My Vista computer crashed and will only start in Safe Mode from the recovery CD. Any ideas? (more…)

There are two issues with my Windows Vista computer and I am unsure whether they are related to each other. First, when booting up the computer the following message regularly appears: “APPLICATION ERROR. Exception EAccessViolation in module dd.exe at 0003a423. Access violation at address 000431423 in module dd.exe. Read of address 00000008”. Clicking the OK button removes the message, although it is irritating and interrupts the boot-up process so I would like to eliminate this nuisance if possible. Second, when I am logged onto the internet the internet screen duplicates itself at around one or two second intervals, each screen overlaying the previous like playing cards. The only way to stop this endless overlaying is to log off the internet, and even this can be difficult as the log off menu is often obscured by another overlay. This overlaying behaviour has also occurred when not logged onto the internet. Can you suggest a fix for this problem? (more…)

My home computer setup consists of a network with three computers – an older server running Windows XP, an HP Pavilion a6420a desktop, and HDX9000 notebook both running Windows Vista. The network runs well, although the HP a6420a will frequently not wake up from ‘sleep’ mode and I must turn the computer off and back on to restart. I recently used the Bit Defender Rescue CD Virus Scanner Bootable which identified two problems: Auto-detection seems to hang, check BIOS settings; and APM Disabled – APM is not SMP safe. What are these problems and what action is necessary to resolve them? Can you also advise on how to fix the sleep problem? (more…)

Around one year ago I purchased an HP computer with Windows Vista. On my previous computer running Windows XP I used photos from the My Pictures folder as a screensaver and after about half an hour of inactivity the monitor would go to sleep, reawakened by movement of the mouse. However, when I use the Photos screensaver in Windows Vista the monitor does not sleep, although if I select a different screensaver it does go to sleep after the configured period of inactivity. Why is this happening and is it detrimental to the monitor if it does not sleep? (more…)

Copying pictures to a CD-R using Windows Vista also copies all of my personal files (such as documents). How can I “unlink” the picture files from all other documents so that only the pictures I want are copied to the CD? Otherwise, if I sent the CD to anyone they would be able to open all of my personal documents! (more…)