Go Googly
One thing really irritates me about IE5: the Search button takes you to MSN. Is there any way to change it to go to, say, Google?
Rob Wilson
rob@helics.com
Jack Schofield replies: Click the Search button, then click Customize. This offers you a choice of four search sites: MSN, Excite, Voila and UK Plus. Pick the one you want and press OK. Sorry, Google is not available (or not in my version).
However, go to Google at www.google.com/options/defaults.html and look half-way down the page for the section called Make Google Your Default Search Engine. Download the file called Google.reg, and double-click it. This will change the Windows Registry to make Google the default search engine.
Also, if you are very keen on Google, you can add a whole Google toolbar to your browser. Go to www.google.com/options/toolbar.html
Games 2000
I have recently upgraded to Windows 2000 on a new PC. On trying to install Microsoft games, which I had purchased for my old PC running Windows 98, I got an error message along the lines of "wrong operating system".
Is there a way to install/run these games on Win 2000? If not, is Microsoft within its rights to force consumers to purchase new programs each time it generates a new operating system?
Judit Carson
judit.carson@mulcaster.co.uk
JS: Games are usually written to run a specific class of PC and the requirements are specified on the box. This may include a specific type of graphics card or sound card, processor, memory, hard disk space and so on.
There is no guarantee a game will run properly if you use a PC with a different specification or a different operating system.
This is more of a problem with Windows games because - unlike Sony, Nintendo and Sega - Microsoft does not control what games are written for PCs, or charge developers a licence fee.
Of course, one of the things holding back consumer acceptance of Windows NT/2000 is that many publishers have not bothered to make their programs compatible with it. You might have thought Microsoft would take its own advice. However, supporting NT/2000 would have added to the development cost and probably not increased sales.
Windows XP, the new version of Windows 2000 due on October 25, includes a lot of new code to provide extra compatibility and many more games will run. (XP will pretend to be Windows 98, for example.)
Online storage
I am leaving my place of employment and decided that instead of spending hours copying personal files on to floppy disks, I'd simply copy them to a web-based storage site. I spent days searching for something suitable and finally decided on www.idrive.com. It was very simple and offered such great services as drag'n'drop between the i:drive and my C: drive from Windows Explorer!
However, over the past three days, I have not been able to drag and drop a single file without getting an error message!
Secure, stable 100% free web space for backing up files? Does it exist?
Tunu Sokiri
tunu.sokiri@ slipstream-sds.com
JS: If it did, it would be over-run with people using it to swap pirate software or pornographic movies. Yahoo Briefcases work pretty well, though the maximum file size is somewhat limited. You can get as many as you like at http://briefcase.yahoo.com.
A trickier but more efficient alternative is to use FTP (file transfer protocol) with a program such as Cute FTP or Bulletproof FTP. You can get up to 50 megabytes of FTP-accessible space from some of the free web page sites.
However, if you had a Mac, you could get 20 megabytes of free space from Apple at http://itools.mac.com
Mail rescue
I have deleted some important emails from the Deleted Items folder in Outlook Express 5 by mistake. Is there any way I can undelete them? The help file recommends no more than moving emails from the deleted items folder to the inbox.
Jon Paul jon.paul@nes.co.uk
JS: There may be some hope, because it can be quite hard to delete messages from Outlook Express 5, except by mistake.
Deleted items are stored in a file called Deleted Items.dbx, which you can find using F3 or Start|Find|Files or Folders. Copy this file, load the copy into Microsoft Word and you may find something of interest by using the Find command (Control-F). However, bear in mind that dbx is a binary file format and does not make much sense at the best of times.
There is a freeware program called DBXtract ( chattanooga.net/~scochran/ DBXtract.htm ) that you can run with OE5 closed. Tick the box marked Recover Mode and it will try to recover deleted messages.
However, when I tried it, I did not manage to recover anything useful.
Download DBXtract, move it to a new folder (such as C:\Program Files\DBXtract) and make sure you set this folder as the output path.
