A Disconnect Between AOL and Windows Me
First, an update.
Last week, the friendly geeks at Q&A; labs dealt with a reader who couldn’t make his Quicken backup files restore from a CD that he’d burned. We suggested that the problem might be an inadequate CD-RW drive, but we also advised the reader to wait on replacement in case our other readers came up with a better option.
And one did. After the two-step process the reader described using to make the CD backup, the data on the CD must then be moved from the CD to the hard drive to actually restore the backed-up data to Quicken.
Q: I have America Online 5.0. When I try to get online, the first telephone number I have chosen fails to respond. Most of the time the second number gains access, but sometimes I have to wait for the third telephone number to be tried. It makes no difference which number is placed first--it’s always the first one that fails. The message I get is “The access company failed to respond properly.†AOL says it is the fault of my Windows Millennium Edition. Microsoft says it’s the fault of AOL. How can this be corrected?
A: First, try upgrading to AOL 6.0. However, we suspect that in fact your problem is possibly related to the cheap modems some computer manufacturers bundle with machines. You can test this hypothesis with an external modem that won’t require a lot of heavy lifting to install.
We’d bet that the modem that came with your computer is just a slow starter. In any case, that box is just chock full o’ evil, pal, since you’re packing both AOL and Microsoft. Consider ditching AOL for a true Internet service provider.
Q: When booting, I get an error message saying that the HTTP file c:.exe is missing. Windows offers to search the hard drive but never finds it. How do I fix this?
A: Beats the heck out of us. We tried to contact you via e-mail to see precisely what the error message said and to find out little things such as what operating system you’re using and which Web browser, but you never replied. Nosing around the usual places brought us no joy; apparently, nobody else on the planet has ever reported anything like what you’re describing.
But let us make some broad assumptions and spin some theories. The fact that it’s an HTTP file suggests that this problem could be linked to your Web browsing software. We have two thoughts. First, try changing your home page, on the off chance that your browser is looking for a file on start-up, although we think this possibility is somewhat remote.
The other easy fix relates to what are known as helper applications linked to the Web browser, the sort of things that the Web browsing software calls up when it encounters things such as music and sound files. It’s possible one of these helper applications is damaged or has been moved; you can see whether the links are valid by digging through the Web browsing software’s preferences.
Unfortunately, we suspect this issue is related to a problem with your system registry. It’s not something we’re comfortable talking you through remotely. You might want to get a technician to take a look at the box.
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Dave Wilson is The Times’ personal technology columnist. Submit questions to Tech Q&A; at [email protected].
