If you need to use symbols or characters not easily accessible on your keyboard you can access them via your ALT key on any Windows PC.

Just hold the left ALT key and type the number for the symbol using the number pad on the keyboard (rather than the numbers on the top line).

• Alt 156 - £ (Pound)
• Alt 0128 - € (Euro)
• Alt 155 - ¢ (Cent)
• Alt 157 - ¥ (Yen)

Remember that on laptops the number pad is usually located on the main keyboard in blue numbers and accessed via the matching blue 'Fn' key (typically on the bottom left of the keyboard) .

So on laptops it will go something like:-

• Hold Alt + Fn
• Type number e.g. 156 for a pound symbol - usually 'jio' on a laptop keyboard
• Let go of Alt + Fn

There are symbols for languages, drawing, punctuation and lots more. Check out this full list of ALT codes in categories.

runPCrun recommend MozyPro for our business clients (usually in conjunction with an in-house backup solution, you can never have too many backups and they are faster to recover larger data volumes). However MozyHome is a good product in itself for home users and I use it myself for my personal data.

When I initially tested MozyHome, there was a "add network share (BETA)"  option which could be enabled. Since I use a Networked Attached Storage (NAS) device for my personal data at home (so my wife can easily access our photos etc.) this was perfect and so I subscribed.  Unfortunately updates to MozyHome since have removed this option. When I contacted MozyHome support their (obvious) answer was that "we don't support that".

Since I was loathe to stop my subscription (it was only a month or so before that I'd finally uploaded 40Gb of my personal photos) I had a root around and found that while MozyHome had removed the option from the GUI, there was still an entry in the registry for this option.

All you have to do is open regedit (type 'regedit' at the Start > Run in XP or Windows button > Start search in Vista) and edit the following key

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\mozy\options
networksharesupport
Value data REG_DWORD = 1

Here is a .reg file for those people that just want to 'click and go' - (right click and "save as")

Now when you right click on the top level of the file system

When you click on this, the Add Network Share dialog box pops up.

And the share pops up now in your File System view for you to select what needs to be backed up.

Once backed up, it will also pop up in the Restore view.

Please note that I've found with the last few updates when MozyHome updates itself, it resets this value to 0, but the backup still functions properly. However it doesn't allow you to change the backup settings until the value is set back to 1 and the UNC share re-added. The restore view always works.

Hopefully MozyHome will not change this policy or remove it completely in future updates.

A reminder that Windows XP availability is nearing end of life, and will not be available after June 30 2008.

Now Dell in the US have announced that they will be offering Windows XP pre-installed after June 30 2008 via the Vista Business/Ultimate "downgrade" feature, but there are no equivalent announcements being made by Dell UK at this moment.

To avoid any problems, if you are considering buying a new PC in the near future and you wish it to have Windows XP installed, then I would advise you to buy now to avoid any uncertainty.

Please remember that this is the end of "OEM sales" whereby it can be purchased with a PC (the Vista loophole not withstanding). Retail copies are not being pulled off the shelves and the actual operating system will be supported by Microsoft until early April 2014

The Internet Archive shows us that the PC of Dr. Thomas Pabst, creator of Toms Hardware Guide - in December 1997 was the following beast of a machine:-

• CPU: Intel Pentium II, 266 MHz, overclocked to 300 MHz
• Graphics: Matrox Millennium with 4 MB of RAM
• Hard disk: 1 Seagate Cheetah ST34501W (up to 18Gb and "Unsurpassed formatted data rates of 14.5 to 21.3 Mbytes per second"
• Modem: US Robotics I-Modem external (yup, a modem)
• CD-Rom Drive: Plextor 12Plex - a SCSI 12x CD-ROM



As we all know, in 10 years our 4Ghz quad-core CPU, 4Gb RAM, 1Tb HDD machines will look as ridiculous as this - which is a sobering thought. Happy computing!

We seem to be seeing a bug in Adobe Acrobat 8.1.2 where printing a PDF from within Acrobat Reader prints out with red backgrounds on images with certain documents, it may be in conjuction with HP printers. But we've only seen 3 cases in various offices so it's hard to be certain of that at the moment.

There doesn't seem to be a fix that we've found at the moment, so we recommend as a temporary solution until it is fixed by Adobe is to either downgrade to an earlier version or to use an alternative PDF viewer.

I recommend the FoxIt PDF Reader as it is free, works well and is fast and solves this problem for the people that have come across it.

Seems rdpclip.exe misbehaves occasionally, preventing use of the "copy" function (via Ctrl+C or menu) in Windows or Office 2003

The temporary solution seems to be to kill the rdpclip.exe process. To do this go to the Start button and click Run. Then type

taskkill /F /IM rdpclip.exe

There is a hotfix for Windows 2003 server to prevent this, but in this instance there was no connection to a Win 2003 server, it was a Windows XP computer that was acting as the server being connected to.