Q. I recently purchased a Dell laptop, and when I switch from electricity to battery operation, the screen becomes so much darker I can hardly read what’s on it. I have been all over the place trying to solve a problem seeing the screen and can find no clue. I hope you can give me the solution.
J.B. Engelman, Tampa
A. Call it the computer version of reading by candlelight, or the brown type on the tan paper in some French restaurant menu, J.B. The biggest problem facing users of laptop computers is getting enough battery life to get as much work done as possible. And so brightness settings sometimes get so miserly that one cannot tell the snails from the snapdragons on notebooks.
So you need to tinker with that laptop’s display settings to find a happy balance between keeping battery consumption at a minimum and rendering the thing at least readable. Your best hope is to jigger with some display settings, a step that carries a bit of risk since it’s difficult to return things to exactly the way they were before the adjusting began. On the other hand, you probably don’t want to get back to where you are anyway.
Give a right-click with the mouse cursor on the desktop and then select Properties from the pop-up menu that appears. Open the tab for Settings and then select Advanced. This brings up a menu for the various optional settings for the video display, and you need to find the one for Color or perhaps Utilities. The layout varies by model, but in most computers this brings up a set of slider bars for Gamma, Brightness and Contrast. You should try increasing the brightness setting until the screen is where you’d like it.
Keep in mind that these settings will make the computer display brighter when plugged into electric power, so take it easy while doing the adjustments under battery. If worse comes to worst you can go back and make changes by hand depending upon whether you’re on battery or wired electrical.
Q. I shut down my personal finance software, Microsoft Money 2005, and somehow lost all of my data files with all of my budgeting and bill-paying information. It was not the first time, but I was able to recover it before because I saved backups on a CD.
Now I find it impossible to reload the data, either from hard-drive backup or a disc. The rub is I can’t open any of these “files,” plus when I try to load I always get the refusal telling me I am using a “read-only document” and it won’t work. Not sure why Microsoft guides you through a backup process then won’t let you access the info. I haven’t got enough years left to reconfigure years of data and info. Is there a solution?
Richard Shockley @aol.com
A. This is going to be a cakewalk, Mr. S., but you shouldn’t feel bad because this read-only issue vexes a great many computer users in a great many ways because of the ways Windows handles backups of existing files.
Whenever you back up a file and then save it to a CD or many other storage devices, Windows automatically tags each file with an attribute that instructs the operating system to allow users to read the information but not to write over it. So when you load that carefully backed-up data into the personal finance software, the read-only setting makes it impossible to go any further.
Fixes are quite simple.
Drag the backup data file from the CD onto your Desktop and then give its icon a right-click and pick Properties from the pop-up menu that appears. On the tab for General in the next display you will find a small box at the bottom for “read only.” Remove the check mark by giving the box a click, then click OK and your financial data will once again be available for loading and changing.
Let me add that a great many folks get blindsided by this automatic setting to read-only for files that are backed up on CDs and other removable storage devices. And way too many of them just give up and accept a needless loss when all they needed to do was give an icon a right-click.
Q. Sometimes when I click on an e-mail contact the computer returns a message that says to install this you must click yes or no for AOL to install.
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I don’t have AOL anymore and I don’t want it. Now I have Prolog Internet service from my local cable company. What do I need to do to change that so I can contact these people?
Joanne Diaco @ptd.net
A. This is either going to be easy or a bit difficult, Ms. D. Let’s hope it’s the former.
You need to uninstall all of the AOL software that was loaded onto your computer when you had that Internet service. Click on Start and Control Panel and then open the icon for Add or Remove Programs. Find the listing for America Online in the list that appears showing software loaded onto your computer.
If you had AOL for a length of time you probably have had several versions of the service’s software loaded onto the machine. Unlike most software outfits, AOL does not remove prior versions of its programs when users upgrade, and so lots of folks find themselves still getting AOL menus after they thought it was deleted.
Click on the Change/Remove icon for the AOL service and you will get a list of all of the versions present. Make sure you go through and uninstall each and every one.
Now for the more difficult situations. If the problem continues it means that AOL’s software-deletion routine left behind programs that run in the background to monitor your actions so they can react as needed for things like e-mail and Web browsing.
So you need to do a manual search of background programs and remove all of them with AOL in the name. To find the programs being loaded in the background, click on Start and then Run and type in msconfig and tap the Enter key. Open the tab for Startup in the menu this summons.
You will find a list of individual programs with a check box alongside each. Removing a check stops that program from returning, so you need to go down the list and uncheck all items that have America Online or AOL in their names. When these are stopped those interruptions will be gone for good.
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