Technical Consulting

February 2006

Greetings!

I hope you had an enjoyable winter recess and that the return to work or school routine has not been too stressful. Thank you for subscribing to my occasional e-Newsletter. Please forward it to friends and colleagues who might find it useful.

Best wishes,
Hilary
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Access db won't open
Have you ever tried to send an Access database by email and found the recipient can't open it even though you are both using the exact same version of Access? Turns out that WinXP-SP2 "blocks" the database - that is, locks it, and the way to unblock it is to right-click the file, select Properties and click the button that says "unblock." (Thanks to Josh Senyak of Quicksilver Consulting for this tip)

World Traveller password woes
Ever been on an overseas trip and dropped into an Internet cafe to check your email? If you've tried to create a moderately secure password by using non-alphabetic characters, you may have found it difficult to find those characters on a non-English keyboard. Here's a work-around: type your password in a Notepad file, where you can try all the combinations of shift, alt, until you get it right, and then copy and paste your password into the appropriate box. Do not save the Notepad file of course!

Black History rewritten
February is Black History Month, and many students all over the US are typing "martin luther king" into Google. But BEWARE, the third hit will send them to www.martinlutherking.org - a site consisting of disinformation about Dr King, hosted by Stormfront, a white supremacist group!
Fortunately, most school district servers will block the site - but not at home of course!

Portable Apps
A portable app is a computer program that you can carry around with you on a portable device and use on any Windows computer. When your USB thumbdrive, portable hard drive, iPod or other portable device is plugged in, you have access to your software and personal data just as you would on your own PC. And when you unplug, none of your personal data is left behind. <http://portableapps.com/>

Printer Sharing
Ever had a frustrating time trying to use the Printer Share wizard in Windows (especially in Win98). You ask it to browse for a network printer and the hourglass sits there forever! A quick solution is to forget the wizard and to the following: Start -> Run -> enter name of machine that has the printer preceded by two backslashes, e.g. \\teacher1. When the window opens on the target computer, drag its printer icon into the "Add Printer" window of the computer where you want to install the shared printer.


Read the September 2005 edition of "News from A-to-Zed"
Read the May 2005 edition of "News from A-to-Zed"
Read the January 2005 edition of "News from A-to-Zed"

Read the September 2004 edition of "News from A-to-Zed"
Read the June 2004 edition of "News from A-to-Zed"

 


 

 © 2004 Hilary Naylor