Moving My Documents

Question
is it possible to change the location of My Documents to another drive?

Answer
This is quite easily done by using Windows Explorer. Right-click on My Documents and select Properties and under the Target Folder Location click on the Move button and you'll be given a choice of where you wish to have your documents.

Duplicates in Excel

Question
I have an Excel 2003 worksheet with a column containing over 12,000 numbers, entered manually. Every number must be unique - no duplicates. Does a procedure or function exist for Excel that locates duplicate numbers within a column?

Answer
I am not aware of an existing function but this is very easy to achieve with one simple IF statement. Start by sorting on the column containing your numbers and for this exercise I assume that they are in column A. In cell B2 enter this formula =IF(A1=A2,"Duplicate","") and copy it down to every cell to B12000. What this IF statement will do is to write Duplicate next to a cell that has an identical number above it and leave a blank if the numbers aren't identical. Then click on Data, Filter, AutoFilter and in the B column select to show only the cells that contain the word Duplicate.

Registry Cleaners

Question
George, can you recommend a Registry Cleaner please? Preferably a freebie?

Answer
Do you have a reason as to why you need it? Some free Registry analysing programs give potentially alarming reports hoping you'll purchase their product. If your system is stable I suggest that you don't purchase a registry cleaner program. There's a very small risk that a registry cleaner program may cause problems that currently don't exist. Microsoft previously had a free registry cleaner program but it was removed from their website some years ago without stating any reasons. It could be that even Microsoft can't give a 100% guarantee that it works perfectly in all situations. In the Microsoft knowledgebase there's an article referring to a problem caused by one particular registry cleaner that prevented Windows from starting, and also references to erroneous listings generated by other programs.

Having given a lot of reasons why you shouldn't purchase a registry cleaner, I ran one such program on my test computer after it reported several hundred errors. I checked several dozen manually to find they were all referring to either removed or obsolete programs. My registry file was about 70 MB when exported. It came to over 12,000 pages of text when opened in Word. After running the program it stated that all problems were fixed. The size of the registry was reduced by a small fraction of 1 %. Running benchmarks before and after showed no difference in performance.

In the case of registry cleaners, I would apply the old saying, If it ain't broke don't fix it, but I'm happy to hear from readers who have other views on this matter.

Batching Photos

Question
I have scanned photos from my many albums so that I can make some sort of presentation to give to my children to show the many changes over their lifetime. However, I've finished up with about 50/50TIF and JPEG. Being new to computers, I don't know how this occurred. As I wish to put them on a CD-RW for showing on TV the photos that remain TIF image won't show on the TV.
Is there any program that will allow me to change the TIF images to JPEG or is there some other method that will allow me to make the changes?

Answer
There are many programs that can achieve this and some are free. My recommendation is IrfanView. If you don't already have this then you can download this small but excellent program from www.irfanview.com. For the batch conversion, from IrfanView click on File, Batch Conversion then select the TIF images and in the Output format select JPG. You can then set the options as to the level of compression/ quality that you would like.

Sorting deleted mail by date

Question
Could you please advise me how to set my Outlook Express settings so that all deleted emails are stored by date order in the deleted folder?

Answer
In order to see the received dates in Outlook Express click on View, Columns and tick the Received box plus any other that you may like to see such as Size. You have to set the view to show received dates then click on the word Received in the heading row to sort. Click it again to toggle the ascending / descending view.

Columns in Vista

Question
I would like to add some additional columns in Vista's Windows Explorer view but can't find any reference to it in Help. Surely this can be done?

Answer
This can be done by right- clicking on any of the headings such as Name and this will bring up a few more columns that you can click on. To see all that is possible, click on More ... and you'll be amazed how many more columns you can have. By highlighting any item, you can use the Move Up or Move Down arrows to have the columns in your preferred order.

Reprinted from the August 2008 issue of PC Update, the magazine of Melbourne PC User Group, Australia

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