I have recently purchased a new computer running Windows Vista Business Edition. Whenever I open a Microsoft Word email attachment in Word this appears as a mixture of machine language and plain text. How can I get the attachment to display correctly? (more…)

I recently upgraded my computer from Windows XP SP2 to Windows Vista. The first upgrade did not work, so I used a recovery point and reverted the system back to Windows XP and then tried again. The second time the upgrade worked, but now every time I start Windows Vista the Windows Boot Manager screen appears offering me a choice of booting “Microsoft Windows Vista” or “Vista Home Premium (Recovered)”. If I leave everything alone it defaults to the “Microsoft Windows Vista” and loads correctly after a 30 second timeout. How can I get rid of this boot menu from the startup sequence? (more…)

My Windows XP computer has two physical hard drives, neither of which are partitioned. Every two months I defragment both drives using Norton’s SystemWorks Disk Doctor. Since April I have been unsuccessful with the defragmentation process. I can defragment the D drive without problem, but when trying to defragment the C drive Norton insists that the drive is scanned using Chkdsk, which reports that everything is OK. However, immediately after using Chkdsk I still cannot get Norton Disk Doctor to defragment the C drive, instead the following message appears: ?Error on hard disk 1 No bootable partition found. The partition table does not contain a valid bootable partition. If you receive the error message “Non system disk or disk error” correct this problem. Do you wish to correct this problem?”. Since I do not receive the error “Non system disk or disk error? I do not instruct Norton to correct the problem. How can I make Norton defragment the hard drive? On a different topic, a while ago when writing a Word document the hard drive made a strange noise and the computer restarted. Windows did not start correctly, and required a few more reboots. However, no other problems have occurred in recent times. Is this anything to be concerned about? (more…)

When attempting to access the Windows Update website the following message appears: ?The website has encountered a problem. Error number 0X800A1391″. How can I get Windows Update working” (more…)

Can you explain the procedure for updating the computer BIOS through DOS, as I am interested in doing this for my computer’s motherboard? Also, how can I create a DOS boot disk for Windows 2000 and Windows XP? (more…)