Baffled by technology or struggling with an IT annoyance? Andrew has the answers to all your troubles.

Q. Why are flat monitors so much more expensive than ordinary monitors?

A. The price difference is due to the expense of manufacturing flat-panel screens that have good colour and a wide viewing angle. As production ramps up and the technology evolves (as it will), the price will inevitably drop but until that time I am afraid flat monitors will remain an expensive (though very desirable) alternative.

Q. I keep getting the message "Content advisor details are corrupt or missing" when I try to open Internet Explorer. Can you tell me what is wrong?

A. This error occurs when the Content Advisor features of Internet Explorer are turned on but the configuration file (ratings.pol) is damaged or missing. The Content Advisor is responsible for attempting to screen-out unsuitable sites, based on the ratings you provide. A full description of the problem and its solution can be found at: help.cioe.com/faq/contentThis problem applies only to Internet Explorer. Netscape and other browsers do not have this feature as standard.

Q. When I type in Word it overwrites text already there when I want it to add it to the front of the text. This is driving me mad. How do I get it to behave normally?

A. This is one of those classic "gotchas" for new Word users. Word has two modes for typing: overwrite and insert. The normal behaviour is insert but if you accidentally press the Insert key (just above the arrow keys on your keyboard), it changes the mode to overwrite. To fix this, simply press the Insert key again to toggle back to insert mode. You can tell if you are in overwrite mode in Word by the little OVR on the status bar that is either greyed out (insert mode) or black (overwrite mode).

Q. I recently bought a scanner and it came with some OCR software. Can you tell me what OCR is?

A. OCR stands for Optical Character Recognition. It means that the computer will take an image of a page of text, attempt to "read" the text and create an editable text document. This can be very useful and can save a lot of time typing but it is by no means foolproof. Depending on the quality of the scan and the types of fonts that the document uses, you can expect accuracy rates of between 70 to 90 per cent.

Andrew Hardy is the owner of DoubleClick IT.