A. In MS Excel, with the spreadsheet open, click on File—Page Setup—Sheet. Put the mouse pointer in the check box beside Gridlines and click to make a check mark. Click OK. Now the grid lines will print. Click in the box to uncheck if you want no grid lines to print.

In Open Office Calc, with the spreadsheet open, click on Format—Page—Sheet. Put the mouse pointer in the check box beside Grid and click to make a check mark. Click OK. (The command is not visible if the sheet was opened with write protection on. In that case, click the Edit File icon on the Standard Bar.)

In MS Works spreadsheet, click on File—Page Setup—Other Options tab. Check in the box beside Print gridlines. This is the same place to check for printing row and column headers.

A. In My Computer, right-click on the letter of the hard drive you want to check; then click on Properties. Click on the Tools tab. The top section is Error-checking and there is a Check Now button. Click on the button and click OK.

Before you proceed, right-click on each icon in the system tray (lower right of screen) and turn off or disable everything that is presently running, especially any anti-virus program. Everything will come back on when the computer is restarted. Press Ctrl+Alt+ Del and turn off all applications running except the Error-checking.

In the Check disk options window, click to put a check mark beside “Automatically fix file system errors” and click the Start button. This will keep any new files from being written to places on the hard drive that might be trouble spots. The files that are “recovered” are unreadable, so there’s no point in trying to recover them anyway.

Note for last month’s article on Defragmenting the hard drive : If you have a screen saver running on your computer, turn it off before trying to defrag, or it will keep interrupting and Defrag will start over and over and over — each time the screen saver tries to come on. To turn the screen saver off, right-click on an open place on the desktop to get the content menu; click on Properties, then on the Screen Saver tab. Click on the down arrow in the Screen Saver section, select (None), and click OK. After you’re finished defragmenting, you can go back and select whatever picture or background you like.