Jargon Busting: BIOS, boots and flashing

What has booting to do with my computer?
The term booting is short for bootstrapping, which refers to a process by which a simple control system starts up a more complicated system such as an operating system. The term may have been taken from a story about Baron Münchhausen who pulled himself out of the sea by tugging on his own boot straps.

What is BIOS?
On PCs, the simple control system that starts up the operating system is called a BIOS. The acronym stands for Basic Input/Output System. When your PC starts up the first few things you see are managed by this BIOS system. It resides in a chip on the motherboard of the computer and manages the computer's hardware. It is rare for anyone to have to do anything in the BIOS, and it is not recommended for the novice to fiddle with it. The most common change to BIOS settings that has to be made is to change the boot order; that is, the order in which the BIOS looks for an operating system on the various drives. Usually the main hard drive is top of the list, but if you need to reinstall Windows you may have to set the CD-Rom drive as the first port of call. Since different manufacturers use different makes of BIOS, you will have to consult a manual or the manufacturer's website for details on how to access and change the BIOS settings on your computer. Sometimes, as the computer starts, it will show a screen that tells what key you need to press to access the BIOS or to change the boot order.


And flashing?
Flashing is the name of the process by which you can update the version of the BIOS your PC has installed. It is rare to have to do this; but if your computer is very old then you may have to update the BIOS to make use of new technologies. Since different manufacturers use different versions of BIOS the methods for flashing vary also, so you will need to consult a manual or manufacturer's website for details on how to flash the BIOS. As with all these low level systems, the novice is warned not to make any changes unless it is absolutely necessary as you can easily cause major problems on your system that could damage the hardware.

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Password problem in Firefox

My recent post on new releases of web browsers provoked a number of comments from people who have been having problems with Firefox remembering to stay logged on to various websites and forgetting passwords. I looked into the issue, mainly because I was having problems with this myself, and have come up with a fix that seems to have sorted the problem for now. It is a little extreme because it involved deleting all password information from Firefox.

The first thing to do is to export all the passwords that you have set up on Firefox, unless you are one of the few people who is confident that they can remember every single username and password they use on websites that require them to log-on.

To export these details this you need to install an add-on, called (unsurprisingly) Password Exporter. After Firefox has restarted, you can run the exporter by pulling down the 'Tools' menu and selecting 'Add-ons'.


Click on the 'Options' button in the Password Exporter entry to open up the add-on. Click on the 'Export Passwords' button. The first time you run it you will be given a warning message.


I chose to export the password information into a CSV (Comma Separated Variable) file because this is easy to open using Excel. To do this pull down the 'Save as type:' list and select CSV. Save the exported file somewhere that you can find it - it may also be worth backing up this file somewhere else too.

Once you have all your password details saved you can clear the password information out of Firefox. To do this pull down the 'Tools' menu and select 'Options...' to open the settings dialog box.


Open the 'Privacy' page and make sure that the 'Ask me before clearing private data' setting is ticked. Click the 'Clear Now' button and untick all the options except 'Saved Passwords', which needs to be ticked. Click the 'Clear private data now' button and then click the 'OK' button to close the 'Options' dialog.


Now you will have to enter your usernames and passwords again for every website that requires them.

This process has dealt with a few of the issues I was experiencing with Firefox. I make no promise that this is a complete solution.

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Spring Cleaning: How to clear out temporary files

Occasionally it is worth checking to see if you have any temporary files collected. These should be deleted whenever the application that created them is finished with them, or whenever Windows closes down, but bad programming and crashes mean that they can sometimes be left behind.

In order to delete these files we must first make the folder that contains them visible. To do this you need to open Windows Explorer - by double-clicking on 'My Computer', holding down the Windows key and pressing E, or whichever your preferred method is - pulling down the 'Tools' menu and selecting 'Folder Options'. Select the 'View' page and make sure that 'Show hidden files and folders is selected'.


Next you will need to open your system drive; which, for most people, will be the 'C: drive.' From there double click on 'Documents and Settings'. This will open the folder that contains all the profiles for all the users on the PC. Open up the folder for your user, if you are not sure what your user-name is open the Start menu which should show your user-name at the top.


As you can see, my user-name is 'Owner'. If the Start menu doesn't tell you your user-name, you can find it out on the 'Users' page of the Windows Task Manager. There are instructions on how to do this in an earlier post on this blog.

This is the contents of the folder for my user.


As you can see, some of the folders are slightly greyed; this is because they are 'hidden folders'. We must open one of these to access the temporary files folder: double-click on 'Local Settings'. In this folder we see one called 'Temp'. This is the folder we are looking for, so open it up. If the 'Temp' folder is empty you are done. If not, it is time to delete the detritus that is there.

Firstly make sure that you have closed as many programs as possible. Next we need to make sure that the list of files is set to the 'Details' view. To do this pull down the 'View' menu and select 'Details' or use the toolbar button as shown below.


As you can see, I have quite a lot of junk in that folder. The next thing to do is to sort the files and folders into date order. To do this, simply click on 'Date Modified'. By clicking on the headings of columns you can sort the list by that column, the little arrow that appears shows you whether the list is in ascending or descending order. Either will do for what we are trying to do here.

Select all the folders that were created before the current date and press the Delete key. You will be asked whether you want to move them all to the 'Recycle Bin', click 'Yes' and they should all be deleted. If any are cannot be deleted try deleting the remaining folders one at a time. Then try deleting the folders that were created on the current date, but be aware, the chances are that they are still in use and Windows will not let you delete them. If not, that is no problem because, hopefully, they will be deleted by the time the PC shuts down.

You can now repeat the above process for all the files that are there. When you have deleted as many files and folders as possible empty your 'Recycle Bin' and feel the warm glow of a job well done.

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A Safari through Windows and a new Firefox

Safari
Apple's web browser is now available for Windows XP and Vista. Safari had previously only been available on Macintosh operating systems. The browser is certainly quick and uses about as much memory as Mozilla Firefox; however, Safari takes up more hard drive space than Firefox: around 60Mb. Nevertheless, Safari is yet another alternative to Internet Explorer.

You can download Safari for Windows for free from here.


Firefox
There is also a new version of Firefox in the offing. At present it is still in Beta, which means that it is being tested by users and should not be considered to be finished software. According to Mozilla, Firefox 3 uses less memory than the old version - a particular complaint of mine.

You can download the Firefox 3 Beta 5 for free from here. (But be aware this is far from bug free software).

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Keyboard shortcut of the week: The Case of MS Word

When using a word processor it is quite common to forget that that the CapsLock key has been left on, or you might decide that a piece of text looks better in capital letters (also known as upper case: small letters are known as lower case).

Thankfully MS Word has a keyboard shortcut that lets you cycle between different cases and formats. All you need to do is highlight a piece of text, hold down the Shift key and press F3.

Each time you press F3 the case of the letters will change (don't release the Shift key!). So, 'testing' will be replaced with 'Testing' on the first press, and 'TESTING' if you press it a second time. Press F3 again and the text will return to 'testing'.

If you type 'tESTING' by mistake, you can change it to 'testing', then 'Testing', and 'TESTING'; however, it will not return to 'tESTING', probably because it is highly unlikely you'd ever want text to be in that format.

[Addendum]

As one commentator has pointed out, a particular word does not need to be highlighted to have its case changed by this method, all you need to do is have the cursor somewhere within the word. If you wish to change the case of several words then you have to highlight them all. Thanks to A. for this clarification.

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Announcement: The Third Carnival of Computer Help and Advice

I am pleased to announce that the Third Carnival of Computer Help and Advice has been published at http://prash-babu.blogspot.com/2008/03/third-carnival-of-computer-help-and.html.

Many thanks to this months host Prashanth and all our contributors and readers.

p.s. If you would like to submit an article for the next carnival or host a future carnival on your blog use the contact forms over at the Carnival of Computer Help and Advice page.

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3rd Carnival of Computer Help and Advice

The 3rd Carnival of Computer Help and Advice will probably be a couple of days late this month (it is due to be published on the 27th March). This is due to me having been ill for the last few days, and so I haven't had chance to pass the Carnival on to this month's host Prashanth.

Apologies for the delay.
K

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