In 2003, Prime Minister Tony Blair's top communications aide, Alistair Campbell, released a Word document with hidden information that proved that the British government had used plagiarised documents as a way to justify its involvement in the Iraq war.

Did you know that what's hidden in your Microsoft Office documents could harm you?

There's a lot more information than you may imagine, lurking in your Office documents, and anyone who receives and views them can see everything.

Documents hold hidden text, names of authors, revision history and markup, hidden cells, hidden spreadsheets, the total number and time of revisions, and other details.

So?

Here's a free program, which will make sure that nothing similar happens to you.

Point it at any document, and it analyzes the file, showing you all the private information lurking within. The program will then clean up the document so that the information drops out of sight.

It's called Metadata Analyzer and is just one of 15 downloads available to improve Microsoft Office. Not all of them are Free, however.

There's another similar type of download utility to Metadata Analyzer. It's called SendShield. When you send a Microsoft Office document in Outlook, the utility examines the document for private information. It then shows you the results and lets you delete that information. The program deletes information only from the copy you send; the original file stays intact. This utility is on trial, the price hasn't yet been set.

15 downloads to improve Microsoft Office

Well worth a quick look, I think.

I have a problem with my Dell laptyop running vista. I have only one user set up and it uses a password to logon. When I try to logon tghis morning I get a message "The User Profile Service failed the logon. User Profile can not be loaded"

I know the password is ok because I have never changed it and it is easy to remember. Also I was logged on to the laptop a couple of hours ago with no problems.

Any ideas?

Just for Jeffie

Hils, you are a star. It worked a treat.

XX

Here's a link to the latest 'PDF' newsletter, full of hints and tips to keep your PC healthy, from my mates, The Computer Doctors.

http://www.computerdoctors.uk.net/newsletter/NL0810.pdf

Inside this issue:

* People still getting ripped off with XP Anti-Virus 2008.

* Organize your Outlook mail Folders.

* Bargain HP Colour printer offer.

* The basics—More on file systems. Move and copy your documents.

* We test various file backup methods to find the best.

* Can't remember all those hundreds of passwords—we check out password managers.

* Windows 7, yet another version of Microsoft Win-dows to confuse us all.

* Google is riding high with it’s latest product, an Apple iPhone clone.

Help please.

My Java doesn't want to work.

All for one and all that.

reload it

Don't have the permissions. Was working fine yesterday.

Try rebooting.

Have just changed my old 15" CRT monitor for a Fujitsu 22" TFT screen & now find that the video clips which worked smoothly, now play in spasms.
I have upgraded the driver for my NVIDIA RIVA graphics card, though it is not being upgraded any more (Since 2003) by NVIDIA, but no difference.
Any thoughts welcome. Am not keen to buy a new graphics card as system only Pent III and 384 Mb RAM with XP PRO. Would extra memory cure the problem?

Harrycat

I suspect the problem is that the computer is struggling to process the all of the extra screen size. You could check this by temporarily reducing the screen resolution to that of your old monitor and see if it makes any difference.

I think that 384MB RAM is a bit small for a modern XP system. It used to be enough but all the service packs and fixes that have been added mean that this is no longer the case. SP3 may help slightly but your best bet would be to upgrade the RAM to 1GB or more, you will ntice the difference. It may also be worth lookig out for a faster CPU. The last of the P3's can still sometimes be found and are normally cheap.

Harrycat

Have a look at Optimist's post 7240 above on Page 362.

Thanks guys. It all comes down to cost really, as the P.C. is now getting a bit out of date. More memory seems to be the cheapest option. I thought that graphics cards came with a certain amount of in-built memory but can't seem to find any data on that. I suppose if I updated the graphics card the CPU would then struggle to keep up? More RAM methinks.
One last question then: When video clips are played, the buffering is presumably writing segments to RAM?

Harry

It's not so much a question of buffering although that does have to be stored somewhere. A second of full screen video on your monitor would only occupy 75MB, but the amount of processing that has to be done to display that video.

Your 384MB of RAM is close to the minimum that XP will use without any programs running. Once the amount of free RAM drops below around 30%, Windows will swap some of the RAM to disk. This is around 200 times slower than RAM and although Windows tries to jugle it around, this users CPU power and is still slow. As soon as you run a proccessor intensive program such as video playback then it can't keep up.

If you want to check it, right click the taskbar - slect Task Manager - select the Performance tab. This will show you the amount of RAM available and the CPU load.

Thanks for your help once again. Looks like I am going to have to upgrade my graphics card as the motherboard has only 3 slots for the old fashioned SDRAM sticks and is unlikely (so I am advised) to recognise anything bigger than 128 MB. At 30 per stick, it is not economical to upgrade the RAM, even if it does recognise it. Graphics cards come with fairly big memory now & seem to be around 30/40 for something reasonable.
What seemed so simple, turns out to be much more complicated, but as my P.C. is now 9 years old, I am informed it is becoming obsolete! They seem to change the slots for plug in boards just to annoy us!

Memory on the graphics card is not an alternative to memory on the motherboard. They fulfill two different functions. I would guess that it's the main memory on the motherboard which is your problem. As Optimist says 384Mb is far too little these days.

You could look up the manual for the motherboard on the manufacturer's website to see the maximum memory it will take (it is likely to be 3 x 256Mb). After 9 years it might be more cost effective to buy a new pc though.

The bottom line is it's not worth spending loads of money on a system which only has limited RAM, small hardDrive (8GB) & obsolete slots.
ISA changed to PCI, to AGP1 then AGP2 & now PCI Express. Most plug in boards now seem to have PCI Express which is not compatible to any previous slot.
Have now found an old Voodoo3 graphics card which has improved things a little, but as you say, a new P.C. is probably the way forward.

Harry

It does sound as though you may be better with a new PC. If you're on a budget, you could pick up a new box (mius the O/S, monitor etc) for 150.

If you do decide to increase the RAM, my experience is that even old boards will take at least 256MB per slot but you may have to update the BIOS.

I have just upgraded my PC memory from 2GB to 4GB. Do I need to change any settings to get maximum benefit from the additional memory.

I am running Windows XP