HELP!!!!!! IT Advice needed

[kingsley]

I appear to have mislaid the bars at the top and bottom of the screen! Any idea what I've done and how I can sort it out. They appear briefly if I move the cursor to the top of the screen, but then vanish!

[Scurra]

Try pushing F11

I do this all the time by accident - it's really annoying... (usually when I want the backspace key.)

[kingsley]

Thank you. I think I must have pushed it by accident while aiming for the backspace button.

[MBH]

LOL - this is going to turn into a general purpose IT thread, isn't it?

Nice to know that different people are having the SAME problems over the years.

[kingsley]

I think I might take all of the tips off here stick them in a book and make millions from selling it to fellow puzzlers.

[giraffe]

Connected laptop to printer for the first time and it seems to have installed the printer etc. (I think)

Trying to print a spreadsheet showing my answers for those 49 little pictures, so I can scribble on it. When I press print it comes up with a box which says


save the file as....




...File name *.xps


Why is it trying to save when I want to print? The printer panel is showing 0 documents queueing.

[dcfanjo]

No idea - sorry...

[SparkOut]

You either have not installed the printer correctly (possible) or it is not set as the default printer (more likely, from what you've described).
When you press the print button it has picked the currently default printer which is the (standard installed) "software" printer which prints the output of the application to the "Microsoft XPS Document Writer". Instead of printing to a piece of paper, it "prints" to a file which you can name and save (that's what the prompt is for) and you can then email that file to someone instead of posting a physical piece of paper. On a modern Microsoft system the recipient would be able to open and view the XPS file on screen and print it to a real printer if he/she chose.
It's Microsoft's version of a PDF file (short for "Portable Document Format") but of course, nobody uses it.
So - check in the control panel for the printer being installed, and if it is, set it to be the default printer. If it isn't showing in the printers section of the control panel, then you need to install the printer again and make sure it's picked up.

[dcfanjo]

Sounds so simp,le when you put it like that .....

[giraffe]

Well I went to install the print er and it told me that if I was using a USB (cable with one of those flat ends I assume) it would install it automatically. So I plugged the printer in and sure enough it appeared in the printers section of the control panel. It was even shown as the one with the tick. (So I assumed that meant it was the default printer)

But clearly something is wrong.

[giraffe]

Aha, I found something to click and it has printed.

I usually get there in the end, but not necessarily by the official route.

[MBH]

I think I might take all of the tips off here stick them in a book and make millions from selling it to fellow puzzlers.

Good luck with that I've got them all stuck in my HEAD and I'm lucky if it makes me Hundreds let alone Millions

For giraffe - there are 2 routes, but they arn't 'Official' and 'Unofficial', they are 'Works' and 'Ohhhh B....'

[Bunnylump]

...or whine and get someone who knows what they're doing to come and do it for you. I have a knack of standing vaguely near anything mechanical and it breaks. For years I couldn't even wear a watch because I always sent them haywire.

[clvrlad]

can i hire you to stand in the tax office

[clvrlad]

Try pushing F11

I do this all the time by accident - it's really annoying... (usually when I want the backspace key.)

strange its how i usually want the screen

[eirian]

Not really advice needed, more information to share.
Our BT home hub has given up, so until we get a new one, we won't be around! BT have promised to send one, but who knows how long that will take..... (they say 2-3 days, but we all believe that, don't we!)
Meanwhile, I've limited access from work, but really shouldn't log on from here all that much, and could lose this access at any time given that Work is rather seriously infected with this d@mn virus and has no sign of being fixed any time soon, in fact various PCs are being totally isolated from the system, and mine could be picked as one of those with a moment's notice!

[SparkOut]

Here's a proposal : get them to pay £500 a day per person, and MBH, Scurra and I will come and fix it for them, we'll have the job done in... easily under 60 days. Perhaps less if we get a significant performance bonus.

[eirian]

hey, I'm impressed - you can clean totally 2000+ PCs in less than 60 days? and still allow the Council's essential processes to continue, and their major projects complete on schedule?

At least they've started unplugging the worst infected machines manually, rather than via the network, so we've got a bit more confidence that it'll all work this time, but they can't just isolate the whole network as there are too many projects that need doing (eg, they can't isolate my PC as I have the only copy of some of the vital legal docs on my machine, but I know my machine is infected, so I can't copy those docs onto another PC as it'll infect that PC.....)

[SparkOut]

splutter... for that sort of money you could get a lot of "cleaning" done!

[gill216]

Wow, I'm not so stupid after all.

I have "cleaned" a 40 plus network after 5pm and before 9am next day- and I hadn't a clue what I should really be doing and I didn't lose any info whatsoever- and thats more than 3 years ago . I think anything I'd managed to wipe would have shown by now. This sounds like contractor "over- inflation of the task" because the local council are paying.

I speak in ignorance so please shoot me with flames missiles or whatever. All I did was applied what I'd have done to our home network on a much larger scale - because the person I worked for was too mean to pay an expert and I was fed up with the problems. . Maybe I just got lucky.