A Problem Shared . . .

Netbooks by their nature have small screens, many which have a vertical resolution which is on 600px. The problem with this is that many web pages and some applications have dialog boxes or popups where the buttons you’d like to click (like OK and SAVE!) are often off the bottom of the screen and unreachable.

One solution to this is AltMove which is a program that allows you to press the ALT key and then left click the problem window and move it up until you can see the missing buttons.

Recently I’ve been receiving email in Mozilla Thunderbird which display odd characters. Changing the character encoding of the individual message solved the problem but only for that message.

Auto detection of the character encoding was enabled but didn’t seem to be working – until I messed around with the settings and did this:

• Go to Tools > Options > Advanced > Config Editor and make sure that mailnews.force_charset_override is set to false
• Now right click on your Inbox and choose Edit > Folder Properties and make sure that the checkbox “Apply default to all messages in the folder…” is NOT checked.

Without reason one of our Windows 7 PCs started displaying incorrect icons on the desktop and in Explorer. The original icons were replaced with a Windows default icon – the kind you get when Windows doesn’t know what icon to show.

We’ve had similar problems in previous versions of Windows and knew that the answer was to clear the icon cache. Here’s how you do it in Windows 7:

• Close all Explorer windows and applications
• Press CTRL-SHIFT-ESC to open Windows Task Manager
• Click the Processes tab and locate Explorer.exe on the list of processes
• Right-Click on Explorer.exe and select End Process
• Click File and New Task (Run) and type CMD and click OK
• In the Command Prompt window type each of these lines – pressing Enter/Return after each line:cd %userprofile%\AppData\Local

  del iconcache.db

  exit

• Now back in Task Manager Click File and New Task (Run) and type explorer.exe and click OK – Your icons should now be back to their correct icon.

Since upgrading to Windows 7 I’ve found my desktop icons were being a little unresponsive. At first I thought maybe my mouse was on the way out but then realised it was happening on all my Windows 7 PCs.

It seemed that to get a desktop icon to open you had to click once to select it then double-click to open it (in effect making a double-click a triple-click).
I then found if I played around with the visual performance settings i could fix it.

Here’s what I did to fix it in my case:

1. Right click My Computer and select Properties
2. Click Advanced System Settings on the left
3. Click the Advanced tab
4. Under Performance Click Settings
5. On the Visual Effects tab ucheck ‘Animate controls and elements inside windows’

We thought we’d grab a copy of Ubuntu 10.04 – even though it’s still in Alpha and shouldn’t be installed on a production machine we’ve found it installed pretty much perfectly on any hardware we used.

The Alpha 2 ISO image is available from http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/releases/lucid/alpha-2/ and here’s a quick screencast showing the installing.

The process has been shortened in video editing but only took around 20 minutes from boot-up to final reboot.