But unfortunately, scammers also love to use the internet to find you, using anyway they can to hide their identity from you.

Scammers like to use popular, legitimate and trusted sites and services to try and lure you into giving them your personal details or money. There are many ways they can engage with you. Maybe through emails, phone calls, text messages. Then they may spin a long and convincing story that plays on your trust and emotions to try and get you to hand over your money. It is all lies – if you pay, you’ll never see your money again.

many companies work hard to keep scammers out, but you need to do your bit too. Be on guard against scammers and the way they can lower your defences and gain access to your life.

Protect yourself against scammers

DON’T RESPOND
Ignore suspicious emails, letters, house visits, phone calls or SMS – press ‘delete’, and throw them out, shut the door or just hang up.

WATCH OUT FOR SLICK TRICKS
Scammers use sophisticated tricks such as fake websites, glossy brochures, technical jargon or posing as someone that you know and trust – don’t fall for them!

DON’T LET SCAMMERS PUSH YOUR BUTTONS
Scammers will play on your emotions to get what they want

PROTECT YOUR IDENTITY
Your personal details are private and invaluable – keep them that way and away from scammers. Unfortunately places like Face book and other social networking sites are a great place for scammers to get your information. Already we have heard of identity theft from these places.

For information on all the scams, please visit a scamwatch site. The link below is for the one in Australia.

http://www.scamwatch.gov.au

Upon starting Outlook I receive the following error;

“This application has failed to start because MSVCR80.dll was not found.
Re-installing the application may fix this problem.”

I reinstalled Outlook but that did not solve it. How can I recover?

The source of the issue is that an add-in that you installed modified or created its own outlook.exe.manifest file in the Outlook installation directory.

Delete the manifest-file
To recover, locate and delete the “outlook.exe.manifest” file in the installation directory of your version of Outlook. By default, for Outlook 2007 this would be;
C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office12

and on a 64-bit version of Windows this would be;
C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Office\Office12

Repair Office
After you have deleted the file, run a repair on your Office installation or start Office Diagnostics via;
Start-> All Programs-> Microsoft Office-> Microsoft Office Tools-> Microsoft Office Diagnostics

Check your add-ins
If the issue returns after you restart Outlook, some add-in keeps changing this file back. To locate this add-in, disable all your add-ins and enable them 1-by-1 to find the culprit. Once you have found the offending add-in, uninstall it or check with the vendor of the add-in if there is an update for it.

Note: Do not download MSVCR80.DLL from any of the many on-line DLL download repositories that are available on the Internet. You are likely getting an older or an infected version of it on your computer. If this file is indeed missing on your computer and required by an application, you can obtain a the original directly from Microsoft by downloading the Microsoft Visual C++ 2005 installer from Microsoft. You’ll find the 32-bit version here and 64-bit version here.

Or

in Outlook Tools – Macro – Security – Add-ins – Manage COM Add-Ins ->Go.  I inactivated every add-in, and Outlook began to work.

——————————-
Or

For the MSVCR80.dll problem, a work-around during the beta was to rename or move your manifest file(s). They are located in the same folder as the Office 2007 executables (e.g., C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office12).
You might need to display file extensions to see the “.manifest” extensions.
There should a file named OUTLOOK.EXE.MANIFEST. I would try creating a subfolder (name it something like “old manifest files” and move Outlook’s manifest file there. Then see if Outlook works.

Grab the lasso marquee tool in Photoshop, and make jagged edges, join them up, and press delete to get the jagged edge effect.. have to do it 4 times for each edge, then on the image, right click, go to blending mode, and do a drop shadow on it..

Simple and easy.

Find your My Computer icon. Right-click it, and then left click on Properties. In the screen that comes up, in a section called Computer it should say how much memory you have. In this example, this computer has 192MB of RAM.

This method tells your computer which DNS to use for all your internet browsing. Most home users have this set to “automatic” and the DNS is provided by the user’s ISP, but you can use any DNS you like (you can even make your own DNS if you’re keen).

Before you start you will need to know the IP address of the DNS to use – if you don’t know this you’ll need to ask your system administrator or ISP.

To set your DNS, you need to find the Internet Protocol window.

For Users on a Dial-up Connection:
Go to My Computer>Dialup Networking.
Right-click your internet connection and select Properties.
A window will open – click the Server Types tab. Click TCP/IP Settings.

For All Other Users:
Go to Control Panel>Network Connections and select your local network.
Click Properties, then select Internet Protocol (TCP/IP).
Click Properties.

You will see a window like the one below – this is the Internet Protocol window. Select “Use the following DNS server addresses” and enter the desired DNS server(s) in the space(s) provided.

A sector is a small area on the surface of a hard drive or a floppy disk.

Hard drives usually have several platters. The platters are the discs which are covered with magnetic material which is used to hold data. Floppy disk drives contain only one platter.

Platters are divided into a set of concentric rings called tracks. A 1.44MB floppy disk has 160 tracks. Hard drives have thousands of tracks.

Each of these tracks is divided into smaller storage areas called sectors. A sector is the smallest storage area on a disk.

What is a Bad Sector?

Hard drives are contain millions of sectors. It is very normal for some of these sectors to be bad sectors, even when the drive is first manufactured.

In addition, a small number of sectors will normally go bad during the lifespan of a drive.

When this happens, the data in those sectors may be lost, but the data on the rest of the disk will be unaffected and the disk is still completely usable.

A bad sector cannot be repaired, but it can be marked as unusable. Once marked as unusable, the Operating System will know not to attempt to store data in that bad sector. The storage capacity of the disk will be decreased by the amount of storage space in the bad sector.

If your hard drive develops a bad sector, back the hard drive up immediately. If the bad sector was caused by a faulty drive head, the problem can quickly spread to other sectors on the disk.

Occasionally one or more sectors on an otherwise good hard drive will go bad.

When this happens, the data in those sectors may be lost, but the data on the rest of the disk will be unaffected and the disk is still completely usable.

Those bad sectors can not be repaired, but they can be marked as unusable. Once marked as unusable, the Operating System will know not to attempt to store data in those bad sectors. The total disk capacity will be decreased by the amount of storage space in those bad sectors.

If your hard drive is experiencing a bad sector, back it up immediately. If the bad sector was caused by a faulty drive head, the problem can spread to many other sectors across the disk.

How to “Repair” a Bad Sector in Windows XP

* Press the button.
* Select .
* Under Hard Disk Drives highlight the disk which you want to scan.
* Open the menu and choose
* Open the tab.
* Click the button.

In earlier version of Microsoft Windows and DOS, this functionality was built into the `scandisk` and `chkdsk` utilities.

Once the bad sector or sectors have been “repaired”, continue to back up your hard drive on a regular basis. Hard drives are mechanical devices and all mechanical devices will eventually fail.

Try This

If you can’t open your Personal Folders file (.pst) (Personal Folders file (.pst): Data file that stores your messages and other items on your computer. You can assign a .pst file to be the default delivery location for e-mail messages. You can use a .pst to organize and back up items for safekeeping.) or your Offline Folder file (.ost) (Offline Folder file: The file on your hard disk that contains offline folders. The offline folder file has an .ost extension. You can create it automatically when you set up Outlook or when you first make a folder available offline.), or you suspect that your .pst or .ost data file is corrupt, you can use the Inbox Repair tool (Scanpst.exe), to diagnose and repair errors in the file.

1. Quit Microsoft Outlook if it’s running.
2. Double-click Scanpst.exe, located at drive:\Program Files\Common Files\System\MSMAPI\LocaleID folder – where LocaleID is the locale identifier (LCID) for the installation of Microsoft Office. The LCID for English – United States is 1033.
3. In the Enter the name of the file you want to scan box, enter the name of the .pst or .ost file that you want to check, or click Browse to look for the file.
4. To specify scan log options, click Options, and then click the option you want.
5. Click Start.

* When the scanning is completed, and if errors were found, you will be prompted to start the repair process.

To change the name or location of the backup file created during the repair process, in the Enter name of backup file box, enter a new name, or click Browse to look for the file.

1. Click Repair.
2. Start Outlook using the profile that contains the .pst file that you tried to repair.
3. On the Go menu, click Folder List (Folder List: Displays the folders available in your mailbox. To view subfolders, click the plus sign (+) next to the folder. If the Folder List is not visible, on the Go menu, click Folder List.).

In the Folder List, you may see a Recovered Personal Folders folder containing default Outlook folders or a Lost and Found folder. The recovered folders are usually empty, because this is a rebuilt .pst file. The Lost and Found folder contains folders and items that the Inbox Repair tool recovered. Items that are missing from the Lost and Found folder cannot be repaired.

1. If you see a Recovered Personal Folders folder, you can create a new .pst file, and then drag the items in the Lost and Found folder into the new .pst file. When you have finished moving all items, you can remove the Recovered Personal Folders (.pst) file, including the Lost and Found folder, from your profile.

Notes

* If you are able to open the original .pst file, you may be able to recover additional items from your damaged .pst file. By default, the Inbox Repair tool creates a file called file name .bak, which is a copy of the original .pst file with a different extension. The .bak file is located in the same folder as your original .pst file. You may be able to recover items from the .bak file that the Inbox Repair tool could not recover. Make a copy of the .bak file, giving the file a new name with a .pst extension. Import the “bak.pst” file, and then move any additional recovered items to the new .pst file that you created.
* A copy of the log file is written to the same location as the .pst file.

Then…

Import information from a Personal Folders file (.pst)

1. On the File menu, click Import and Export.
2. Click Import from another program or file, and then click Next.
3. Click Personal Folder File (.pst), and then click Next.
4. In the File to import box, specify the path and file name of the .pst file you want to import.
5. Choose one of the following:

Replace duplicates with items imported Existing data will be overwritten with the information in the file being imported.

Allow duplicates to be created Existing data will not be overwritten, and duplicates will be added to the current Outlook folder.

Do not import duplicate items Existing data will be kept, and the duplicate information in the file will not be copied to the current Outlook folder.

1. Follow the remaining instructions in the Import and Export Wizard.

Note You should not import items created in multiple languages or in a language that is not supported by your system code page to a file type that does not support Unicode. For example, if you have items created in multiple languages in a Microsoft Outlook Personal Folders file (.pst), you should not import the items to a Microsoft Outlook 97-2002 Personal Folders file (.pst). This file type does not support Unicode and therefore any items containing characters in any language other than those supported by the system code page in text fields other than the body of items (item: An item is the basic element that holds information in Outlook (similar to a file in other programs). Items include e-mail messages, appointments, contacts, tasks, journal entries, notes, posted items, and documents.) such as To and Subject lines of messages, ContactName and BusinessTelephoneNumber properties of contact items will be intepreted incorrectly and will result in the display of ‘?’s and other unintelligible text.

The message is saying that you are trying to open or execute a file and that file has an extension “.exe, .pdf, .doc, .mp3″ etc… that the system doesn’t have a default program for to run that file. For instance if you are trying to open a .doc file and you get that message the computer is looking for MS Word Viewer or MS Word to open that file.

Sometimes you will have to “associate a file with an application” in other words, tell you browser or operating system what program can be used to read a file type.

You need to choose a program to open it with. If you have saved the file, right click on it, select Open With, Choose Program and select the applicable program. Also tick mark to always open that file type with the program you selected.

The problem comes in when you put in a bad address, and then every time you go to type in the email address, the incorrect one appears in the auto complete list.

To fix this problem, there are two ways around this. The easiest way is this:

* Start typing in the address that shows up incorrectly.
* Hit the Down arrow key to select the auto completed address.
* Hit the Delete key to delete the auto complete address

The other way is by opening the profile folder and deleting the .nk2 file.

* Open up windows explorer, and paste the following into the address bar:

%APPDATA%\Microsoft\Outlook
* Delete the Outlook.NK2 file that you find in this folder.

So, for example: when you double click to view a movie file on your computer, it is first loaded into RAM (a chunk at a time), then moved to the CPU (Central Processing Unit) where it is processed and decoded, and eventually output to the screen and sound card. And voila, you have your movie.

RAM is also known as “Primary Memory”. Comparatively, Virtual Memory (also known as Secondary Memory or Page Memory) is used in place of Primary Memory, but only if there is no Primary Memory available at the time.

Since Virtual Memory is stored on the hard drive, it is significantly slower than RAM; therefore, virtual memory usage should be avoided whenever possible. To compare: hard drive speeds are measured in Milliseconds (MS) where as RAM speeds are measured in Nanoseconds (NS). Generally speaking, the more RAM a computer has, the faster, or “more optimized” it is — especially when switching between tasks.

If you are constantly getting the message that your system needs to increase Virtual Memory settings
and you’re not overworking the PC, I would suspect a memory leak. This is, of course, assuming that you haven’t played with your virtual memory settings in Windows (it’s best to leave it alone or restore to default).

When all of your computer’s real physical memory (RAM) is in use, Windows will try to create virtual memory by grabbing a chunk of hard drive space and treating it like real memory. Your software can’t tell the difference between real and virtual memory, but you might because virtual memory access is much slower, due to the hard drive activity it requires.

If you encounter the low virtual memory error message, then you have used the maximum amount of real plus virtual memory that is supported on your system. Sometimes programs that crash or ones that are poorly designed will not return their working memory space to the operating system when they’re done using it. Other programs that need a large amount of memory to run may fail because Windows cannot “see” the available memory. In most cases, a shutdown and restart will resolve this problem.

Windows Knows Best

If you still see the dreaded “Your system is low on virtual memory” message then the first thing to do is make sure your computer is configured to allow Windows to automatically manage the virtual memory. In Windows XP, follow these steps:

* Click Start, then open the Control Panel.
* Click Performance and Maintenance, and then click System.
* Click the Advanced tab.
* Under Performance, click Settings.
* Click the Advanced tab.
* Under Virtual memory, click Change.
* Under Drive [Volume Label], click the drive that contains the paging file (virtual memory) settings that you want to change. In almost every case, this will be your C: drive.
* Click to select the “System managed size” option, then click Set.
* Click OK three times and restart your computer.

When you allow Windows to manage your virtual memory, it should make the optimum amount of virtual memory available, by automatically shrinking or enlarging the paging file as needed. If that doesn’t solve the low virtual memory problem, there are a few more things you can try.

Eliminate Non-Essential Programs

Over time, we tend to accumulate a bit of clutter on a computer. My article “Making Windows XP Run Faster!” will show you how to keep your system updated, eliminate viruses & spyware, scrub the hard disk of unneeded files, slim down your startup selections, and eliminate unnecessary system services. All of these things will free up resources in your computer, making it run faster and more reliably.

Add RAM to Your System

It might just be the case that your computer needs more real, physical memory. By this I mean RAM sticks that can be purchased in most computer, electronics, or office supply stores. If your PC is more than three years old, chances are it’s close to being obsolete — at least in terms of the ability to run today’s resource-hogging software packages. And adding RAM to an older computer is the most effective thing you can do to upgrade it.

To see how much memory you have installed, follow these steps under Windows XP:

* Click Start, then open the Control Panel.
* Click Performance and Maintenance, and then click System.

On the System Properties window, you’ll see the type and speed of your processor (CPU) and the amount of RAM. Note that Windows always seems to report that you have slightly less memory than you actually have. For example, if Windows reports 496 MB of RAM, you actually have 512 MB. (Memory will always be installed in 64 MB increments.)

The more RAM you have, the better your computer will perform. I recommend you have a minimum 256 megabytes (MB) of RAM, but with 512 MB or even a gigabyte of RAM, you’ll notice much better performance.