Inbox highlights

Welcome to InBox, where we attempt to answer your internet questions.

*Anne Johns may be a novice, but she's also a tidy housekeeper. "When defragmenting, does the screensaver slow down or interrupt the process? ... I have had it running for 4 hours and it still says '0% complete.' How often - and when - should the maintenance wizard be run, and does [the screensaver] interfere with this?"

Screensavers should always be shut down when defragmenting or maintaining your machine, Anne, for as you suspect, they will drive you mad by continually interrupting these processes, like a number of other small programs running invisibly in the background.

That's why lately I've been recommending EndItAll, a small free utility to close them all down at once. And it's usually best to let the Maintenance Wizard perform its tasks once a week, at a time to suit you.

If you have a very small hard drive, though, it may be an idea to schedule your "defrag" twice a week, probably in the small hours.

* "This might seem like a silly question," writes Brian Walker, "but I really need to know how you can paste text from another Windows application (such as Word) into this Hotmail text box that I am typing in right now, instead of using an attachment?"

There are no silly questions at InBox, Brian, and you should have no trouble pasting into Hotmail if you select your text and hit Control+Insert to copy, then reposition your cursor and hit Shift+Insert to paste.

* Something is stamping on Paul Cleary's brakes. "I'm using IE5.5 with a 28.8K modem. When I download a file the download speed (as shown by IE) starts really fast at 20-25KB/sec but then drops to maybe 4KB/sec. It's annoying and time-consuming. Any idea what is causing this?"

It's a bandwidth thing, Paul - at first, as your modem negotiates a practicable rate for this particular transfer with the distant server, the bytes come spraying through like mad.

But it's nearly always too good to be true, and the rate quickly settles to what is sustainable throughout the download.

* Sheila Malloy writes: "In Microsoft Works 4, do you know a way of changing lower case letters to upper case?"

Our resident MS expert, Sean Dring, supplied us with these hotkeys, Sheila: Shift + Ctrl + K - All Caps; Shift + Ctrl + A - All Caps; Shift + Ctrl + Z - All Lower case.

* More of your Inbox questions will be answered tomorrow in CyberLunch, on air 12:00-1:00 with Murray Lindsay and Peter Sinclair on Classic Hits 97FM.

If there's anything you want to know about the exciting world of the web, just e-mail inbox@herald.co.nz.

Links

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