Has BT installed spyware on my laptop?
QI’d been using Office 365 on my Windows 7 laptop for a few months without any problems. Recently, Excel stopped working. When I try to launch, it displays an error message about something called ‘btofficeaddin’. It gives me the option to disable it, but I really don’t want to do the wrong thing. My internet service provider is BT so I’m wondering if the company has forced something on to my PC, perhaps some spyware so it can watch what I do in Office? What should I do?
We know that your tapes look and feel like analogue relics, but we have some good news: they’re actually digital video (DV) tapes, so the footage they contain is already digital. The bad news is that transferring this digital video to your modern PCS is almost certainly going to require the purchase of some new hardware.
AYour camcorder will have a small, four-pin Firewire port (probably labelled as ‘DV port’ or ‘IEEE1394’, but they’re all the same thing), which you can use to connect your device to a computer. The problem is that very few modern PCS have built-in Firewire ports.
For your specific circumstances the easiest (and cheapest) option is to buy a Firewire expansion card for your desktop PC. This £5.29 example from Amazon ( www.snipca.com/17510) even comes with the cable you’ll need (see image above).
Once you’ve installed this card into a spare expansion slot, you can then link
http://windv.mourek.cz)
This has the hallmarks of failing hardware – probably the hard drive. A flashing cursor when switching on is an indication that the PC can’t find a hard drive and/or an installed operating system. The problem’s intermittent nature suggests an impending failure.
Install a Self-monitoring, Analysis, and Reporting Technology (SMART) tool to give the drive a health check, either one downloaded from the drive manufacturer’s website or the free Passmark Diskcheckup ( www. snipca.com/17591, see screenshot below). Click the Desk Self Test tab, then click Start Test.
Our guess is that you’ll be told the drive is on its way out. Is it worth fixing? That’s up to you. Replacement hard drives are pretty cheap (like this £40 1TB model from Western Digital, www.snipca.com/17558), so while the old one is still working you could install a second drive then use the free program Hdclone 5 ( www. snipca.com/17559) to create a carbon copy. Then swap the new for old and you’re done.
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