Monday, November 13, 2000		Dr Tribune

Dr Tribune: You must check your computer clock setting. If it is set-up with wrong time, this type of problem will occur. You can see the time setting at the right bottom corner of you computer monitor or go to Windows control panel and click the Date/Time icon. Regarding your second question, the speed of any computer mainly depends upon the kind of work it performs. If the work requires lot of processing, a P III will perform better than a Celeron. But if the work involves only word processing or e-mail as in case of most home uses and small offices, you will not be able to see much difference between a P III and a Celeron.

—Gobind Ahuja

Dr Tribune: This problem may be due to Norton Antivirus or any other software that forms a part of the booting process i.e. runs when the computer is started. Antivirus software are know to cause such problems. Try uninstalling the antivirus and reinstall it after checking the date and time of the computers system clock. However, if this problem persists, get your computer thoroughly examined for presence of computer viruses.

Your problem is simple. All you have to do is clear the cache from your browsers. If you are using Internet Explorer, chose Internet Options from the Tools menu and chose Clear History. Once you do that previous URLs will not be displayed in the browser.

In case of Netscape Communicator, open the browser and click on Edit menu on the menu bar. Click on the last item "Preference" In the Preference window, look at the third section of History and press the clear history button. Then in the fourth section press the "clear location bar button". This will erase the history of the sites visited by you and also clear the location bar.

Dr Tribune: Outlook Express has a setting that allows disconnection after completing the task of sending and receiving mail. On your computer, the setting would have been enabled. To disabling this feature, click on Tools menu on the menu bar and in the drop down menu, click on options. Click on the connection tab. Look at the first section of this window and in the dial up section uncheck the "hang up after sending and receiving" option. Now click on apply at the bottom of the window and click OK.

Dr Tribune: This generally happens in case of some corrupt files or memory allocation problem by running too many programmes at the same time. But in your case this appears to be a hardware problem. Before jumping to conclusions run Scandisk from the DOS prompt. If you find some errors on your hard disk, let Scandisk correct them and see if the problem persists. If the problem remains, get your hardware components, especially motherboard and RAM checked.

I have upgraded my computer to have a Pentium III 450 MHz processor, 64 MB RAM, and 4.2 GB HDD. After upgrading some games have stopped working as they require a resolution of 640x480 pixels. When I changed the resolution of my monitor, the screen blanked out. After restarting, the colour settings changed and the picture on the desktop was blurred. After I reverted to the previous resolution, most games and some screensavers did not work. Please help me rectify this. Could this be due to the upgradation? Also can I send MP3 files through e-mail?

Dr Tribune: It appears that you have not installed your games correctly. The screen size would normally not create any problem in running a game, though in some special cases it may affect the performance. There is no need to alter the screen size. Moreover, the screen size of 640X480 may support only 16 colours or 256 colours, thus it may affect your computer’s screen. I would suggest that you uninstall these games completely and then reinstall them. As far as your second question is concerned, it is theoretically possible to send MP3 files via email, but since these files are very big, it will take a lot of time in uploading from your side and then downloading at the other side. Thus, it is not practical to exchange MP3 files via email. A one-minute MP3 file translates to about 1 MB data. An average song is three to four minutes.

Dr Tribune: You must first study the structure of your motherboard with the help of the manual that came with the computer. You will be able to find out from your motherboard manual if you can combine the EDO RAM with SDRAM in the DIMM socket. Possibly, your motherboard may have restriction on using two different types of memory modules together.

Regarding your second problem, it is essential to understand that after bad sectors emerge on a hard disk, it becomes unreliable and is prone to crashing. However, if you wish to continue using your hard disk, it will not be without risk. In that case reformat it using some disk utilities and find a portion without bad sectors on your hard disk for use. If you decide to buy a new hard disk, a 10 GB hard disk, with multiple partitions would be fine for you.

—Madhur Goyal

The temporary Internet files, cache and cookies slows down your system, but help in faster opening of a site. But despite faster site opening, it is advisable to delete these files regularly. You can even use some utilities that can remove these files periodically from your system.