December 2004
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We use Outlook Express as our e-mail program. Frequently it will tell me we have more messages than actually end up in our inbox. It'll say "downloading 2 new messages", yet only one appears in the inbox. Is this a concern? Where is the other message coming from, and where does it go? Repeated virus scans show no problem.
It's possible that the mystery messages are just viruses, and that your virus scanner is deleting them before you even have a chance to view them. In this case a manual scan won't show anything as the offending message is already in that big bit-bucket in the sky.
Virus scanners will generally keep a log of their activities, and if you can track this log down and have a look at it, you can see if there is any activity around the time you checked your mail.
Overall, I wouldn't be overly worried unless you know for certain that you're losing mail (in which case people will hound you eventually).
We have four old computers running windows 2000. They have a C and D drive, the D is partitioned from the C drive. The C drive is almost out of space, despite being cleaned regularly. The D seems to have nothing on it. Can the partition be removed? Would this cause any problems?
You can indeed merge the partitions, but not without third party software. The granddaddy of them all is a thing called Partition Magic, which works very well. It will let you merge, change and add partitions. Unfortunately, it's not free. You can find it online at www.powerquest.com.
Googling "free partition manager" returns quite a few hits - of which many aren't actually free. I don't actually know of any free software offhand, and when dealing with an exercise like this it's probably not a bad idea to be cautious of potentially buggy, non-commercial products. It's not like you can hit undo if things go wrong. (The worst case scenario is that you'll lose BOTH partitions).
As always, back everything important up before you begin. As the mantra goes: Data that is not backed up is not data you want to keep.
As far as de-partitioning causing problems, you will definitely have dramas if you have installed applications to D. In such cases, "uninstall and reinstall" is the go. On the other hand, if you only have data files on D, you'll be fine.
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