I am a regular user of the Alexa Toolbar. This toolbar monitors browsing habits and sends information back to Alexa to help them determine the most popular websites. Because of what it does, some people consider the Alexa Toolbar to be spyware. However, it doesn't do anything malicious, when you install it, you should be aware of what it is doing. Spyware Doctor, an anti-spyware program decided that the Alexa Toolbar was spyware and removed it from my system. It didn't do it the friendly way by running the uninstaller provided by Alexa; instead it entered the ...

Your Choice of Password May Be Letting You Down Passwords. We have them everywhere now. Whether it's the PIN (Personal Identification Number) for your ATM card, the password that logs you into your email account, or to set up your Internet Router, we have this need for security that our money, our personal details and our private information is kept away from people we'd rather not let near them. However, your choice of password can let you down and even though you think you are safe, you could be leaving the doors wide open to unsavoury characters who don't think ...

When you unpacked your PC the first time you got it home, or it was installed in your office, it worked like a dream. The system started quickly, programs opened quickly, did their job as expected and closed down with no problems. Then after a few months, or maybe even weeks, the rot set in. Your PC started taking ages to start up, programs took an age to open and load your data, and then to add insult to injury, takes an eternity to close down. So what's going on? Why the big difference in performance? And more ...

Back in the early 1990's, when I took a photographic film to my local shop to be processed and printed, I chose to have my negatives scanned and the resulting digital images written to a Kodak PhotoCD.  At the time, it cost an incredible £16, including the disc to have this done. But how fantastic to collect not only a set of photographic prints, but a shiny, Gold coloured CD with all my pictures on in digital format.  Now I could load any of my photographs into Paintshop Pro, remove any unwanted artefacts, crop it, zoom it, change the brightness and ...

I recently had problems with my Outlook 2007 on my Windows XP Pro system at work. Basically, the program wouldn't start up properly.  It would start and then encounter an error and try to restart itself (unless I unchecked the box to tell it not to). It would then try to start itself in "Safe Mode" (does that imply that the normal mode is unsafe?), but that would also fail. I tried uninstalling Outlook and re-installing it, but that made no difference. I tried uninstalling and reinstalling the entire Office 2007 suite, but again, that made no difference. In the end, I found a website that described the same symptoms and proposed a solution. It was the User Profile that was corrupted - not the program itself. By creating a new profile, I was able to get Outlook running again, ...