Replies

Many thanks, Beryl M, for your input, but your tip didn’t work for me. Perhaps it’s because I’m using Office XP. I changed the font colour and then followed the rest of your suggestion: I changed the pattern, then I could indeed select the colour, but when I changed the pattern back, I lost the colour.

Another point (and this is difficult to describe, so I have attached a few pages from the document) is that I am getting solid black behind the text, but not in the whitespace (eg tabs). Changing the shading colour only changes the colour of the whitespace.

On the attached document (about 65k) go to page 4 for the ToC. The first use of the TOC 1 style is on the “1 Introduction” line.

Many thanks

Hi Bowlie,

I agree with Francois. Go for a complete install with Win 98 (2nd edition).

I have a Toshiba Tecra 700, which is over 5 years old and has a Pentium chip (I recall it is 90 or 100 MHz) and 48K of RAM. I went through much of what you are going through and I was getting really miffed at the time I was wasting each day. Now the machine is on W98 and boots respectably fast.

However, buy the upgrade to Win 98, NOT the full version. Part-way through the install, if you have re-formatted the hard disc, it will need proof that you actually do own Win 95 and you will have to feed it your W95 CD-ROM for a moment or two.

Here’s the justification to wave at your technical colleagues: it sounds like you are wasting up to an hour a day on restarting your docked laptop. If you spend a most of day installing W98, plus all your other software on a re-formatted hard disc you will better off half-way through the second week.

It will take you half a morning to back up your important files over the network to a networked drive that your network administrator can make available. How much space do you need? 50 Mb? 100 Mb? This should be no problem.

Re-formatting your hard disc and installing the upgrade version of Win 98 (Second Edition) is a two hour job for your technical friends. Re-installing your software will take up the rest of the day and maybe some of the next day as well.

So, tell your IT people (in the nicest way, of course) that a day of their time today will save you an hour of your day every day for ever. You heard it from an old IT man (I was programming an IBM 1620 in SPS and Fortran in 1963) so it must be true!

Good luck.

Hi,

Did you restore the file from a CD-ROM backup? I make a regular backup to a CD-ROM of all My Documents etc.

I have discovered that whenever I copy a file (using Windows Explorer, nothing special) *every* file I copy _to_ my hard disc _from_ my CD-ROM is automatically set to Read Only on my local hard disc.

“Snap-to” is there in Windows Me. In the Control Panel click on the Mouse icon. The Mouse Properties window that then opens has three tabs. The tab headed Pointer Options includes a check box for selecting the Snap-to option.

Hi,

This sounds very odd. If I read you correctly the “File As” data is present in each record (which you know because it shows in the “details” view) and yet it shows as a blank in the “Address Card” view.

The first problem is that I can’t find a “details” view on my copy of Outlook 2002. I do, however, have “Detailed Address Card view”. If this is the one where you see the “File As” data I have a thought:

Use the Customize feature on the Address Card view and check if the “File As” field is included in the list of data fields to be displayed. If you already know how to do this please forgive me detailing it here.

Select the “Tools” menu and click on “Customize…” (or click the icon). Click on “Using Views…” and select “Address Card” from the dropdown listbox. Then click on “Customize Current View…” which you can find at the top right of the window near the X that closes the window. The next window that pops up shows all possible data fields in the left window pane and the currently chosen ones in the right pane. If “File As” is not in the ‘chosen’ list drag it from the left pane and drop it ***at the very top*** of the right pane. You can use the buttons at the bottom of that window to move it up if you drop it in the wrong place.

Regards
John

Hi, maybe I have part of the answer…

Can this be done in Excel? (I’m not an Excel user). However, if search-and-replace works in Excel like it does in MS Word, then export your contact folder (File|Export, choose Excel format) and you will have an Excel version of your entire contacts list with one column per data field. Having fixed the +44 problem (replace “+44 ” with nothing) then Import the resulting Excel file to Outlook. At one point in the Import sequence there is a radio button selection which allows you to ignore or overwrite or allow duplicate entries. Select overwrite, of course. (Also, of course, you will have previously copied your entire .pst file to another directory in case the whole exercise goes wrong.)

By the way, I can live without my e-mail copies, but I can’t live without my Contacts, so I export the contacts list very regularly to an Excel file and keep it as a back up. This is because my .pst file is well ovre 10 Mb.

Thanks for the info.

Good luck

Hi. I have the same problem on Windows Me. Your solution doesn’t appear to help. I do everything you say, but the option “My Documents Folder on Desktop” that you mention isn’t there when I select File | New.

Here’s my answer:

In Windows Explorer’s LH pane (the tree view) I can highlight the drive c: thus showing all its folders in the RH pane. Then I drag “My Documents” in the RH pane to the very top of the tree in the LH pane — to the icon labelled Desktop. This results in an error message saying, in effect, that I can’t drag it there, but do I want the desktop icon instead. Say ‘yes’ and the icon appears. Sometimes it lasts a few minutes on my desktop, sometimes a few hours. Eventually it always vanishes again.

Life is weird enough, without Bill Gates’ contributions.

Hi,

Let me answer you as an application programmer. I don’t know VB, nor Word’s ‘form’ capabilities.

I would assume that, if you can save to this folder, you can also delete a file from this folder after the e-mail has gone. Why not delete it programatically? Or maybe your problem is that you can’t be sure the e-mail has gone?

My second point is that MS Windows maintains an environment variable pointing to the temporary folder. You may also find that there is a registry entry pointing to this. I would suggest you consider using this folder (mine is in c:windowstemp) instead of “c:windowsTemporary Internet Files” because it seems to be there for the exact purpose you have in mind.

My third point is that many utilities offer a disc cleanup service and the three that I have on my machine all include c:windowstemp. The first utility is Norton System Works, the second is a nifty freebie called HDValet. Find it on http://www.zdnet.com using their Search feature. (The freebie was originally published in PC Magazine.) The third utility comes in Windows Me (and maybe in Windows 98 as well). Click on My Computer icon. Then Right mouse click on the c: drive and choose Properties and you will see the pie chart representing the used and unused space on the drive. Windows Me users will see a command button just below the pie chart labelled “Disk Cleanup…” This will, when clicked, offer to empty many of the folders, including Temprary Internet Files and the Temp folder as well.

Hi,

Bill Gates hid the backup utility on the Windows ME CD-ROM. On my copy of the CD-ROM it’s in the folder d:add-onsMSBackup. Here’s a clip from the file backup.txt in this folder:

QUOTE
INSTALLION AND SETUP OF MICROSOFT BACKUP
========================================

In previous editions of Microsoft Windows, Backup was
available as an optional component located in System
Tools. Microsoft Backup is now available as an iexpress
package (named msbexp.exe, installed from the Add-on
folder on the Windows Millennium CD-ROM. Backup requires
at least 5.1 megabytes of free disk space on the hard
drive for installation.

To install Microsoft Backup on your system, browse to
the Add-onsMsbackup folder in the Windows Millennium Edition
CD-ROM. Locate the Backup Iexpress installation package
(msbexp.exe). Double click on msbexp.exe. The package
will open and provide instructions for completing
the installation.
UNQUOTE.

Good luck

Many thanks. I thought I had tried the right mouse button, but I was probably hovering over the mesaage text at the time. I’m at the office right now, so I’ll give your solution the full treatment when I get home.

Thanks and bye
John

Hi,

EzDesk worked fine for me. However, it is taking an aspirin to cure a headache and not curing the underlying disease. Bill Gates’ greatest skill is knowing to a nicety just how many bugs he can leave in his software and still sell it.

By the way, I think there is the smallest trace of insectivorous behaviour (I stole that phrase from a Watch newsletter) in your first posting to me when you included a link to qualityimage.com. There is an extra piece of html at the end, namely ”
“. The link looks like this:

http://www.qualityimage.com/Downloads20/EzDesk18.html

Naturally IE couldn’t find the page until I deleted the offending characters.

In the e-mail that notified me of your reply, the link was correct.

If I haven’t been very clear, please write back.
Good luck with the lounge.
John

DaveA: I take your point about having a lot of icons. I have about 25 or 30. However, I have downloaded a copy of EzDesk at someone else’s suggestion on the basis of curing the symptom, if not the underlying disease.

Thanks again for interest. I hope EzDesk will answer all my needs.

Regards
John

Many thanks for the pointer to EzDesk. I have succeeded in downloading it and will try it out next.

If I understood your profile then this site is your design. I wish I could shake your hand. Particularly for the spell checker. That’s a great idea for those of us who type badly.

Best regards
John.

PS You commented that EzDesk is “It’s old but it still works like a charm.” I look forward to having that as my own requiem!

Hi, DaveA. Thanks for the interest in my problem.

It used to be I would add an icon (maybe a shortcut to a utility, maybe a new folder) to my desktop and carefully position it to match the tiled background (a small photo of my little boy). It used to be that I could reboot and find the new icon in the same exact place I had carefully put it the day before.

Now, since unremembered months ago (6?, 7?, 8?), all recent carefully-positioned icons re-appear in apparently random places when I reboot. I try puttting them back where they belong, reboot and they are back in their W95-specified places.

The carefully-positioned icons I have had for ages, since I first set up this PC, always re-appear exactly where I put them: it is only the ones I have added since 6/7/8 months ago that never remember their place.

To answer your other specific question: I haven’t installed a new desktop. I’m not quite sure what that actually means because the desktop is not an installable feature. However, I haven’t changed the background (wallpaper) or any other Properties of the desktop in living memory (except the Settings which I routinely change whenever I attach my PC to our VGA projector).

Your interest is appreciated, and any help will be gratefully received.
John