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Windows Tips Page 2
Here are just a few more Tips for Windows 95 / 98 that may make your life a little easier by changing some system settings.
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In Detail
Registry Tips Remove Arrow from Shortcuts By default, Windows 9x adds an arrow to the corner of shortcut icons. The arrow is used to distinguish shortcuts from the items they point towards. Under some circumstances, you may wish to remove the shortcut arrow from your Windows 9x installation. To do this, first back up the registry and then start the Registry Editor (Regedit.exe) by clicking Start | Run and typing: regedit and clicking OK. Navigate to HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\lnkfile, right-click the IsShortcut value, and select Delete. Navigate to HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\piffile, delete the IsShortcut value, and then close the Registry Editor. NOTE: registry editing can be risky, be sure you have made a backup before making any changes Top of Page Problems Restoring Registry Files When you start your Windows 98 computer, you may receive a message reporting: "You have restored a good registry. Windows found an error in your system files and restored a recent backup of the files to fix the problem." This message can be displayed if you have tried to restore a registry backup file, or the Registry Checker tool is not resetting the "damage" flag in the current registry files. To try to fix the problem, you can run the Registry Checker tool as follows. Restart Windows. While Windows is restarting, hold down the [Ctrl] key to display the Microsoft Windows 98 Start Up menu. Select the Command Prompt only option. When the command prompt appears type scanreg /fix and press [Enter]. When scanreg has completed, press [Enter] and then type scanreg /opt and press [Enter]. The /opt switch removes unused space from the registry files to optimize them. When this has completed, restart your computer. If you still receive the above error message, you will have to try to restore a different registry backup using the /restore switch with scanreg. NOTE: always make sure you have made a backup before making any changes Top of Page Misc Tips BURY YOUR DEAD LINKS Shortcuts can be a great time-saver. From your desktop or taskbar, you have easy access to those files hidden far down in the network, which can spare you from all that repetitive navigation. But shortcuts can also be great at cluttering up your desktop when the files they point to have long been moved or deleted. Unfortunately, Windows 9x can't update shortcuts to track location changes. To combat the problem of dead links, the Windows 98 Resource Kit offers you the Link Check Wizard, which looks through your system for shortcuts and verifies if they have an active file associated with them. Checklinks.exe then reports any "dead" links and gives you the option to remove them. Top of Page Eliminate Floppy Drive Check To eliminate the floppy drive check, right-click on My Computer and select Properties from the context menu. Click on the Performance tab and then the File System button. Click on the Floppy Disk tab and clear the Search For New Floppy Disk Drives Every Time Your Computer Starts check box. Close the applet boxes by approving your changes. Reboot the computer, and Windows will no longer spend valuable time checking to see if a new floppy drive has been installed. Top of Page Setting Default Printer Using the Default Printer (Defptr.exe) utility from the Windows 98 Resource Kit. Once the utility is started (it's a single executable file so just double-click it), all you need to do to change your computer's default printer is select another printer from the given list. The default printer utility then sits back in the System Tray next to the clock at the bottom right of the screen. If you want your users to have access to the default printer utility from start-up, copy the program to each computer, put a shortcut to it in the start-up folder, and modify the shortcut's properties so that the Run field is set to Minimized. Mouse Gestures In Opera The Opera browser supports what is called "mouse gestures" for many operations. For example, if you hold down your right mouse button and drag the mouse down, Opera will open a new window. Here are some Opera's mouse gestures: Hold down the right or (secondary) mouse button and move the mouse down to open a new window up and down to reload a page up and then right to restore or maximize the window down and then left to minimize the window. Top of Page Desktop Tips Search From Quick launch bar If you want to have Quick Launch bar access to Windows 98's useful Start | Find | Files Or Folders option, try this simple procedure: 1. Click Start | Find | Files Or Folders. 2. Click File | Save Search and a desktop icon named All Files will be created. 3. Drag-and-drop this icon to the Quick Launch bar. To perform a search, just click the icon in the Quick Launch bar Top of Page Address Book Folders You can choose the way you want to view the Address Book. Just open the Address Book and choose View|Folders and Groups. This switches the Address Book to a double-pane view similar to Windows Explorer. The various folders and groups will appear in the left pane and your contacts in the right pane. To switch back choose View|Folders and Groups again. This command acts as a toggle and will switch you back to the original view. Top of Page Backup Address Book (1) If you lose your Address Book, you could have a lot of trouble recovering it. You might never recover some of the addresses. To backup your Address Book, you first have to find it. To do this, run the Address Book (you may have to run Outlook Express and click Addresses). Now, in Address Book, choose Help|About Address Book. The About dialog box will display the location and name of the Address Book. Once you know the Address Book's location, run Windows Explorer and drag a copy of the Address Book file (*.WAB) to another location. You could also insert a blank formatted floppy disk into Drive A and copy the Address Book to the floppy. Top of Page Backup Address Book (2) A much better way than the one described above is:- Start Address Book, Click File / Export / Other Address Book Then select Text File (Comma separated values) and click Export Click the Browse button to select where you want to save the output file to, and it's name, Then click Ok and then NEXT On this page, tick the fields you want to export, then click FINISH To Import the file into your new Address Book Start Address Book, Click File / Import / Other Address Book Then select Text File (Comma separated values) and click Import Browse to find the *.CSV file you created earlier and follow the on screen prompts Top of Page Wheel Mouse & Internet Explorer 1 Here's an Microsoft Internet Explorer feature that I have just heard about. Hold down the Shift key while you move the wheel on your wheel mouse, Internet Explorer will move backward and forward through visited pages. Just like clicking the Back and Forward buttons, or holding down the Alt key while you click the left or right keypad arrows Top of Page Wheel Mouse & Internet Explorer 2 Changing The font Size In Microsoft Internet Explorer If you use a wheel mouse, you can use the wheel to quickly change the font size in Microsoft Internet Explorer 6. All you have to do is hold down the Ctrl key and move the wheel to increase and decrease the font size. This is much quicker and cooler than using the menu to change font size. Top of Page Multiple Accounts If you have multiple mail accounts set up in Outlook Express, you may not be able to tell easily which messages go with which accounts. However, Outlook Express offers an Account column (it doesn't appear by default) that will show you which account each message belongs with. To activate the Account column, choose View - Columns. When the Columns dialog box opens, select the check box labeled "Account" and then click OK to close the dialog box. The Account column should now appear in your Outlook Express window Top of Page Underlining Links in IE5 onwards Microsoft Internet Explorer 5 and greater underlines each link on a page by default. If you'd rather not have the links underlined, you can easily turn off this feature. Choose Tools - Internet Options. When the Internet Options dialog box opens, click the Advanced tab. In the "Underline Links" area, select Hover or Never. Click OK and the underlines no longer appear. Top of Page Netscape and Opera
Show Netscape Cached Files To look at your Netscape Navigator cache file, click in the Address bar and type "about:cache" and press Enter. This opens an HTML page that displays all the current cache file statistics. If you enter "about:cache" into the Mozilla Address bar, you'll get information concerning your memory and disk cache files. You can click "List Cache Entries" to view separate entries in both the memory and disk cache files. Top of Page Adding Bookmarks In Netscape An easy way to add a bookmark in Netscape is to drag the URL from the Web page to the blue Bookmark Quickfile button. To do this, use the mouse to grab the icon just to the left of the address bar to the Bookmarks button. Hold the mouse button down until the Bookmarks menu opens. Drag the URL to the folder you want it to reside in, and then release the mouse button. Top of Page Opera Splash Screen If you like, you can use your own custom splash screen in Opera. Create the splash screen you want to use (works up to size to 256 X 256 pixels) and place it in the Opera folder. Now double-click opera6.ini and locate the [User Prefs] section. You should see the current splash screen line at this point. Change it to your new splash screen. Example: Splash image=C:\Program Files\Opera\Images\lili.jpg (where you have saved your file) Choose File - Save to save opera6.ini. Now, you can close Notepad and run Opera to see your new splash screen Top of Page About Netscape 6.2 Want to know a bit more about what's going on in Netscape 6.2? For example, what plug-ins are currently active? To find out about plug-ins, click in the Address Bar, and type about:plugins then press Enter. You'll get a complete page telling you more than you likely want to know about Netscape's current plug-ins. To view an interesting page, type about:mozilla into the Address Bar and press Enter. Top of Page Multiple Windows in Opera 6 It's very easy to open new windows in Opera 6. All you have to do is press Ctrl + N. The only problem is that you end up with many open Opera windows. If this happens to you, you can tab through the Opera windows by simply pressing Ctrl + Tab. Note that Ctrl + Tab has other functions in other programs, so you should use this only when you're in an active Opera window. Top of Page Disable Image Bar in IE In Microsoft Internet Explorer 6, any time you move your mouse over an image, a little toolbar pops up asking if you want to save, open, mail, or print the image. This is okay (we suppose), but it gets annoying after a while. To eliminate the image toolbar, run IE 6 and choose Tools|Internet Options. When the dialog box opens, click the Advanced tab. Now, scroll down to the Multimedia section and deselect the "Enable Image toolbar" radio button Top of Page Clearing The Netscape Cache Even if you aren't especially concerned about security, it's still a good idea to clear your Netscape 6 cache now and then. To do this, run Netscape and choose Edit|Preferences. When the Preferences dialog box opens, double-click the Advanced category to open it. Now click Cache. In the Cache pane (on the right side of the dialog box), click Clear Disk Cache. Click OK to close the dialog box. Top of Page Put The MIE History Folder On Your Desktop If you frequently use Microsoft Internet Explorer, you might want to consider placing it on your Windows desktop. To do this, right-click on an empty spot on the desktop and choose New/Folder. Copy the name shown here and then paste it into the new folder name. History.{FF393560-C2A7-11CF-BFF4-444553540000} It's very important that the name of the folder be entered exactly as shown here. This is why I suggest a copy and paste to name the folder. This works in Windows 98. It does not work properly in Windows XP, and I have not tested it in other Windows versions Top of Page Scrolling In Microsoft Internet Explorer Although there are a number of ways to scroll through a Web page in Microsoft Internet Explorer (Page Down, Page Up, use the mouse, etc.), one of the easiest is to simply press the Spacebar. Pressing the Spacebar scrolls down a page. If you need to scroll up a page, press Shift + Spacebar Top of Page Translating Text in Opera 6 Opera 6 is a great browser for translations--we've already mentioned that you can translate from one currency to another, so now we're going to look at translating text into another language. Since it seems to us that we often run across what appears to be interesting information in German, Spanish, Italian, and French, we could use a quick translation. It doesn't have to be a perfect translation--just good enough to get the gist of the article. When you use Opera 6, all you have to do to translate text is highlight the text and right-click it. Choose Translate and then select the necessary language pair. |