Your PC software problems solved

The Taskbar is too small to fit on all the applications I like to have open.

In all versions of Windows it is easy to expand the Taskbar to deal with this annoyance. Right-click any blank part of the Taskbar and choose Properties. Remove the tick from the ‘Lock the taskbar’ box and click OK to close the dialogue box. Now hover the mouse pointer over the top edge of the Taskbar and, when the pointer changes into a double-headed arrow, simply left-click and then drag up until the Taskbar increases in size.

How do I send and receive emails in the Windows 7 operating system?

For a variety of reasons, Microsoft does not include an email program as part of Windows 7. However, the company’s Windows Live Mail program is available free to all users of Windows 7 and Vista.

I’m trying to upgrade to Windows 7 from Vista but it stalls at 62 per cent.

This is a known bug for which Microsoft has issued an automated fix. Use a web browser to visit Microsoft's web page, click the Microsoft Fix It button and follow the prompts.

When I try to eject a USB memory key, Windows tells me that a file on it is in use.

Close all applications. Simply having the drive’s contents displayed in Windows Explorer can cause this problem. If all else fails, just shut down the PC then remove the memory key.

User Account Control is annoying. Is there a way I can disable it?

Watch Computeractive's video on how to disable User Account Control.

Video playback on my new Windows 7 laptop isn’t great, despite it being an expensive PC.

Click Start followed by Control Panel then click the Hardware and Sound link followed by Power Options. Now click Change plan settings followed by Change advanced power settings. Scroll down the category list, expand Multimedia settings and change the ‘When playing video’ settings to ‘Optimize video quality’.

My display suddenly flipped sideways and I can’t seem to right it.

This isn’t a hardware problem but a feature of some graphics card drivers and Windows 7. Look for a screen-orientation option in Display section of Control Panel or the graphics card settings. Also, try holding down the Ctrl and Alt keys while tapping the cursor (arrow) keys – this may change the rotation.

The MP3 files made from my CDs don’t sound as good as the discs.

Mp3 audio files are highly compressed to save space, so audio quality is lost. If your music application is storing tracks at a bit rate of below, say, 128Kbits/sec then you may notice poorer quality playback,  so reduce the compression level.

In Windows Media Player, for example, select Options from the Tools and then change the Audio quality slider on the Rip Music tab. For true CD quality you’ll need to select a lossless audio format rather than MP3.

Some videos won’t play on my PC, while on others I can hear only the sound.

This is probably due to missing or incompatible codecs. The simplest option is to download and install the free VLC Player, which can handle just about any file, but if you want to keep the same player try a pack of codecs that can be installed in one go.

1Double-clicking digital photos no longer opens them in my image-editing program.

The file association may have been changed, perhaps by a newly installed program. Right-click a file of the affected type then choose Open With followed by Choose Program (or Choose default program in Windows 7). In the ‘Open With’ dialogue box, click to select your image-editing program. If it’s not displayed, click Browse and use Windows Explorer to locate and select it. Now click to place a tick in the ‘Always use the selected program to open this kind of file’ and click OK.