birth year in – your relatives and friends have a good idea of how old you are – and you might want to consider putting the date a day or two earlier than the real day.

To change your Facebook profile information, click on the Profile link on the right hand side of your Facebook home page, you can edit all your details from there as shown below. Remember to click Save Changes after making each change and move between the different categories to ensure you’re only sharing what you’ve comfortable with.

Set your privacy
Facebook makes assumptions about what you want to share with your network of friends. This is not always in your interests and you should regularly review what your settings are as Facebook have a habit of changing how the privacy settings work.

To enter the privacy settings, click Account and Privacy Settings as shown below. Once you’re in the Privacy Settings, click on Custom option and Customise Settings. You can then set your details to only be accessible to you or your friends. The following example shows a recommended configuration which may be suitable for you.

Choose your friends
Many people treat Facebook and other social media services as a competition to gain as many friends, connections or followers as possible. This isn’t the point and on Facebook in particular it opens you up to a number of risks.

Once someone is your Facebook friend, they are privy to any information you choose to share and much of what your other friends post on your wall. The main risk is that new Internet is not quite as stable or honest as you thought. By accepting friend requests from people you don’t know you increase the risk of letting risky individuals into your life, your family and your group of friends.

Another danger lies in the Facebook places feature which allows your friends to check you into locations. A malicious “friend” or a practical joke could see you being advertised as having checked into a place you really don’t want to be associated with.

If you decide that is an acceptable risk, then revise the above recommendations on your profile information. If you are promiscuous in who you befriend online then be very careful about the information shared with them.

Be careful which applications can see you
Facebook applications are one of the reasons for it’s success. These applications – or mini-programs – allow you to play games, enter competitions and sign up with other services quickly.

The proposed change in January 2011 to the information Facebook gives out to application owners would have allowed a lot of your personal information to be shared with third party developers. As it is quite a few of these applications “scrape” information from the various services you subscribe to. A good example is with Twitter where private, non-public, messages can be seen by some of these services.

You should only allow applications to use your Facebook connection details if you absolutely trust them; right now, there are few services people can or should trust.

If you have been allowing Facebook to connect your subscriptions to other websites, then you may want to review who you’ve given trust to. To do this, click Account then select Privacy as shown above. In the Privacy page click Apps and Websites and the page shown below will appear. By clicking Edit Settings you can then delete applications or change what they are allowed to do on your profile.

Despite the risks of stalkers, identity theft and various privacy issues, Facebook is a valuable tool for millions of people who want to keep up to date with their friends, relatives and colleagues. By being sensible in choosing your online friends and what you share with them, it is a great website for keeping in touch with people you might otherwise lose track of.

I’m defragmenting my hard disc and I’m noticing a strange situation here! before defragging my free space was 110Gb and now when its 31% defragged the free space is 92GB and its decreasing continuously.. any ideas about what I should do now??

Mechanical hard drives store data in blocks, which are like parking spaces in a car park. When Windows saves data onto a drive it “parks” the new information in the first available space and often will break up files bigger than a single block (which are most files) across different parts of the disk. This slows down the system when you want to open or save a file.

The Windows defrag program rearranges the data on your hard drive so all the bits in each file are parked next to each other, making the process a lot more efficient.

Because defrag has to shuffle the stored data on the hard drive, you’ll see the amount of free space available grow and shrink as it goes about figuring where the best place to put data is. It’s the same as when you reorganise a cupboard or workroom.

So don’t worry about it unless you find there is substantially less free space at the end of the process. If that does happen, check your drive for bad blocks or give your drive a clean up.

I have a Sony Vaio CR Notebook that I purchased in 2008. It was working fine until Thanksgiving. I noticed the screen blurring and I would sometimes have to restart it to get a clear picture. It was mimicking a TV screen that was hit by lightning but to my knowledge, no single event caused it to begin this.

I could partially see and it was loading my icons on my desktop as usual, It just couldn’t be used. Now, it is comletely unusable. The screen is black.

My research papers and pictures are saved on the hard drive under my documents or in Windows Photo Gallery. Is it possible to determine if the hard drive is damaged? and if not…could I somehow extract that information off my sony using some external device? I am a teacher and use computers but am clueless about the logistics of computers. Can you please tell me if I have any options? I would greatly appreciate it!

The good news is it sounds like the display – or the associated cabling and electronics – are causing the problem, not the hard drive. So all the data on the drive should be fine although repairing the computer probably won’t be worth repairing.

You’ll need to take the computer to a computer technician who can remove the hard drive and copy the data to a new computer, DVD or send it to an online storage service. Either way, all of your information should be fine.

I have been trying to instal AVG Anti-Virus Free version 2011 on my home computer. I use windows XP.

I went onto the internet and run the program to load it on,it then asked me to disinstall my Norton Anti Virus before proceeding to instal the applications. I did as instructed and then proceeded to run the program to install the applications. It showed 119mb.I left this program to run and it was loading on very slowly so I left it overnight.

When I checked the monitor next morning there was a black window with BKR Saver on the top left corner showing and I couldn’t do anything to get rid of it to see if the program was still running.I started from scratch again yesterday and again this window came after a short while when installing the applications.

It had however downloaded 37mb from the previous days attempt when the computer had been on for at least 8 hours.I am at a total loss as to why this is happening.Can you offer me any advice?

The problem is with the AVG downloader package, it’s obviously not handling the download and the speed of your Internet connection well.

The best bet is to download the package directly from the AVG Free website, make sure you choose the 16-bit program for Windows XP and avoid choosing the Windows downloader again.

If that doesn’t work, there are alternative free anti-virus packages which we’ve discussed on our Three Free Antivirus Programs post.

My Canon Pixma IP 1000,  3 – 4  years old and been fine. Suddenly won’t print text. Same in Word, Publisher, Notebook, Excel etc. Graphics, pictures, lines etc all  print OK, but no text….. Have cleaned nozzles tried new usb cable,  Reinstalled driver…Grey scale test works fine…. But still no text.  Any suggestions please?

It sounds like the black ink cartridge or print head isn’t working properly. The fact it can print greyscale and graphics indicates the printer’s color heads are fine.

You may want to try running another head clean before replacing the black ink cartridge. When you do it’s a good idea to try printing out something that is very heavy in black text.

Keep in mind though that the Canon IP1000 was a very cheap printer at its time and it simply isn’t designed to work forever so it might be time to consider a new printer.

Do I need to use both the VGA and the USB cable for my Monitor. I am using Vista.

What you’ll find is the USB cable is probably for the USB ports and other accessories such as webcams or TV tuners that might be built into the monitor. Generally the monitor connects either with a VGA, DVI or HDMI cable, USB is almost unknown as a way to connect a monitor to a computer.

It is best to connect both as without the USB connection you’ll be unable to use the accessories included with the monitor.

Microsoft now considers XP to be older software – yet quite a few of us will keep XP as our operating system for many years.

I rebuild 3+ machines every year and the additional downloading of updates can take many hours and bandwidth.

Is there a “final” fully integrated XP Install CD/DVD/iso-file that comprises all service packs and fixes?

There’s no such thing as a “final” Windows installation, or of any other operating system, as supported products are always having some sort of updates or hotfixes released to meet new security issues or hardware requirement. Windows XP gets a lot of these as it’s particularly prone to attacks on various security holes that aren’t an issue with Vista and Windows 7.

What you are actually looking for is a “slipstreamed” Windows install where all of the updates are rolled into the Windows installation disk.

No-one reputable will distribute these as to do so risks falling foul of Microsoft’s licensing rules, but Microsoft themselves make the instructions available in their knowledge base at How to integrate software updates into your Windows installation source files.

You’ll find it’s a fairly complex and fiddly procedure which you’ll have to keep up to date as new patches become available. You would start with the Windows Service Pack 3 package and then add every subsequent update and hotfix.

If you’re only re-installing Windows XP on three machines every year, you might find it’s not worthwhile doing this and perhaps re-imaging the drives when you do a clean install might be a easier, quicker and less fussy option.

turned my computer on and this error message appeared;

\windows\system32\config\

Usually data isn’t affected by a damaged registry file, however the damage can sometimes be an indicator that the hard drive is failing. So it’s important to check your hard drive for errors once the computer has been repaired.