Win95 Tips |
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by Tom Lassiter |
We have reached the very merry month of May — the month of spring, and wildflowers, and birds singing, and spring housecleaning. Here's an idea for you. When your spouse or significant other suggests you assist in the housecleaning ritual, tell them that you would love to — BUT you really need to devote the time and energy to cleaning up your PC. After all, it is where you spend most of your time these days, isn't it? You probably can't even remember where you left the TV remote, it has been so long since you used it.
And your PC could use a good cleaning too. Yes, I know that as a regular reader of this column you use WIN95 ScanDisk and Disk Defragmenter on a weekly basis to maintain the health of your hard drive. But you also need to take the time to review the programs on your PC at least annually (better now than never) and remove those you no longer use. Clutter like that gets in your way on your PC even more than it does in your closet, attic, or garage.
Some knowledgeable gurus even suggest you back up your hard drive, wipe it clean with FDISK (only if you truly know how to use it), and reinstall only your really used software from scratch. That will definitely remove the clutter, and all those nasty .DLL files lingering on your drive from previously removed programs, and even significantly improve its performance. I too recommend you do this — and with any luck, and my wife scrapping her "honey do" list, I may even get it done this month myself. If you are not of a mind to bite off such a large chore just yet, maybe you would like to chew on some of these little tidbits as a warm-up:
Quit wondering what all those FONTS listed in your word-processing and other programs look like. Print them out and look at them in detail. And by the time you are through you will have a nice coffee table book ready for binding, and future reference. Just click on START, SETTINGS and CONTROL PANEL, double-click on FONTS, then in the resulting dialog box click on VIEW and DETAILS, double-click on the font of your choice. The pop-up box that appears will show all characters of the font and display the font in several different point sizes. Just click on the PRINT button to receive a hard copy for your book. Be sure and click on DONE before you leave each font window or you will soon have a Taskbar full of icons for all those still open.
Want to sort Files by Name, Size, Type, or Date? Open My Computer or Windows Explorer, click on VIEW then on DETAILS. Then just click on the appropriate column heading to sort the list. Repeated clicks will invert the sort from ascending to descending and vice versa. A number of other Win95 programs' windows that have such columns also can be sorted by clicking on the column headings this way.
To resize columns in the Details view of My Computer or Windows Explorer just move your cursor onto the vertical border line between column headings until it changes to a double-sided arrow. At that point you may perform a Drag and Drop to move the border right or left. A double-click on the right border of a column will cause the column to automatically resize to the narrowest width that will still fully display the widest wording in the column. Other Win95 programs' columns will similarly resize.
To see how much free space you have left on a drive — double-click on My Computer, right-click on the drive to be checked and then click on PROPERTIES.
The Win95 HELP file has some excellent help available to you for memory problems and hardware conflicts. Click on START, HELP, then click on INDEX and type MEMORY, then click on TROUBLESHOOTING, then on DISPLAY. To get Hardware help follow the same route but in the HELP INDEX window type CONFLICTING and click on CONFLICTING HARDWARE, TROUBLESHOOTING, then on DISPLAY. Send me an e-mail to let me know how much spring cleaning you escaped due to my introductory advice — or to let me know how the divorce is coming along. See you in June.
NOTE: These tips and tricks are provided as an informational member service. Neither HAL-PC, the author, nor the editor of this article accept any liability for the above tips and tricks nor their applicability to a particular computer or purpose.
Tom Lassiter is a HAL-PC member, Chairs the Steering Committee of the Build or Buy a PC SIG and emcees that weekly SIG meeting, is a HAL-PC Ambassador to the America Online (AOL) User Group Forum, and was one of the initial HALNet beta testers.
E-mail me at webmaster@hal-pc.org with any comments you have and tell me what you want to see here.
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