Q. Why do Windows programs stop responding?

A. A computer, operating system, software program or driver may stop responding, or cause other programs to stop responding, for several possible reasons such as a conflict for hardware resources between two programs, lack of system resources, or a bug in the software or drivers. I cannot give you specific help because no specific application is mentioned, but I can tell you how to solve the initial "freeze" problem when a program stops responding. To recover from a program that has stopped responding, press the CTRL + ALT + DEL keys simultaneously to open the "Close Program" window, or open the "Task Manager" window, and click the "End Task" button to terminate the program. If another window opens, click the "End Task" button again to confirm stopping that program. It is important to realize that when a program stops responding any work that has not been saved will more than likely be lost when terminating a program. Unfortunately, there is no alternative!

Q. Sometimes a hash (#) sign appears when I am typing a pound sign. How do I correct this? I use Windows.

A. If a hash (#) symbol appears when the pound key is pressed, or other characters are misplaced, the wrong keyboard language has been selected. Try pressing the left Alt and Shift keys together. If this fixes the problem, it means both US and UK keyboards are installed. To fix this in Windows 7, 8 or Vista, type "change keyboard language" in the Start search box and press Enter. Click Change keyboards. If ‘English (United Kingdom)’ is not shown, click Add and choose it from the list. Click OK, then choose the UK keyboard item and click Move Up until it is at the top. Choose ‘English (United Kingdom)’ from the dropdown menu. Click OK and restart the PC if prompted. If two languages are shown, choose the non-UK one in the Installed Services box, then click Remove. Click OK, and restart if prompted. In XP, open the dialogue box by opening Control Panel then double-clicking Regional and Language Options. On the Language tab, click Details, then proceed as above.

Q. The display on my digital camera is described as Amoled? What on earth does that mean?!

A. Amoled stands for Active-matrix organic light-emitting diode. It is a type of thin-film display used in portable devices such as mobile phones and digital cameras, as well as in larger displays. Amoled displays consume less power, enabling portable devices in particular to make more efficient use of battery capacity.

Q. When I open a scanned document in my word processing package to check that it is OK before sending it in an email, it opens as gibberish. But if I open the scanned document from the original file, it is fine and I am able to read it. What is going wrong?

A. Scanned documents become image files, not text files, and text/word processing packages cannot open image files: they see the file content as the gibberish that you describe. You can see the scanned document properly when you open it from the original file because your computer opens it in your default image processing program such as Paint. You must use an image processing program to open an image file. You would have the reverse problem if you tried to open a text file in an image processing program. If you want to insert images into a text document, then you must follow this sort of approach, which applies to Microsoft Word 2010. First select the Insert tab on the ribbon at the top, then click the Picture button and choose Insert Picture from File.

Q. My Windows computer's desktop icons keep moving about into new positions, and I have to keep dragging them back to where I want them to be. How can I make them stay in place?

A. The most likely cause of this is that one, or more, of the programs that you run regularly changes your screen to a lower resolution. A game is the most likely culprit. When this happens, the computer will shuffle the current desktop icons around to make sure that they remain displayed. However, it will not restore them to where they were once the usual resolution is restored. Other then identifying the culprit program and not running it again, which I imagine is not an attractive option, your best solution is to download the free DesktopOK. This lets you store your desktop icons' positions for a range of screen resolutions, which you can cycle through very simply.

Q. I used to be able to save a shortcut to a website to my computer's desktop, and have the resulting icon look like the icon that the website uses in the browser's address bar. Now all of my shortcut icons look the same as the browser's icon. How can I customise them again? (An example of a customised website icon can be seen in the address bar above since invictamaid.org uses one.)

A. The creation of customised website shortcut icons is a useful feature of Internet Explorer. Just saving a website shortcut to your desktop will usually pick up the relevant customised icon - known as a favicon. I suspect that your loss of these customised icons is because you have changed the browser that you use to, say, Chrome or Firefox. Any shortcuts that you create whilst you use another browser will just take that browser's logo; only Internet Explorer supports customised icons. To recover the ability to customise these desktop shortcuts, your only option is to revert to using Internet Explorer.