A few years ago I purchased a Dell computer which is now getting quite slow on boot-up, loading software, etc. Is that because there are a lot of shortcuts on the desktop? I would welcome any suggestions that you have for speeding-up the computer. In any case, I am considering purchasing a new computer with an upgraded processor. Is there some way to link the old computer with the new computer to increase my total computer capacity or power? The current computer has about 50 GB free on the hard drive. (more…)

iPhone owners may have noticed that there is often no option to reject an incoming call. If your phone is sleeping when an incoming call is received, the only option presented is “slide to answer”. However, if your iPhone is not sleeping when an incoming call occurs (as you may be using the iPhone at the time) you are presented with “Answer” and “Decline” options. The rationale for presenting only “slide to answer” when an incoming call is received while the phone is asleep, is the same as the “slide to unlock” when you manually wake-up the phone – to prevent you from accidentally unlocking the phone or answering a call while the phone is in your pocket. However, this raises the question about how you can reject a call when only the “slide to answer” option is presented. Fortunately there is a very easy solution. To silence an incoming call, press the sleep/wake button (at the top of the phone) once. To reject an incoming call, press the sleep/wake button a second time.

Having upgraded from Office 2003 to Office 2007 the spell checker in Outlook Express changed from English to French. The spell checker in the other Office applications is alright, but I cannot change the Outlook Express spell checker back to English. Can you help? (more…)

On booting up my Windows XP computer the following message always appears “Checking file system on C. The type of file system is NTFS. One of your disks needs to be checked for consistency. You may cancel the disk check but it is strongly recommended that you continue. Windows will now check the disk”. The CHKDSK utility then verifies files, indexes and security descriptors, after which the following message appears “The file or directory \$Mft is corrupt or unreadable. Please run the Chkdsk utility”. Once this message has appeared I can use the computer normally, but I am concerned about this message since it consistently appears every time the computer is started. Additionally, I cannot find the \$Mft folder on the computer. Can you tell me how to fix this problem? (more…)

If you are virtualising Windows on a Mac-based computer, using VMware Fusion, then often you will want to share files and documents between the Windows and Mac sides of the computer. For example, you may primarily use the Mac operating system but also wish to use Windows for word processing (using Office 2007). Therefore, you would want to access all your files and documents from both the Mac platform and Windows platform. Previously you would need to do manual copying of the files between Windows and Mac. However, VMware Fusion has a very neat feature called Mirrored Folders. This allows you to set your Windows My Documents, My Pictures, My Music and Desktop folders to point to the Mac equivalents. Therefore, you can store all your files in the Mac file system, but they are accessible from your Windows Virtual Machine. To enable this feature, open the settings for your virtual machine and then click “Sharing”. Tick “Share folders on your Mac” and then tick all the folders which you wish to mirror.