The World of Computing and Solutions

Question: I have a Microsoft Word 2003 document that is formated like a dictionary. The entries are various in words and abbreviations. The format of the entries in the document is like those words found in the Random House Webster’s Unabridge Dictionary. The entries are not sorted. I would like to sort the entries in accordance with the initial highlighted word. How can I do this?

Answer: The problem here is that Windows Word can not figure out how to sort your text. It’s not tabular so you can’t sort the columns. And sorting by paragraph wont work either because that would separate the individual lines of each entry. What you’ll have to do is reformat the text so that each entry is a single paragraph. Right now each line ends with a hard carriage return, making each line its own paragraph. You need to replace all but the terminating carriage return with a “new line” charater that starts a new line but doesn’t end the paragraph.

You need to retain the double carriage returns that represent the blank lines between entries. To do this, use Find/Replace to replace ^p^p with a marker string that appears nowhere in the document, for example, #$%. Next, use Find/Replace to replace ^p with ^l. This replaces the hard carriage return at the end of each line with a new-line character. Use find/Replace once more, this time to replace #$% with ^p. Now each entry is a separate paragraph. Select Table | Sort from the menu and perform a simple paragraph-based sort.
At this point your dictionary entries will be in sorted order, but they wil have lost some of the formatting.

Press Ctrl+A to highlight all the text. select Format | Paragraph from the menu. Set a hanging index to define the indentation for all lines after the first line in each paragraph.

You now have a document that closely resembles your original, except that it can be sorted now. When you add a new definition, remember to press Shift-Enter (this inserts a new-line character) at the end of all lines except the very last one in the definition.

Question: recently I was sent an email from a contact of mine describing a trick to protect your address book from misuse by viruses. it says to add a new contact with the email address: aaaaa@aaa.aaa; it claims that a virus trying to send itself to everyone in your address book would start with this one, since it’s alphabetically first. Because the address is invalid, the attempt would fail and the virus would quit. Also, you’d get a delivery-failure warning, which would alert you to the attempt. Is this true?

Answer: There’s so many of these “so called tricks”, unfortunately, your contact is wrong. If an e-mail virus is running on your computer, it will send itself to all or some of the people in your address book. Some even search documents on your system to harvest the email addresses. The virus doesn’t care whether the addresses are valid or not, it just blasts out to them regardless and ignores any responses.

the “trick” also claims that you will be alerted to the attempt by the deliver-failure message. That’s wrong too. It would be stupid for the virus creators to allow that. Its function is to remain on your system and infect other systems without your knowledge.

Every address book contains a few invalid email addresses. the virus “spoofs” the return addresses, directing any nondelivery notices to an address chosen at random from those it collected.

Don’t throw away your anti-virus program in favor of this quick, but very useless fix.

Question: is there a way in Microsoft Word 2003 to search for only curly quotes, or straight quotes?

Answer: the solution is plain and weird. In the find dialog, click the More button and then check the box titled, Use Wildcards. Enter a regular double-quote in the Find what box. When Use Wildcards is checked, it will only find the regular, straight quotes.

To find the curly quotes, leave the Use Wildcards box checked and enter this in the Find what box: [“”]. That is, open square bracket, left curly quote, right curly quote, close square bracket. To enter the left curly quote, make sure that NumLock is on, hold down the Alt Key, tap out the numbers 0147 on the keypad (not the top-row numbers) and release the Alt Key. For the right curly quote, again hold down the Alt Key, and enter 0148 and release the Alt Key. Or you may find it easier to just copy and paste the curly quites from the document itself. While in the Use Wildcards mode, Word searches for any characters found within the square brackets, so you will find both left and right curly quotes this way.

Transferring Mirrored RAID 1 Data

Question: My motherboard supports two SATA drives through the Intel connection. I have a Maxtor 140GB and a WD (Western Digital) that’s 160GB large in RAID 1, which is in two partitions. I need to replace both with 300GB drives and mirror what’s on the 140GB drive to the new drives, wtih new partitions so I can use the full 300GB. How do I get the current mirrored information that includes boot Windows XP to the 300GB hard drives?

Answer: Actually there’s many ways to do this, but the far easiest method is to use a partition tool like the Symantec Ghost, or Acronis True Image. Either of these will do the trick and clone a hard drive or backup EXACT copies of the disk, inlcluding the registery files (called a disk image) to the files for archiving.

Since there’s two SATA connections, it’s likely to be a multistep process. The current versions of Acronis and Ghost support back-up to optical drives, other hard drives including external drives, and over the network. Install the imaging software on your system and then create a bootable CD or DVD containing all of the software you need to restore the disk image, from the application.

With just two SATA ports you will need another physical drive or DVD burner. The physical drive could be external (USB or FireWire), or an internal IDE Drive if your motherboard has free IDE DVD’s (about 15 to 20 DVD R-single-layer discs for 80GB of actual data). If you use a hard drive, make sure it’s at least as large as your RAID array.

Be sure to enable any error-checking options on the disk-imaging software. If one of the DVD-R discs is currupt, you’ll lose all of the data. Imaging your hard drive can take serveral hours. As your data is precious, consider making a second copy/back-up.

Once you’ve backed up the hard drive images, power down the system and remove the existing hard drives without formatting them or destroying the data. Make a note of which SATA port each drive was connected to at the time.

Set up your new RAID 1 Array with the RAID BIOS set up, then insert the bootable CD you made ealier and boot into the image-restore utility. You can then clone the disk image onto the new RAID array. Once that’s done, you should be able to boot normally from the hard drives. The process of setting up the RAID mirror might change the boot drive order. You can correct this via the system’s BIOS Set up.

Question: Recently Yahoo updated Yahoo Messenger to verison 8.0.0.716. MyYahoo Module 8.0.0.1. I’m using Kaspersky Internet Security 6.0. For weeks now I’ve not been able to Login to Yahoo Messenger. Please help this is driving me crazy.

Answer. Firstly the bare basic system requirements are…

Microsoft Windows 98, Windows 2000, Windows ME, or Windows XP
Microsoft Internet Explorer version 6 or later
Pentium II 233 Mhz or better (500MHz recommended)
Minimum 64 M B RAM for Windows 98 and ME
Minimum 128 M B RAM for Windows 2000 and XP
Minimum 30 Mb disk space needed to install

Avatars need Macromedia Flash Player installedAvatars and Audibles require Macromedia Flash Player this must be installed via Microsoft Internet Explorer
Yahoo! Games requires Java to be enabled
spring open Internet Explorer
hit Tools
select Internet Options
select the Advanced tab
Scroll down to Java Sun category
put a check mark beside Use JRE 1.5..
click Apply
click Ok
restart when prompted

If you don’t have or need a Java update head to http://www.java.com/en/download/windows_automatic.jsp and follow the instructions carefully, this must be installed via Internet Explorer

Voice chat requires the basics and also..
voice chat needs a no proxy connection. A non-proxy connection to the Internet. A microphone, sound card, and speakers DSP Group TrueSpeech™ Audio Compression (CODEC) software Voice Chat firewall and proxy settings Protocol: UDP or TCP
Servers: v1.vc.scd.yahoo.com, v2.vc.scd.yahoo.com, v3.vc.scd.yahoo.com, v4.vc.scd.yahoo.com, v5.vc.scd.yahoo.com, v6.vc.scd.yahoo.com, v7.vc.scd.yahoo.com, v8.vc.scd.yahoo.com, v9.vc.scd.yahoo.com, v10.vc.scd.yahoo.com, v11.vc.scd.yahoo.com, v13.vc.sc5.yahoo.com, vc1.vip.scd.yahoo.com
Ports: 5000-5010

Calling, Webcam, and Yahoo! Music require:
Windows Media Player - 7 or above
test your WebCamand to use the WebCam feature you will need to have a Yahoo! Messenger compatible WebCam.
A non-proxy connection to the Internet to check this setting login to Yahoo! Messenger click Messenger select Preferences click on the Connection category make sure No proxies is selected hit OK, log out of Yahoo! Messenger, log back in.

Your firewall must be configured to grant outgoing TCP connections on port 5100
Protocol: TCP Server: webcam.yahoo.com Port: 5100
for Super WebCam to work both parties must have a broadband connection

To test your web cam, using Internet Explorer, head to http://help.yahoo.com/help/us/messenger/win/webcam/webcam-18.html, when prompted install the Yahoo! WebCam Upload Wrapper, it’s an ActiveX control so you need to grant permission first.

If Yahoo! Messenger crashes when you start your web cam then check out this article.

Yahoo’s PhoneOut feature may not be supported for Windows 98 usersPremium Yahoo! Voice services phone out requires Windows 2000 / ME / XP so Windows 98 users don’t be surprised if you can’t get this working properly
PC to PC calling requires Protocol: TCP Ports: 5061 or 443 or 80.
Voice Calls use
Ports: 5050-5070 to set up the call, Ports: 5000-65535 to pass the call media.

scripting must be enabled in Internet ExplorerScripting must be enabled via Internet Explorer (double check this if you can’t see the text in your incoming or outgoing IM’s)
Log out of Yahoo! Messenger and close, now spring open Internet Explorer.
hit Tools select Internet Options.
click on the Security Tab to select it.
Under Select a Zone to view or change security settings click on the Internet icon (world globe)
Under Security Level for this Zone click on Custom Level.
The Settings window will open, scroll down to the category Scripting
Enable
- Active scripting
- Allow paste operations via script
- Scripting of Java applets
click OK, click OK
Launch Yahoo! Messenger, now login again.

make sure Show Pictures has been enabledIf your smileys aren’t animated check…
log off Yahoo! Messenger and close
fire up Internet Explorer
click on Tools
select Internet Options
click the Advanced tab
under the Multimedia category
make sure Show Pictures has been selected
click Apply
click OK
restart Yahoo! Messenger
click on Messenger
select Preferences
under the Messages category
make sure Enable Emoticons is selected
click Apply
click OK

stop Yahoo! Messenger from launchingIf you want to stop Yahoo! Messenger from launching every time your computer boots…
launch and login to Yahoo! Messenger
select Preferences
in the General category
under the heading When I start up my computer
uncheck Automatically Start Yahoo! Messenger
click Apply
click OK

Question
I often need to move files and have found that the best way to do it is open two instances of Windows Explorer and then resize them so they fit side-by-side on the monitor screen. I find it’s very cumbersome to go through the motions of opening one instance of Explorer, resizing it, then opening another instance of Windows Explorer, and resizing that one. Is there any utility or program that can do this automatically?

Answer
You don’t really need any special utility. Windows makes it easy to get the effect you want. Exactly how you’ll do it depends on the circumstances. Start by launching your two instances of Windows Explorer. If Windows combines the taskbar buttons for the two windwos into a single one with a title that says something like “2 Windows Explorer”, simply right-click that buttn and choose Tile Veritcally from the pop-up menu. If each of them has its own button, try this:

(1) Click one button; (2) Ctrl-click the other; (3) right-click either buttons; (4) choose Tile Vertically from the pop-up menu.

Here’s another method you can also try, possibly necessary if you have more than two instances of Windows Explorer sharing a button on the taskbar:
(1) Minimize all windows except the two Explorer instances; (2) right-click the taskbar itself; (3) choose Tile Windows Vertically from the pop-up menu.

As you can see, there’s plenty of choices to choose from.

Question
With all the current emphasis on new worms, Trojan horses, viruses, and other malware, I have a quesion about Microsoft Outlook Express. I’ve shut off the preview pane to prevent someone from owning my PC, but evey time I’m purposely viewing my e-mail and elect to delete it, the next message in my queue opens up. I really want the application to go back to the inbox view. I haven’t a clue how to do that, nor have I found anything in the Help file. Any idea how I can make that happen? My Windows XP is fully upto date.

Answer
By turning off the preview pane and deleteing the suspect mail without opening it, you greately reduce the possibility that an HTML-based message could exploit some security flaw and compromise your system. You also foil any attempts to snag private information that’s sorted in the Web browser cookies using a “web bug” image.
It’s true that when you delete the current message, the next message in the queue will take its place. Fortunately, there’s a simple solution: Scan your list of messages starting at the bottom. Delete any that don’t look right and read the ones from your known correspondents. If you delete the last message in the list, you’ll go back to the Inbox view, as requested. And if the mesage you deleted is not the last, the one that takes its place will be one that you’ve already approved, since you’re working up from the bottom.

Question
When I installed Microsoft Outlook XP, I misspelled my name as the owner. Now it shows up as the owner name in the Task Window, and it’s spelled wrong for every new task  create. Is there a Registry place that I could change to correct this?

Answer
The task owner shows up in a variety of places, most commonly in the Owner column when you list taks By Person Responsible. The name shown there is the same as the name of the corresponding e-mail account, so you’ll definitely want to correct the spelling. Select Tools | E-mail Accounts from the menu, choose the option View or Change existing Email accounts, and click Next. If there are mulitple accounts, choose the one you normally use and then click the Change button.
Correct the spelling in Your Name box, click the Next button, and click the Finish button. This won’t fix the tasks that already have misspelled name, but all new tasks will show the correct spelling.

Question
In my Microsoft Word, the default automatic font colour was changed from Black to Blue. How do I change it back to Black?

Answer
Generall text gets its colour from your system’s colour scheme or desktop theme. Most likely, you may of happen come across a nice looking theme to use and chose to install it on your PC System, without really realising the full extent of the changes it makes globally throughout the workings of application runs.

The changes however do not affect your printed documents, they always default to Black unless otherwise chosen by the user - and of course if you’re using a colour printer, otherwise black text is the only thing you’re going to see. lol

Right click on the Desktop, choose Properties, and click the Appearance tab. If you’re using Mircosoft Windows XP, click the Advanced button. There’s a list of items shown; scroll down to the one named Window at the bottom and select it. You’ll see two coloured boxes shown. The upper one is the default window background colour and the lower one is the default text colour. Just click the lower coloured box and choose Black. Now click OK and, if you’re using Windows XP, click OK again to accept the change. Now it’s all fixed!