Many people find themselves in the situation where they are away from home and need something from their home computer. There is a fantastic service called LogMeIn (www.logmein.com) which can help with this situation. This service allows you to remotely access and control your home computer from anywhere, just through a normal web browser. No messy firewall configurations are required – all you need to do is install the LogMeIn software on the computer that you wish to control. LogMeIn offers both paid and free subscriptions so take a look and see what meets your needs.

During the original installation of Windows XP on my computer the hard drive was partitioned into a 35 GB system partition (for the operating system and programs) and 170 GB data partition. This has worked well for the past two years, and I do regular housekeeping on the computer (such as defragmentation, antivirus scans, and antimalware scans). Last time I checked there was 16 GB of free space on the C drive and plenty of room on the D drive. However, suddenly the C drive has become full even though I cannot find any extra data on the drive. In fact, I had to uninstall several programs just to give the defragmentation utility enough space to run! Now that the defragmentation utility has been able to scan the computer it shows masses of red (non-contiguous) files and almost no white (empty) space. Do you have any ideas of what could be occupying all the free space? (more…)

When not at school I often like to make movies and have found a CD-ROM from 1995 called Microsoft 3D Movie Maker. The program seems to have lots of sound effects that I would like to use. However, I cannot find the sound effect files on the disc, even though I can see other bits of video and audio. Is it possible to take the sound effect files from the disc to use in my movies, and how can I do this? The computer is running Windows Vista. (more…)

A few years ago I mentioned the free ClipboardFusion (www.clipboardfusion.com) utility in this column, and I would like to mention this again given the usefulness of this utility. This excellent utility allows you to manipulate any text copied to the Windows clipboard (i.e. when you copy text from an application in Windows). The functions include being able to strip formatting from the copied text, replacing text on the clipboard, and also write macros to manipulate the text on the clipboard. If any of these functions takes your interest then ClipboardFusion is definitely worth a look.

Following your advice I usually reinstall Windows XP Professional every year or so, to clear out the cobwebs and get a nice smoothly running computer. However, each time I reinstall Windows I need to download and install all of the Windows XP updates. Is there a method to roll these updates into the installation of Windows so that they do not need to be constantly downloaded for each reinstallation? (more…)