A message appears occasionally saying that there is a shared IP address or IP address conflict. I have no idea what this message means, but everything seems to still work correctly. I am unsure whether it is related, but since switching broadband providers I am having problems accessing the Hotmail website. Instead, a page in Internet Explorer appears saying “Internet Explorer is unable to connect to the webpage”. This problem never occurred with my previous broadband provider. (more…)

Recently Apple announced the developer preview of the next version of the OS X operating system – Mountain Lion (10.8). While the preview edition of the operating system is only available to developers, one of the new features of Mountain Lion is iMessage for desktop computers. This allows messages to be sent between Mac computers together with iOS devices (such as iPhones, iPod Touches and iPads) which are registered with the iMessage service. Apple have released a beta version of iMessage which runs on Mac OS X Lion (10.7). You can download the beta of iMessage for Lion at www.apple.com/macosx/mountain-lion/messages-beta .

Whenever my Windows XP computer starts a message appears saying “Unable to locate component. This application has failed to start because CoreFoundation.dll was not found”. When doing some elementary research I found that this file is related to iTunes and tried updating iTunes, but that did not fix the problem. While this seems to be a common problem I am reluctant to download any files because I am concerned about viruses. The last antivirus scan of my computer detected “TR/Dldr.Zlob.Bogy” which was removed. (more…)

I am using an antivirus product which includes system clean-up utilities that (claims) it can fix registry errors, junk files, fragmentation and broken shortcuts. Thus far I have been happy for the software to fix junk files and broken shortcuts, but have been hesitant about the registry errors since you have previously warned against using software which offers this facility. Do you think that I could use this feature without ill-effect? (more…)

In Mac OS X Lion (10.7) it is possible to display a custom message on the login or lock screens. This can be useful for including information such as your contact details if the computer is lost. You can configure the message by going to the Apple menu (in the top left-hand corner of the screen) > System Preferences. Open the “Security & Privacy” preferences and on the “General” tab you can tick and configure “Show a message when the screen is locked”. Be aware, you may need to click the padlock at the bottom of the window to unlock the settings before they can be changed.