Recently I purchased Battlefield 2142. At first the game appeared to run alright, but as soon as the game has finished loading and the game play begins the game ends. There is no error message and no functionality problems – the game simply ends and exits back to the Windows desktop. No other games have had this problem on the computer, so I am unsure as to the cause of this problem. Is this fixable? (more…)

After installing Microsoft Office 2007 whenever Outlook 2007 is opened the following message appears: “The Add-in ‘mobile phone tools’ (C:Program FilesMobile Phone ToolsOut97.dll” cannot be loaded and has been disabled by Outlook. Please contact the manufacturer for an update. If no update is available please uninstall the add-in”. I have uninstalled the Mobile Phone Tools program, and unticked the entry for these tools in the Outlook Add-Ins window, but the problem continues. How can I get rid of this message? (more…)

My computer running Windows Me is very slow and I cannot understand why, as the hard drive is only one-third full. I have completed a Disk Cleanup which deleted all the temporary files on the computer, and also attempted to run Disk Defragmenter but this did not proceed past the 3% mark (instead it constantly restarted once it reached this point). Is there something wrong here? There is also another irritating problem, whereby the clock in the Windows system tray has disappeared. How can I restore the clock? What’s more, the clock does not keep the correct time. Can this also be fixed? Finally, how can I find out what is running on the background on the computer? I have noticed that on other machines I can press CTRL-ALT-DEL to open the Task Manager but this does not work on my computer. (more…)

In previous columns I have discussed the free Microsoft SyncToy 2.0 utility for synchronising data between two sources, such as a computer and a portable USB drive. I used SyncToy until recently, when I needed a synchronisation utility with more functionality (such as the ability to support file paths longer than 256 characters, and also be able to see a comparison of two folders). I found an excellent utility called ViceVersa Pro (www.tgrmn.com) which performs these exact functions. ViceVersa Pro is not free, but is still a very good utility if you have similar needs.