Ask Owen

I have a desktop PC on which I have installed both Windows XP and the Ubuntu operating system. Until recently Windows XP was set as the default operating system, starting automatically 10 seconds after the computer was switched on. Recently, though, I was invited to upgrade to Ubuntu 11, which I did, and now Ubuntu is set as the default operating system (again starting automatically after 10 seconds). I can select Windows XP but I want to reset the boot menu so that Windows XP is shown as the default operating system. How can I do this?

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I’ve just gone to my website and found that it’s showing links to an unsavory site. I didn’t put them there and they weren’t there last week. Can you give me some pointers as to what I should be looking at?

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Instead of getting broadband for my house, I decided instead to buy a 3G broadband dongle on a pay-as-you-go (PAYG) contract for use with my laptop. This works reliably most of the time but sometimes the internet connection disappears. Is there anything I can do about it?

The intermittent reception on your 3G signal is possibly caused by external interference. As you’re probably aware, 3G broadband dongles use radio waves and, like any other kind of radio signal, reception can be affected by outside influences such as someone using a microwave oven or cordless phone nearby.

As such, unless there’s any particular frequency to it then there’s probably little hope of finding the cause. That said, if you’re sufficiently keen to resolve this annoyance, then we would suggest keeping a diary of the events for a week or two: if the connection dropouts occur at particular times of the day, then this may help isolate the culprit. You may be able to take it up with your telecoms provider and request their help to find out exactly what’s going on. 3G signals tend to vary from provider to provider (look at the indigo-3g results) and sometimes switching to another provider could also help alleviate the problem.

I recently bought a 3D camera. I can plug it into my 3D TV and see my photos but I would be really cool to also see them on my Mac. How can I do that?

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I need to access the settings page on my router, but I need to point my browser at it. How do I find out the IP address for my router?

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I was watching a mate of mine watch a video on his PSP and I could almost swear it was was in 3D. I haven’t heard of any movie that can do this on the PSP, do you know what I’m talking about?

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I’ve connected my Android phone to my Wifi network at work, but they use a proxy and I cannot use my browser without setting the proxy on my browser. Is there any way I can do this?

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I bought some blank DVDs to store backup files. The disks say that they hold 4.7Gb of data, but when I put one in my computer, Vista shows it having 4.3Gb of space. What happened to the other 0.4Gb?

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