School is back in a week. Preparing lessons for the upcoming term.

If you are running a small to medium Windows network (without a Windows domain controller) you will often wish to restrict access to particular shared resources on the network. You may have seen a “Security” tab in the Properties of folders. However, this is mysteriously absent in the Windows XP default configuration. To get the Security tab back, open My Computer or Windows Explorer and go to the “Tools” menu > “Folder Options”. In the window that appears click the “View” tab and scroll to the bottom of the options list. Untick “Use simple file sharing (Recommended)” and click OK. Now, go back into the Properties of any folder and you should see a Security tab allowing you to grant and restrict access to that resource, based upon username.

When sending email through Outlook 2003 the messages stay in the Outbox and only send when I click the “Send/Receive” button. This is a recent occurrence as previously the email messages were sent immediately. Interestingly, this only seems to happen at my house because when I was staying at a hotel in my travels this problem did not occur. (more…)

My elderly mother keeps forgetting to disconnect from the internet so her phone line is busy for hours. It is not worth changing to broadband as her usage is very low. Following one of the answers on your website, I tried to set her PC to disconnect if idle for 20 minutes by ticking the appropriate box in the Internet Options control panel > “Connections” tab > Advanced. However, this does not disconnect the connection after 20 minutes of inactivity. I also ticked the box “Disconnect when connection is no longer needed” but without success. The computer is running Windows XP. (more…)

It seems that I have done something to an important Word document which details my home contents for insurance. I have used this document for the past 9 years without mishap. Now whenever I attempt to open the document a message appears saying the document is “Read Only” and a blank Word document appears. I have tried going into the properties of the document file and unticking the “Read Only” box but this did not fix the problem, nor does renaming the file. How can I regain access to this file? The computer is running Windows XP with Office 2003. (more…)