Q. I have acquired from my son the laptop he used during his last year of college and for a couple years after that. He did a lot of online gaming, watching videos, downloading of stuff from the Internet, etc., that I do not do. I wanted to get rid of several programs and miscellaneous materials that are no longer needed, but I have encountered a problem.
When I open the control panel and click on Add or Remove Programs, that utility does not open. The hourglass shows for a few seconds, then disappears, and nothing happens. I have also tried right-clicking on the icon and clicking Open, with the same lack of results. How do I restore functionality to that utility? The laptop is a Dell Inspiron 8600 operating on Windows XP.
John DePue @comcast.net
A. If this is an easy fix, it will be sweet, but if not, oh my! Most likely the problem is that the icon is corrupted on the Control Panel that is supposed to take you to the Windows tool for adding and removing programs.
If so, you can bring up this display without the mouse clicks by using the Run tool that is available when one clicks on Start. In the input box for Run, type in appwiz.cpl and click OK. This will bring up the window showing all of the programs on the computer, along with buttons to remove any or all of them.
If some slack-jawed, rat-eyed, drooling hacker got deeper into the Dell laptop’s innards and corrupted the display setting for Add or Remove Programs, you probably can get around things by booting the computer up in Safe Mode, which starts the computer without running any of the background programs that could be your culprit.
Turn the laptop off and then switch it back on and hold down the F8 key. In the blocky low-resolution display that comes up, click on Start and Control Panel again and click on Add or Remove Programs. You then can remove what you want and return to normal mode by restarting the computer.
Now we get to the “oh my!” part. There is a chance that a vandal rewrote parts of the System Registry to stop display of each individual program on the computer. I don’t think this is the culprit, but if it is, your only fix is to retrieve the recovery disc that came with the Inspiron and reinstall the operating system.
Q. I am learning to work with digital photos and I can’t figure out how to compress the file size. At work, I have Microsoft Office 2003 Picture Manager, and it has a feature that compresses the file size. But I have Microsoft Office XP at home, which has Photo Editor, and that same compression feature isn’t available (at least I cannot find it). Maybe this isn’t even necessary, but I thought it would help manage the disk space on my hard drive.
When I download the photos from the camera, the file size for each photo is about 1 megabyte, and all the files are JPEG format. Also, I want to back up my photos to a CD and thought the compressed file sizes would let me burn all the photo files on a single CD. Can you please give me a quick lesson on this?
Dena Whitaker @comcast.net
A. You almost certainly should not do what you want to do with those camera-created pictures, Ms. W. The Office Picture Manager doesn’t actually compress files in the way that word usually is used by computer experts.
Compression like the JPEG you are using removes unnecessary bits of information to squeeze a file down to the smallest it can be while retaining its resolution, which is the number of pixels or dots in the photo. This is done by cheating on things like shadows, secondary colors and other aspects of an image.
But Microsoft is using a different approach altogether. It is tossing out a great number of pixels to deliver images that are quite small but also quite tiny in terms of the information they hold. If you compress an 8 x 10 image, it remains 8 x 10. If you use the Microsoft compression tool, the 8 x 10 becomes much smaller, maybe 2 x 3.
This means lousy prints and visibly diminished quality, even in an e-mail message, Word document or Web page. It writes over the original image, which ruins it for things like printing or onscreen viewing. Don’t do it with original photos. If you must compress in this sense, make a copy of the image first and then squeeze it.
It’s true that a CD or DVD can hold far more of these Microsoft-mashed images, but keep in mind that these storage devices will hold a great number of images without messing them up. Figure roughly 600 of those big JPEGs, or 4,000 on a DVD. That’s a whole lot of quality photos.
Q. I have a weird problem. Running XP, doing a lot of video editing and putting the machine through its paces, I loaded all the Google desktops the other night, and after it crashed (hung up) I went to Control+Alt+Delete to find the Windows Task Manager. It came up, but the menus on the top were gone.
There was no way to get rid of it once it was up, other than to go to the Start menu and just shut the computer down and restart. Have you ever heard of this?
David Johnson, San Jose, Calif.
A. Mister Computer Question Answer Person hates to admit he’s never heard of something, Mr. J., but I fear I’ve never heard of this wrinkle on problems that seem to crop up when folks load a whole lot of those free tools from Google like the Google Toolbar and the Google Desktop.
If I were you I’d start by using the Windows Add or Remove Programs control panel to remove all of Google’s stuff on the computer (click on Start, then Control Panel and then Add or Remove Programs).
This should restore the Windows Task Manager to its proper configuration, with menus on top, because the uninstall software is supposed to remove all changes made to system settings, along with removing the selected program.
If this fails, you should use the System Restore utility to bring the computer back to its condition before you installed those Google utilities, which are great when they work but sometimes are causes of burps and blips and hang-ups.
To review, click on Start and then All Programs and Accessories and then System Tools. Open the System Restore icon there, and you’ll get a display showing calendars that you can click to send the computer back to that date, in your case the day before getting googled by Google.
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Contact Jim Coates via e-mail at jcoates@tribune.com or snail mail at the Chicago Tribune, Room 400, 435 N. Michigan Ave., Chicago IL 60611. Questions can be answered only through this column. Add your point of view at chicagotribune.com/askjim.
