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Ask The Geek Disappearing Outlook Express dictionaries M'excusez-vous, avez-vous vu mon dictionnaire? If you use Outlook Express as your e-mail client but have decided to install Microsoft Office 2007 — Microsoft's latest flavor of its flagship office productivity suite — you will no longer have an English spell-checking dictionary available in Outlook Express. Sadly, this is not a new discovery, at least for Microsoft. In its Knowledge Base article KB932974, it states that the English, Spanish and German dictionaries (which various Microsoft applications share) are removed when Office 2007 is installed. They are replaced with newer versions that "are incompatible with Outlook Express." You're left with the French dictionary, though, so all is not lost. Microsoft's solution? From the article: "There are a variety of third-party free spell-checking programs available on the Internet." That's right, you get to go hunting for your own replacement dictionary. The last time this Knowledge Base article was reviewed for accuracy was Sept. 28, 2007. In other words, Microsoft would appear to have no plan to remedy the situation itself. Fortunately, I found a great, free, replacement English dictionary. You'll find it listed in the Links section below. Bottom-dwellers being active Beware: The basement-dwelling natives are bored and restless. Many reports I've recently read agree that there is a noticeable rise in malware activity. Some of it is severe. More than one report blames a "war" between the ne'er-do-wells who create "trojan" viruses and the social rejects who compose "worms." The result is supposedly a rise in the number of nasty programs that are released into the wild, and an onslaught of new problems for normal people like us. Whether or not the "war" is real, I'm seeing a noticeable rise myself. Over the previous week I've battled some seriously nasty malware for several of my clients, including my mother. The often-told spooky tale about malware that infects a computer, then holds open the door for a flood of friends, isn't just a myth. That seems to be the modus operandi for the current wave of attacks. Each machine I worked on had been freshly infected, and each machine included at least one form of "trojan," "worm," and "rootkit." This is a trifecta of evil on a PC: Viruses that wreak havoc and download other viruses, worms that spread themselves to the other computers on your network and system-level programs that await further instructions from their creators. Even more frightening: In each instance, the PC's built-in Windows Firewall had been compromised with dozens of erroneous (and likely dangerous) "Exceptions," leaving the firewall a smoldering, shrapnel-peppered, useless mess. In one case, the client's anti-virus protection was only a couple of weeks old. In another, the virus strings were updated, but the version of the scanner itself was one generation behind. I also witnessed one of the most professional-looking scams I've ever come across. It is called "AXPFixer," and it is a slick-looking program that runs each time Windows starts. It dutifully "scans" a computer and reports a slew of severe infections, but all it does is trick you into purchasing a bogus program. If you see AXPFixer, get thee to a virus scanner! Here are my basic recommendations:
Links: Kevin McDonald: Writer and professional computer/network administrator. He lives in Amarillo with his wife and children, and owns and operates Definition Computers (806-236-9615). E-mail Kevin at askthegeek@definitioncomputers.com with questions you'd like to see answered in this column.
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comments about this story Posted: June 12, 2008 |
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