Q–As of Monday, I started getting X-rated e-mails out of the clear blue. I can’t imagine where they came from, but more important, I need to stop them immediately. You see, my children use this computer and e-mail. In addition, I am now getting 6-8 a day and I don’t want to deal with it. Can you help me with this? I’d really appreciate it.
Linda Bartlett @aol.com
A–With children in peril, you should log on to America Online and then type in Control + K for Keyword Search and then type in Mail Controls. Many options are available in the windows that follow.
To be absolutely safe, you can order all e-mail addressed to your account shut off. Another choice lets you stipulate which e-mail senders’ notes will reach you, causing all others to be rejected automatically. A less secure but still welcome tool lets you copy the sender’s address from the offensive e-mails and order all stuff from that source stopped in the future.
I suggest that you set up a screen name for your children and shut off all mail to them and then use the other tools to reduce the incoming offensive stuff to your own adult account.
Q–Recently, in one of your replies to a question, you wrote, “My advice is to partition your hard drive into several different directories of 100 to 500 mb each.”
My question, how do you partition? I looked up the Win95 help, but no luck on finding any info on partitioning. I have a 6.?-gigabyte hard drive and asked the computer salesman about partitioning, but he said I didn’t need to, as Win95 would efficiently utilize the hard drive without partitioning.
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I am a self-employed tax preparer/bookkeeper, and I believe partitioning would be quite helpful in keeping certain directories separated. Can you offer help that isn’t too complicated?
Terri Zurcher @micron.net
A–As the salesman told you, partitioning is a bit of a hassle and not really needed by a great many Windows users. But, as you note, you can simplify certain backups by breaking a huge drive into at least one small partition of a couple hundred megabytes as well as a huge partition holding the rest.
You just do your important stuff on the small partition, which backs up much faster than does your current 6-gigabyte Goliath. I find Partion-it ($60) by QuarterDeck Corp. the easiest and most reliable partitioning software out there, and if you’ve got a couple of free hours sometime you could do that. Another software choice is Partition Magic ($70) from PowerQuest, which includes additional features such as allowing one to set up a dual-boot machine capable of using more than one operating system.
An alternative that appeals to me more than partitioning is to get a ZIP drive or some other large-scale removable storage device for about $150 and use it as though it were a hard drive for the stuff you want to ensure gets backed up each day. You just place the folders you want to protect on the Zip instead of the hard drive. You can then use Iomega’s built-in copy function to back up your Zip disk.
The downside is that saving and retrieving data takes a bit longer when accessing a ZIP drive than a hard drive. The upside is that setting it up is almost as simple as plugging a single cord into the parallel (printer) port on the back of your PC and you are spared the hassle of dealing with partitioning software and hard drive backups.
Q–I’ve noticed that some of my e-mail from my family in Seattle takes hours or sometimes a day to get to Chicago. They’re on Prodigy and I’m on AOL. I thought this stuff traveled at 186,000 miles per second. Where is it spending its time?
Jack Largeet, Chicago
A–As pilots who land fighter jets on the decks of aircraft carriers like to point out, going real fast isn’t anywhere near the challenge as is landing in one piece. E-mail operates in a parallel fashion; the real problem isn’t circling the planet at the speed of light but rather in landing in its targeted mailbox.
E-mail works by breaking your notes into what are called IP (Internet Protocol) packets, usually of 128 bytes each, and then sending each on its way through whatever connection is least busy at that particular split second. One packet might head from Chicago to Seattle by way of San Francisco while another bit of the same message might go from Chicago to Atlanta to Tokyo to Seattle. The dozens or even hundreds or thousands of IP packets that hold your message move about the network until they reach the computer called an e-mail server used by whomever you are addressing.
Delays come from all sorts of things. Your own server probably waits until a fairly sizable bunch of mail is queued up before sending it all off. At the other end, the server must wait until all of the scattered bits of each incoming message are collected before reconstituting the note and storing it for later delivery. Waiting for straggler packets can go on for whatever period of time the server’s operator wants before an incomplete message is rejected.
Rain and sleet and snow aren’t a problem on-line, but delivering e-mail has its rough patches, just as does snail mail.
Q–I had a power failure that crashed my computer. When I rebooted, I got a message saying “INI file can’t access a turbovxf.vxd file.” The computer seems to work OK, but how do I find out what program this file belongs to and how can I get rid of the message?
Bob Schultze @mailexcite.com
A–Many a doctor has lost a patient by advising someone with a bad headache to take an aspirin and call back in the morning. Keep that in mind if troubles erupt a bit down the road. Meanwhile, you can fix the problem by the electronic equivalent of taking an aspirin.
Go to the Windows Start command and then choose Run and type in sysedit, which will open a window with all of the so-called INI files (Windows initialization files) on your machine. Go through each until you find the one with turbovxf.vxd. Then place a semicolon in front of just that line and close the Window.
That will stop the annoying tickler and, since your machine is working fine anyway, you should consider yourself cured. If your computer dies after taking the aspirin, you can always call me in the morning (less than)grin(greater than).
Q–I have a friend new to computers, He asks me for advice sometimes. Should I recommend he buy MS Office for his computer? He has Works on it now. I cannot give him much help with Works because it’s different from Office. He usually calls me on the phone, which makes it hard to follow what he is doing. He is going to create an employee mailing list in Works. If he does, can it be easily converted to Access?
Frank Lawler @msn.com
A–Save your friend $600 and recommend that he work on learning Works. To borrow a cliche from the motivational speakers’ rubber chicken circuit, picking Microsoft Works over Microsoft Office is a decidedly win/win trade-off for small-business folk who have relatively straightforward database needs.
Even if the company mailing list your friend is cooking up were for General Motors, the database module in sub-$100 Works can quickly set up a data entry form and then perform mail merge on documents produced in a very serviceable word processing module.
Should your friend’s needs ever grow to the point that a category killer like the $700 Microsoft Office product is needed, the changeover is as easy as opening the Works database already prepared and importing it into Access, literally a click of a mouse.
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Contact Jim Coates via e-mail at [email protected] or snail mail at the baiduhai, Room 400, 435 N. Michigan Ave., Chicago 60611. If you think you’ve got a better answer to any of these questions, add your point of view at www.chicagotribune.com/go/askjim.
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