Richard

I have one of these mini PCs, and it appears that the CMOS battery has expired - CMOS sum-check error, lost settings and the clock no longer holding the time.

Does anyone have a service manual in electronic form, or can anyone describe where the battery is located. I have searched for information on replacing the battery, but although I have found several articles on dismantling the PC with fairly detailed pictures, so far none have shown the battery or where it is hidden.

Any help from someone who has replaced the battery in an RL85 will be appreciated. Thank you.

I have been repairing a laptop for a neighbour that suffered a disk drive failure. I have replaced the drive, but I have now discovered an intermittent fault with the keyboard. Whereas replacing the disk was a fairly trivial task, removing and replacing the keyboard is much more complicated. The laptop is several years old and sourcing a replacement keyboard may be difficult, then there is the actual process of removing and replacing the faulty unit.

I have discussed the situation with the owner, and he is happy to use an on-screen keyboard. The fault is that the keyboard randomly start submitting characters. Sometimes this leads to the screen randomly changing orientation and at times this can happen several times per second. Hitting various keys will sometimes stop the random submission of characters for a few minutes.

I have managed to disable the keyboard, but this also prevents the touch-pad from working. A USB keyboard and mouse work normally. It's not a Windows 10 issue, and running with a Linux live system shows the same bursts of random characters can appear.

How can I disable the keyboard but keep the touch-pad still operational?

My next door neighbour asked me to look at his laptop as it stopped working. He says it uses Windows 10, but he doesn't know whether it is a 32-bit or 64-bit version.

I have identified the problem is due to the death of the hard drive. he has never made any backups, so when I install a new drive it will be followed by a full clean install if Windows 10. I have established by running a Live DVD version of 64-bit Linux that the CPU is a 64 type.

I plan to download Windows 10 onto a DVD-RW media and install from the DVD. DVD-RW media do not have the capacity to download both 32 and 64 bit versions on to the same disk. So I will try one and if fails to activate I will try a re-installation of the other one. If the same entitlement will work for both, then I can just choose one of them and go with that.

I doubt whether my neighbour will worry about which version he has. Does anyone have any recommendation as to which one to use if either will work? From what I can find out, 64 bit might be slightly faster, but will preclude the possibility of running any 16 bit applications should he have any.

Any information about whether the same entitlement works for both 32 and 64 bit will be appreciated. Thank you.

I have just noticed that a few days after a question has been posted then the ability to post answers and add comments is disabled. I have no problem with that; however, what I do find surprising is the fact that any comments against answers disappear at the same time.

I frequently add clarification comments against specific answers when I believe there is some ambiguity in the answer. For example, if someone asks "How do I find my IP address?" and gets an answer "Run the command 'ipconfig /all'." I might add the comment "This applies to the IP on a Windows computer. The public IP address will be different if you connect through a router."

Now the comment disappears after a few days. Why?

Within the Chrome browser (on Windows) there is the option either to cast the current tab or the whole screen (desktop) to the dongle.

When I cast a tab, then the PC's sound is turned off (unless it is already muted), but the sound is transferred to the dongle along with the picture for normal viewing on the TV screen.

However, the Chrome browser does not handle all video types. If I cast the desktop, I can open a player such as VLC over the top of Chrome so that the whole screen is showing the VLC window and play videos in other formats. This gets mirrored through the dongle and TV. However, the PC's sound remains active, and as the mirrored image on the TV is one or two seconds behind what is on the PC, I get two separate audio sources that are one or two seconds apart. If I mute the PC, then the sound from the TV is also muted.

Is there any simple setting that will allow me to turn off the sound from the PC but still keep it on the TV when I cast the desktop?

I am using the latest build of Windows 10 (version 1703) and I just downloaded Skype on my Lenovo Miix tablet/laptop PC. When I use the camera App, both the front and rear cameras work as expected with upright images. However, when I run Skype and go into settings and enable Test Video, the front camera shows an inverted image, but the rear camera continues to work as expected with an upright image. A left/right swap would not be too bad, but inversion is definitely ridiculously bad.

Obviously I am reluctant to use the forward camera - the one for face to face Skype conversations - if the I will appear upside down on my contacts screen. Why does Skype invert the forward camera image and how do I fix it?

I have recently got an 8 inch tablet running Windows 10. I am quite used to using on-screen keyboards on Linux and Android systems, but it seems to me that Microsoft have a massive catch-up job to provide tablets that work as well as the others I have used.

I have some applications that require the use of the function keys normally found across the top of a real hardware keyboard. I also want to access the non-existent Alt key. I tried using Microsoft's help features, but these seem to have become almost totally useless in the last 10 to 15 years. Also, online help might be of some use, but not when I do not have a network connection when away from home.

If there is a way to input Alt and the F1 to F12 in the Windows 10 on-screen keyboard?

I have C: and D: as two partitions on my HDD. If somebody steals the laptop, they cannot immediately log in without the account password. How do I stop them simply reinstalling Windows in C: and accessing D:?

A BIOS password is not the answer as they can remove the CMOS battery to clear that. That will allow them to reinstall Windows. Once C: is replaced with different account credentials, since BitLocker encrypts using keys in the TPM chip in the laptop what is to stop the thief accessing my personal private data in D:?

Any suggestions?

It used to be possible to set up communications preferences for Yahoo Answers accounts so that I could enable or disable communication using Instant Messenger or Email. I never used the former, but the latter was excellent as it allowed someone to email me and for me to reply without the actual email addresses being revealed.

The email mechanism required that both the sender and the recipient had the option enabled.

I have tried to email somebody today, who I am sure I have emailed previously, but the option did not appear. There was just Block or Follow, but no Email option. When I went to check my setting for this I could not find it. Has the option been moved to a new location or have the clowns at Yahoo removed what was a very useful feature?

If it has simply been moved, where is the setting now?

Thanks to anyone who can provide the definitive answer.

Going back well over a year, Yahoo Answers used to send emails to me when I was awarded a Best Answer. That stopped working a long time ago.

However, in the last couple of days some of these emails have started coming through again. In most cases they seem to relate to questions that I answered many months ago, and which were awarded best answer by the asker a long time in the past.

Why have these emails only started arriving now, and more importantly, are there other emails on my Yahoo account that are stuck in limbo somewhere and will magically appear a very long time after I should have responded to them.

Why does it always take many months for Yahoo to sort out problems?

In the days of Windows XP, the Windows Zero Configuration tool allowed me to search for and connect to wireless networks in a specific order. Windows systems I had between XP and 8.1 were all Ethernet connected.

Now I have 8.1 and 10 laptops, which I wish to connect to a wireless access point in another part of the house when the WAP is switched on, but if I am not in that part of the house I leave the WAP off, and the only option then is to connect to the main router and share the WiFi with all the other devices in the house.

Is there a way to configure Windows 8.1 or 10 so that they will use the WAP if it is on but automatically connect to the router if the WAP is off, and do this all automatically? Currently I am selecting the network manually each time I use the laptops. The WAP and router use different SSIDs. If they have the same ID, there is no control over which network is selected.

I recently had a conversation with someone on the Yahoo Customer Service Help Desk after I had a problem with my email account. During the conversation the following 'facts' were announced by this person:

1) NAT Routers and Firewalls are there to block viruses from getting onto the private network. They do not offer any protection against hackers getting passed them.

2) My network had been hacked. [Kaspersky Internet Security and Malwarebytes, both with the latest signature files, reported no infections on the computer]. When I told him this he said, no the hack is on your network not on the actual computer.

I actually have two cascaded NAT routers as the first one provides a guest network for visitors and the second router protects my own computers from any guest activity. Neither router has DMZ or any port forwarding enabled, and UPnP is turned off in both routers.

The final point that clashed with what the guy had previously said was that he could connect to my computer (if I let him) and remove the problem from the computer. I declined.

It has since become apparent that the problem is one of the many bugs in the Yahoo site.

Has anyone else had similar advice from Yahoo Customer Service? Maybe this sort of advice is why they say the help is always free.

I have had a 64 GB Blackberry Playbook for several years. I bought it to hold a number of films, books and music for when I was going into hospital for several weeks.

After that, I did not use it for several weeks, and when I started using it again it would no longer remember the details of WiFi networks when it was turned off, and I had to key in the pass phrase each time I turned it on if I wanted to use the network. I also noticed that the sequence of colours while it was starting up went on for longer. Originally is finished with a plum red sequence just before the desktop appeared, but it went on beyond the red colours into a sequence of blues before the desktop appeared. Eventually I did a security wipe, and since then it has remembered network details perfectly.

Anyway, the son of some friends of ours has the same model of Playbook, and it has started forgetting WiFi settings, although it still goes to the desktop from the plum red colour sequence.

Why do Playbooks experience amnesia with respect to WiFi settings, and is there a way of recovering from this without a security wipe? The young man has a number of partially completed games on his Playbook that he does not want to lose by performing a wipe.

I have an old Kodak dye sublimation photo printer that still produces excellent images; better than my recent HP ink jet printer. Kodak stopped supporting this type of printer some years ago, and there appear to be no drivers that work on Windows 8.1 or 10. I also have an editing package I use with this printer that requires DirectX 9 or later.

I have looked at Microsoft's Hyper-V, but unfortunately this does not work for Windows 10 home. I have also been told that Hyper-V does not offer USB support.

I have tried Oracle's Virtual Box on Windows 10. This runs XP, which can read and write to USB memory sticks and works with a USB DVD drive. It recognises the USB printer, but the printer software reports that the 'RPC server' is not running. I don't know whether the server is supposed to be in the host or VM system, or how to fix this problem.

Also, certain features of the editor suite come up with the error message that it requires DirectX 9 or later.

I can still run all of this on my old XP netbook. It used to work on Vista, but some editing tools stopped working following a service pack upgrade to Vista. I retired my Vista system around 12 months ago, and tried the software native on 8.1 and 10 on my replacement system, but the printer driver will not install and those editing tools continue not to work.

Are there any other free VMs that will run XP and give me full USB and DirectX support, or can anybody suggest fixes to allow Virtual Box run the full package on XP.

The Asus T100TA tablet/netbook with 32-bit Windows 8.1 has a hidden 7.5 GB partition that is not normally visible when Windows is running normally. However, when in Safe Mode, the partition is visible in the Diskmgmt.msc tool although it does not have a letter assigned to it. It is possible to assign a letter to the drive, after which it can be accessed in File Explorer until the system is rebooted, at which point the drive loses its letter again.

The hidden partition has two hidden folders (RecoveryImage and RecoveryBoot) and a file (PQA.CMD). The RecoveryImage folder contains a file called Install.wim, and the RecoveryBoot folder contains a file called Boot.wim plus two other small files. The file PQA.CMD seems to set up a number of variables, one of which is the serial number on the computers label.

There does not seem to be way to invoke a recovery. The option in the recovery section of Control Panel provides a facility to create a recovery drive on a USB memory stick, but the option to copy the recovery partition is greyed out, possibly because the restore partition is not visible. Windows will not allow the creation of a recovery drive while in safe mode.

Does the restore partition actually allow the system to be returned to the factory state?

If so, how is this achieved?

Many of the answers to questions about home network problems simply say something like "Use a pin to reset the router".

Resetting a router should be the last thing to try after everything else has failed to fix an issue. Any personal settings, such as WiFi network name and pass phrase are reset, and any port forwarding information is also lost.

"I have lost my Internet connection." - have you checked to see whether your connection to your ISP is still working?

"I reset my router and now I cannot connect to my WiFi." - Had you set up your own SSID or pass phrase? If so, you will need to set these up again.

"My WiFi is running slowly." - Have you tried setting the router on different channels. A nearby network may be interfering with the channel you are using.

These are just three examples I have seen recently that got answers to reset the router to its factory defaults.

Leave the factory reset to the last thing to try. Does anyone agree?

The Ethernet port on my Windows 8.1 desktop occasionally freezes, and I have to disable it in Network and Sharing Center, then re-enable it in Device Manager. Are there any command line commands I can script so that I can unfreeze the port from just one mouse click?

For years I have been using Windows Mail on a Vista desktop computer to access emails. I have various accounts for different purposes. Several are with my ISP's mail service, but I also have a Gmail and Outlook mail accessed by the Windows Mail client.

I have the client configured to leave emails on the mail servers for a couple of weeks in case I accidentally delete an email from the client or want to download it on to my laptop.

All email services are accessed using POP3 and SMTP protocols.

I am migrating onto a new desktop computer running Windows 8.1, which does not support Windows Mail. I have installed Windows Live Mail on the new PC. Everything works well, except that whenever I download an email from the Gmail service, it deletes the email from the Gmail server. On all my other accounts, everything works the way I want it to work with the emails remaining on the server for the designated time.

Why does Windows Live Mail delete mails it downloads from Gmail?

Is there a way to fix this problem?