2010 Most Popular Questions

The Top 10 List

1. How do I change my MSN Hotmail password? Change your MSN Hotmail password with step-by-step instructions. Changing your Hotmail password is easy, and you should do it regularly.

2. How do I delete my Hotmail account? Delete your MSN Hotmail account with these step-by-step instructions. Deleting your MSN Hotmail account isn't necessary, but it's easy to do.

3. I accidentally deleted my Recycle Bin in Vista - how do I get it back? It turns out to be fairly easy to accidentally delete the desktop Recycle Bin in Vista. Getting the Recycle Bin back is easy, just not obvious.

4. How do I delete history items from my Google tool bar? Deleting Google history takes a few steps, depending on what Google history you mean. Here are step-by-step instructions for deleting Google history.

5. Where is my Outlook "PST" file located? Outlook's PST or Personal STore is a single file that holds your email, contacts and more. You can use Outlook itself to find the location of the file.

6. Someone's sending from my email address! How do I stop them?! Email spoofing is rampant. Spammers often send email that looks like it came from you. And there's little you can do about it.

7. What are iso files, and how do I open them? Iso files are a common disk image distribution format. We'll look at the best ways to open iso files as well as a couple of ways to create them.

8. Can I send text messages between a computer and a cell phone? Well, let's clear one thing up right away: cell phone text messaging, or "SMS" text messaging, is not the same as instant messaging on your computer. They're two very different systems.

9. Why is my Task Manager disabled, and how do I fix it? Task manager can be disabled manually, but more commonly it's disabled by a virus. It's easy to re-enable once you're virus-free.

10. How do I move my Outlook Express folders to my new machine? Moving Outlook Express folders from one machine to another isn't obvious. Moving Outlook Express folders involves finding them, copying them, and importing them. And then there's the address book.

2010: The Year of Email Account Theft

There's a strong theme to many of this year's top 10 entries, and it's simply this: people's email accounts are getting hacked, stolen, or otherwise compromised at an alarming rate; particularly Hotmail users.

Item #6 - Someone's sending from my email address! How do I stop them?! - a newcomer to the top 10 is by far the most obvious sign, but the number 1 and 2 entries are signs of the same problem. In each case people are finding these articles in an attempt to regain access to their accounts, or close a compromised account that they've lost.

If you have only one take-away from this top 10 list it should be this: email account theft is rampant and you should make absolutely sure you're doing everything you can to protect yourself.

Oops, I Did It Again

The rest of the list shows a broad range of issues that people face with very high frequency.

• Even though Windows 7 removed the easy-to-make mistake of deleting your recycle bin, Vista and XP users continue to accidentally remove it when they mean to empty it.

• Privacy, privacy, privacy: folks are eager to remove the various traces of where they've been on-line, or are spooked by the suggestions that Google might be making as they type in search terms.

• Outlook is a fantastic email program, but they really hide from you exactly where all your information is kept in your PST file; lots of people are looking for.

• ISO files are new to the list this year, perhaps a reflection of more software being distributed in this disk-image format. Or it's a reflection of piracy on the rise, I'm not sure which.

• Email to Text messages and back is a perennial favorite, probably as the teens in school realize that email's perhaps the only way to get the attention of the older folks - and vice versa.

• Our only malware related item, disabled task manager inches up a notch this year.

• And finally Outlook Express makes an appearance, most probably due to the fact that it's no longer available in Windows Vista and Windows 7 and people are looking for a way to move their XP-based email to their new machines.

The data's drawn from Google Analytics, which also tells me that it's the result of nearly 20,000,000 visits to Ask Leo! between January 1, 2010 and today.

General Observations

I'll mostly just repeat what I said last year:

Designing a good User Interface is hard. What's obvious to one person - perhaps a person too close to the problem - can often have dramatic negative implications when it's assumed to be obvious to all. The Recycle Bin issue is the simple difference between "Empty" and "Delete" - when both are present on a menu it's not always clear that people will a) see both, and b) know which one to choose.

Information needs to be both obvious and available when people need it. Closing accounts or changing passwords is another case where apparently the information provided by Hotmail at the time people need it is insufficient or too difficult to locate.

And once again malware doesn't make nearly as strong a showing as expected.

The major issues people seem to have are not as much about software quality and failures, as they are about usability.

The good news is that usability is something that software manufacturer's have control over. The bad news? As I said, it's difficult to get "right", particularly when "right" differs from person to person.

Onward to a 2011 with fewer problems and less confusion... we hope.