The Microsoft Word spell checker keeps reverting to English (US) even though I have manually set the language as English (Australia). How can I permanently change the language and spell check to English (Australia)? The computer is running Windows XP Professional and Microsoft Office 2000. (more…)

The Processes and Performance tabs within the Windows Task Manager provide a good basic overview of system performance, but often you may want more information on how your system is performing and which programs and processes are using memory and CPU time. Windows 7 comes with a new utility called the Resource Monitor. Go to the “Start” menu and in the search box, type “resmon” (without the quotes) then click OK. This will open the Resource Monitor window which allows you to complete similar operations as those available in the Task Manager (such as ending processes) but provides much more information about system performance. Just make sure that you don’t go closing processes if you are unsure about their purpose, since you may inadvertently close a process which is required for Windows to operate correctly.

There is an ongoing problem with Internet Explorer 8 on my Windows Vista computer. When I first installed Internet Explorer 8 the Windows desktop would sometimes freeze, and a reboot seemed to be the only way to get things working again. I then ran some utilities, including a registry optimiser, which appears to have exacerbated the problem. As a result, I uninstalled and reinstalled Internet Explorer 8 several times. After these reinstallations the problem appears to have stabilised, as directly after a reboot I can always get into Internet Explorer 8. However, at some point afterwards the message appears saying “Unable to connect - Diagnose connection problems” which then tells me that nothing is wrong. Occasionally the entire screen will freeze as well. On opening the Task Manager there will be several “iexplore.exe” processes running and if I sequentially start closing these processes there is usually a brief pause and then everything suddenly unfreezes and the problem disappears (but can then reoccur later). That said, on other occasions this does not fix the problem and I need to restart the computer. How can I fix this frustrating problem? (more…)

In the Windows 7 Start menu there is a “Shut down” button which, as the name implies, will shut down Windows. You can also click on a little arrow to the right-hand side of this button to show additional options such as Log Off, Sleep, etc. It is possible to permanently replace the Shut down button with one of these other options, as this may be more convenient if you often don’t shut down the computer but instead prefer to log off or put the computer into sleep mode. To change the button, right-click on the Start menu button and select “Properties”. In the window that appears, click the “Start Menu” tab and here you can change the “Power button action”. Once you are done, click OK to save and close the window.

In a recent article you detailed how to enable and disable startup items by going to the “Start” menu > “Run” > “msconfig”. However, when I try this procedure on Windows Vista there is no “Run” option in the start menu. Is this procedure done differently in Vista? (more…)