Deleting email attachments

A friend who is a Mac owner would like to slim down her email inbox by deleting all the attachments from the emails, but keeping the main body of the message. (She has already saved important attachments to folders elsewhere on her hard drive.) As far as my investigations can tell, the Mac Mail program does not have this facility. However, the Thunderbird email program (which I use at home) does have that ability, and a Mac version of Thunderbird is available. When you install Thunderbird, it gives you the option to import your emails and address books from your other program, so you don't have to lose any important contacts. On a PC, Microsoft Outlook 2007 has the ability to delete attachments (not sure about earlier versions), but Outlook Express does not. Again, the PC version of Thunderbird does. For Mac owners who do not want to move away from Mail, I can think of two other work-arounds (both a bit clumsy). One is to forward the email to your own address, deleting the attachment at that point. The other is to save the email as a text-only file in an appropriate folder on the hard drive.

Salvaging the accidents

The "oh crumbs!" moment is a fact of life when you work with computers. (Ok, I'll admit it, the strength of the expletive is in direct proportion to the severity of the stuff-up.) How many times have I accidentally deleted text I have slaved over, or destroyed a work of art in Photoshop with a slip of the mouse?
When this happens, I try hard not to panic, stop everything, take a deep breath, and then hit "undo" keys, Ctrl-Z. (I wish life had a Ctrl-Z key to erase those dumb things I do or say.) Some programs, such as Word, have almost unlimited levels of undo. Just keep hitting Ctrl-Z, and you can go back a long way down the path you have come. If you undo too much, you can redo by going to the Edit menu and choosing that option. Some programs, like PhotoShop, by default have only one level of undo. Then, Ctrl-Z becomes a toggle between undoing and redoing. However, PhotoShop also has a History function, found under the Window menu, which allows you to go back to any particular action and alter it.
Some programs have a Revert function (usually found under the File menu). Choosing this takes the document back to the last-saved version. Depending on how frequently you save, this may take you back further than you wanted to go, but it can salvage many worst-case scenarios. As I have got myself into the habit of saving text documents at least every five minutes, Revert has been my saviour on many occasions.
Word does not have a Revert feature, but one more option is open to you, which also works for every other program without exception. Simply close the document, and when you are prompted, do not save the changes. That will take the document back to its last-saved version.

Restoring browser defaults

According to reports, a glitch in Internet Explorer 6 forced the new Microsoft search engine Bing onto users as the default search engine. Even when users manually altered their preferences, Bing came back. Micosoft says it has now fixed the problem, but similar problems have occurred before.
When one of the early versions of Windows 7 was released a month or so back, IE8 was automatically pushed as the default browser. This caused competitors Opera and Firefox to complain. If that has happened to you, and you want to reset Firefox or Opera as your default, there is a solution.
1. Close Internet Explorer if it's running, then start Firefox.
2. Click Tools, Options, then click the Advanced icon in the Options toolbar.
3. Click the General tab if it's not already selected, then make sure "Always check to see if Firefox is the default browser on startup" is enabled.
4. Click Check Now, then confirm that you want to make Firefox your default browser.
5. Click OK and you're done.

When an unwanted program lacks an uninstaller

A fairly regular annoyance in the Windows world crops up when you want to uninstall an unwanted program. Most programs either have an uninstall option, or you can delete them using the control panel "Add or remove programs". But from time to time, the uninstall routine becomes corrupted, or is even missing completely. (It's certainly happened to me on a number of occasions.) Lincoln Spector has some helpful tips on what to do in such cases.
In addition, a marvellous free utility called Revo Uninstaller, can assist in tidying up the nasty left-overs from messy uninstalls.

Dreamweaver to PDF - help wanted

This might be a bit specialised for many, but I could use some help. I am creating some web documents in Dreamweaver and would like to convert them to pdf files. Alternatively, convert to some format that I can email to others so they can view the finished product. Any ideas greatly received.

Bing debuts

Microsoft's new search engine, Bing (formerly known as Kumo), has come online, though primarily still in Beta mode (ie, not fully developed). It has one or two nice features. For instance, when doing an image search you can specify a lot more exactly what you are looking for; eg, a cartoon or live image. But I don't like the fact you can't tell the web address or size of the image until you hover your mouse pointer over it. The web pages search has got quite a way to go to compete with Google's new features, and the whole engine still has a not-quite-finished feel about it. As for the name: maybe that says it all. (To be fair, perhaps we laughed at the name Google when it first launched.) Will it break Google's dominance? I suspect not, but in the topsy-turvy internet world, who can be certain about anything?