Editor’s note: While Jim Coates is on vacation, we’re rerunning a few often-asked questions from his recent columns. A new Ask Jim Why column will run next Monday.
Q. Every day I open my e-mail (Microsoft Outlook Express), only to find dozens of pieces of spam. The junk mail is basically the same–end debt, start your own Web site, make money, etc. The problem is, I’m not in debt, I have a Web site and I have a job. Is there a blocking feature that will stop these ads, many from the same sender, from reaching my e-mail box?
Raymond L. Johnson [email protected]
A. The Microsoft Outlook Express e-mail software that comes with Windows 98 and Windows ME uses a strategy known as message rules to handle unwanted e-mail, as well as to streamline dealing with mail you want. The software walks a user through setting up rules that will kick in when e-mail comes in from various senders or with selected keywords in the subject line or the body of the text.
For example, you can quickly set up a rule to delete any message sent by that one spam specialist you mention. You also could set up rules that would look for e-mail from people you care about, either in your family life or your business life, and route it into special folders instead of into the inbox that catches all incoming e-mail.
Q. I bought a computer from Gateway and I am delighted with how it works, but I suddenly realized that although I specified what size of hard drive, how much memory and what sort of Pentium chip it would have, I really don’t have a way to check and make sure. How do I know I have the specifications I agreed to buy?
William Barnhart, Chicago
A. Great question, Mr. B. Actually, three great questions:
1. To make sure your hard drive is the size you paid for, click on the My Computer icon and move your cursor arrow over the icon for the C: drive and right-click. Pick Properties from the pop-up menu that gets displayed and you will see a pie chart readout of how many gigabytes your hard drive holds and how many are filled and how many remain available.
2. To confirm your PC’s chip, shut the Properties display and move your mouse arrow back over the My Computer icon and right-click there. In the pop-up that this creates, pick Properties. The display that comes up next will include a box showing the name of your operating system, the serial number of your computer and the identity of the microprocessor it is running.
3. In that same box, look for a tab marked Performance. Click it and you see the amount of random access memory in your machine.
Q. I goofed up my PC, and now my desktop icons are very large. When I run games, especially solitaire, the cards are one-fourth off the screen. How can I get this back to normal?
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A. I would say it’s a near certainty that you messed up your screen resolution settings playing one of those games you like so much, Mr. F. Your resolution sounds like it’s set to a bare-bones minimum of 640 pixels wide, and you need at least 800 pixels wide to get those icons down to a size you like.
A fix is a mere couple of mouse clicks away. Move your cursor onto the desktop and give the right mouse button a click. Pick the Properties choice in the menu that pops up.
Select the tab marked Settings in the next display, and you will find a slider bar that lets you move the screen resolution up and down from the lowest possible setting, which you now have, all the way up to the maximum your monitor can handle with your computer’s video card.
A second tip is that if you choose the Advanced button on that same display, you will find a choice to permanently display an icon in your Taskbar that will allow you to change resolutions without messing around with the settings menus I just described.
Q. I use Outlook Express and, when sending e-mail, the recipients tell me they get a message “An ActiveX Control on this page is not safe. Your current security settings prohibit running unsafe controls on this page. As a result, this page may not display as intended.”
Some of my friends have not opened the mail from me for fear of getting a virus. I am sending this to you on my husband’s computer. Please tell me what’s wrong.
B. Karpay, Land O’ Lakes, Fla.
A. Most likely your Outlook Express has been set to create messages using so-called Stationery features. This makes for pretty e-mail notes, but cautious souls who have set their browsers’ security settings for maximum vigilance find their computers rejecting stationery-embellished e-notes.
To strip future notes of these embellishments, open Outlook Express, click on Tools and then Options. Now select the Compose button and you will find the command to shut down Stationery for all e-mails written on your machine.
Q. I am an artist troubled about how to deal with some clients who use Windows and others who use Macs. Specifically, I have a PC Iomega CD 650 but need to burn a generic copy of my portfolio to send to both PC and Mac users. I have tried going to the Iomega Web site and found no help regarding this problem. Can you help?
Diana Messinger @megsinet.net.
A. Guess what, Ms. M.? You don’t have a problem; you just think you do, thanks to the arrogance of Microsoft Corp., which refuses to meet the Macintosh halfway in the area of having PCs read Mac removable disks and Macs read PC disks. It just goes one way, which is to your advantage in this case since you are saving stuff on a PC and shipping it to folks with Macs, whose machines are PC-fluent.
Macs can read disks formatted on PCs because that functionality has been built into Apple operating systems for nearly a decade.
So those CDs you burn on that nifty Iomega CD-RW drive can be inserted and read in Macs or PCs alike.
However, removable media written to Macintosh standards cannot be read by machines running Microsoft Windows, making this little love match a one-way street.
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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 this column. Add your point of view at chicagotribune.com/askjim.