Q1 Single-sided v Double-sided RAM
I recently purchased a Chaintech ZNF3-250 motherboard with an Athlon 64 3200+processor and 1GB of DDR 400 Kingston Value RAM. The RAM is in the form of two double-sided modules of 512MB. On boot up, the machine registers all the RAM, if it gets that far. It is highly unstable and usually freezes at some point during the boot process. On closer inspection of the manual, I found that only the first memory channel is compatible with double-sided memory and subsequently discovered that the machine is indeed perfectly stable with only one stick of RAM placed in this channel. If the other two channels are incompatible with double-sided memory, how does the computer register the amount of RAM correctly when double-sided memory is placed in one of these channels? Is there any way of upgrading these slots so that they can use double-sided memory?

Q2 Outlook cannot perform my search
In Outlook, the error message, “Outlook cannot perform your search. Outlook cannot display this view. A folder by this name already exists”, has started to appear. Any ideas what causes it? I am running Outlook 98 on Windows 98 SE. It's generated from “Advanced Find”.

Q3 Why do I have 10,000 inf files?
My Windows\inf directory has more than 10,000 files called OEMxxx.INF, with xxx going from 0 to 9999. And they are all empty. I presume I can remove them. But where did they come from?

Q4 Explorer error after reinstalling windows XP
I recently had my hard drive reformatted by another computer repairer in order to rid my PC of a premium-rate dialler that had embedded itself on the system. I then managed to reinstall all my system drivers and programs but every time I fire up my system, within 20 to 30 seconds of all the programs loading I see the following message: “Explorer has caused an error in-7058755670.TMP. Explorer will now close”

Q5 Seeing Avery labels
I'm trying to print standard Avery labels in Word 2003 Pro. The problem is that I can't see the labels. I choose the appropriate label, then select 'Full page of same label'. When offered the choice, I select' New Document'. I then see a blank page of the right size that seems to have some formatting, but I don't see where the labels actually are. When I used to do this in Word 2000, I could see the actual sheet of labels, which made it much easier to tab through the sheet and see the layout and appearance.

Q6 Movie maker says I don't have enough memory
I'm running Windows Movie Maker under Windows XP Home, and I've assembled rather a large movie, complete with backing music, titles and so on. When I ask Movie Maker to complete the final step and Finish Movie, it whirrs and clunks for some considerable time and then tells me I've run out of memory on the drive. I have lots of memory on my computer, and a disk drive with40GB of free space on it. I'm wondering whether the problem is that Movie Maker is on one of the drives with less free space.

Q7 Recovering a personal profile in XP
A system running Windows XP Professional has “automatically” deleted a personal profile that now appears to be lost. Is there a way of finding and recovering this information?

Q8 I lost my pictures when I inadvertantly moved them to the fonts folder
I have managed to lose a large part of my photo collection while trying to move it to a shared folder on my home network. Instead of dropping the folder (which was a sub-folder of My Pictures) into the shared documents folder I accidentally dropped it into a folder called Fonts beneath it. The folder was successfully created below the Shared Fonts folder but appears to be completely empty. It is also no longer present under My Pictures. No error or warning message occurred during this operation and if I try and move the folder back again I just get an” access denied’ message, despite being logged in with administrator privileges. Have I lost my photo collection for good or is there a way to get it back? The PC is running Windows XP Home Edition using the NTFS file system, so it isn’t easily viewable from a DOS prompt.

Q9 Hardware changes in XP
As I understand it the original activation code for Windows XP cannot be reused after reinstalling Windows, if I make any significant hardware changes to my computer. Over the years I have upgraded and added to my computer using operating systems ranging from DR DOS to Windows M.E., while not necessarily changing the operating system at the same time as the hardware. Will I lose this flexibility if I change to Windows XP?

Q10 My processor is running at half speed
I recently purchased a Hewlett-Packard Compaq NX9105 notebook direct from HP. It has an Athlon XPM 3000+ processor that is supposed to run at 1,600MHz. When I checked the System Properties General tab, however, it said it was running at 797MHz, which is around half the speed. HP's technical support staff told me to run Msconfig and disable all the background startup programs. I did this and sure enough the system showed the processor running at 1,600MHz.What do all these background startup programs do? My notebook seems to work perfectly well with them disabled. Is it normal for startup programs running in the background to drag down the processor speed like this? Isn't processor speed a constant factor?

FAQ PC faults 1-10.....11-20