I offered to help a friend of mine upgrade his PC, so after the latest computer fair we gutted his 486 and installed a new mother board (gigabyte GA-5AA), AMD K6-2/400 CPU plus fan, 64MB PC100 RAM, 4.3 GB Seagate HDD (model ST34311a) and an 8MB video card. The HDD fdisked and formatted ok. Went to install windows using a startup disk with CD-ROM support and Microsoft Windows is installing with less that a minute to go and then it crashes big time. Errors and faults in something called VXD etc… I did manage to get a clean install on the 5th go (played around in the BIOS), delivered it to him after playing around on it and seeing that it was stable but then it crashes at his place! His PC will now run in safe mode but when you click on the ‘Start’ button, there is a fault in ‘explorer.exe’. Please can you offer some advice? I have the same system, but with a 4MB card and a Quantum 6 GB HDD. I have had no problems. (more…)

My PC uses Eudora for e-mail and Netscape Communicator for internet. If I want to switch to Microsoft Outlook and Microsoft Internet Explorer, is there a way to copy my Eudora nicknames and stored In/Out messages to Outlook, and to copy my web site bookmarks to Explorer? (more…)

I wonder if you can help me with a problem that has just started happening in Word97. I am trying to print customised labels within Word97/Windows95 and am not able to adjust the sizes correctly anymore. Having customised the label size and added the data I require, I then go into ‘Print Preview’ before printing. Everything looks fine there, and the margins are correct etc. However, when I print the label, the top margin is around 1cm shorter than the margin settings. I have resorted to trying to fudge the margins in desperation. However, this leads to a lot of hit and miss (more miss than hits!). I have since printed the labels on another PC with Word97/Windows NT and had no problems. I’m also having problems with my footers in some documents as well. The problem here is that the footer is getting cropped at the top of the text! It appears in the preview
window, however, it won’t print all the text. (more…)

We recently purchased a new PC for the family (a fair way up the ladder from our old 486!). I have a couple of questions because we are still grappling with the new toy. The machine (Pentium 450 running Win 98 etc…) came with an Internet trial offer. We have moved to a different ISP but when we use Internet Explorer 5 the text in the window bar at the top of the window says ‘Microsoft Internet Explorer provided by XXXXXXX (the name of our first ISP). Is there any way I can change this ? It’s not a great big problem but it would be nice to ‘tidy it up’. Secondly, our machine came with a 32Mb TNT 2 AGP Video card. How do these work (what do they do) and does this piece of hardware benefit from any up dates etc.. as fair as software (i.e. can we make it work better and keep it ‘tuned’ to perform well with games etc), and if so how do I do it? (more…)

I’m currently using Netscape Navigator 4.05 and have been building a web site. When in Navigator I click on mailto:firstname.lastname@whatever.com.au and can’t send email. I get an hourglass while the cursor is on the email link however, this disappears when I move to the main screen and I get no new e-mail popup box. There do not appear to be any problems with html coding, and I seem to be able to launch the e-mail pop up from my hyperlink from another computer. MS Outlook 98 is the e-mail package installed on my computer (and the one I’m keen to use). Do you have any idea how I can tell Netscape to launch MS Outlook as my mail package? I have re-installed Communicator, but in only launches the netscape e-mail package. Also, I have re-installed Outlook, but Netscape still uses it own e-mail. Any ideas and your advice greatly appreciated. (more…)