Windows 10 (and The Return of the Back-up)

I thought I'd give Windows 10 a try. All I had to do was hit the little icon that had appeared a while ago as it seems the bulk of the download had already arrived.I started a few minutes before 7pm.

At about 7:30pm it was more or less complete.

7:35pm Windows 'welcomes me back'! Not that I had gone anywhere' I'd 'sat back and relaxed' as the previous screens instructed!

A couple of minutes later the attractive new screen appears briefly. Note that the time was an hour and ten minutes out! That was a bit strange.

The pretty screen goes quickly though and a minute later I am reassured that whatever's happening won't take long.

It didn't. After 'taking care of things' at 7:39pm I was able to use the new system, basically carrying off where I'd left off with a few tasks, at 7:40pm. Say, at the outside, 45 minutes from start to finish. I was impressed and the appearance is attractive. You will want to adjust the colours of the small tiles that appear in the Start menu, probably getting rid of quite a few!

So far all my old programmes work fine, including Office 97!! Dreamweaver MX had a spot of bother closing but had worked fine and Task Manager soon shut it down for me.

Just one problem but I am not at all sure it was a Windows 10 thing. I rely on the Auto Back-up feature that used to be a Picasa thing and is now a Google Photos affair. I am pretty sure it stopped the day before in 8.1 as there were no back-ups of new photos transferred from my camera on 29th July morning. Strangely, some items I had used to illustrate a blog and some photos I'd put on Facebook were backed up! Very odd.

Being quite concerned I put a plea for help in various places but got no response. Eventually I spotted this evening a comment from someone on the Picasa users forum that Google Photos backup hadn't been working in Windows 10 so the guy had uninstalled them both and reinstalled them. It worked for him and it worked for me too. I had tried downloading the gphotosback-up_setup file with Picasa in place but that wouldn't even open and was declared 'incompatible' by Windows. Clearly the uninstall / reinstall is the key if you happen to get stuck too.

So all is well, so far. To be honest, I don't see much difference but I guess some improvements will emerge in due course. I haven't used Edge yet but am told that is quite a major improvement on the browser front. Cortana will speak to you if you have a microphone or just give you ideas for various queries. She does insist on Bing, though. I guess that's understandable.

If you're happy with 8.1 then stay with that for a while as there are bound to be several tweaks and updates during the first few months. It is a free upgrade for most Windows 7 or 8 users which I think is great but you have ages to take advantage of that. No hurry but also no major issues that I can see if you decide to go for it now.

Repairing Windows when you don't have the Windows DVD

Win8.1: A setup-disc or flash drive creation tool

Microsoft's Installation Media Creation Tool can download a complete set of Windows 8.1 installation files to your hard drive; it can then automatically set up the files on a bootable DVD or flash drive. Note: Although you're creating Win8.1 setup files, you don't have to run the easy-to-use tool on a Win8.1 machine; you can use a Win7 or Win8.0 system to build the bootable disc or drive.

To start, go to the aptly named Microsoft page, "Create installation media for Windows 8.1." Read the introductory material and then find and click the Create media button. (It's about halfway down the page.) A small file (mediacreationtool.exe) will download and run. (If it doesn't run automatically, locate the file in your browser's download folder and click it.)

The tool will present you with several options for the setup files, including choices for language, Windows 8.1 edition, and architecture (i.e., 64- or 32-bit). Your choices should match the version of Windows you're currently running. For example, if you have an English-language version of Win8.1 Pro, 64-bit installed, then you should choose "English," "Windows 8.1 Pro," and "64-bit (x64)" (see Figure 1).

Figure 1. The Win8.1 Installation Media Creation Tool starts with your selection of language, edition, and architecture.

You'll then be given a choice of installation medium. If you want your setup files on a bootable flash drive — and you have a USB flash drive with at least 4GB of free space — select USB flash drive. If you wish to create a bootable installation DVD, select ISO file (see Figure 2).

Figure 2. The Win8.1 installation tool can automatically create a bootable DVD or flash drive.

Once you've made your selection, the proper installation files will then download to your hard drive, as shown in Figure 3.

Figure 3. The Win8.1 setup files are approximately a 3.25GB download — for either the DVD-based ISO or the flash-drive version.

When the download completes, the Media Creation Tool then burns the ISO to a blank DVD disc or sets it up on a flash drive — depending on which option you selected. (Keep in mind that any data left on the flash drive will be deleted.) Just read and respond to the onscreen prompts. No other tools are needed; the Media Creation Tool handles it all!

When you're done, you'll have a bootable installation DVD or flash drive. You'll also have a copy of the ISO or flash-drive setup files on your hard drive — usually in the C:\Users\{username}\Downloads folder. You may wish to make additional, archival copies of these files for safekeeping.

Booting from Windows-setup DVDs or flash drives

As mentioned at the top of this article, these Windows setup discs and drives are free of OEM-added software. On the plus side, that means no crapware. But the potentially bad news is that there also are no OEM drivers.

That's not necessarily a show-stopper: Your PC might boot and run fine with the generic drivers built into Windows. But the safe and smart thing to do is to download copies of your PC's specific drivers from your vendor's support site. Save the driver files on a disk or drive, and store them with your setup disk or drive.

A final note: Newer PCs sometimes make it hard to boot from anything other than their main drive, making it difficult to actually use a bootable setup/installation DVD or drive to repair, refresh, or reinstall Windows.

The April 17, 2014, Top Story, "Emergency repair disks for Windows: Part 2," covers how to use any bootable medium — even on PCs that are locked down with Win8's Secure Boot and related features.

This excellent information comes from the Windows Secrets people.

Microsoft's Word App

We've had Office 365 for ages and its web versions of Word, Excel and PowerPoint (and, yes OneNote, if you insist) but it is only recently that Microsoft have promoted these. They now call them their Word app (and presumably Excel app etc.)

Google really have led the way in this respect with their Docs getting better and better and considerable integration of Drive in Chrome. Microsoft have done a lot to try to keep up, including an Excel Survey app which I have only just noticed! That may rival the very effective and useful Google Forms, I'll have to review that later.

I thought I would have a quick look to see just how close Microsoft had got to something that really does rival Google.

Accessing your SkyDrive is easy enough, and your folder f documents is displayed. There's a strange-looking symbol for PDF documents. I opened a new Word App document and pasted in some content from a document I had in G Drive. The images didn't come with the paste but the text layout was OK and there are a reasonable number of styles and formatting options in the familiar-ish ribbon.

I chose that particular document because I wanted to remove a footer from the front page which I couldn't do in Google Docs. Hmmm. In Microsoft's Word app you can't even add a footer, never mind what I was trying to do! So I am afraid that's as far as I went. It will need to be more advanced if it is to be a real challenge and not just a place where people who haven't got a Google account go to create simple documents.

Excel looks more powerful but I really can't at this time recommend a move away from Google Docs which are getting better every week.

Something that Microsoft do give you, though, that I spotted is a link to your folder. I suppose Google do provide a url you can copy but here is an embedded blue box! Absolutely no way to change the security for individual items but never mind. And they do warn you about that. So it's pretty useless but quite pretty.



You'll see items there from 7 years ago when I first started experimenting. Gosh, was it that long ago! You'll also see that I have done nothing since.

The necessity to use docx may annoy some who still like Office2003 and there is only Download as a Word document as an option. All a bit restrictive. But more familiar to many and a port in a storm, I guess.

Browsers. You've always had a choice. Now Microsoft has to tell you.

A European Court ruling has required that Microsoft offers people a selection of browsers to choose from of which Internet Explorer will be just one. Starting around now, a Windows update will result in those with Internet Explorer as their default browser being presented with a screen showing what appears to be the five alternatives, in random order. So Firefox, Google Chrome, Safari, Opera and Internet Explorer will be offered on a panel with buttons for download.

This is good news and should result in a much more pleasant internet experience for lots of people who have never even thought there might be another way than the familiar blue e symbol and its continuous warnings and annoying pale yellow bars and boxes asking questions that even now I have to think about before clicking Yes or No.

What is particularly interesting, though, is that those five are not the only ones actually being offered. Those five are the applications that are the First Panel contenders. However, look carefully and there is a second panel. Scroll horizontally and you'll see a selection of a further seven that I have to say includes six I had never heard of before!

[screenshots by Stephen Shakland, CNET]

Goodness only knows what people will make of these! Those behind these currently lesser-known browsers are expecting to see downloads rocket as to date their growth has been 99% through word of mouth and mostly among pretty specific groups of geeky types at that. Maxthon is apparently second to IE in China and even a 1% addition to its current user numbers will double its present share of the browser market! It will be fascinating to see which of these seven do best and how they react to their new-found fame as, courtesy of some suits in Europe, an estimated 100 million Europeans could see their logos on their screens.

I say could see as the Second Panellers are a little miffed that in order to see their wares people have to perform that unnatural business of horizontal scrolling and the bar isn't exactly obvious either.

I guess I'd better download all seven now and review them on the webtools site before the European Commission start knocking on my door.

17 drafts and counting . . .

Some time ago a client gave me the nickname Merlin because he reckoned I could work magic on documents to turn tedious text into something professional that someone might actually want to read. It's quite an enjoyable pastime, especially when I can get paid for it too and I almost relish the prospect of getting some Arial bold underlined and italic text, usually justified and in too bigger font to weave a spell over.

A few days ago, 12 Word documents arrived for my attention - the idea being to merge them all into one. As it was something that would be getting a wide circulation and possibly forming the basis for some future regulations its content would be contentious and likely to be mulled over in great detail. I had a feeling it wasn't going to be the easiest of tasks. The first problem was an assortment of page orientation and margins. Setting one set of margins for the whole document was fine except for the landscape pages where tables now stretched off into the distance right and others now appeared to have text jumbled about. The author had carefully typed entries into cells in a table, including longer sentences being split into two or more cells. Why on earth they hadn't had the whole thing in one cell, or merged a few I have no idea. As if that wasn't enough of a problem, I was then faced with indents that weren't indents but three or four spaces. Now these probably looked lovely in a particular font at a particular size but they sure didn't work now!

Eventually things began to take shape but I still had lots more sections than I wanted. The trouble was, every time I deleted a section break I lost headers and footers and no amount of linking to previous seemed to work. Finally, just two sections, one for the front page and the rest in the other, headers behaving and footers too.

Sent this off. The client says he'd like a nice graduated colour background. Hmm. In Word? No. I don't think so. better use Serif Page Plus which does that sort of thing excellently. Unfortunately, I couldn't transfer the contents from Word into Serif. It kept going wrong at the tables and making a complete mess. Another idea: I'd make a PDF from Word 2007 and use Serif to add backgrounds then re-export as a PDF again. Well, it certainly looked nice. Unfortunately, there had been some typos and text changes to fix. That's when I learned what a complete mess Serif makes of text in tables on conversion to PDF. Admittedly the text was a bit odd with spaces, some cells merged, some not, but the collection of overlapping frames with bits of text here and there was a nightmare. Even some words appeared to be split. Then there were the lines. what had been continuous lines in Word were now hundreds, maybe thousands, of very tiny lines instead. Fine whilst they all stayed together but one slip of the mouse and all was lost. Adding just one character to a word resulted in everything moving in a most unpredictable manner too. I persevered and sort of managed to make the tables look OK but it took hours.

That would have been fine but then came the dots. I hadn't seen them on my screen but someone else asked about them and it seems that moving some lines around left 1 pixel dots here and there. I found a few and managed to delete them but most were on layers several below and proved impossible to get at without moving those odd frames out of the way. That was just impossible as they'd never fit into place again so I gave up on the Serif solution.

Back to Word, which I knew had a watermark option and by using a custom image I could get some sort of background in place. That was quite easy but the edge of the image was exactly on the same margin as the text so looked a bit grotty. I had an idea to indent all the text but that was far too big a job and would have meant narrower tables which would have messed up the words in cells again! I knew I should have sat down and retyped all those individual cell contents into one big one but too late to start that now.

Strangely, the client was quite happy with the background but I wasn't. How could I add a full width background to a Word document? Ah! I could use the watermark image but not as a watermark but as an image behind text. I tried one page and it worked. Great. Pasted another 64 in and, after a bit of lining-up it was looking as good as the Serif production. Better, actually, which is saying something for Word.

Another really nice thing about using Word was that I could get the client to correct their own typos, or amend something they changed their mind about! Such a relief! Unfortunately, they must have moved some of those images while they were fiddling so it came back looking a dog's breakfast again. That's when I discovered that if you add images to a document when viewing more than one page they are inclined to disappear without trace if you go slightly over one edge! No idea where they went but lost 6 or 7 that way.

Finally, by now at draft 15, the delight of just save as PDF in Word 2007 and I sent a nice-looking document to my client. Draft 16 was needed because my image had covered up the footer. I had made it transparent at the top to allow the header to show but had forgotten about the footer. But why doesn't setting the image as 'behind text' not go behind the header and footer? Silly. It should do.

This morning I gather that Devon needed to be Dorset. I was so tempted to say, well, just change it then. But I didn't. Luckily, the client agreed to dispense with the footer. The only solution to that would have been adding to the image - now that would be getting crazy!

Quite some spelling test for Merlin!

Windows 7 questions but Microsoft staff need to learn some other lessons

To help you get the best out of Windows 7, Microsoft has produced a short guide, which we're passing on to you. It's a PDF full of helpful hints, tips and how-to information; download your Guide to Windows 7 here (802 KB).

Add your own questions and answers to our Word version of the Guide, then pass it on to your users. Download it here (2.3 MB).

Something that occurred to me when I saw the size of these 8 page documents, though, was the need for someone at Microsoft to look at why they're so massive! Having just worked on a 65 page document with illustrations, backgrounds etc. which still only lands at 1MB in Word2007, I reckon theirs should be considerably smaller. This business of sharing unnecessarily huge files is something I have been going on about for over 5 years now - and it so often seems to be people who should know better who cause the most problems!

For all that, I like Windows7 and admire the way Microsoft have created a Word document and suggest we add our own Q & As! Although it is a bit odd.

Office 2010 beta now available for download

If you fancy taking the new Microsoft Office 2010 for a spin then download it here. Microsoft suggest that you remove any previous versions first which means you may need some alternative way to deal with Office stuff on whichever machine you decide to put it on. Just in case.

Microsoft Security Essentials is free

Once there was One Care Live or Live One Care which was free for so long that I don't think I ever had to pay for it. It was a bit slow but did seem to catch some nasty stuff that other anti-virus applications had missed. Then there was the Malware protection that came with IE8, free again, and a suggestion that the OneCare pack would be available free under a name I did publish ages ago but can't now remember. Then came Windows 7 and you may find that you need to install some new anti-virus and malware protection. Windows 7 does come with some pretty smart firewall protection and IE8 will bring the same as it had before but for peace of mind you may wish to download Microsoft Security Essentials. (Here's what they say about it in their own words. Hope they don't mind the copy and paste but saves me time!)

Microsoft Security Essentials provides real-time protection for your home PC that guards against viruses, spyware, and other malicious software.

Microsoft Security Essentials is a free* download from Microsoft that is simple to install, easy to use, and always kept up to date so you can be assured your PC is protected by the latest technology. It’s easy to tell if your PC is secure — when you’re green, you’re good. It’s that simple.

Microsoft Security Essentials runs quietly and efficiently in the background so that you are free to use your Windows-based PC the way you want—without interruptions or long computer wait times.

*as long as you're running genuine XP, Vista or 7

There's another wave coming

Microsoft also tend to be a little backward in coming forward sometimes. I've mentioned the brilliant deal on Office 2007 available to many and time is running out for the most quietly announced Windows 7 cut-price offer too. Now I discover they have a Wave of their own, obviously hoping that this will prevent Google claiming the word as their own!

An attractive site (Google still have a bit to learn there) sets out in reasonably plain English what they're up to and links to various betas, trials etc. Worth dropping in from time to time.

Microsoft Wave

when = doesn't = equals in Excel 2007?

Just for a change, it's me that's looking for an answer. Something strange happened during a recent Excel 2007 course when I was demonstrating how to make one cell use the content of another one and compare it then put a statement in a box depending on what the result was. For years I have been using something along the lines of =if(A1=0.01,"right","wrong"). Pretty simple stuff but it didn't work!

Investigating, it appeared that instead of A1 containing something like 0.01 which was the result of some basic adding and multiplying it actually contained something like 0.0099999913. So I was getting wrong when it should have been right.

We looked at other numbers on the sheet and lots of them were similarly odd. Even though we'd entered just numbers with at most two decimal places in cells and none of the calculations could have led to intermediate steps in the calculations (just adding or subtracting or multiplying by whole numbers) some had lots of extra decimals and were nearly the right number and when rounded showed the right number but weren't stored by Excel as the right number.

Now, unless I have been really silly or the coffee and biscuits had a detrimental effect on not only my sanity but also that of some pretty talented delegates, this is bizarre to say the least. I guess I should do a search for the answer but thought I'd share it with you just to show that there are questions I can't answer! No doubt there'll be more on this soon!

I don’t want people to see my formulae (and may also want to prevent editing of some cells)

To hide formulae in Excel2007 select the cell(s) with the formula or formulae and right click. The Format Cells panel has a Protection tab. In there check Hidden (and locked if you don’t want people to edit the cell at all). Then return to the sheet. On the Review ribbon, click Protect sheet. Be careful if you set a password to make a note of it somewhere!

In older Office all cells are locked by default, so ‘protecting’ the sheet will prevent any changes which may not be what you want. So you need to uncheck the ‘locked’ setting first for whichever cells you want people to have access to. I think it’s the same for Office 2007. To protect a sheet in Office 2003 and previous versions use Tools>Protection>Protect sheet after clearing cells as necessary.

Similar principles apply to hidden cells (‘hidden’ seems to mean formulae only rather than anything else)

My language setting is Welsh! How do I change it?

Use *Tools menu > Language > Set Language

In the panel select just English (UK) and click on Default then click Yes to change Normal template for Word

If this doesn’t work try using *Tools > Options >Popular options and change language settings

It is more likely that your default language may have been set as English (US) instead of English (UK) which you’ll spot by things like color, dialing with one letter l and organization with a z instead of an s etc.

*see other post to locate Tools in Office2007

How do I stop overwriting in Word?

This happens in older versions because you have (usually accidentally) hit the Insert key.

Use *Tools menu > Word Options > Advanced

On that panel uncheck the Use Insert key to control overtype mode

In Word2007 this is off by default but may be on in older versions

*see my other post for the new Tools location

Where on earth are Tools and Options for Office 2007?

To get to the Tools menu in Office 2007 either download the ‘old style’ toolbar add-in or use Start>All Programs>Microsoft Office>Microsoft Office Tools

Office 2007 Ultimate for £38 or even free

Microsoft sure hid this well. They call it The Ultimate Steal. This is a great deal for anyone who can't get it from their boss (many organisation licences include a Home Use element which is worth asking the boss about) and who is a 'student' with an institution recognised by Microsoft. Most .ac.uk e-mail addresses are recognised.

Here's the link:

http://www.microsoft.com/student/discounts/theultimatesteal-uk/default.aspx

Good luck!

Are your friends getting odd e-mails from you?

You may not know about it if your friends are polite but your computer could be mailing everyone on your address list a whole load of stuff if you've got a virus. The one that everyone's talking about at the moment is called Conficker and, whilst supposed to do things on 1 April could well rumble away in the background and mail out or share information any other day in reality. I've already had a few examples from people I hadn't expected to be victims but who may not have got the important patches when they were released by Microsoft.

To make this as simple as possible, if you have any doubts (and especially if the computer's been running sluggishly on occasion) follow the instructions below to see whether you have the necessary Windows update file. (XP and Vista versions coutesy of Office Watch. There are links to the patch if you need it.

Windows XP

Go to Control Panel | Programs and Features | Add or Remove Programs then check the ‘Show Updates’ box and wait for the long list of updates to appear. Scroll down to the list of updates under ‘Windows XP – Software Updates’:

Windows XP - Conflicker patch details.jpg

Scroll down the long list and look at the ‘KB’ references – the one you want to find is KB958644 .

The Windows XP patch if you don’t have it installed.

Windows Vista

Go to Control Panel | Programs and Features | Installed Updates. It may take a little time for the entire list to appear including all the Windows patches.

Windows Vista - Conflicker patch details.jpg

Scroll down the long list and look at the ‘KB’ references – the one you want to find it KB958644 .

The Windows Vista patch if you don’t have it installed.

Office 2007 menus!

There are lots of things I like about Office 2007 but even after all this time I often struggle to find things that I could do in a flash in Office 97 (which I still use quite happily on a couple of machines!) I've searched and searched through the new ribbons and actually thought that it would have been quicker to search Google first but, of course, by the time you realise that you think that surely it won't be much longer before you find what you want!

Classic things that left me stranded for a while were form things and discovering how to switch off Protection took ages! Even headers took a while at first and I missed the nice tables and borders menu. There is a solution, though: get a 'classic' menu like the one above that should be a much more familiar environment for anyone else like me. It's free, too. Courtesy of UbitMenu as featured by the splendid OfficeWatch people.

Cloudy days coming

Cloud computing is the latest industry buzzword. There is a lot of debate within the industry as to exactly how Cloud Computing is defined but, basically, what it refers to is the concept of providing applications as services over the Internet, supported by a remote pool of servers doing all the computing hard work. Examples include services such as Hotmail and Google Docs. The user of the application doesn’t need to install any software on their PC except for a web browser to access the application, and has no idea where the application is running, or on what sort of computer.

While Hotmail is one of Microsoft’s most popular current cloud offerings, they are planning a massive expansion of applications they make available ‘in the cloud’, which could eventually lead to versions of Microsoft Office, paid for via a subscription model, accessed via your web browser. Microsoft’s cloud system is based on a new technology they have developed called Azure Services Platform. The interesting thing is that this allows other developers to write software that runs in the cloud, on Microsoft’s servers, potentially rendering Windows, and the desktop PC as we know it, redundant.

Acknowledgements to Stefan Johnson of Windows Adviser who writes cool news in Plain English and gets to know stuff like this earlier than many.

GDrive and Live Mesh

There have been rumours but it does look like Google are getting ready to launch something that could be really big. The article below from David Mayer at ZDNet.

There's been a flurry of speculation of late, surrounding Google's online storage play, the fabled "GDrive". We're always suspicious of such unconfirmed, echo-chamber-type stories, but this one is most definitely real.

The evidence lies in an online, recently-updated Google Pack file that refers to a product, called GDrive, that "provides reliable storage for all of your files, including photos, music and documents [and] allows you to access your files from anywhere, any time and from any device - be it from your desktop, web browser or mobile phone".

It is not yet clear how much storage will be available through GDrive, as Google has not yet officially announced its launch. A Google spokesperson sent a statement to ZDNet UK on Friday, which said that "cloud computing is going mainstream" and noted that "the applications people use every day, such as email, photo sharing, and word processing, are moving to the web because it's easier to share and access your data from anywhere when it's online, in one place".

"We're always listening to our users and looking for ways to update and improve our web applications, including sharing and access options, but we don't have anything new to announce right now," Google's statement read.

Quick addition. Microsoft's Live Mesh! More soon but it looks brilliant, in theory, at any rate. Access one computer's files from another, synchronise stuff. Sounds like exactly what I've wanted for ages and this could transform the way we all work. OK. I'll calm down. Go check out Office Watch and make your own mind up.

It's not what you do . . .

It's the way that you do it. Microsoft's Service Pack 3 for XP may have all sorts of good things in it but if you're still using Internet Explorer 6 you could find yourself heading for problems. Now, you shouldn't be using IE6 still as IE7 has been out for ages and is a whole load better but I know plenty of people that haven't updated and I found myself back in IE6 land when all my browsers ceased to function and I finished up having to re-install Windows. (More about that in another post!)

To give you the advice first: install IE7 before XP SP3. If you don't then you may find that none of the updates they release will install successfully, and there are lots of them. I have to say that I find it really annoying that Microsoft didn't think about this before and included some sort of fix for the problem in the Sevice Pack download, or warn people not to download. After all, you have to wait while their on-line tool checks every nook and cranny of your computer before recommending what you should have and you'd have thought that this would have been simple to include in that process. Anyway, it wasn't. The subsequent updates are important, though, and you do need them, if only to stop the list of updates that Windows tries to install growing ever longer (and they include IE7!) and Live One Care or One Live Care or whatever it's called warning you every few minutes that you might be at risk! To which I have been yelling "I know, I don't want to be but you won't let me do anything about it!!"

The reason for this post is that I did a search for IE7 install problems and landed on a whole pile of articles, written by people far more qualified than me, which were without exception doom and gloom-laden and, basically, saying not much more than "you shouldn't have done that" which didn't help much. For a few days I carried on with Firefox, which I much prefer anyway, and just ignored the dire warnings but today I decided that this was ridiculous and Microsoft really should give me a hand.

I went to their Updates support area and after several attempts found the right combinations of words to get what I wanted - a solution at last. It seems that, to work properly, the Updates installation tool needs a certain file buried deep in your registry to work which, if you have things in the wrong order, it doesn't. In my case, I had reinstalled Windows from a CD probably created in the dim and distant past so the file wasn't as it should be.

To save you the trouble, Microsoft offer two methods to get out of trouble at this link. I've seen clearer instructions and if you've never used Start>Run before you may need someone more technically inclined to hold your hand but Method 1 worked for me and I now have IE7 and all the recent updates at last.

The browser does now say it is without add-ons which I've never seen before and so far I have failed to find a way to get it to work normally but as I shall probably only use it for those sites that refuse to function properly in Firefox (Facebook picture uploads, the bank and a few others) I can live without add-ons, I hope.