Q–Being a somewhat meticulous person, I often go back over an e-mail to correct spelling or grammar. Sometimes I change a phrase. Not always–but enough times to drive me crazy–AOL will step in when I tap the “send” and say, “This has been revised. Do you want to save it as a text file?” I can answer yes or no. I tried no the first dozen times, and AOL cut me off and the e-mail disappeared into space, never to be seen again. So I tried yes, and the same thing happened. Either way, I am cut off from AOL, with the explanation that the modem has stopped sending a signal. Can you help?
M.J. Termondt @aol.com
A–I guess that this is what you get for taking time to get your e-mail just right in our supercharged world of information overload. The AOL software is set to sign a user off if 10 minutes or so go by without a keystroke, and your ruminations appear to cross that limit.
When you get that message about saving it as a text file, you should say yes and the software should pop up a menu box showing the folders on your computer and letting you type in a file name to hold your note for later retrieval.
I have learned to avoid this nasty effort to make us dash off our e-mail too rapidly by using the command Send Later rather than Send Now. You can write off-line, and Send Later will automatically save the note. Then the next time you log on, you’ll receive a prompt that asks if you now want to send your carefully composed message.
Q–We have a Pentium II, Windows 95, 56K modem, 17-inch monitor and an APC USP surge protector. We are experiencing a problem and we cannot find the answer. Our background is white. Some days, in an instant, the background turns to either a light creamy color or a dark creamy color or may switch back and forth before going back to the white. Some days it will only happen once and some days it does it several times.
Tomas Castilla, Andalusia, Ala.
A–Bad news, Mr. C. Your monitor probably is burning out. But, just in case, try bypassing the surge protector to make sure that it isn’t your problem. For this test, make sure that you plug the monitor into an outlet without any other stuff plugged in to it.
Those changes of color are typical of the early stages of failure of the electrical transformer that reduces your high-octane house current into a lower power form. Although erratic power from the outlet can cause the current to fluctuate, it is more likely that you have a bum transformer.
For whatever it might be worth, I have had this happen with a couple of monitors in the past, and one of them kept running for several years after the problem set in.
Because this seems to happen only for short periods of time right now, you might just put up with the annoyance as I did.
Q–I read your recent item about the problem associated with Energy Star computers turning off. That sometimes happens to me as well, but only after I’ve been away from the computer for an extended period of time.
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Isn’t there a way that the computer can be set so that it doesn’t turn off as quickly as it does right now? That would probably fix the problem the majority of the time.
Karen J. Lewis, @elpc.org (Environmental Law & Policy Center)
A–I take comfort that somebody with your excellent pro-environment credentials shares my concern about how too many computers are crashing when the well-meaning Energy Star screen saver kicks in on Windows. All too often the abrupt power-down from the Environmental Protection Agency-approved Energy Star screen saver causes a freeze-up because it conflicts with other software running in the background.
Your suggestion about setting the Energy Saver clock back rather than disabling it is both excellent and Earth-friendly. One can change the settings so that a full 60 minutes must pass without any keyboard or mouse input before Energy Star activates.
By right-clicking on the desktop and picking Properties and then Screen Saver, you will find the box to disable and alter Energy Star. Just type 60 in the delay box (that’s the maximum allowed).
For people whose machines freeze up when the screen saver gets triggered there will still be a crash, of course, but at least it won’t happen as often.
Q–Microsoft Word 97 has a letter-writing feature that automatically formats indented paragraphs whenever one uses a bullet or number. However, this just gets in the way when you are trying to write an article as opposed to correspondence or a business report.
How do I manually override the default to allow myself to do this? I’ve tried Word Help many times but just can’t seem to ask the right questions.
Jim Olsztynski @aol.com
A–You’re just missing one of the thousands of options readily available through the command menus at the top of the Microsoft Office display, Mr. O. Click on the Tools menu and you will find a choice for bullets and numbering. Click that one and you will find a large number of options including the one you crave: None.
Q–I would like to have the hard drive partitioned into C: and D: sections. The C: drive would have my old DOS 6.22 and my favorite word processing program, Xywrite 3.11–much easier for me to edit with keys that define rather than with a mouse and MSWord. The D: drive would have Windows 98 and all the baggage that comes with it. Am I asking the impossible?
Marion Markham @ameritech.net
A–You’re not asking the impossible, but I fear you are asking the difficult. If you have a copy of DOS 6.22 on floppy disks, you can simply shell out $100 or so for partitioning software such as Power Quest’s Partition Magic that will let you set up the C: and D: drives you crave. You then load DOS 6.22 in one and Windows, which uses different DOS versions, in the other. The partitioning software will let you set which one boots up each time.
If you don’t have the 6.22 disks, you’ll need to get them, and buying out of date Microsoft software is pretty complicated. You can find the details at http://microsoft.na.subservices.com/msdn/default.asp
May I suggest that you could take the extra hours it would take to go through all the partitioning and software loading and spend them learning the keyboard commands built into Microsoft Word?
These Word keyboard equivalents frequently work exactly like they do in Xywrite, and it’s pretty easy to remember the differences.
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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.