Drag & Drop Files to an External Drive

A number of readers have asked how to copy their photos to an external hard drive or flash drive.
    First let me say that copying photos (or any kind of files) to an external hard disk or flash drive is infinitely easier than copying them to a CD or DVD. Files stored on external hard drives or flash drives can be moved, renamed, deleted, and changed in other ways, just as they can be on your PC's internal hard drive. Doing anything other than just copying files to an optical disc is way more complicated.
The easiest way to copy files to an external HD or flash drive is to drag them from their original location on your "C" drive onto the destination drive. However, many folks say they can’t see the target drive or they don’t know what it’s called.

Do this: Click Start and then click "Computer" or "My Computer" (depending on your version of Windows).

This will display all your PC’s various drives. The main hard drive is called C. (Early A and B drives are long gone from most computers.)

Your built-in CD/DVD drives will probably be listed as D or E.

External drives are likely listed as F or G (or beyond) and show a description of each. Let’s assume Drive-G is the device to which you want to copy your photos.

Photos are normally stored in your "Pictures" folder ("My Pictures" in earlier Windows versions). Open this folder by clicking Start>Pictures (or My Pictures).

Now drag your photos onto the G drive. If you can’t see G it’s usually because the Photos folder covers all or most of your screen. You need to shrink it to where you can see your "Computer" folder alongside it.

In the upper-right corner of your screen there are three tiny icons: the first shows a "dash" and the third an "X." The middle icon will show a rectangle or two overlapping rectangles.

If it shows one rectangle, click it. It will change to two rectangles and the folder will become smaller. Now the folders can be reshaped by grabbing an edge or corner and adjusting. When you see your photos, drag and drop them onto the G-drive. Double-click the G to prove that it worked.

Microsoft’s Office 2010 Fine Print

Jim Franke wrote about something he spotted in the fine print of Microsoft’s Office 2010 User Agreement: "The software will stop running on Oct. 31, 2010. You will not receive any other notice. You may not be able to access data used with the software when it stops running."

I have no idea what Microsoft plans on doing beyond next Halloween next year, but I’ll try to find out. It’s hard to imagine they want the PR nightmare of suddenly leaving potentially millions of users in the lurch.

MSOffice 2010 Can Coexist with Earier Versions. But...

Warren Krumm called to ask if the free MSOffice 2010 suite can be used alongside another version of MSOffice. Well, historically, installing a newer version has replaced an older version. However, 2010 is rumored to be useable with other Office versions – but I haven’t found evidence that this works. If it can be done, I’ll write about it here.

Warren also asked if he were to reinstall Windows and Internet Explorer on a crashed hard drive that had been restored, would the dozens of security updates have to be reinstalled as well. Not likely, because many of the updates were for earlier versions of Windows and IE. Installing Win-7 and IE-8 would need only what few updates might apply to them.

Printer Outputting a Blank Page

A reader wote that he created a Word document that was supposed to fit on one page. However, his printer carried a few lines onto a second page. So he made the text slightly smaller, and everything appeared to stay on just one page. Nonetheless, his printer continued to output a second page, even though nothing was on it.

The usual cause of this problem is having a few extra carriage returns (pressing ENTER) at the end of the document. The CRs are invisible on the screen, but the printer recognizes them as blank lines that are supposed to be output to a page. The easiest fix is to press Ctrl+End, which will send your cursor to the actual bottom of the document. Now hit the BACKSPACE key as many times as needed to eliminate the unwanted blank lines.

© Donald Ray Edrington – All Rights Reserved

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Don Edrington - Computer Columnist for The Californian and San Diego's North County Times

Senior Computer Tutor
Don Edrington

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