Internal hard drives faster, but external ones easier
By JOHN TORRO
Published August 21, 2006
I have an 80-gigabyte hard drive, which is more than 50 percent used. I am thinking of moving my pictures and the Picasa 2 program to an external hard drive, thus freeing up some of my C: drive. Does this make sense, as opposed to adding an internal hard drive? If so, how do I accomplish this without losing any of my pictures?
Yes, it makes a lot of sense. Internal hard drives will always be faster than an external drive. But for extra storage, the convenience of just plugging in an external drive to a USB port can't be beat. You should just be able to drag and drop your pictures from your drive to the external drive open up a Windows File Explorer window for each. When dragging files and folders between different drives, Windows defaults to copy mode (as opposed to moving mode when you do this between locations on the same drive). You can delete your pictures from the original location once the copy is successful. The Picasa 2 program will need to be uninstalled and reinstalled, specifying the new drive as the default location.
If Address Bar disappears, check the Toolbar view
My MSN home page modified itself, leaving off the Address line on the toolbar. I cannot type in Web site addresses or pull down past addresses I would like to visit. What happened?
It sounds as if you are saying that the Address Bar is no longer visible on your Internet Explorer main toolbar. Click View, Toolbars, and make sure Address Bar has a check next to it. If not, check it to turn it on. It may be on, but somehow was inadvertently resized. Find the Address toolbar label and expand it by clicking and dragging the divider line next to the label. Once you correct it, you can avoid inadvertent changes to your toolbar by clicking View, Toolbars, Lock The Toolbars.
Pictures too small? Turn off Automatic Image Resizing
My kids gave me a very nice computer for Father's Day this year, a Dell Inspiron 9400. I'm into photography and enjoy the huge screen with all my picture work. I have a problem for which Microsoft and Dell are not willing to accept responsibility. When I open programs or pages in Internet Explorer, they sometimes open in "reduced" size rather than the "maximum" size. It is annoying when I am looking at pictures on the Web and have to maximize them each time they are opened.
What you're referring to is called "Automatic Image Resizing." When AIR is turned on, Internet Explorer displays a smaller but complete version of the picture. You can then hold the mouse over the bottom right corner until the "Expand" icon appears, which when clicked displays the picture at full size. If you want your pictures to show fully expanded by default, do this: From the Internet Explorer menu, click Tools, Internet Options. Click the Advanced tab, and then scroll down to the Multimedia section. Clear the Enable Automatic Image Resizing check box. I've found the best option when viewing my pictures is to click the View as Slide Show option on the left side of the Windows File Explorer folder window. This will automatically expand your pictures to the full size of your screen. And if you can't find the slide show tool, here's a possible fix: Go to the Control Panel, double-click the Folder Options dialog box, then click the General tab. Now, change Window XP's default to "Show common tasks in folders." Click OK and try it again.
Save your power changes to a new theme name
My monitor and hard drive would shut down after 15 minutes of inactivity. Then they began to act intermittently, and now they remain running. I went into Power Management and re-entered the 15 into the Monitor, Hard Drive and System Standby fields. When I tried to save the power scheme as "Home/Office Desk" I got an error message advising: Power Policy Manager unable to set policy, two revisions are incompatible. If I just apply the settings and click OK, my problem remains.
This seems to be a problem common to PCs that were upgraded to XP from a previous version. One work-around is to make your changes and then save them under a new power theme name.
Send questions to personaltech@sptimes .com or Personal Tech, P.O. Box 1121, St. Petersburg, FL 33731. Selected questions will be answered only in the column. John Torro is a Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer and a Microsoft Certified Solution Developer.
