Leo's Answers #242 – August 3, 2010

In Windows 7 Ultimate x64, open up Notepad. Turn Word Wrap off, and then maximize the Notepad Window. Type a long sentence that runs off the screen by a good amount. Then try to select the text from the right. That is, try to highlight that line from the right. Notepad has a glitch, and will not scroll left for you. If the Notepad window is not maximized, or if you select it from the left instead, it will scroll across for you as you try to select the line. However, when maximized and selecting from the right, it does not.

This is a Windows problem, as I duplicated it on another machine that is running another copy of W7 Ultimate x64. I tried using Microsoft Connect, but they won’t take any Notepad or Windows bugs. My only option is to pay to call them and submit this as a support request or do it over the internet – for a charge. I feel it’s unfair for me to pay to tell Microsoft about their product problems. Any solutions?

Is there no longer a hotmail.com? I am so confused. I sign into hotmail and it automatically sends me to hotmail live. It would not take my old password, so I had to change it. But, there is nothing in the account. How do you retrieve information that was in hotmail.com. This is crazy!!How can I get my messages from my old account or is this really something that has happened. Is there no longer a MSN hotmail.com? or is this a joke of some kind.

I bought a Windows 7 64-bit computer last fall (Dell XPS8000). Hi-def monitor. Yeah! I WAS enjoying it much. Soon I get “Windows Media Player has stopped working. Windows is checking for a solution and will notify you…..” Or something to that effect.

The rub is that Microsoft apparently anticipated that under some circumstances Windows Media Player would quit working because they included this error message. Yet, 8 months later, there is not (as far as I’ve been able to determine) a solution in sight. Windows hasn’t notified me of anything.

Is Windows doing anything more than popping up an error message? Or is this problem so abstruse that it is taking all these months find a solution? My hunch is that Windows is just up a dead end street, and I’m up a creek sans paddle.

My free yahoo email account was stolen and a fake email was sent to my contacts asking for money as I was in the U K and robbed. I did get my email back but my contacts were deleted. After changing my password, I got an email from the U K asking me to purchase their Firewall and computer protection. I unsubscribed to that email. Should I have just deleted it? How else has my computer been compromised? I am starting to get email with offers I did not subscribe to, such as Publisher Clearing House email winner. Should I just delete or unsubscribe which may be adding more viruses to my computer.

I recently received the following email, supposedly from MSN, is it legitimate?

Sam Merchant writes:

I work at a data recovery lab and most of the drives we receive for data recovery services are large capacity drives. There is no favourite drive manufacturer; all are destined to fail at some point in time. In many cases I have seen newer and larger capacity drives going down within days of use.

Having a mirror set, RAID-5, or RAID-10 for redundancy is an excellent idea, yet does not guarantee against the data loss as we get RAIDs of all configurations with multiple failed drives quite frequently for recovery.

If your data is important for your person or business then there is no better alternative to have regular data backups at multiple locations.

John writes:

I have been using Drop Box. I have a free 2 GB folder in the cloud. It automatically syncs with a Drop Box folder on each of my computers. I do zero work, do not have to initiate back ups etc. It is the exact answer that this poster is looking for. It is also a backup of my working files in another physical location. All my files are also accessible from other computers through a browser. I had been skeptical of cloud storage but this is a perfect well thought out solution. It is so good that I decided to upgrade to 50GB storage for 10 dollars a month. www.dropbox.com

Toni writes:

Referring to “ALL” questions and “ANSWERS” shown above. I have changed my “password” so many times I lost count. It does not matter or work for me. Whoever has hacked my account knows every password I have and knows when i change it. And comprimises that password too.

Mark Jacobs writes:

I’ve gotten some very professional phishing emails. One for example was purporting to be from PayPal. It was flawless and when I clicked on the link, it sent me to a great replica of the real PayPal website. I filled in some fake log on data, and when I clicked log-in I immediately was sent to the real PayPal log-in page. This would have raised very few suspicions as the person trying to log in would most likely thing they just got their password wrong and try again. Bottom line: assume all “Official” e-mails are suspect and NEVER EVER click on a link in an “Official” e-mail.

Bank of America sends me a monthly e-mail telling me to click on a link to download my monthly statement. This is legit but stupid. I’ve e-mailed them about this warning them that they are sending a bad signal to their customers, but they, being a know-it-all multinational, ignored me. Anyway, even though I know it’s legit I still log in through a bookmark I’ve saved so as not to get into a bad habit. Let’s just hope the phishermen don’t figure out how to spoof bookmarks on your browser.

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