Restoration puts films in full view

Q. We just bought a new PC with Windows XP Home Edition, and, for the life of me, I cannot get it to display any of my home movie files as full-screen showings.
When I click on the command for full screen, the videos are displayed in a window that takes up the whole screen, but it also has silver bars for commands on the top and bottom. Surely, I am missing something.
A. Surely, you are missing something. It's a buried command in Windows Media Player that in new machines often isn't properly selected for showing raw movie format like AVI, MPG and so on.
Open the Media Player, go to the Tools item and then select the Options command in the menu that appears. Next, in the box this summons, select the Performance tab. Open it and click on the Advanced button. In the display this creates, remove the check from the two boxes on the right-hand side dealing with "full screen" in the title.
I can speculate that Microsoft programmers left that silver command bar on the bottom because it gets used in playing blockbuster-type DVDs that have their own full-screen and letterbox settings. Surely, they goofed.
Q. I have a Micron PC with Windows 98 SE. My drives were divided into C: and D:. When programs have been installed over the years they have gone into the C: space. As a result, I have a ton of open space on my D: drive and not much room left on the C: drive.
I have tried to obtain information on how to transfer programs from the C: to D: drive. I was able to drag a couple programs from C: to D: when Desktop is opened. However, there is a lot more I would move to D: if I could.
A. You probably won't like this answer, but a great many folks get inconvenienced by this all-too-common unbalance problem between a C: partition and a D: partition and maybe even an E: or F:. You can fix things either by uninstalling and then reinstalling programs or by acquiring drive-partitioning software to change the balance by making D: smaller and C: larger.
If you are fortunate enough to have all of the original CDs for your software, all you need to do is reinstall it and pick D: instead of C: as the directory for the program. Most folks don't particularly notice, but the installation software for most programs includes a screen showing that the software is going to be saved on the C: drive in a named directory. There is a Browse button here that can be used to point it to the D: drive instead.
You probably will need to uninstall a program before the installation software will run, because a lot of installation routines won't continue if they find a version of the software still on the computer. To add or remove software, use the Add/Remove Programs Control Panel that comes up as an option when the Start button is clicked.
A far tidier but somewhat costly fix is to get partitioning software. I use Partition Commander from V Communications Inc. (www.v-com.com; be sure to use that hyphen). It costs $50 and comes in separate versions for XP/ME/2000 and for 95/NT and for DOS.
Another excellent choice is Norton PartitionMagic 8.0 from Symantec, at $70. Hugely powerful Symantec acquired the software from well-regarded Powerquest Inc., which had sold it under the title Powerquest PartitionMagic. It was popular because it handles Linux and Windows partitions simultaneously. That, however, is pretty much inside baseball stuff that you likely won't need.
Q. To get to the spyware repair site that I need to use, you must start the address with a tilde. How do you create one on the computer keyboard?
A. I recommend holding down the Shift key and then tapping the tilde key (~), which is on the key next to the numeral 1 just above the alphabet on standard keyboards.
You are far from alone in this confusing situation, Mr. R.
The tilde amounts to a punctuation mark that is used commonly in languages including Spanish and Portuguese, but hardly ever employed in English. When it is used in an English expression, like "Coates is ~correct," it would mean that the statement is approximate rather than certain. People in the sciences use it, as do mathematicians, to connote things like ~10 grams or ~750 milliliters.
Precisely because it is as rare as a ~hen's tooth, the tilde was adopted by the writers of the original Unix hypertext markup language that creates Web sites as a way to reserve part of a larger site to a subgroup.
Knight Ridder Tribune