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Houston 060, 04/07/09
DAB Dementia
Recently my DAB Radio has begun to randomly lose its pre-set
station memory. I have been in touch with the manufacturers, they seemed aware
of the problem, explaining that the radio was not at fault but probably lay in
a bug in the DAB signal. Is this possible?
Does it affect other makes of Radio? Could this be caused by a virus in
the broadcasting system? Do you know
what is being done to solve the problem?
Anthony Hall-Fletcher
You can stop worrying about viruses and bugs; it’s usually due to
something a lot simpler, like careless design or reception problems. Several
models suffer from amnesia if the signal dips below a pre-set level – not
uncommon in a marginal reception area -- or the radio is moved to a new
location. When this happens the receiver dumps the stored presets and re-scans
the band for stations. Some receivers rely on a backup battery to power the
memory chip that stores the station list when it is switched off or unplugged.
If the radio is disconnected from the main supply, or not used for a while the
backup battery runs down and the data is lost. Of course it could just be a
good old fashioned fault, so if its still under warranty and it has only
recently started losing its memory, take it back to the retailer and ask them
to check it out.
Prevent Past Pictures
A few weeks ago you dealt with a problem concerning images
appearing in the body of a received email. Great, done that, but is there any
way you can stop pictures, which are attached to emails appearing in the body
of my copy of Sent mail?
Leslie Emment, by email
You can’t do it retrospectively to messages that have already been
sent but you can stop it happening on all future sent messages by going to
Tools > Options > Send > HTML Settings and uncheck 'Send pictures with
messages'.
Gridlock in Word
Somehow I have set Word 2007 to show a grid pattern on every new
document. Even when I open an existing letter instead of a blank background it
will have the grid pattern superimposed on it. How can I revert to having a
blank page?
Vic Adams, Grimsby
Most recent versions of Word have a facility to display a grid,
which can be useful for aligning objects on the page. Prior to Word 2007 this
facility could be found on the Drawing Toolbar; to enable or disable it click
the Draw menu, select Grid and uncheck ‘Display Gridlines on Screen. The
Drawing toolbar was replaced in Word 2007, so this time display the Page Layout
ribbon, click the Format tab, select the Align button then Grid Settings and
uncheck ‘Display Gridlines….’
Drive for Improvement
I have recently bought a small Acer netbook PC running Windows XP
and I would like to install Roxio Photo Creator on it, but the program is on a
disc, and this machine doesn’t have a CD or DVD drive. How can I do this?
Marilyn Hilton, by email
You have a couple of options. You can either buy an external
CD/DVD drive, which plugs into one of the laptop’s USB ports; prices start at
around £20 from online sellers. The alternative is to use Windows Explorer on
your desktop PC to copy the entire contents of the CD onto a USB memory stick
(delete any other files it may contain beforehand). When you pop the drive that
into the laptop’s USB port the installation should start automatically,
otherwise you can start it manually by opening the drive in Windows Explorer
and double-clicking on the program’s ‘setup’ or ‘install’ file.
Word Alternative
My PC runs Vista Basic and I have Word Reader installed,
which means I can open but not edit and reply to Word attachments sent by
email. I am not sure if I have enough disk space to fully install OpenOffice,
so could I just select the ‘Write’ section? (I have 38.6Gb of free space out of
64.4Gb).
Mrs C. Corcoran, by email
In fact you have plenty of room. The standard OpenOffice
installation takes up just 650Mb and you can trim this further by choosing the
Custom option when you install the program. Otherwise, if all you need is a
basic Word-compatible word processor, try AbiWord.
It’s small (it consumes just 16Mb of space); it is easy to use and completely
free. You’ll find a link to the download at: http://tinyurl.com/28hx9k
Obstinate Addresses
Can you please tell
me how to get rid of a disused email address in Outlook Express? If I
put an ‘r’ in the To: line, to send an email, an address
comes up which is years old and no longer in the Contacts folder.
The string must be somewhere and I would like to delete it.
R Mynett, by email
This information is stored in a protected section of the Windows
Registry and it is not easy to get at. There are some commercial programs that
claim to be able to edit this data but I haven’t used them so I cannot make any
recommendations. There are a couple of workarounds, though and the quick and
dirty fix is to switch off the address auto complete feature. All you have to
do is go to Tools > Options, select the Send tab and uncheck the item
‘Automatically complete email addresses when composing’.
Method number two is to create a new OE Identity (File >
Identities > Add new Identity). Give it a name, fill out all of the details
to set up new email accounts and finally, import the Messages and Address Book
from your old Identity, which will ignore any deleted entries. Once you are
happy that it’s working properly you can delete the original Identity and
switch to using the new one full time.
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© R. Maybury 2009 2206
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