- The Guardian, Thursday July 3 2008
SD or xD?
Looking at digital SLR cameras, most appear to use xD cards. I already use SD cards. What is the difference?
Maurice
JS: The SD (Secure Digital) card standard was developed by Panasonic, SanDisk and Toshiba to provide a small protected storage format for devices such as PDAs, MP3 players and mobile phones. There are now miniSD and microSD versions, plus SDHC cards.
The SDHC cards look the same but are generally incompatible with older devices that lack SDHC support, so this is the main point to watch. Digital SLRs that use SD cards are available from Nikon, Canon, Pentax, Panasonic and Samsung.
The xD (extreme Digital) storage format is similar, but was introduced later by Olympus and Fujifilm. This now has variants called Type M and Type H, so again, watch out for compatibility problems. Since xD is less popular that SD, prices are usually higher and cards will fit fewer devices. Frankly, I can't see any reason for choosing xD rather than SD or CompactFlash - an older but very reliable format that uses a much bigger card - and I avoid the numerous Sony Memory Stick cards for the same reasons. If you have multiple devices, then it should be cheaper and more convenient to stick to a couple of popular formats, instead of having a different type of card in each device.
OE? Oui!
I like Outlook Express but cannot use spellcheck with my new laptop because it has only French spelling.
GP Ray
JS: Funnily enough, this is a common complaint, because Microsoft Office 2007 installs English, Spanish and German files that are incompatible with Outlook Express 6. This is a problem because OE does not actually have a spellchecker: it borrows one from Microsoft Office or Microsoft Works. Microsoft's Help Centre article offers a solution. It says: "There are a variety of third-party free spell-checking programs available on the Internet". One popular option is Vampirefo's Spell Checker For OE, which is also available from SnapFiles. You could also use the inline spellchecker in Firefox 2 or Internet Explorer 7 with IE7Pro. If you really want to try to fix the problem, however, Tech-Pro.net has an article on How To: Fix spell checking in Outlook Express 6.
Replacing Picture It
For several years I have been very satisfied with Microsoft's Picture It! program. However, having changed my computer, it is no longer available.
JH Prentice
JS: Microsoft's Picture It! was included in the Microsoft Works suite and subsumed into the Microsoft Digital Image Suite. Microsoft discontinued it after adding most of the features to Windows Vista. However, your old CD could work: according to web reports, Picture It! 9 and 10 will work in Vista if you run it in XP compatibility mode and check the box "As Administrator". Sadly, the very easy photo retouching features were not added to Vista, and I don't know of any other program that takes the same non-geeky approach. The closest may be an online Flash-based picture editor, Picnik. Otherwise, Paint.net is a good free picture editor for Windows, though it's in the traditional mould.
NetSnake corralled
One of my three anti-spyware programmes keeps reporting a Trojan backdoor in the internat.exe Windows file. This has a large query as its icon, and properties describes it as a Keyboard Language Indicator Applet. If I let the program remove it, or if I delete it myself, then it promptly reappears.
Richard Parish
JS: Try running a search for internat.exe, the name of the software that detects it and "false alarm", because that's what it probably is. There are at least two versions of internat.exe, one of which puts a small blue square in the SysTray to let you change languages. Most UK users don't need this feature and don't run it. This has a question mark icon and is about 20K. The Trojan version is about four times larger and has a zip file icon. If it also says "Hello. I'm NetSnake" on startup, then it's definitely a virus. For more information, see Symantec's write-up.
Backchat
· Bill Taylor has come up with "a very simple typo that causes a Word document to be closed without saving" - which was Stafford Linsley's problem. It's "Ctrl+W - an unadvertised keyboard shortcut for Close". He says he learned the hard way by typing "When" and hitting Ctrl instead of the shift key. I've previously recommended Ctrl-W as a quick way of closing unwanted popups and browser windows.
