The Windows Vista sidebar only comes with a few “gadgets” by default, such as a clock, RSS reader and picture display. However, there are plenty more gadgets which can be added to the sidebar. These can be downloaded from the Windows Live Gallery at vista.gallery.microsoft.com . (more…)

My computer has a bad habit of starting and restarting itself. This usually happens at least once a day, and I often come back to my computer after being away to find the machine sitting at the Windows logon screen. I have read your past answers about disabling all power management settings in the BIOS and I have done this, but the problem remains. Interestingly enough, the computer also restarts in response to certain stimuli. For example, when I click the “Copy” button in Nero the computer restarts. I don’t know if this is a related problem, but reinstalling Nero has not resolved the issue. Any advice you can provide on this problem would be greatly accepted. (more…)

My wife and I share a Dell Latitude laptop, running Windows XP Professional SP2 with Norton Antivirus. We each have separate logons to the computer. My wife uses the Yahoo email service, and accesses email through the web based interface using Internet Explorer. I use our ISPs (Telstra) email server and go through Microsoft Outlook to read email. If my wife checks her email through Yahoo and then logs-off the computer, any subsequent attempts by me to use Outlook for email fail with the errors 0×80042108 for my POP3 email server and 0×80042109 for the SMTP email server. The only way to fix this problem is to restart the computer. The problem only started when we switched from Transact broadband onto Telstra ADSL. I have tried disabling Norton Antivirus but this does not resolve the issue. (more…)

In Office 2007 the developer tools within Word, Excel and PowerPoint are not displayed by default. This limits the ability of Office power users to write macros and insert other form elements (such as buttons and text boxes) into documents and spreadsheets. To enable the developer tools and “Developer” tab, click the Office button > ?Word/Excel/PowerPoint Options?. In the window that appears, click “Popular” and enable “Show Developer tab in the Ribbon”. Click OK to save and close. (more…)

When shutting down or restarting Windows, the following messages appear:
? “End Program ” SW. The system cannot end this program because it is waiting for a response from you”
” ?dwwin.exe ? DLL initialisation failed. The application failed to initialise because the Windows station is shutting down”
” ?AcroRd32.exe ? Application Error. The instruction @ 0×5ad71531 referenced memory at 0×00000014. The memory could not be read?
These actions do not appear to cause any problems, but it would be nice to prevent them from interrupting the shutdown process. (more…)