The
October weekend spot looked at computer disasters.
Disasters with your computers can come in all shapes and forms. The
most common is hardward failure but often the data is easily recovered
unless the hard drive has failed.
The important thing with computer failures is not to panic. When you
panic is when you lose data.
So if you think you've lost your work; don't panic. Call your local
computer tech and let them have a look at it.
Of course, if you have a backup of your
data, then you don't need to panic at all.
A more avoidable computer disaster is posting something silly on the
Internet, as a
Sydney call centre worker found last week.
The rule with anything on the Internet is not to write anything you
wouldn't like to see next to your name on the 6 o'clock news. We have
a guide to general email ettiquette
to help avoid some of the bigger mistakes.
Listener's questions
As usual we had plenty of callers. If you missed out asking a question
about a computer problem, you still can at our IT
Queries website. A theme with our callers this week were problems
with Microsoft Word files.
Capital letter blues
Jean had trouble with capital letters appearing on new
lines. The simplest solution to this is to hold the control key down and
press the the Z key.
A later caller, Mike suggested this is related to the list function
and if you do the ctrl-Z a number of times, Word will get the
idea to stop doing this.
You can change the Auto Correct options in Word although this is a
bit more complex and we've put the answer on our
IT Queries website.
How to get rid of the copyright symbol
Continuing the Word Auto Correct theme, Howard called in with an irritation
that the copyright symbol kept creeping in to his Word documents when
he typed (c)
for his lists.
Again, this can be fixed through the ctrl-Z combination and
we have the more detailed instructions on stopping this happening on
IT Queries.
A better solution for Howard though would be to use the list function
in word that will manage letters for him.
Copying data to a new computer
Cathy asked about copying data from her old machine to a new one. This
a common problem as data is the most important thing on your computer.
Basically it boils down to five choices; use an external drive, burn
the information to CD or DVD, remove the hard drive from the old computer
and connect it to the new one, network the computers or email the data
to yourself.
Each of these has there own downsides and we've made this the our problem
of the week.
Upcoming shows
Our apologies to callers we couldn't get to, if you'd still like to
ask a question visit our IT Queries website.
The next ABC 702 Weekend spot will be on November 22 at 10am.
