Lost files and folders

Several people have been telling me that they have lost files or folders - even My Documents and e-mail - recently. Whilst one or two may have been a little unimaginative in their excuses for not doing something, most I reckoned were genuine. Often a careless sweep of a mouse or unfortuante combination of keys, especially involving Alt or Ctrl instead of shift, can have strange effects - the important thing to remember is that nothing just disappears.

Everything you've ever done is there somewhere (unless you have formatted the whole disk). You just don't know where. Searching is worth a try but not using Microsoft's sluggish tool. Get Google Desktop and give that a whirl once it's indexed your drive. Take a peek in your Recycled bin too. Failing that, and especially if there have been visual changes to the desktop, try going back to a recent Restore Point. Start>Control Panel>Performance & Maintenance>Restore Points.

Files never actually leave the hard disk, even when deleted. If there's something important stll missing then you may be able to find it using a program like Recover4All which is worth keeping a link to for another day too.

"Sorry - forgot the attachment . . ."

We've all had to say that - in my case on umpteen occasions! In fact I had a standard phrase worked out to add to the second message which ran along the lines of why on earth doesn't someone come up with a little program that scans your mail for certain words like 'attach' or 'enclose' and warn you when you forget to do so and planned to paste this in each time.

At last someone has come up with just that! Gmail users can now get a simple add on created by someone called Jonathan K (hopefully not singing Everyone's Gone To The Moon). Look in Settings and then Labs and scroll down to the required entry. Click Enable and that's it. Great!

Now maybe someone can make something as simple for the tediously ill-featured Microsoft Webmail I have to use for College mail.

FAQs they can answer

The CNET Community is one of those nice sites where you can get answers to problems and, in particular, read other people's questions and see what sort of replies they got. Yes, there are a few very geeky ones and a few more that even my daughter (she's the non-techy one) can answer but you can ignore all those if you like.

Here's the link. That'll take you to the Archives.