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

Within days of its launch www.anythingradioactive.com, the world’s first website devoted to the fun side of nuclear ionizing radiation attracted the attention of a impressive number of government agencies, security services, research establishments and international regulatory bodies. It is possible links to articles on how to build an atomic bomb (and how to defuse one…) may have caught their attention.

In just one day the site logged visitors from the Ministry of Defence, the FBI, British Nuclear Fuels, Porton Down Research, NHS, DHSS and many others who didn’t leave calling cards or used anonymous addresses. Several even made purchases, with ‘Toxic Waste’ mugs, Atomic Head sweets and key rings proving especially popular with the nuclear establishment.

The Anythingradioactive office, which also sells Geiger counters, glowing radioactive ‘uranium’ marbles and Trinitite (fused sand recovered from the test site of the world’s first atomic bomb test) on the web also received a visit in person from the local council Health and Safety department, who gave the site the all-clear.

An investigation, sponsored by Microsoft and carried out by market research company IDC has found that a quarter of the web sites offering counterfeit product keys, key generators and key cracking tools try to infect the visitor’s PC with malware. Over 10 percent of the key generators downloaded form the web and almost 60 percent found on peer- to-peer networks contain malware or other nasties. The malware payloads these files carry -- usually Trojans, Worms and keyloggers are used to harvest data, which may be used in identity theft or fraud.

No prizes for guessing what’s at the top of my Christmas wish-list. The CDS-AD66 or ‘Watch MP4 Player 2Gb’ to give it is full name has a 1.5-inch 128 x 128 pixel/250k colour OLED screen, it supports MP3, WMA and MP4 (NVX) video formats and JPEG image files, displays time and date when it’s not showing movies, records, has 5 equaliser modes, super bass and 3D sound. It’s new, so new in fact that we’re not aware of any UK distributors but if you’re interested in becoming one you can contact the wholesalers and buy a sample for $101 or a 5-pack for $95.92 each, and if you do let me know, I want one!

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/

It’s true, apparently, according to MS watcher Dan Richman. Microsoft is planning to give away Office Accounting Express 2007, a bookkeeping program for small businesses and an upgrade of Small Business Accounting 2006. So what’s the catch? Well, it’s an on-line product and you will need to shell out for some of the services, for example payroll services will set you back $169 a year, credit card processing works out at $9.95 a months and you can receive up to 300 credit reports for around $100 per month. The program has all of the usual accounting features, including processing invoices, sales orders, receive payments through credit cards and PayPal, produce reports and so on, and it also has the facility to sell products online through ebay.

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.