Turning off auto-dim in Dell laptops and win7

I had a Dell laptop with Win7 that the user was complaining that the screen was going black. I quickly realized it was not the screen, but a setting. When you put your hands on the keyboard, the screen would dim. If you put your finger over the sensor, it would (obviously) go black. I hunted around for quite a while, but found a simple fix:

function

This turned the auto-dim function on and off. I am thinking that he inadvertently set it when he was trying to change his resolution.

cannot open excel files

Well, this one stumped me for awhile. I now have Win7 and Office 2007. All was going well, when I couldn't open any excel files. The error was:

"There was a problem sending the command to the program"

After digging around a bit, I found the solution.

Bring up the Excel options, go to advanced and then scroll down to the

"General" section. Make sure that "Ignore other applications that use

Dynamic Data Exchange (DDE)" is not checked.

I am not sure what DDE does, but after unchecking that box, I could open Excel files again.