Q–Greetings (by snail mail) from a couple of dinosaurs who read your column but don’t own a PC. To us, PC means “personally confused” because we are in our 80s and do not intend to get one. But we really want e-mail so that we can communicate with our children while we travel to places like Mexico. Can you advise us how to acquire an e-mail address and tell us of any difficulty we might expect?
Louise and Ed Neafsey, Chicago
A–For several years now I have been a fan of the PocketMail service, which sounds absolutely perfect for a pair of chipper travelers who don’t want to mess up vacation time fiddling with computers. For about $100 you can buy a PocketMail device that looks like one of the clamshell electronic organizers but has a telescoping device on the back that you pull out and press against the earpiece and mouthpiece of a telephone.
You pay $10 per month for an e-mail account with the company and then compose e-mail on the small keyboard using the liquid crystal screen to view the text. When the note is ready, you dial a PocketMail 800 number and hold the gadget up to the phone. A series of squeaks and howls get generated on the gadget that PocketMail translates as text and sends your e-mail. Meanwhile, any e-mail waiting for you gets sent to the device by the same sounds.
The gadget is utterly simple to use, which is what you ordered. You can buy it at OfficeMax stores in Chicago or find an online dealer at www.pocketmail.com.
Q–Can you tell me if there is any kind of software that would allow me to type letters in English (the only language I know) and to have them translated into French? I have a cousin in France who knows only French. I am too old to try to learn a new language, and I desperately want to correspond with him.
Sharon Loftus @granitecity.com
A–Zut, alors, Ms. L. Your translator awaits at http://babel.altavista.com. This added offering of the superb AltaVista Web search engine includes a very sophisticated translation service along with the much better-known Internet keyword searches.
Babel.altavista.com lets you type in several hundred words and then uses artificial intelligence and a huge database of multilingual dictionaries to translate back and forth.
It does English to French, Spanish, German, Italian and Portuguese. It also renders English translations for those who type in text in any of those languages.
(I ran “Ask Jim Why” through the site and got Demandez A Jim Pourquoi.)
Q–I have this old computer (a.k.a. boat anchor) taking up space, but I’m loathe to toss it if there is a chance I can retrieve the data I created using it and then stored on tapes. While I religiously backed up everything on the hard drive, I never tested the data retrieval software that came with the tape drive. It is CPBackup for DOS.
When the hard drive got fried by lightning, I replaced it and reinstalled the software, but when I reloaded CPBackup to attempt the data retrieval, it didn’t work. As a result I have three tapes with the historical data for three businesses that I run plus personal mailing lists and the like.
Emily Johnston
@compuserve.com
A–You’re probably in luck, because CPBackup for DOS (Central Point Backup) still is supported by software powerhouse Symantec (www.symantec.com). If you go to that Web site and use the Central Point Backup keyword for a search you will find all sorts of software patches for this powerful but antique data storage tool.
You’ll also find links to Symantec’s Data Recovery Service that will, for a fee, take those data tapes and move them on to a CD so you can read them with a new computer. Expect to pay in the $400 ballpark for that data from your various companies. I hope that your businesses are so prosperous that $400 is a bargain. If not, you can always just save the tapes in case you ever have an urgent need to recover historical data.
Q–Would you please tell me what is the Windows keyboard shortcut to maximize a screen, to use in place of clicking onto the middle box [restore/maximize] on the top corner of a screen?
Charles Gildem @dellnet.com
A–You’ve focused on what probably stands as the single most useful trick to avoid continually moving the mouse around the screen when you wind up with a large number of open Windows and want to minimize some or all of them to simplify the display on your monitor.
The trick is to hold down the Alt key and then press the space bar. You then tap the N key to minimize a window. Or, if the Window is already minimized, you do Alt and space and then X to maximize the window.
Beyond your question, you should know that when you want to completely shut down a program instead of just minimize its display, Alt+F4 will nuke an open application.
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Q–I have a 5.4 gigabyte IBM Thinkpad with a partitioned drive. My C drive is three-quarters full, my D drive practically empty. I currently have AOL 5.0 on my C drive. I would like to install AOL 6.0 on my D drive when the CD disc becomes available, and remove 5.0 from my C drive. I would also like to make a similar transfer when I decide to upgrade my current Microsoft Works program, which is on my C drive. How do I accomplish this without losing the files I already have in these programs?
Adrienne Joy Goldstone
@aol.com
A–With AOL 6.0 the buzzword is Expert Installation, while Microsoft Works calls it a Custom Install. These options are presented as you load both AOL and Works and simply allow you to specify a target drive for the installation.
In the case of Works, I recommend that you first uninstall the software and then do the custom install on the upgrade and specify that the software go on the D drive.
With AOL, however, you need to first install AOL 6.0 on your D drive and then remove AOL 5.0 from your C drive. This is the only way that your address book, filing cabinet and favorites lists will survive the upgrade.
So here is how you need to do the uninstalling: Click on the My Computer icon on your desktop and then open the Control Panel folder in the window that pops up. Look for the icon called Add/Remove Programs. This calls up a command box that lets you select any of the programs now loaded on your machine and remove them in such a way as to clean up all of the assorted files scattered all over your system that each software title creates.
By removing Works first, you will be able to re-create all of those scattered bits on the D drive once you install the upgrade. As to your documents created in Works, the default is to store them in the My Documents folder on the same drive as Windows is installed (C) so the installation on the D drive will still find your files.
It looks to me like you will save on the order of 100 megabytes of drive space doing this.
If it’s not enough space, you might consider the superb Partition Magic software from PowerQuest Inc. (www.powerquest.com). This $70 program lets users adjust the sizes of multiple hard drive partitions on the fly and would make life much simpler for you as time goes on and that bloated C partition fills up again.
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Contact Jim Coates via e-mail at [email protected] or via snail mail at the baiduhai, Room 400, 435 N. Michigan Ave., Chicago, IL 60611. Questions can be answered only through the column. Add your point of view at chicagotribune.com /go/askjim.