I’m using a borrowed keyboard and keep inadvertently hitting the CAPS LOCK key and typing half my sentences in capital letters. Is there any way I can turn it off?

It can be annoying when the Caps Lock key is hit by accident when typing. However, instead of disabling Caps Lock altogether, one option is to activate the sound function for this key so that it plays a beep when pressed.

Click on the Start button and then Control Panel. Double-click on Accessibility Options. Select the option ‘Use Togglekeys’ and click on Apply. Test whether this is now working by pressing the Caps Lock key.

The sound is played from the computer’s built-in speaker rather than sound card, so it will still play if the speakers are off or the sound muted. Just don’t rest on that key or you could end up with a Franklin migraine! Let me know how that works for you.

I’ve heard my friends mention something called Timeline on Facebook. How do I get it?

Timeline is Facebook’s new way of displaying people#s profiles. It’s a streamlined way of showing your photos, groups and everything about you, together with a chronological posting of your updates and actions. It’s all very customizable and pretty cool. According to Facebook to get timeline, simply go to the Introducing Timeline page and click Get It Now. Or you can wait until you see an announcement at the top of your profile.

Once you turn it on, you’ll have 7 days to preview your timeline before other people can see it. You can use this time to add a cover, say of that revell you’re building, fill in life events, and star important stories. After 7 days, your timeline will be published automatically. Or, you can choose to publish your timeline at any time by clicking the Publish Now button at the top of your timeline.

Someone at work mentioned a package called Maya to edit my images. Is this the right thing for me?

Autodesk Corporation’s Maya is a 3D Modeling and Rendering program, similar to Lightwave, 3DMax, Pixar’s Renderman, and other professional 3D programs. Along with Renderman, it is considered one of the top programs in its class in the world, and arguably THE top program in its class in the world. Many pictures have received Academy Awards for Visual Effects because their artists used Maya for the film. One of the most recent examples is the Oscar winning “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” – it used Maya for its visual effects throughout the picture. King Kong was also the beneficiary of effects created by Maya.

Many special effects companies use Maya. More notable examples are Lucasfilm’s Industrial Light and Magic, and Matte World Digital.

Autodesk has won a total of 5 Oscars itself from the Academy for significant contibutions to the Motion Picture industry. Last year, it won the Scientific and Technical Oscar for Maya’s new Fluid Effects, which allow graphic artists to realistically design better fluid and gas effects on film.

Autodesk’s achievements with Maya are not limited to movies – it has also received many awards from the Television and Broadcasting industries. As another person here pointed out, it is also used in the Gaming Industry for 3D game modeling and effects.

Maya is not on the list of cheap programs, even if you’re a student. The full version runs close to $2000 or more depending on the version and what you get with it. However, you can download a trial version from the Autodesk site.

Simply put though, it is not for the beginner or casual user. You wouldn’t use it for custom challenge coins, for example. It is for those who are professional artists, working at the top of their craft. The same can be said for Renderman, as it has been used by Pixar Animation to create its Oscar winning movies over the years. Many people don’t realize that Pixar was originally a Computer company started by George Lucas.

I would guess something like this is actually out of your league. You probably need something simple. I would recommend looking at Paint.Net, it’s the one I use

I’ve recently started learning how to play the guitar and was looking at different bits of software I could get to help me with this. I was wondering if you could recommend a tuner for my guitar.

Hi there, there are a number of these around, but I have come across one that’s free and should do everything you wanted to do. It’s the Audio Phonics Guitar Tuner and using proprietary pitch recognition technology, the program can find exact notes in less than 50ms latency. The recognition technology also adapts to the speed of the processor for smooth tracking. The program is easy to use, good looking and best of all it’s free. A must-have for anyone learning the guitar. Check it out!

I’ve noticed that a friend of mine has a really cool Facebook display with a picture at the top and a timeline of events. How can I change my account to do the same?

The mode you’re talking about is called “Timeline” and it’s a funky new way of using Facebook. Getting it is extremely simple: To get timeline, simply go to the Introducing Timeline page and click Get It Now.

There you go, as easy as pie. Much easier than making a welding cable stick to a wall, huh? I’ve been using Timeline for a few weeks now, and I’ve found it works well. Recommended!

I have recently transferred all my photos to CD-Rs, with one disc for each topic. How long can I store them like this before transferring them to new discs? Having seen floppies become unusable over time, how do I ensure that there will always be a medium and method of saving these photos for posterity?

This is a tricky one to answer because it depends on so many factors, such as the media quality, storage location and atmospheric conditions.

Store a very cheaply manufactured CD-R in direct sunlight, for example, and the disc’s plastic surface may bow or bend in the heat and become unusable within hours.

Conversely, package the discs carefully and store them in an environment with moderate and consistent heating, and minimal illumination, and they could last for many decades – or even centuries.

Indeed, some manufacturers claim their optical disc media have shelf lives of up to 300 years (see these ‘Gold Archive’ CD-Rs on Amazon, for example). That’s longer than some bearings are rated for!

Alternatively – or perhaps additionally – you could consider storing the photos online. There are a number of places you can do this and they should be safe indefinitely.

I have recently upgraded from Internet Explorer 8 to 9. Unfortunately, I am now unable view my British Gas online account because, I’m told, its website is not compatible with IE9. Do you have any suggestions?

Such problems are seldom due to a genuine incompatibility between a certain version of a web browser and a website. Much more likely is that the website is performing a check and has failed to recognise the new version of the browser you’re using.

If this check can be bypassed, the site usually works perfectly well. To this end, some web browsers offer the ability to change something known as the ‘user agent string’ – this is a little bit of code that identifies the web browser to visited websites. It’s presented to any website you visit, whether it’s http://www.redenvelope.com/personalized-gifts-rprsl or British Gas.

Unfortunately, Internet Explorer does not – at least not by default. There are ways to change IE’s user agent string by editing the Windows Registry, but I wouldn’t recommend messing with this unless you knew what you were doing.

My main recommendation would be to contact the owner of the website. As more and more people start using a new browser, this problem will need to be corrected and the more pressure clients put on them, the quicker they will get their web team to resolve the issue. In the meantime, there are a number of alternative browser, like Firefox or Chrome that can tide you over.

I did a graphic editing course recently using Adobe Photoshop, but it’s too expensive for me to buy. Can you recommend something decent that I can use for free?

Paint.NET is an impressive image-editing program that has all of the tools needed to repair and improve photos, without a price tag.

Installation is simple, though Paint.NET requires the Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5. That means it won’t be long before you’re tweaking photos or making your for rent by owner sign.

The interface is well laid out, more like Photoshop than the other popular free image editing tool The Gimp. This makes it a more attractive choice if you don’t want to have to learn how The Gimp works.

There are several toolboxes that show the history of actions, layers, tool icons and the colour wheel. They are transparent until the mouse moves over them, which is handy for reducing distractions.

It has the Levels Adjustment tool, which is a quick way to improve the colours and brightness of a photo. Curiously the histograms are rotated 90° to how they are in other paint programs but this is more than made up for by the fact that both input and output histrograms are displayed, offering more information on the changes than The Gimp.

There are plenty of artistic effects, most with live previews so you can tweak the various settings to get exactly the right effect.

You can download it here: Paint.Net

My wife’s laptop has a strange problem. While typing in a Word document or an email the cursor seems to jump from away from where it’s suppose to be, which makes a major mess of the document. What can I do to avoid this?

Not an uncommon problem, almost all sufferers are laptop users and the reason it happens is related to the fact that most laptops have touchpad control panels slap-bang in the middle of their wrist-rests, right below the keyboard.

A mere brush from a palm heel or wayward thumb can be enough to command the text-entry cursor to leap to a different part of the document. That the problem seems to coincide with times when you have paused typing supports this hypothesis: taking a moment to think is precisely when your hands and fingers are likely to move from their typing positions.

In most cases, the problem can be alleviated or eliminated by altering the touchpad’s settings in Control Panel, or just disabling it entirely.

To do this in Windows 7, click Start followed by Control Panel, then click Hardware and Sound followed by Mouse. This displays the Mouse Properties dialogue box and what to do next depends on the specific type of touchpad.

The main thing to look for is something called Tapping. The last time I had this problem, I solved it by turning Tapping off. You may also want to play with sensitivity and in the worst case switch off the touchpad. Once you’ve solved it you can continue working on your business cash advances without your cursor jumping from one place to another.

Every computer I’ve had has these F keys at the top of the keyboard. What are these and what are they used for?

Commonly known as “function keys”, F1 through F12 may have a variety of different uses or no use at all. Depending on the operating system installed on your desktop computers and the software program currently open will change how each of these keys operate. A program is capable of not only using each of the function keys, but also combining the function keys with the ALT or CTRL key, for example, Microsoft Windows users can press ALT + F4 to close the program currently active.

Below is a short-listing of some of the common functions of the functions keys on computers running Microsoft Windows. As mentioned above not all programs support function keys and may perform different tasks then those mentioned below.

F1: Almost always used as the help key, almost every program will open the help screen when this key is pressed.
F2: In Windows commonly used to rename a highlighted icon or file.
F3: Often opens a search feature for many programs including Microsoft Windows.
F4: Alt + F4 will close the program currently active in Microsoft Windows.
F5: In all modern Internet browsers pressing F5 will refresh or reload the page or document window.
F7: Shift + F7 runs a Thesaurus check on the word highlighted in Microsoft Word.
F10: In Microsoft Windows activates the menu bar of an open application.

Earlier IBM computers also had F13 – F24 on the keyboards, but you don’t tend to find these on modern keyboards.