ItsGeekToMe.co

Q: I enjoy reading your column although I don’t understand 75% of the questions or the answers but would appreciate your answer to a somewhat minor problem I continue to experience. Every time my husband forwards me an email from his account, instead of his name or email address appearing in the “from”, it says “customer service”. We use HP running Windows 10, Microsoft program 365. We are not particularly computer savvy, but will attempt to understand your response to fix this ongoing issue

– Connie P.
Destin, Florida

A: I’m sorry that you don’t understand a lot of the column content, Connie. Hearing that is a bit troubling to me, because I take great pains to minimize the use of jargon and terminology within my writing, and where I must use technical language I try to go out of the way to explain things in simple enough terms that one need not have a Computer Science degree to understand.  One thing I will say, my website has a vastly underused discussion feature, where readers can comment on articles and participate in crosstalk.  That would be a great place to ask for clarification of something you didn’t understand, or to get more information. 

The problem you’re having with your e-mail seems like a simple misconfiguration in your husband’s e-mail account.  Any e-mail service needs to have certain information configured in the account settings before it can properly send and receive e-mail.  Among these data are the e-mail address (of course), the sending and receiving server information, and, most importantly, the name of the person associated with the e-mail account.  If your husband would be so kind as to go into the account settings for his e-mail account, I’m guessing that instead of his name, he will see “customer service” in the field that specifies the person from whom mail originates.

If what I have said above is true, it shouldn’t be just you who receives e-mails labeled as coming from customer service – all recipients of e-mail from him should see that.  You didn’t happen to mention whether that’s the case.  If it is, then replacing “customer service” with his name will fix the problem.  If not, then I’m off base, and the problem lies elsewhere.  Write-in again, and I’ll look for another solution.

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 Q: My child decided he wanted to push a bunch of buttons on the laptop, and now all the icons are huge.  They were a lot smaller, and took up half the screen.  Now I can’t even see them all because he made them so big.  He was just randomly pushing all kinds of buttons when my husband caught him.  Can you tell me how to undo what he did?

 – Cheryl W.
Baker, Florida

A:  If the worst thing that your child did when left unattended with your PC was to change the size of your icons, you should consider yourself lucky, Cheryl.  The way that Windows is built is intended to make things as easily accessible as possible.  This has the unfortunate side effect of making destructive actions such as moving or deleting files, or even formatting your hard drive all-too-easy.  Finding that your icons have changed size is trivial compared to what might have happened.

To return things to normal, first find an empty spot on the Windows Desktop (that’s the official name for the main background that lives behind all your icons).  Right-click in the empty space and a context menu will appear.  If you don’t get the menu, you might be clicking on an icon and not in an empty space.  In the context menu, look for an entry that says “View” with a little arrow off to one side.  The arrow means there is more of the menu that isn’t displayed yet.  If you move your mouse over the arrow, it will expand, and you should see, among other things, size settings for Large, Medium or Small icons.  It sounds to me like it’s been set to Large.  Try setting it to Medium, and if they’re still too big, set them to Small.

Once things are back to normal, keep a watchful eye on the little one.  My experience tells me that few young children ever have only one such adventure on a computer.  He’s sure to be back at it, trying to see what else he can make it do.