Q. At the office I ran a computer with Windows XP Home. The computer was fried when lightning struck close by and I harvested the hard drive and put it in an external case and connected it to my other computer running Windows XP Professional.

When I access the old drive and try to go to Documents and Settings try to open the folder with my data I get following error message:

H:\Documents and Settings\Owner is not accessible.
Access is denied.

How can I access my data?

A. I cannot tell you how many times I have done what you describe. Whenever one of my co-workers has a system failure I just pull out the hard drive and attach it to another computer and rescue the files that I can.

In most cases there is no problem. The drive shows up as a secondary drive and I browse to the folder and can copy the files I want.

When you see this error you must turn off simple file sharing, which is enabled by default in Windows XP Pro and then take ownership of the folders.

To turn off simple file sharing open up Windows Explorer and select Tools and then Folder Options and click on the View tab. In the Advanced Settings window locate Use simple file sharing and uncheck it. Click OK and it will be disabled.

To take ownership of the folders, locate the ones you want and right click them and select Properties. Here you will see a Security tab. Click this tab and if a security message appears just click OK. Click on Advanced and then go to the Owner tab. Locate your user name in the Name list or select the account you are logged in with and check the box that says "Replace owner on subcontainers and objects."

Click OK. If you get a box popping up that says "You do not have permission to read the contents of directory folder name. Do you want to replace the directory permissions with permissions granting you Full Control? " Click Yes.

Click OK and then give yourself full permissions on the folders using the check-boxes.

That's it. You can now access your files.

Q. A while back I did a stupid thing, I deleted some important fonts while cleaning up my font folder. I am at a loss as to how to restore the original Windows XP fonts. I tried reinstalling Windows XP from the CD that came with my computer but I get a message stating that setup was stopped because the system on my computer is newer that than on the disc. I am assuming it is referring to SP2 for WinXP that I did install.

A. I think that reinstalling XP may be a tad drastic. All you really need to do is restore the fonts you deleted and you should be fine.

The only fonts that XP requires are the standard system fonts that are installed with XP. These include the following:

Courier New (TrueType, including Bold, Italic, and Bold Italic variations)
Arial (TrueType, including Bold, Italic, and Bold Italic variations)
Times New Roman (TrueType, including Bold, Italic, and Bold Italic variations)
Symbol (TrueType)
Wingdings (TrueType)
MS Serif
MS Sans Serif

You could expand just these fonts files from the CD to the font directory one by one but that would be time consuming. I suggest just getting all the font files from the CD and restoring them to the Fonts folder.

To do this verify the location of your font folder. On most XP systems it will be C:\WINDOWS\FONTS.

Place your XP CD in the CD drive. If it autoplays just cancel it. Open a command prompt by clicking Start then Run and typing CMD then hitting Enter. Change to your CD drive letter by typing it at the prompt followed by a colon. In most cases this will be D:

From here change into the i386 folder by typing cd i386 and hitting enter. You prompt should now look like D:\i386>

At this prompt you will now type the old DOS command to extract and expand files from the install CD to your font directory.

The command you want to type is expand -r *.tt_ C:\WINNT\FONTS or expand -r *.tt_ C:\WINDOWS\FONTS depending on where your Fonts folder is located. This will extract all the fonts from the install CD into your Fonts folder, including the crucial system fonts.

Q. I have Windows XP and I use the Outlook calendar to show all of my appointments. When daylight savings time hit it changed all of my appointments to one hour later. I corrected it by choosing a time zone different from mine and the appointments changed back. How do I avoid this in the future?

A. In your situation there are two things to look at. The first is the time zone settings of your computer/operating system.

When you double click the clock on the right-hand side of your Taskbar -- an area called the System Tray -- you will see a tab that says Time Zone. Here you can set the time zone you are in and you can tell your system whether or not to adjust for daylight savings time. Make sure that box is checked.

The second place you have to look is within Outlook itself. Select Tools, Options and click on Calendar Options.

Here you will see a button marked Time Zone. Click that button and make sure that Outlook is set for the correct time zone and that there's a check in the box that says "Adjust for daylight savings time."

For those of my readers who live down under, there is a known bug with Outlook 2003 for those using Outlook in several Australian states including New South Wales, Victoria, Australian Capital Territory, South Australia and Tasmania. Since The Commonwealth Games are scheduled to be held during March 2006 in Melbourne Australia they have changed the Daylight Savings transition end dates to the first Sunday of Apr 2006.

Q. I heard that once you visit a Web site it is always on your hard drive. If that is true, is it possible to delete it?

A. Your Internet history is stored on your PC in a number of ways.

Internet Explorer uses Temporary Internet Files as a method of speeding up your Web browsing and these files can offer a trained eye a glimpse of your browsing habits. IE also tracks your history in the auto-complete feature.

If you are concerned about your privacy, you can clean this up in the Internet Options section of the Tools menu in Internet Explorer under the General and Content tabs.

In Firefox you can clear the cache and auto-complete by going to Tools, Options and adjusting the setting in the Privacy section.

Beyond cache files, Temporary Internet Files and history is a file called index.dat used by Internet Explorer. This little nugget stores quite a bit of your Internet usage such as Web sites visited and so forth and does not get cleaned up when you use the methods I described above.

Acesoft offers a program called Tracks Eraser that will clean this file of all information about your web browsing activity.

You should keep in mind that the index.dat file stores all Web sites visited INCLUDING sites access as a result of pop-up advertisements. That means you might see web sites there that the computer user did not intend to visit.