Q. I have many names in my Outlook Express address book that I would like to delete. I also have others I would like to separate into a personal list or into a business list. How do I do it?
Also, I have extensive lists of favorites, and I want to delete some of these as well. There are some folders that contain some items I would selectively delete. Is there also a way to manage and alphabetize my address book and favorites?
Rick Flynn @imax.net
A. The address book built in to the Windows operating system as part of the Outlook Express e-mail module is another example of Microsoft’s vexing policy of releasing superb software with all kinds of powers that users are never shown.
So here’s a brief user’s manual on these points, Mr. F.
The Outlook Express address book lets users input a lot of data about each contact and then sort them by name, phone number, business address and home address. Just open the address book and check out the display in the right-hand pane. It lists in brief each of these aspects for each contact, and they can be sorted by simply giving a double mouse-click to the category’s name at the top of the display.
Users also can employ a Sort option that pops up in the View menu from the Address Book toolbar. This has an added command to change the sort order from ascending to descending.
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To separate your contacts into groups for personal and business, just click on the File command and pick New Group. This brings up a display of all your contacts on the left and a list for the new group on the right. You can select items in your current list and copy them into a new group. Then give the new group a name and close it. You will see a list of all your folders on the left of the display, and the new group will appear below the master folder heading of Main Identity’s Contacts.
The Favorites list can be manipulated using the same technique by giving a right-click on the Start button and selecting the Explore option. In the resulting display, look for the folder called Favorites, with a distinctive yellow star for an icon.
Open that folder and you will find the actual files that make up your favorite Web sites and the folders you set up. The content is listed in a pane to the left, and whichever folder is selected will have its contents displayed to the right. To manipulate these files, set up the Details view by right-clicking in the Favorites folder and selecting Details from the View menu. Instead of icons, this view gives individual lines with file name followed by information about size, date created and such.
You can use the same kind of toolbar mouse-clicks as in the Address book to rearrange and sort items by category.
To find stuff to move and delete, open each folder and drag the icons for stuff you want to move to the appropriate folder. You can right-click on unwanted items and use the delete command that pops up.
This Windows Explorer tool lets one perform many more operations than using just the Organize Favorites option that comes up when one clicks on the Favorites icon in the browser.
Q. My 80 gigabyte Compaq runs Windows 98 and is getting long in the tooth. This fall, I plan to replace it in a new Dell, probably with 250 gb. In the meantime, I’m concerned about backups (my CD burner isn’t working).
If I were to buy a large-storage external drive, would I be able to copy My Documents content from my PC onto this medium without going through any special hoops?
Tom Witom @comcast.net
A. You need one or perhaps two types of external storage devices that come attached to a cable that connects to the USB port on a computer for data transfer. The choices are an external hard drive and/or an external DVD burner.
However, since you don’t have a modern Windows XP machine, you have an additional problem that is fairly easily overcome.
Your wheezer of a Windows 98 computer has the slow USB 1 connectors instead of the new and far faster USB 2. So it would be best, by far, if you acquire a USB 2.0 card that is inserted in an expansion slot inside the computer’s case. This is quite easy to do, and the result is two or more high-speed USB 2 ports on the back of the case.
Simply pushing one board into one of the computer’s expansion slots is much easier than acquiring internal hard drives and DVD recorders, because they must be wired into the circuitry and then mounted to the case using screws and rails that have busted many a knuckle.
Makers of external DVD drives and external hard drives include software that can handle backups automatically, or you can do it by hand.
In your case, you could plug a USB 2.0 hard drive into your computer and drag the icon for My Documents onto the icon for the new drive in the My Computer folder. Even if you have that 80 gb drive filled to the brim, the transfer time will be measured in minutes. Many external hard drives will work with USB 1, but the process takes many hours to complete and, therefore, dangers of errors are greater.
I included an external DVD drive in this answer because these drives have the advantage of saving important data onto a disc where it cannot be overwritten, as a hard drive can. Furthermore, DVDs lack all of the moving parts that make hard drives wear out and/or crash on occasion.
Most external DVD drives come with software like Nero 6.0 that automatically will break your data into segments that can span a stack of DVDs.
Q. On our family computer we all log in separately. Do we have to scan disc, defragment, spyware search, etc., under all four settings, or is it enough if I do it under my sign-in alone?
Scott Bross @msn.com
A. Except for relatively minor spyware issues, you don’t have the concerns you expressed, but there is some other stuff that you need to know, Mr. B.
Just about everybody with Windows XP has experienced the maddening phenomenon when after running one of these hard-drive maintenance modules included in the operating system, they get a repeated error message saying that another program is using the hard drive, and so the maintenance had to be shut down.
So before that happens to you, let me urge you to boot your computer in so-called Safe Mode before running these utilities. Safe Mode is a stripped-down version of Windows without programs running in the background. As ever more stuff gets loaded onto a PC, there are ever more of these background programs to cause trouble.
To start in Safe Mode, press the F8 key during bootup. This starts the computer with all the icons larger than usual and with far fewer colors in the display. But the hard-drive utilities still can be accessed with a click on Start and All Programs and Accessories and then System Tools to run the utilities.
There is a chance with spyware that one of your family members has saved as a browser Favorite some booby-trapped Web site that kicks in to do something invasive when opened. But otherwise you can assume that spyware scans cover all of the potentially dangerous temporary Internet files, cookies and plug-ins in each separate account.
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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.