Even those with 20-20 vision can have trouble with the icons in Toolbar Microsoft Word. They’re pretty small to begin with but they becoming increasingly indistinct on larger screens at higher resolutions so if you find your self squinting or switching to precision mouse mode to avoid mis-clicking then try this simple little tweak. Right click into an empty part of the toolbar, click Customize then select the Options tab. Under Other check the item ‘Large Icons’ and the toolbar icons will double or even triple in size, depending on your screen settings. Finally click Close to exit the Customize dialogue box. One point to watch out for, this change affects all MS Office programs, so be prepared to see some big icons in Excel, Outlook and so on. Please don’t forget that there are hundreds of Top Tips, links to the best freeware and shareware programs and solutions to your computer problems at www.pctoptips.co.uk

How many programs do you have running on your PC? Probably a lot more than you think and many of them will be installed without your knowledge or permission and run automatically after Windows has finished loading. This little utility, unearthed by Propellerhead called Startup Monitor keeps a watch on new programs and if any of them try to add themselves to the Startup group you will be notified and asked to allow or disable it. The program is tiny, just a few kilobytes and it runs in the background using minimal resources. More great Windows tips, tweaks, hints and freeware can be found at www.pctoptips.co.uk/

Here’s an interesting little oddity in Windows that will keep any conspiracy theorists you know entertained for hours.

Here’s how it works, open Notepad (Start > Programs > Accessories) and type the following ‘bush hid the facts’ (without the quotes). Now go to File > SaveAs, call the file bush.txt, click OK and close Notepad. Run Notepad again and open the file and see what happens. Spooky! Your text message will have been scrambled, turned into foreign characters or little boxes… Now try it with ‘moon pix are fakes’ and the same thing happens, it’s uncanny!

The more eagle-eyed amongst you may have spotted something. In both cases the messages comprise an even number of lower case letters in the form ‘xxxx xxx xxx xxxxx’. This combination of characters just happens to trigger a little known bug in Windows that prevents it from checking short strings of ASCII characters, and it seems to have escaped the attention of the Vista development team because it works in that version of Notepad as well.

Has your hard disc drive ever let you down? Could it be about to do so? There’s no easy way to tell, it could pop its clogs tomorrow or next week, most likely never but it would be helpful to know in advance if there are going to be problems.

That’s something you might be able to find out with a freeware application that comes to you via Propellerhead from Hitachi Global Storage, called the Drive Fitness Test. It works with SCSI, IDE and SATA types drives and all you need to use it is a floppy drive or CD Writer. Once you have downloaded the file open it and it will create a bootable floppy disc or CD. Restart the PC and allow it to boot from the disc it runs through a barrage of tests, from a quick and simple ‘Exerciser’ to a ‘High Confidence’ test. It will identify problems with the drive’s tracks and sectors, cables and cooling and where necessary repair any serious problems.

Windows Paint is usually the first and sometimes the only graphics program many PC owners ever use and to be fair it does the job, but it is incredibly basic and really not much use for anything other than very simple editing.

Well if you like Paint but you hanker after something a bit more sophisticated then have a look at a free Open Source picture editor called Paint.net. All of the familiar elements from Paint are there but it adds a whole load of new features, including a very good assortment of special effects, it supports layers, and if you get it wrong there’s an unlimited undo facility. It could be the only picture editor you’ll ever need. Don’t forget there are hundreds more PC tips, tweaks and games to try over at: www.pctoptips.co.uk

Sooner or later it will happen to you and you will delete a file, intentionally or by accident, then some time regret it. You might be lucky and it will still be in the Recycle Bin, but most of the time it’s gone to digital heaven and there’s no way of getting it back, or is there?

As you may know when you delete a file in Windows all that happens is its directory entry is erased and the space the file occupies on the hard drive is marked as free. Until they are overwritten -- and that could be hours, days or weeks afterwards -- deleted files can often be recovered and one easy way to do that is to use this little freeware utility unearthed by Propellerhead. It’s called Freeundelete.

Propellerhead’s recent travails with Microsoft Word left him with what was effectively a new installation and he quickly discovered that one of most frequently used features was missing. It’s a macro, called Allsave and he relied on it for at least the past seven or eight years -- in various incarnations -- to make regular backups of the document being worked on. In days gone by they were sent to a floppy, nowadays they go to a UDF formatted CD-R, which works just like a giant floppy. For anyone who is interested here it is and note that this version only works in Word 2000 onwards.

To install it all you have to do is go to Tools > Macro > Macros in the Name box type Allsave then click the Create button. The Word Basic window opens and you will see a flashing cursor after the words 'Sub' (and before the word End Sub), copy and paste the following commands:

Sub Allsave()

'

' Allsave Macro

Dim Pathroute

Pathroute = ActiveDocument.FullName

ChangeFileOpenDirectory "D:\"

ActiveDocument.SaveAs FileName:=ActiveDocument.Name, FileFormat:= _

wdFormatDocument, LockComments:=False, Password:="", AddToRecentFiles:=True, _

WritePassword:="", ReadOnlyRecommended:=False, EmbedTrueTypeFonts:=False, _

SaveNativePictureFormat:=False, SaveFormsData:=False, SaveAsAOCELetter:= _

False

ChangeFileOpenDirectory "C:\"

ActiveDocument.SaveAs FileName:=Pathroute, FileFormat:= _

wdFormatDocument, LockComments:=False, Password:="", AddToRecentFiles:=True, _

WritePassword:="", ReadOnlyRecommended:=False, EmbedTrueTypeFonts:=False, _

SaveNativePictureFormat:=False, SaveFormsData:=False, SaveAsAOCELetter:= _

False

StatusBar = ActiveDocument.Name & " saved in active directory and on backup drive"

End Sub

In this example the backup drive letter is D: if yours has another assignment simply change the letter in the line: ‘ChangeFileOpenDirectory "D:\"

To assign the macro a button on the toolbar (or keyboard shortcut) click on Customize on the Tools menu, select the Commands tab, scroll down the list in the left hand window and click on Macros. For more great Word tips, and hundreds of hints and tweaks for Windows PCs head over to the archive at PCTopTips