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How do I stop Gmail showing old photos?
Q
We’re in the middle of buying a
fl at and my wife urgently
needed to send me a legal
document to check. Th e scanned
document’s fi le was about 7MB but my
work email blocks attachments over
5MB. So I had the bright idea of having
her send it to my Gmail account, as I
know this can handle larger fi les.
It worked, but the moment I opened
her email at work I was embarrassed to
see a bunch of old personal photos
appearing down the right-hand side of
the Gmail window under the heading
‘Recent photos’. Neither of us uses Gmail
very often and these photos aren’t recent,
but where did these photos come from
and how do I stop Gmail displaying
them?
Ryan Watson
A
We’re assuming you don’t often
delete emails because Gmail has
dredged up these photos from
your old email exchanges with your wife.
In an effort to be helpful, Gmail displays
To avoid displaying recent photos on the right-hand side of
your Gmail emails, click this option in General settings
thumbnails of the last few images sent to
you by the current contact. In this case,
the ‘Recent photos’ were quite simply the
last images your wife sent to you via
Gmail, which was some years ago by
the sounds of it.
In fact, the entire right-hand column in
Gmail is reserved for what Google calls
the People widget. Other information can
appear here, including Google+ details
and summaries of recent emails.
Th e People widget can’t
be modified, but it can be
disabled. Click the cog icon
at the top-right and choose
Settings. Now select the
General tab, scroll down to the
People Widget section then
select ‘Hide the people widget’.
After that, scroll down a bit
further and click Save Changes.
If you’d prefer to keep the People
widget but just remove the offending
photos, you’ll need to delete the related
emails (Gmail doesn’t let you delete only
attachments). A quick way to fi nd the
relevant emails is to click in the Gmail
search bar, type from:yourwife@
heraddress.com has:attachment and
press Enter. Tick the unwanted emails
then click Delete.
Why won’t my
grandson’s laptop
work at home?
Q
I upgraded my grandson’s
laptop to Windows 10, and it
all went well. But when my
grandson took his laptop home, it
always failed to boot beyond the
Windows Desktop. All it does is reboot,
and display some message about a ‘DPC
watchdog violation’. When I bring the
laptop back to my house, it boots fi ne.
Any idea what could cause this strange
behaviour?
Ian Jackson
A
Th is is strange, but we have
an idea of what might be
happening. Are you connecting
different external devices at either
home address? For example, perhaps
you set up the laptop using your own
keyboard and mouse, and then
reconnected these when trying to fi x it?
Or perhaps your grandson is attaching
devices at his home? Devices such as
external hard drives and memory sticks
If your upgraded Windows 10
laptop fails to boot, identify
problem external devices and
update their drivers
can cause this type of
problem.
Use trial and error to fi nd
out which device is causing
the problem. For example,
it might be that the laptop
works fi ne with your
mouse, but crashes without
it because its built-in
touchpad’s drivers are
clashing with Windows 10.
With the offending device
identified use your
grandson’s normal setup to
launch Windows 10, then
press Windows key+X and
click Device Manager.
Right-click the problematic device,
choose Properties followed by Driver
and then click Update Driver (or Roll
Back Driver if no new drivers exist).
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