New To WinDoze 7

[richard]

Hello:

Its been many years since I've visited this site and its good to be back. I hope someone can help me.?? I just bought an Acer Aspire Computer with Windows 7 on it.(Fried the mother board on my old computer):yyk: After 2 days of trying to figure out how to use it I'm having a few problems.

I'm having trouble reading text size on web sites. Everything is so small I have to use the magnifier to see anything. I've been trying to increase the size but to no avail. Can someone tell me what to do.??

The hard drive says its is 640 Gigs but its only showing 582 Gigs. I know you lose some due to the to the configuration, but this seems quite a bit of loss to me. Does this sound right.??

Last problem. the computer seems to re-boot or shut down buy itself during the night. I have service pack 1 with all the updates available downloaded. It said it might do this. Is there a work around to fix this.??

Thanx

MERRY Christmas

Richard

[mitch]

For the text size... with IE open.. hold down the CTRL key and use the scroll wheel on your mouse.. you can make it larger or smaller
or see http://windows.microsoft.com/en-CA/windows7/Make-the-text-on-your-screen-larger-or-smaller or http://windows.microsoft.com/en-CA/windows-vista/Make-the-text-on-your-screen-larger-or-smaller or http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/windows7/What-accessibility-features-does-Windows-offer

Is it rebooting after installing updates? if this is the case you can change the setting.. Start.. Control Panel... System... Windows Update.. Change Settings... (I have mine set to download only and let me install.. that way i know when i will have to reboot)

Is the computer going to sleep or shutting off.. you may need to change the power settings... Start.. Control Panel... Power Options

[Mindcore]

The hard drive says its is 640 Gigs but its only showing 582 Gigs. I know you lose some due to the to the configuration, but this seems quite a bit of loss to me. Does this sound right.??


It is quite common for a hard drive not to show in Windows as the size claimed by the manufacturer. There has been much confusion about this over the years. Look at the section on "Consumer Confusion" in the Wikipedia page on "Gigabyte" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gigabyte.

Go into Windows Explorer, right click on the drive, and select "Properties". You will see a pie chart representation of the drive showing "used" and "free" space. You will see 2 values for each. One is reported in bytes and the other in Gigabytes. You will notice that the bytes, when added together, should come close to 640,000,000,000 whereas the Gigabyte values will total the 582 you normally see. Again, the link provided will explain this difference.

[dbusguy]

If your mouse doesn't have a wheel,
you can also
CTRL + for bigger
CTRL - for smaller
and
CTRL 0 for normal (zero)

[Aristera]

Yea, Advertised drive size vs actual is not the same. To labels, 1gb = 1,000,000,000 bytes. To computer, 1gb = 2^30 or 1,073,741,824 bytes.
640,000,000,000 / 1,073,741,824 = 596 gb. Are you sure yout 582 is the total drive size or free space available? 14gb for windows and other stuff sounds about right.

My guess is that the computer is not rebooting or shuting it self down but that it is going into Hibernate mode. Hibernate mode copies all the data from RAM to the hard drive and then shuts down all hardware it can. It uses very little power and starts up much faster then a full boot because it just copies the data back to RAM and your exactly whewre you left off. If you don't want this, you should be able to turn it off in the control panel under power settings or something like that. (I still don't run WIN 7) If you want to test if this is what is happening, do this. When you leave the computer for the night, leave some windows open. Open notepad and open Caculator and leave it. When you come back the next day, hit the power button and windows will load. Your open programs whould still be open and running. If the programs are gone then it actually was a fresh boot.

[smirnoff]

Its also a new computer so it likely has a restore partition if its from a major company.

[ted]

Hi Richard,

I think the Acer Aspire is an excellent laptop and the newer ones have the excellent Acer Backup Program with the new "image your drive" option.

When you get used to W7 you'll soon see that its an excellent OS.

[richard]

Thanks to all the people who replied to my post. My 'puter is a desktop, not a laptop. As for the computer shutting down I must have been downloading an update or something. It hasn't rebooted since. Everything seems to be running normal. I think I've mastered 7 now. Its totally different from XP.

Is there a way to customize live mail such as when you get new mail-empty the deleted folder.?? I have a few wavs I would like to add if possible to make it more customized to my liking.