I recently connected an HP Photosmart printer to my computer running Windows XP. Now, every time I boot Windows the printer is re-detected and reinstalled. This means that I end up with several copies of the same printer installed. How can I prevent this from happening? (more…)

While completing a “Find” operation in the Photoshop Elements 5 Organizer all the organizer records (such as photos, tags, and collections) were lost. I lost the ability to go back to the photo well and then all organizer records - photos, tags, collections. When going to the “File” menu > “Catalog” > “Open” a message appears saying that My Catalog.psa will not open. Is there any way to recover the organizer data? (more…)

My Windows XP computer has two physical hard drives, neither of which are partitioned. Every two months I defragment both drives using Norton’s SystemWorks Disk Doctor. Since April I have been unsuccessful with the defragmentation process. I can defragment the D drive without problem, but when trying to defragment the C drive Norton insists that the drive is scanned using Chkdsk, which reports that everything is OK. However, immediately after using Chkdsk I still cannot get Norton Disk Doctor to defragment the C drive, instead the following message appears: ?Error on hard disk 1 No bootable partition found. The partition table does not contain a valid bootable partition. If you receive the error message “Non system disk or disk error” correct this problem. Do you wish to correct this problem?”. Since I do not receive the error “Non system disk or disk error? I do not instruct Norton to correct the problem. How can I make Norton defragment the hard drive? On a different topic, a while ago when writing a Word document the hard drive made a strange noise and the computer restarted. Windows did not start correctly, and required a few more reboots. However, no other problems have occurred in recent times. Is this anything to be concerned about? (more…)

Recently you replied to my question concerning a blinking hour glass cursor appearing on the screen. As you suggested, Windows Messenger seemed to be causing the problem as closing this program ceases the problem. I have also found that if I untick the option “Allow Windows Messenger to run in the background” the problem no longer occurs, presumably because Windows Messenger is no longer running in this case. I am currently using Windows Live Messenger for instant messaging, so can you advise why I need Windows Messenger as well? (more…)

In early May, Windows XP Service Pack 3 was released. This service pack contains all the updates which have previously been released for Windows XP, plus some new features. Although these new features do not greatly affect the user experience, they do provide some added functionality for back-end services. While you may not notice a major difference after you have installed SP3, it is good practice to install this latest update for Windows XP. Service Pack 3 is available for download from Windows Update (windowsupdate.microsoft.com). (more…)