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Your Tips & Tricks at Data~Creek
Your Tips & Tricks: TWEAK UI non-functioning Explorer Choice ack@gis.net September 05, 1999 When using the TWEAK UI Power Toy with W98 (maybe W95 too?) make sure the default settings within the "My Computer" tab, drives A: / Z:, are checked. Otherwise, a right click on the START button may leave you with non-functioning "Open" and "Explorer" choices. Running a "LASTDRIVE=Z" in config.sys doesn't seem to help the above predicatment. Move Within Forms August 15, 1999 When filling out a form online, instead of clicking from one form box to the next, press the 'tab' button and it will automatically take you to the next feld. To go back up to a previous field, press 'shift' and 'tab' SPACE BAR SCROLL August 14, 1999 So what if you don't have a fancy wheel mouse. Although they may make it easier to negotiate down web pages and long email an even easier way is a touch of the space bar, advancing one page at a time. as if you were clicking on the open space in the scroll bar. FAST DESKTOP/FILES ACCESS June 16, 1999 If you have IE4/5 (with Active Desktop) installed on Windows 9x, right-click on your Taskbar, select 'Toolbars,' then 'Desktop.' You should see a new toolbar appear in your Taskbar; left-click where it says 'Desktop' and drag it all the way to the right (towards your System Tray) until you see just the word 'Desktop' and a couple of small right-pointing arrows. Left-click on those arrows, and you'll get a menu of all the items currently sitting on your Desktop, plus cascading menus for every component and folder on your computer. Much faster than digging through folders! SCANREG /FIX June 16, 1999 When changes are made to the registry nothing is removed. Even though you may delete items the size of the registry never decreases. In time the registry can become quite bloated. The only way to decrease the size of the registry is to use this process. This results in a smaller file (good if you're low on disk space), and a quicker bootup. Solution If you have Win98, type SCANREG /FIX and enter at the prompt. If you have Win95, follow these instructions. Find and run the program regedit.exe in the Windows directory. Click on the "root" (usually called My Computer), and select Export from the File menu. In the dialog box that appears, change to your root directory (usually C:\), specify a filename with the REG extension (if you've configured Windows95 to show your extensions), such as COMPACT.REG, and click OK. Restart Windows in MS-DOS mode (or just Exit to DOS). Change to your Windows directory using the CD command (in most cases, type "CD \WINDOWS" at the prompt). Now, have REGEDIT rebuild your registry by typing the following command (make sure you replace COMPACT.REG with whatever you specified above): REGEDIT /C C:\COMPACT.REG Important: if you receive an error at this point (such as "CAN'T ACCESS REGISTRY"), First of all, try to get into Windows. Type WIN . If you're able to get back into Windows95 and you would like to restore to the last configuration, just open Explorer, find the COMPACT.REG file you created, and double-click on it. After a few seconds, you should see a message like "Information in C:\COMPACT.REG has been successfully entered into the registry." When you see this, restart Windows95 immediately, and everything should be fine. If you can't get back into Windows95, you'll have to restore the backup you made beforehand. It is unknown at this point why the DOS version of the Registry Editor gives this error. That's it. If you didn't get an error, you should now be able to restart Windows95, and you'll notice your registry is now smaller. HOT KEYS SIMPLIFY. June 10, 1999 You may have a number of shortcuts displayed on your desktop, as have I; but, it's not always convenient to get to them to start a particular application. Of course, Windows logo key +M will get you there by minimizing everything. Instead, you might prefer assigning a hot key to a function you use a lot. That's easy enough to do, just right-click on the Shortcut icon, click on the Shortcut tab, click in the field for Shortcut key, and enter the hot key combination you want to assign to it (make sure you don't use a combination you've assigned to another application.) Replacing a corrupt Windows 95 system file. June 10, 1999 Replacing a corrupt Windows 95 system file is a chore, because there's no simple way to find the distribution *.CAB file that contains the compressed master file. To make this task less daunting, you can create a list of master files that you can search easily. First, insert the Win 95 distribution media (we used the Win 95 CD-ROM in the D: drive), then run these three commands from a prompt: EXTRACT /D D:\WIN95\MINI.CAB > WINLIST.TXT EXTRACT /A /D D:\WIN95\PRECOPY1.CAB >> WINLIST.TXT EXTRACT /A /D D:\WIN95\WIN95_02.CAB >> WINLIST.TXT Next, open WINLIST.TXT in WordPad and use Edit|Find to locate the corrupt file. When you locate its master file, scroll to the top of the list to find the .CAB file in which it resides. Now use EXTRACT /Y /L {target folder} {.CAB file} {master filename} to overwrite the corrupt file. TURN OFF CD AUTORUN June 10, 1999 If you place a CD in your CD-ROM drive, you'll notice the busy light flashes much longer under Win 95 than it did under Win 3.x. That's because Win 95 looks for the AUTORUN.INF file. If Win 95 finds the file, it will automatically launch the CD, whether you want it to or not. This will surely slow you down if you only wanted to look at the disc's directory structure. To turn this "feature" off, open My Computer, choose Control Panel, and double-click on System to bring up the System Properties dialog. Choose the Device Manager tab, double-click on CD-ROM to expand the branch, then select your CD-ROM drive. Click on the Properties button and the Settings tab. Under Options, deselect the Auto insert notification option. Click on OK, OK, and restart your computer. Win 95 will no longer automatically run your CDs. Disabling AutoRun in NT 4.0 is a bit more complex because you have to edit the System Registry. First, expand HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE, then open System|CurrentControlSet|Services|Cdrom. In the right pane, double-click on the AutoRun icon, and change the number 1 in the Value data field to 0. Then restart your machine and AutoRun should be disabled. EASY REGISTRY BACKUP & RESTORE. June 05, 1999 Windows 98 backups your registry with each reboot, so that you have the five most recent registries stored. To access these, click "START|Shut Down" and choose "Restart in MS DOS Mode". At the prompt, enter (without the quotes) "scanreg /restore" and note there's a space between "scanreg" and the slash. You'll see the five backups there. Now, if you believe you've messed your system up, you can return to an earlier registry by clicking on it, but this is not something to be taken lightly. Everything you have downloaded or modified since the selected earlier registry may be gone. Associating Files June 05, 1999 FILE ASSOCIATION (the easy way). Select a file (click on it just once to highlight it.) Then, hold down SHIFT and right click on the selected file to get a context menu and click on "Open With." From there, just select the application with which you want the application to open (assuming, of course, that it's capable of handling that particular file.) Bring Up Directories Faster June 05, 1999 OPTIMIZE VCACHE - (Increase Performance) Without these settings, only the names of the currently open directory are kept in memory. Thus, each time you select a new directory, the Explorer will have to spend time reading the names of the files in that directory. With these settings added, all the names of the files or icons on the hard drive are written into a cache in memory, when the Explorer is started. The Explorer is then always ready with the names of the files. Solution Find and run the program regedit.exe in the Windows directory. Find and expand Hkey_Local_Machine\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\explorer. Select the explorer directory by clicking on it once. Select String Value under New in the Edit Menu. Type "MaxCachedIcons". Double click on the new item, MaxCachedIcons, and enter "4000" in the dialog box. Close regedit.exe. Find and open the file, system.ini. Find the line, [vcache] and add two lines, mincachefile=0 and maxcachefile=4096, so that it looks like: [vcache] mincachefile=0 maxcachefile=4096 Restart Windows for this to take effect. Easier Minimizing CptSiskoX@geocities.com February 16, 1999 With Windows 98 or Internet Explorer 4.x/5.x you can minimize almost any open window by simply clicking on its depressed button in the taskbar. Internet Address Time Saver CptSiskoX@geocities.com February 16, 1999 If you right-click your taskbar, choose the "toolbars" option, and select "Address" you will get a new item on the taskbar that allows you to type in any URL (on the Internet, your hard drive, or a network share) and automatically open that page or folder. This saves the steps of having to open your web browser, then type the address in. CptSiskoX@geocities.com | ||||