Q. I recently purchased tickets from Delta Air Lines over the Internet. When the airline transmitted the e-tickets, I received the cover letter, but the attachments could not be viewed or printed (they were “grayed out”). There was a message that “OE removed access to the following unsafe attachments in your mail.”
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Fortunately, I was able to make contact, and the tickets were faxed to me. I frequently see from my Internet service provider messages that e-mail may be spam, but I at least have the opportunity to make the decision to open or not. I had no choice in this matter.
What do you suggest to avoid situations like this in the future?
Marion [email protected]
A. Welcome to the ranks of dismayed people victimized by the well-meaning efforts of Microsoft to protect even the most careless computer users from hacker attack. The Outlook Express virus force fields are set to burn to a crisp instead of just stun in many versions of the Windows Outlook Express e-mail module.
The fix is simple enough. Make your computer a tad promiscuous.
In Outlook Express, click on Tools and select Options. In the menu with tabs that this summons, click on the Security heading. There you will find a check box next to a choice that reads, “Do not allow attachments to be saved or opened that could contain a virus.”
Remove the check, and anything that comes in will be available to open at will. If at all possible, this choice should be activated generally and then released when you know you’re not going to need it. Of all the ways to get hurt by virus and worm attacks, none is as devastating as clicking open an e-mail attachment carrying a booby trap.
Q. A friend of mine put photos that he took on his Alaska trip on a DVD+R disc using a DVD recorder/player on his Gateway PC. I am not able to see the photos from either of my two computers (Windows 98 Drive and a Notebook Windows XP DVD/CD-ROM drive) or from my DVD player.
Is it the way that he recorded them, the media that he used, or is it my equipment?
Caroline [email protected]
A. One word, Ms. R.: ISO 9600. OK, so maybe it’s a word and number. Either way, your friend with those tempting DVDs apparently hasn’t heard of it.
DVD recording software can be set to burn discs in many formats, including ones that play as DVD movies, ones that will automatically play a slide show when inserted, and ones that simply use the huge 4.7 gigabyte storage capacity to hold data.
After a user fills a DVD or a CD with data, a step called finalizing must be taken to create a message on the first spot where the disc is read by the player, which establishes what sort of stuff is being offered. The most common of these finalizing procedures creates the ISO 9600 heading that makes the disc readable by PCs other than the one on which it was created, as well as Macs, PlayStations, DVD players and such.
Most of today’s recording software simply presents a choice to finalize rather than burden the customer with specific jargon like formatting standard names. But if you don’t take that last step, you will have a disc that can be read by only your own computer and maybe other computers running the same software for disc recording.
This has puzzled a great many folks who try to share stuff and find that it works great on their own machines but nowhere else.
Tell your friend to look for the finalize feature in his software or consider getting one of the more user-friendly DVD programs like Easy Media Creator 7, Nero 6 and Sonic MyDVD/Record. And make sure the user knows that each project must be finalized.
Q. I am a longtime Mac user and have enjoyed the simple (Mac) life since the late ’80s. I’m also very familiar with the basic rules of computer use–back up, back up, back up. Right now, because I can’t seem to figure out how to make my dream plan work, I use a portable hard drive that I plug in to the computer as needed, and then store it in the garage for safekeeping.
It’s a pain to remember to go get it, back up, log it, then return it to the safe place. I can string Ethernet cable from the Mac to the garage, and I want to connect it to a slave drive so I can just drag and drop stuff on the screen in the house to move files to the drive out in the garage. I know I can do this if I buy a second computer for the garage, but I don’t want to do that.
How can I get the Mac in the house to see the drive in the garage to let me keep my backups in a safe place?
Dan Tucker, Wasilla, Alaska.
A. I’ll supply answers for Mac and Windows, Mr. T., although a smart-aleck answer that might work would be to get a very long USB cable and run it instead of that Ethernet networking cable from your house to the slave drive in your garage. That’s way too indelicate, if nothing else.
You need a system called a workgroup router/server.
Since you’re using a Mac, there is an Apple-built solution in the AirPort Extreme base station, designed to let Macs network and access the Web wirelessly. The white, flying saucer-shaped AirPort Extreme includes a USB port as well as traditional Ethernet connections.
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The USB plug was intended to let Mac owners connect a printer to the wireless unit with both tucked out of sight. But you could plug a portable hard drive into the AirPort. You then would run that Ethernet cable from your Internet access DSL or cable modem to the garage.
You could then run a second Ethernet wire from your computer to the secondary Ethernet port in the AirPort. Or you could add a wireless receiver to your Mac. Either way, you can use the Mac OS networking module to display the slave drive as a desktop icon in your comfy house way up north there in Alaska.
In the Windows world, companies like DeKalb-based Micro Solutions Inc. and Chicago-based U.S. Robotics Inc. make similar devices, called file serving routers, that can accommodate a stand-alone hard drive and add it to a network.
Micro Solutions offers its Wireless Workgroup Server for $449, which includes a 120 gigabyte hard drive as well as the circuitry for distributing wireless Internet to a home network. A PC user would use this device in place of the AirPort and the portable hard drive. (www.micro-solutions.com)
U.S. Robotics offers a similar solution called the USR8200, a router that includes USB connections for plugging in a hard drive without the need for another computer. (www.usr.com)
I tested both, and the devices worked as advertised.
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Contact Jim Coates via e-mail at [email protected] or via snail mail at the baiduhai, 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.