Aunty Virus 21st June 2010
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Pam via email asks:
Hi Aunty. I want to download a translator onto my laptop, where I can scan documents or letters etc. in Spanish, and then have them translated. I am running Windows 7. Could you recommend a free version download for me please?
Aunty Says:
Hello Pam. I’ve spent a lot of time trying various free solutions to this very same task and I’ve yet to come up with an accurate reliable way of doing the whole operation in one process. What I found is that all of the modern printer/scanners come bundled with enough software to do the document scanning, and the free web based translators do a fine job of translating the document. Look for anything called OCR (Optical Character Recognition) which will scan your documents to a OpenOffice, Word or PDF document and use Google or Yahoo’s Babelfish to do the translation. You will need to simply copy and paste the text from the OCR scanned document into the online translator, and I have found that rather than pasing in the whole document, a sentence at a time gets better results regarding grammar.
Derek and Pat via email asks:
Hi Aunty Virus my problem is with trying to download AVG a message came up
“did I want to upgrade from 8.5 to 9” and I said yes. Then they both locked up and neither worked. I deleted both and started again and now nothing will download at all but everything else seems OK any Ideas?
Aunty Says:
I know from experience that you really need to uninstall AVG 8.5 before you start the version 9 install. Maybe the best option here is to use the Windows System Restore utility to bring the computer back to just before all this started. You haven’t mentioned which version of Windows you have so I’ll assume it’s XP so this may be slightly different for Vista or Win7. Go to ‘start’ ‘all programs’ ‘accessories’ ‘system tools’ and you will see the ‘system restore’ option. Choose the ‘restore my computer to an earlier time’ option and click ‘next’. You should see a calendar with some dates in bold and these are the dates that you can hopefully go back to. You will likely see a lot of calendar entries called ‘system checkpoint’ which are basically restore points that were automatically created by Windows, and as long as this was before you started the AVG adventure, they can be used as well.
James via email asks:
Hi Aunty. I always read your column and find it invaluable. Can you help? I am getting at least eight or more emails in my spam on Google, some are the same people over and over again, how can I stop these altogether? Can I amend my email name without loosing my current information, or will I have to cancel this and start up again? Could the problem be that our email address consists of both mine and my partners Christian names? Your comments would be greatly appreciated.
Aunty Says:
Hello James. Your email address doesn’t seem out of the ordinary so I suspect you are simply another random victim of the spammers. To be 100% sure that you are off the spammers lists you will have to scrap your current email address and create a new one, however there is something already built in to Gmail that you can try that may save you having to do this. When you receive a spam email in your inbox if you click on it you will notice a ‘report spam’ button that will send it into your spam folder and log the senders address with Google (what exactly Google do with this information I’m not sure). Try this for a few weeks and see if the amount of spam decreases.
Geoff via email asks:
Hi Aunty. I have a problem that is driving me mad. I Have windows XP on dial up and at some nonspecific period during every log on, for some unknown reason the Windows Magnifier that is attached to the curser comes on and remains on until I restart the computer. There seems to be no specific reason or action taken by me that begins ‘The Magnifier’, and I have found no way to turn it off (other than by as previously stated restarting the computer)
Aunty Says:
You can normally control this (and other accessibility options) by holding down the Windows key (left of spacebar with the Windows flag) and pressing the ‘u’ key. Here you can stop the utility and control whether it starts each time you login. This may or may not work in your case and as it may appear to start at ‘nonspecific’ times, with computers there is always a reason behind things so if you notice any pattern whatsoever let me know.
Hi Aunty. I want to download a translator onto my laptop, where I can scan documents or letters etc. in Spanish, and then have them translated. I am running Windows 7. Could you recommend a free version download for me please?
Aunty Says:
Hello Pam. I’ve spent a lot of time trying various free solutions to this very same task and I’ve yet to come up with an accurate reliable way of doing the whole operation in one process. What I found is that all of the modern printer/scanners come bundled with enough software to do the document scanning, and the free web based translators do a fine job of translating the document. Look for anything called OCR (Optical Character Recognition) which will scan your documents to a OpenOffice, Word or PDF document and use Google or Yahoo’s Babelfish to do the translation. You will need to simply copy and paste the text from the OCR scanned document into the online translator, and I have found that rather than pasing in the whole document, a sentence at a time gets better results regarding grammar.
Derek and Pat via email asks:
Hi Aunty Virus my problem is with trying to download AVG a message came up
“did I want to upgrade from 8.5 to 9” and I said yes. Then they both locked up and neither worked. I deleted both and started again and now nothing will download at all but everything else seems OK any Ideas?
Aunty Says:
I know from experience that you really need to uninstall AVG 8.5 before you start the version 9 install. Maybe the best option here is to use the Windows System Restore utility to bring the computer back to just before all this started. You haven’t mentioned which version of Windows you have so I’ll assume it’s XP so this may be slightly different for Vista or Win7. Go to ‘start’ ‘all programs’ ‘accessories’ ‘system tools’ and you will see the ‘system restore’ option. Choose the ‘restore my computer to an earlier time’ option and click ‘next’. You should see a calendar with some dates in bold and these are the dates that you can hopefully go back to. You will likely see a lot of calendar entries called ‘system checkpoint’ which are basically restore points that were automatically created by Windows, and as long as this was before you started the AVG adventure, they can be used as well.
James via email asks:
Hi Aunty. I always read your column and find it invaluable. Can you help? I am getting at least eight or more emails in my spam on Google, some are the same people over and over again, how can I stop these altogether? Can I amend my email name without loosing my current information, or will I have to cancel this and start up again? Could the problem be that our email address consists of both mine and my partners Christian names? Your comments would be greatly appreciated.
Aunty Says:
Hello James. Your email address doesn’t seem out of the ordinary so I suspect you are simply another random victim of the spammers. To be 100% sure that you are off the spammers lists you will have to scrap your current email address and create a new one, however there is something already built in to Gmail that you can try that may save you having to do this. When you receive a spam email in your inbox if you click on it you will notice a ‘report spam’ button that will send it into your spam folder and log the senders address with Google (what exactly Google do with this information I’m not sure). Try this for a few weeks and see if the amount of spam decreases.
Geoff via email asks:
Hi Aunty. I have a problem that is driving me mad. I Have windows XP on dial up and at some nonspecific period during every log on, for some unknown reason the Windows Magnifier that is attached to the curser comes on and remains on until I restart the computer. There seems to be no specific reason or action taken by me that begins ‘The Magnifier’, and I have found no way to turn it off (other than by as previously stated restarting the computer)
Aunty Says:
You can normally control this (and other accessibility options) by holding down the Windows key (left of spacebar with the Windows flag) and pressing the ‘u’ key. Here you can stop the utility and control whether it starts each time you login. This may or may not work in your case and as it may appear to start at ‘nonspecific’ times, with computers there is always a reason behind things so if you notice any pattern whatsoever let me know.