Travel light
I want to buy a new portable, and although Psion has decided to pull out of selling consumer PDAs, I still think the Series 7 (£699 on the high street) is the winner all round. Are there new kids on the block to which I ought to give first refusal? I need to buy now.
Romney Tansley
Travel Light Ltd
www.travellight.org
Jack Schofield: If the Psion Series 7 meets your needs, I would have no hesitation in buying one. The only drawback is that it is not going to get any better. The Series 7 is bulkier but still much more functional than a PDA (personal digital assistant) such as a Palm or PocketPC with a Targus Stowaway keyboard.
However, none of these machines will do if you need to run Microsoft Windows. In that case, look for an obsolete IBM ThinkPad 240X, or a second-hand Toshiba Libretto or Sony PCG-1. The Libretto suffers from a restricted keyboard, while the Sony's main drawbacks are its letterbox screen and a choice of either very poor battery life or the slow but battery-friendly Transmeta Crusoe chip.
More spam
"To avoid disseminating a virus, create a new contact in your address book with the name '0000', without any address or details" etc. Any opinions on the validity of this?
Nick Peed
nick.peed@tesco.net
JS: It is another hoax email doing the rounds, as a quick web search shows. See, for example: http://antivirus.about.com/library/hoaxes/bltip.htm, www.vmyths.com/hoax.cfm?id=263&page=3 or http://hq.mcafeeasap.com/dispVirus.asp?virus_k=99213. But it is popular. Perhaps it could be regarded as a variant of the Gullibility Virus.
Quick, hide
When my small grandson visits, he makes a beeline for the PC's keyboard and mouse. Is there a quick way of disabling both instantly upon his arrival?
Mike Strutt
mikeandliz@cwcom.net
JS: Try Cronosoft's Quick Hide Windows. Press Ctrl-Alt-Shift-X and it locks the computer so that a password is needed to access it. It also offers a "boss key" function, which clears the screen of anything you would not want another person to see. QHW is freeware and can be downloaded from www.cronosoft.com/download/qhw. It seems to work well. Some screensavers also have password protection and can be invoked instantly, but it is hard to find out which ones offer this feature.
Hidden text
I use the Track Changes facility in Microsoft Word, and I have noticed that when an apparently "clean" document arrives by email, you can often tell what changes have been made to it. Unfortunately, there are many occasions where you do not want the other organisation or person to see what changes you have made. I have tried saving as a new document, or cutting and pasting an entire document into a new one, but the tracked changes still remain hidden in the text.
Nick Holder
nick.holder1@ntlworld.com
JS: There is a way, but it should be in the Guinness Book of Records for obscurity. Think of the hidden text as being printed in an invisible font. All you have to do is search for text in this font and replace it with nothing. In other words: (1) Go to Tools|Options and select the View tab on the properties sheet.
(2) Tick the check box for Hidden Text and click OK.
(3) Go to the Edit menu and select Replace.
(4) Click the More button to expand the resulting dialog box.
(5) Click the blank box next to "Find what" to put the cursor there.
(6) Click the Format button, and select Font.
(7) Select the check box marked Hidden, and click OK.
(8) Go back to the Find and Replace box and click Replace All.
By publishing this information, I may be depriving some journalists of a useful source of information.
No sharing
I use one serial port for two purposes at different times. At times it serves the modem, at others communication with a handheld, originally a Psion, now an HP Jornada. In changing from one to the other the computer frequently hangs, or the handheld refuses to communicate, saying that the port is in use. Is there a simple way to close the port in Windows Me?
Dr RL Symonds
r.symonds@virgin.net
JS: The PC serial port, which first appeared in 1981, was not designed for "plug and play", and is now obsolete. You are doing well if you can use one port for two things but in my experience it does not work reliably with three. I suggest you move the Jornada to a faster and more flexible USB (Universal Serial Bus) port. If your PC does not have USB, you can add one or two ports on an expansion card. Ideally you should not use the serial ports at all. However, the Psion does not support USB so it will have to stay put.
Quiz
I have built a website using Microsoft FrontPage 2000, and would like to include a quiz with multiple choice questions, the submit button taking you to your score with comments, then the option to see the correct answers.
John Wood
wood@fish.co.uk
JS: I wouldn't know how to do this either, but Microsoft can get you started. See www.microsoft.com/education/planning/online/Score.asp. Only correct I have made a large number of additions to my Auto Correct dictionary in Word 2000 and would like to copy it to my laptop via a floppy disk. Can I do this?
Geoffrey Randall
geoffrey.randall@british library.net
JS: You can. See www.mvps.org/word/FAQs/Customization/ ExportAutocorrect.htm
Talkback
· Lore was "not very happy" with my suggestion that using stationery was the best way to put a company logo in email messages. The proposed alternative is to put the cursor where you want the image, go to the Insert menu in Outlook Express, select Picture, and browse to the Gif or JPeg image you want. You can do it this way, but I would not want to have to explain that to a couple of dozen managers. If you must have a company logo on your email messages, then for consistency and ease of use, stationery is the way to go.
· Last week, I mentioned Silurian's free DiskSpace Chart as the simplest way to get a pie chart of a hard drive, so you can see where your disk space has gone. Linda Wallan (linda_ wallan@yahoo.com) suggests "a neat utility called Sequoia View, that uses a visualisation technique called Cushion Treemaps". It was developed by the computer science department at Technische Universiteit Eindhoven, it is available from www.win.tue.nl/sequoiaview and it is free. Not only is it powerful, the graphics displays could pass for modern art.
