Category Archives: LangaList Plus

Readers often ask how to back up
their Outlook Express files; others ask how to correct problems in OE itself.
Reader Mordy Cohen— in the process of solving his own problem— found a great
resource that addresses all those issues:

In the last issue, we talked about
an amazing white paper ( http://www.langa.com/newsletters/2001/2001-01-15.htm#7
) that claimed that most web search engines actually only scratch the surface of
what’s available online. The authors of the white paper believe they have a way
to dig out information from the "deep web," which is available from
online databases and such rather than in the normal web pages that standard
search engines catalog. It’s an interesting claim, and thought-provoking
reading.

Well over 1,000 of your
fellow readers have "Loaded the code." Please click over to http://www.langa.com/code.htm
, and maybe you can join them! (If you’ve already "Loaded The Code"
and are wondering if your site will appear here or on the Langa.Com web site,
please see http://www.langa.com/link.txt 
)

If the word "puka" doesn’t
mean anything to you, or if it only conjures images of Polynesian seashells,
then read on:

Know the saying
"necessity of the mother of invention?" Well, the needs of a LangaList
reader— a German Journalist Living in Florida—led him to invent an extremely
cool way to search. It goes way beyond what we normally know as
"metasearching," and the result— well,  lemme just say that I
*love* his site. 

There’s a good chance you can speed up your hard drives and your CDs, CDRs and
DVDs— for free— via Windows’ almost-hidden DMA setting. Doing so can make
your drives as much as 15% faster, and reduce the load on your CPU by as much as
40%.

Some LangaList readers are seeing
a longer, expanded version of this newsletter (ie one with more items), and
they’re seeing it in their choice of text or HTML email. Others are seeing a
"digest" format that carries just the headlines and a very brief,
easy-to-skim description of each item in the newsletter, along with a link that
allows them to jump to the full text of any item that interests them. And none
of them are seeing any ads at all.

In "Avoid The
Reformat/Reinstall Two-Step" ( http://www.langa.com/newsletters/2001/2001-01-11.htm#2
) we discussed an "in-place reinstall" where you just layer a new copy
of the OS over the copy that’s gone bad. With some kinds of problems— missing
or overwritten system, files, for example— this kind of reinstall may
completely cure what’s wrong, and can do so without losing your data, your
installed apps, or any customizations or alterations you’ve made.

Canadian reader Derrick Kearney
expressed an increasingly-common frustration recently:

Last issue’s item on the
potential evils of using the "Hosts" file to block ads ( http://www.langa.com/newsletters/2001/2001-01-11.htm#7
) brought some interesting replies.