We directed Neil to some information on templates and some further reading on using Word to create letterheads, but it was clear to us that Neil lacked sufficient understanding even to realise how deep his problems really were.
In a covering letter, he'd explained that he'd attempted to communicate with us by email, but he had received the following message: "Microsoft Office Outlook does not recognise 'bleedingdge.com.au'."
We could see immediately that Neil had not yet grasped the fundamental difference between a Web browser and an email client, and had tried to send us an email via the Bleeding Edge blog's Web address, which generally appears at the bottom of these columns.
In these cases, Bleeding Edge knows that we have to refer the patient to a specialist: the Melbourne PC User Group. It provides the sympathetic ongoing care and advice that these people require. While we would normally have referred Neil to Melb PC's application form, we decided that in his case, it was better to provide him with the phone number: 03 95678000.
The same thing applied in the case of the young woman who sought our advice over "a box" that kept popping up on her PC. Like so many computers that pop up similar boxes, the poor little machine was trying to reach out to her, but her owner was so sadly enclosed in her own world that she had simply ignored it. She was incapable of even remembering just what the message in that box was.
We asked her to write the message down when next it appeared, and relay it to us. The message, which some of you may have also received, was this: "Error. Could not find the file 'flash.ocx'." We were pretty sure that her screensaver had been trying to tell her something. It had almost certainly been programmed to use a file called flash.ocx, but Adobe had changed the name of the file.
We suggested she use Windows Explorer to navigate to the c:\windows/system32/macromed/flash folder or alternatively do a search and find a file called flash9.ocx, or flash9b.ocx, and right click on it and select "copy". She could then right click in a blank area of the folder window and select "paste", which would give her a file called "Copy of Flash9.ocx" or whatever the original file name was. She could then rename it to "flash.ocx".
We never heard back from her, and we suspect that she was completely bewildered by the instructions. We hope she took our advice and joined Melb PC, because it was highly likely that one day, one of those boxes she was in the habit of ignoring would be quickly followed by a potentially disastrous crash. She had no backup, and no knowledge of how to make one.
There are, however, some boxes that users should completely ignore, and one of our calls for help that week included one from someone who'd failed to distinguish between a benign box and a malevolent one. He'd been browsing the Web when a box popped up and informed him his computer had 34 viruses .
He'd done precisely what this box suggested, and paid $50 to install the "helpful" program, XP AntiVirus. Although it looks like something that Microsoft might have offered its customers, in fact XP AntiVirus is one of a selection of rogue software that displays false results as a tactic to scare victims into purchasing the software. Once installed, it's difficult to get rid of, despite the uninstall option in the Add/Remove Programs section of Control Panel. We referred the victim to the removal instructions and suggested he would have been much better off spending $60 on a Melb PC membership.
As for the person who spent a large sum of money buying a completely new PC with a fast processor, 4GB of RAM and Windows Vista Ultimate when his existing PC slowed down dramatically after he'd updated the ZoneAlarm firewall, we decided it was probably better not to tell him that the problem was almost certainly caused by ZoneAlarm, and his old PC was probably still perfectly adequate. We suggested instead that we knew some helpful people who might be able to show him how to talk to his computer.