Email hoaxes

I normally have a pretty good radar for hoax email messages, including those startling 'facts' which turn out to be urban myths. Unfortunately, I got caught this week passing on a supposed speech by Australian prime minister Kevin Rudd, in which he exhorted all immigrants to get with the Aussie programme or ship out.
A lot of people forward these messages in good faith, but there are several good sites to check whether they are genuine or not.
Hoax-Slayer is dedicated to debunking email hoaxes, thwarting internet scammers, combating spam, and educating web users about email and internet security issues. It also includes anti-spam tips, computer and email security information, articles about true email forwards, and much more.
Another useful source for info on urban myths is www.snopes.com The myth that gets me particularly is the one about the frog that doesn't have enough sense to jump out of a pot of increasingly hot water. Or for church-goers, the common sermon illustration that says the word 'sincere' derives from a Latin phrase that means 'without wax'. 'Fraid the Oxford dictionary doesn't agree.

The Show the Desktop Icon (and how to restore it when it vanishes)

If you are like me, you often have more than one application open at once (and sometimes so many their names are barely legible in your task-bar). An irritating aspect of working like this is that you sometimes need to open a folder that is easiest accessed via your desktop but of course you cannot see it because of all your open applications.

If you haven't discovered it already, the 'Show the Desktop' icon is your best friend. One click and all open applications are tabbed down to your task-bar for easy access; when you are finished with your desktop, a second click restores everything back to being open again, in the order and location you had it open in.

The 'Show the Desktop' icon is generally located in the cluster of icons on your task-bar, next to your start button, see picture. If you don't have a small cluster of icons next to your start button, right click your task-bar, select 'toolbars' and then 'quicklaunch' and it will become visible.
To the right of your cluster of quick-launch icons there is a small double arrow (it is visible just below the word "Shortcut" in the picture above). Right clicking this will show you all the icons you can quick-launch (so called because a single click opens each instead of the usual two). You can drag and drop your three most used applications onto the task-bar and order them as you want by dragging them around. As you can see looking at mine my top three are Explorer [I am sorry, I just do not like Fire Fox], Outlook and Show the Desktop.

There is, however, a problem that can arise with one's 'Show the Desktop' icon; it can mysteriously vanish. Just when you cannot imagine how you ever coped without it it isn't there and you have to manually tab down every page again. So frustrating! There are varying theories as to why this happens but the most useful piece of information to know is how to restore it.

I have tried various options over the years when ours has vanished but it always would vanish again a few days later. A few months back I tried a very simple piece of code and it has never vanished since. This works for XP users, and is not scary I promise!

Open a notepad or other plain text document.
Copy and paste the following into it:

[Shell]
Command=2
IconFile=explorer.exe,3
[Taskbar]Command=ToggleDesktop

Select: Save as
In the file name type: Show Desktop.scf
Ensure save as type is showing: 'plain text' or 'text documents'
Save it wherever you want it.
Then drag it from wherever it is onto the Quick-launch bar.

That's it.

(You can just memorise the keyboard command 'windows key + d' or 'windows key + m' but I think one click is more efficient than having to hit two keys - less to remember anyway!)

Panorama photos

I would love to have a camera that offers a panorama option, but they are way above my price range. However, a good option is to take a sequence of pics of a landscape (or any other subject) and stitch them together into a panorama. For this I use Serif Panorama Plus, which is simplicity itself. The software does only one thing, create panoramas, but it does it superbly well, even adjusting colours at the joining edges. The results are usually pretty seamless. I got my copy of this program free from a computer mag disk, but normally you have to pay for it. However, there are several good free programs out there:
The latest version of the free Irfanview has a panorama-creation tool, which can stitch pics horizontally or vertically. Some others:
Panorama stitching tools
Autostitch
Photopos Panorama Plus
An important tip for achieving good results is to keep your camera horizontal - if you point up or down, you will get some very curved straight lines in the panorama. Use a tripod if you can.
Incidentally, most inexpensive digital cameras have a lens roughly equivalent to a 38mm lens in film camera terms. This means they are a wide-angle lens, and therefore compress the horizontal picture. To get your pics back to a more realistic representation, you should ideally crop either the top, bottom or both, which is a semi-panorama anyway.

Password-protecting Word documents

Not many people realise you can lock Microsoft Office documents (Word, Excel, etc) so they can only be opened with a password. Great to protect family recipes or whatever from prying eyes. The method is much the same in both Word 2003 and Word 2007, except the buttons are located in different places. Here's the procedure:
1) Choose "save as" from the File menu.
2) Click on the "Tools" button, which I bet you have never noticed before. It's top right in the 2003 version of Word, and bottom left in the 2007 version.
3) Choose "General" options, and a dialogue box will pop up in which you enter your password. You can also have a second password for modifications, so people can access to read but not to modify the document.
Warning: Don't forget that password, because the encription is so strong even computer experts probably won't crack it.

The downside of Windows 7

Just when I think maybe life might get a bit simpler, along comes someone to spoil my day.
Further to my post on Windows 7 last week, Galen Gruman now tells me that if I want to upgrade from the XP operating system, I will have to do a complete reinstall of everything.

Unlike Vista users, (XP users) can't do an "in-place upgrade," in which the new OS overwrites the old one, preserving their installed applications, preferences, and data. Instead, they'll have to do a clean install, which means they have to back up their data, install Win 7 (either deleting or XP or installing as a separate environment), reinstall their apps, restore their data, and re-create their preferences.
For Windows XP users who avoided Vista because of its many problems, that upgrade work may seem as adding insult to injury, making it harder for them to finally adopt a new version of Windows. Through its PR agency, Microsoft confirms to InfoWorld that there will be no "in-place upgrade" option for XP users, but it declines to explain why not. "More materials on your question are in the works," the spokesman says.
But there may be good reason not to support an in-place upgrade, suggests Michael Silver, a Gartner analyst who follows Microsoft technologies. That's because viruses, registry errors, and other performance-sapping flaws in the user's Windows environment would be carried over into Windows 7; something that would not happen with a clean install.