If you can’t find your monitor on the list, look on the vendor’s Web site for a suitable INF file. When you find the correct file, copy it to your hard disk (put it in a Utilities or Miscellaneous folder). Right-click on it in Explorer and select Install. Now you should find your monitor in the Properties dialog, as outlined above. If your monitor is capable of displaying higher resolutions, you should get the choice to change it back on the Settings window when the correct monitor is specified. You’ll also protect your monitor by disabling potentially damaging refresh rate and resolution combinations.

It is technically possible to use a TV card as a video recorder using the capture function, but it is not a practical solution at the moment. The resulting file is huge (you can get approximately 60 minutes on a CD in MPeg1 format, and much less in AVI) and, compared to a traditional VCR, the image quality is quite low. This will probably not be the case for very much longer with both digital TV and general technological advances playing their part in improving quality and ease of use, but for the moment it's probably better to stick to the TV for watching football and the VCR for recording. Sorry.

Please help. I am using a three-year-old Tiny P130 under Windows 95 and have been getting an intermittent dreaded blue screen with the message: A Fatal error exception OE has occurred at 0028:CO27B515 in VXD IFSHGR(03) + 00010F5. The computer has then to be restarted with the loss of anything not saved. I recently slotted in extra Ram (2x32Mb, 72-pin Simms to take the total to 80Mb) and have been trying to clear some space on a struggling 1.6Gb hard disk. The problem occurs without warning and has happened at start up, from within MS Word and Pegasus Capital.

It's a little hard to say exactly. Fatal Exception OE usually indicates a memory error but that could either be hardware or software related. So it could be your new memory to blame. However, your problem is more likely to be due to running out of hard disk space. You need a large amount of disk space for the Windows swap file and temporary files {such as browser cache files and printer spool files) in addition to your own data files. I suggest a minimum of 256Mb free on your boot drive. I know you have already searched for more disk space (and large hard drives are cheap now) but check the following.

IE5 hides its cache files. To clear the cache go to Control Panel, Internet Options, and on the General tab you will see Temporary Internet Files listed. Click Delete files, then click on Settings and reduce the maximum space it is allowed to use. Most temporary files are stored in Windows\Temp and often are left behind when the computer crashes or when install programs fail to tidy up after them. If you are not running any applications it is safe to delete everything in this folder, including folders within it. When a computer crashes, files written but not closed become 'lost clusters'. Scandisk will identify these and either delete or save them. Most are not worth saving, but if you do choose save you will find a bunch of files with names like FILE0000.CHK in your root directory. Delete these after you have looked at them. If you right -click on Recycle Bin you can reduce the amount of disk space used for temporary storage of deleted files. Though Windows is meant to release this as needed, it does not always work that way. The defaults are far too big.

I'm considering building my own PC from scratch and need a little advice. Oh, and before you bring it up, I know that the DIY route probably isn't the most cost-effective method of buying a computer, but it's something that I've always wanted to do and, besides, I would feel more confident fixing problems that arise from my handiwork as opposed to one that's been cobbled together as quickly as possible by someone else. My stumbling block, however, is that I'm confused as to which graphics card to go for. Until recently, I've coped perfectly well with a PC with a 4Mb ATI graphics card and now everything seems to be equipped with 8Mb, 16Mb or 32Mb. My own computing requirements don't really extend beyond word processing, spreadsheets, and an accounts package, but my son is keen to play games (the reason for a new PC as my Pentium 90 fails to meet the minimum recommended requirement for games) and assures me that a Voodoo 5 card is worth waiting for. Will a new 8Mb graphics card suffice, could I keep my existing 4Mb PCI ATI card, or is my son right and should I hold out for a Voodoo 5?

As you've already pointed out, you probably won't save any cash building your own system, but you are quite correct in the supposition that you'll know your way round it better than anyone else – plus, of course, you won't find yourself being fobbed off by tech support staff if anything does go wrong! Anyway, in answer to your question, you are correct in assuming that a basic graphics card will suit your own needs. While keeping your existing card will probably be adequate, it'll seriously cripple the capabilities of the system when it comes to games playing. As this is the raison d'etre for your DIY PC project, a graphics card upgrade is a must and given the meaty requirements of games these days, you should be looking at 16Mb minimum. With games playing in mind, there are a number of options -the most cost effective is probably a 16Mb Voodoo 3 3000 which will cost you around £90. The Voodoo 3 3000 isn't, however, the best all-round graphics card. If you can afford the extra expenditure, a 32Mb TNT2based card is a better bet, although you're unlikely to see much difference playing games. As for the Voodoo 5, well, obviously your son is on the ball when it comes to games hardware and with 64 and 128Mb models planned, the specifications make impressive reading. However, there is as yet no official launch date and although 3Dfx have pencilled spring 2000 in as an approximation, it could well be another four months before the boards are widely available and probably even longer before they're available for sensible money. So your best plan is to opt for a Voodoo 3 3000 now, which will run all current games to their optimal performance. If the lad protests, tell him that you'll consider a Voodoo 5 when the Voodoo 3 is no longer up to the task.

A good digital video set-up is built around a Scsi disk system with a capacity of at least 9Gb, anything less will be hard work. The problem is that, while DV is compressed, it is still very large and quite possibly too much quality for your needs. You have two options. If you want to process and edit only DV, you will most certainly need to up the specification of your computer, two or three times the Ram and at least one big Scsi drive -plus, of course, a FireWire interface. This will cost you -a complete package with the capture software is your best bet, something like Pinnacle's MiroVideo DV200 which costs a whacking £440. A more reasonable starting point might be Pinnacle's Studio DV product, which costs around £170 and will work with your DV camera. This solution doesn't need to capture the full data to hard disk the card provides a sort of halfway house between online and offline editing. However, while the process of completing a video and 'printing' it to VHS tape involves more hassle and operations, the card and method places much less strain on your computer although you could still do with upping the Ram. This card comes with video editing software, but if you are going to get serious about this sooner or later. You will need to buy a copy of Adobe Premiere or at least ULead's Video Director -all of these programs make use of at least 128Mb of Ram and as much processing power as they can get.

Quite right I screwed up. I now learn that while nVidia, like most graphics chip makers, sells chips for others to make cards out of, 3Dfx chose to control quality and support by making the cards. Sorry if I misled anyone.

As I understand it, the problem lies not with the system in this case, but with your DVD-player software that doesn't know about APM (Advanced Power Management). The only solution I know of is to get some DVD software that is APM aware, or to disable APM on your monitor when you're playing your films. I can't help you with the former, but to do the latter go down to the Start button, click on it, select the Settings menu item and then the Control Panel menu item. Double-click on the Power Management icon, make sure you have the Power Schemes tab selected, and then select 'Never' as the option in the 'Turn off monitor' section.

The choice of display drivers is crucial to getting the best performance out of games. This is much more important than upgrading from PCI to AGP. An AGP card, however, does help run games that need to transfer large amounts of textured backgrounds from main memory to video memory. Download the latest drivers both from the board-makers site and from the chipset vendors site. Before installing them though you will want to make sure you have the latest Bios, and if using an AGP card, the latest AGP driver for your motherboard. This motherboard, if I recall correctly, uses an Aladdin chip set (all PC100 Socket 7 boards use non-Intel chipsets) and there have been a number of updates to resolve compatibility issues with various graphics accelerator chips. Your description of 'momentary freezes as large graphics are drawn' would seem to suggest driver issues.

Your second problem -'the hard drive suddenly starts writing away to itself after a couple of minutes' -could be due to anyone or all of three causes. It may be Windows updating its swap file, some background process such as an anti-virus checker, or else the hard drive itself doing 'thermal recalibration'.

First, Windows 98 may be incorrectly assuming inactivity and choosing to copy data from Ram to its swap file. It does this when it thinks the system is idle, so that it can then quickly reuse memory pages if it needs more memory. Unfortunately, the Windows memory management system was designed in the days when 8Mb was more typical and assumes that virtual memory used will always be more than the amount of physical memory. It therefore ends up copying far more data to the swap file than it actually needs to.

It is hard to cure this behavior but you can considerably speed up swap file activity by making sure that Windows has a contiguous swap file to write to. You do this by setting the minimum swap file size (under My Computer, Properties, Performance, then Virtual Memory) to 4Mb more than the amount of physical memory on your system. You should also make sure that the swap file is on your fastest drive (or the least used drive, if you have more than one fast drive). Defrag your drive before increasing the swap file size, or else use a defrag program such as Norton’s Speedisk, which will optimise the swap file for you.

Since you have so much physical memory, you may also wish to experiment with setting a very small maximum swap file size. Do not disable swapping altogether as this has unintended adverse consequences on other Windows system functions. Instead, set the maximum size of the swap file to something like 8Mb or 16Mb. Be aware, though, that while this may speed up your system, it can also make it more unstable. Windows is not very tolerant of low memory conditions and if you run graphics software that needs large amounts of memory, you may find that you need more than 128Mb physical Ram.

I would look really hard at what is being loaded and run in the background. Often background tasks are not at all obvious, running as services or else at system level via VXD files loaded by the registry or System.ini file. Some can be seen from Task Manager by pressing Ctrl-Alt-Del, others won't show but can be spotted loading from a Startup folder in Start Menu\Programs, others will run from Registry keys. If you use Microsoft Office, remove the FastFind indexer from the StartUp folder. The other most likely culprit is anti-virus software but badly written drivers for scanners or other hardware can also cause strange slowing-down. Finally, you can't do much about thermal recalibrations except buy a new hard drive. All hard drives are not made the same and when you buy a cheap drive like the Samsung, you may not get the same performance as a more expensive drive. The best hard disks will be those rated for 'AV' use -meaning that thermal recalibrations will not interrupt tasks like video or CD-Rom burning.

1 Click the Start button and select Settings - Control Panel.

2 Double-click on the Display icon.

3 Click on the Settings tab and then the Advanced button.

4 Go to the dialog's Monitor tab and click the 'Automatically detect Plug and Play monitors' check box to clear it, and click on Apply.

5 Your next buttons to click are Change, followed by Next.

6 Select 'Display a list of all the drivers in a specific location' and then click Next.

7 Click 'Show all Hardware', and then find your monitor manufacturer and your monitor model from the available list.

Its also worth checking, of course, that your video adaptor was correctly identified when it too was detected. What you're suffering from is something known as 'mode pruning'. Basically, the capabilities of both your graphics card and monitor are being examined to show only the modes they can actually support, but they'd been wrongly detected.

This is common for installing video card drivers, although there are still occasions when you'll have to do it manually. In each case, follow the instructions; these are generally to be found in a file labelled README.TXT, README.1ST, INSTALL.TXT or similar. If you can't find anything like that, check the site you downloaded the files from for instructions. If you still can't find anything, email the driver manufacturer and ask it to Point you to the instructions or email them to you by return.

Fortunately, the solution is straightforward. Go to the Matrox Web site (www.matrox.com) and download the latest drivers for Windows 2000 (version 5.51.00I dated 26 February 2001).

Its also worth collecting a software pack from the site called e-DuaIHead, as this allows a lot of control over the dual-headed output. For example - you can enhance Internet Explorer 5.5 with the Page Wrap, PageLog and PageJump functions: PageWrap takes a long page and wraps it onto the second screen, thus allowing much more of the page to be seen at once; PageLog keeps a record of all the pages you've visited for easy access; and PageJump uses Control Click to view information in one browser window, while a new page loads in another, so avoiding pages being hidden.

1 Click Start - Run, type regedit into the edit box and then hit the Enter key.

2 When the Registry Editor loads, go to the following key:

HKEY-CURRENT-USER\Control\Desktop\WallpaperStyle

3 Set the value of WallpaperStyle to 2 (0 is for normal display).

This won't work if you have your wallpaper set to Tile.

As for the three cards you mention, the best option is the GeForce2 MX, followed by the Voodoo 3 and then the TNT2. Unsurprisingly, their prices also follow this trend with the GeForce2 MX about £30 more than a TNT2. If you can afford the extra we'd recommend it, especially if you're getting a Celeron-based system that will run the latest games but will struggle without the support of a decent graphics card. If you take the Intel810 (or other integrated graphics chip route) you'll end up looking to upgrade the graphics on a PC that doesn't have an available AGP slot, and your options will be much more limited. Currently the best gaming PCI upgrades are Voodoo 3s (from £80 to £240) and the best all-round PCI upgrade (including hardware DVD support and TV-tuner) is ATI's All-in-Wonder (at about £120).