InBox

Q. Karen is a customer of Xtra but for some reason her internet password refuses to work. She says: "Xtra help staff have checked it several times - they even changed the password twice - but now have confirmed there's definitely nothing wrong with the account that could cause this at their end."

A. Check your Caps Lock key, Karen. Passwords are case-sensitive and if it's lower case, capital letters will cause it to fail.

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Q. Peter has upgraded his hard drive and now runs Windows XP. When he couldn't get his flatbed scanner to work, he took it and the hard drive into a shop for attention. He was informed the driver disks were out of date.

A. Type in the scanner manufacturer model number and the words XP driver into a search engine such as Google, Peter.

Or go to www.driverguide.com (requiring free registration) for a large database of old and recent drivers that cover a multitude of peripherals.

If the XP driver is not available, it may be time to upgrade the scanner to a current model.

New flatbed scanners start at $90, or a printer/fax/copier/scanner will set you back $260 or more.

Sometimes obtaining the driver file upgrades can be frustrating to say the least, and many are prone to problems. New models tend to be compatible with current systems and even the cheap ones outperform their predecessors.

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Q. When Don's daughter sends email from his granddaughter's computer, the type size is fine on screen but prints at a small size. He was having the computer checked by a technician who found and eradicated a number of viruses. He showed a copy of the small-type letter to the service man, who had to admit he was baffled.

A. It is down to a font size mismatch between Internet Explorer and Outlook Express shared components, Don. To fix this, set both IE and OE to: View/Text size/Medium.