Q: I’m donating my old PC to charity. How can I wipe off all my old data, including any credit card numbers, tax information and household budgets?

A: Deleting everything on your hard drive, or reformatting your hard drive doesn’t truly eliminate its information. Many data recovery specialists can still recover the files, a fact handy to know if you’ve accidentally wiped out your entire hard drive.

To really erase your information, you need to write new information on top of it. In today’s world of exponentially increasing identify theft, many free programs on the Internet offer to overwrite your data with zeros or random numbers.

Some programs overwrite it many times, truly smashing the data. The Department of Defense 5220.22-M specifications call for data to be overwritten three times with different characters each time. The best data killers write over your data seven times, but that’s probably overkill unless you’re James Bond.

The free program Darik’s Boot and Nuke (DBAN) does a fantastic job of detecting hard drives from a wide variety of manufacturers, and then scrubbing them completely clean of data. DBAN works by creating either a bootable floppy, CD or DVD that you place in your PC’s disk drive. When you restart your PC, it loads from the disk, not the hard drive, letting DBAN do its work. It renders your data useless, both to you and the vast majority of data recovery specialists.

Once you wipe the drive clean, reinstall your copy of Windows, place your original Windows CD into the box with your PC, and ship them both to a charity, knowing your TurboTax files won’t fall into the hands of strangers.

(The above information is taken from my book, PCs: The Missing Manual.)

Q: I bought a Toshiba computer and unknown to me found that it is running a 64-bit version of Windows Vista.

I have tried a number of  “Air Cards” for Internet access from Sprint and none will work with a 64-bit system.

Someone told me that Windows Vista is both 32 bit and 64 bit.

How do I turn off the 64 bit and turn on the 32 bit?

A: If only it was that simple.

First, a bit of background. For years, Windows ran in 32-bit mode, meaning it could access up to 4 GB of memory. And that was plenty of memory for most PCs. But as PCs and programs grew more powerful, 4 GB seemed downright skimpy. Changing with the times, Microsoft began offering Windows in two flavors, 32-bit to run on PCs with normal amounts of memory, and 64-bit for the more powerful (and expensive) PCs that came with more than 4 GB of memory.

Your 64-bit version of Windows can run almost all 32-bit or 64-bit programs, so there’s little problem there. Unfortunately, a 64-bit version of Windows needs 64-bit drivers — the tiny bits of software that work as translators between Windows and your PC’s parts.

As you’ve discovered, 64-bit drivers are still rather rare. Since none of Sprint’s Air Cards cards have worked on your PC, those drivers were most likely 32-bit, not the requisite 64-bit.

So, you have three ways to solve your card problem:
Click to read more »

Q: I have a Hewlett Packard Photosmart 7350 printer that worked just fine with my old computer. However, it’s obviously not compatible with Vista. (I tried the old CD but it wouldn’t work.)

Do you know of any way (or any company) that could help me salvage this printer so it works with my Windows Vista laptop? Hewlett Packard says there isn’t any software available. I’ll be avidly awaiting your reply.

A: Hewlett Packard sells hundreds of different printers, and they’re often quite similar to each other. Since the different printer models often share the same parts and features, you can often substitute one model’s Vista driver for another printer model.

So, you’re in luck: According to the Installing and Configuring an Alternate Driver in Windows Vista page on Hewlett Packard’s Web site, your printer will work fine using Vista’s own, built-in drivers. You don’t need to download anything.

There’s only one trick to make your printer work: When you install the printer, tell Vista you’re installing a “Deskjet 5550” model, instead. Those drivers should let you use your Photosmart 7350 printer in Vista.

The page I’ve linked above gives you complete step-by-step instructions.

Q: I find your Windows For Dummies book very helpful, but it doesn’t show me how to open an e-mailed attachment that gives me this error message when I try to open it:

This file does not have a program associated with it for performing this action. Create an association in the Set Associations control panel.

I would like to open these attachments in Windows Mail, but I can’t seem to find out how. Can you help me?

A: You’ve encountered one of Windows’ most confusing error messages. It neither explains the problem, nor say how to fix the problem.

The message pops up in Windows Mail when you try to open an attachment somebody’s e-mailed to you. That message usually means one thing: Somebody sent you a file created by a program that’s not installed on your PC.

For example, if somebody sends you a file created by PowerPoint but you don’t have the PowerPoint program on your PC, Windows won’t be able to open the attachment. But instead of telling you that, Windows mumbles something about the “Set Associations control panel.”

The solution is to discover what program created the attached file, and your big clue comes by looking at the last three letters of the file’s name. For example, PowerPoint presentations usually end with the letters PPS.

So, you can open the document by buying a copy of PowerPoint, or downloading a free viewer from Microsoft. Here are some free viewers for opening commonly attached files: Click to read more »

Q: This box keeps popping up on my screen that says ‘Luminance’ with some symbols inside the box. After about a second, it goes off and another box pops up with ‘Brightness’ and ‘Contrast’ with a percentage bar in blue under each. Then it goes off.

Five minutes later it starts all over again. It’s really bothersome because it’s right in the middle of the screen. I can’t close it out because my mouse arrow goes under the box. Should I call someone? Is my monitor broken? It’s not even two years old! Help me please!

A: The problem lies with your monitor, unfortunately. I can sympathize, as mine does the same thing. Monitor manufacturers use really cheap buttons for adjusting the monitor’s brightness, contrast, color, and other settings. The buttons turn on and off by themselves.

And when they turn on, your monitor drops a menu onto the screen, right over the top of Windows. That’s why your mouse and keyboard have no effect on them. You can only control the menu through those finicky buttons on the monitor.

I removed my monitor’s case and stuck a guitar pick in front of the circuit board. The guitar pick bends the circuits just enough so the buttons don’t flip on quite as often. It’s not a perfect fix, but it’ll let me get a few more months out of my monitor. (Monitors are cheaper to buy new than repair.)

Eventually, I’ll get frustrated enough to buy a new one and cure the problem, once and for all.

But until you buy a new monitor, you’re stuck with those awful menus.