WindowsTips

Miscellaneous Windows Tips

This page contains miscellaneous notes I've taken for my own reference, mostly from other online sources. Since this wasn't originally intended to be put online, I didn't always make note of the source and I have yet to go back to track down some of those sources. If you know any of the sources and would like me to give specific credit where it's due, please contact me.

More Icons in Windows Windows defaults to shell32.dll to give you options of new icons. You can also change this location to get more icons. Try browsing to the .exe of your favorite app and see what icons are available to choose from.

Want more music oriented icons? Try %SystemRoot?%\system32\wmploc.dll

-- from comments on Lifehacker

FuseMailSSL Support

FuseMail is pleased to announce that we now support encrypted SSL transmissions for both IMAP and SMTP.

IMAP Server: IMAP.FUSEMAIL.NET port 143, port 80, and SSL port 993

SMTP Server: SMTP.FUSEMAIL.NET port 25, port 2500, port 25000, and port 465 with or without TLS SSL encryption.

- from: http://www.fusemail.com/forums/viewtopic.php?p=3982#3982

Misc

Freeware Text-to-Speech Programs

- from [1]

OCR/Scanning

". . .I discovered a program called Microsoft Document Scanning. I'm not a big fan of Microsoft but since this is part of Microsoft Office, I figured that I might as well use it. It provides a much better "front-end" to the scanner.

When I scan documents with this program it saves them as TIF files. The program uses OCR to convert the text on the scanned page and stores it in the TIF's header. This means that the files are perfect copies of the originals but are still searchable using the Windows "Find" feature. . ."

- from http://www.davidco.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=646

Excel Time/Date Data Format

From Converting HH:MM to Minutes in Excel:

Excel stores times and dates as a number of days; for example, when you enter 1:00, meaning one hour, it is stored as the number 0.041666, or 1/24, since an hour is 1/24 of a day.

So to convert a time to a number of minutes, all you have to do is convert days to minutes by multiplying by 24*60, and then set the format of the cell to numeric (rather than time, which it otherwise assumes you want).

For example, if I put 2:32 into cell A1, and put the formula 

 =A1*24*60

MP3 TOOLS

"DbPoweramp Powerpack. 30 day free trial. Works well, I've been using it for years now to transcode from one compressed format to another. Nice feature is that it's got shell extensions, so you just right-click on an mp3 or any other music file in explorer, and you have the option to 'convert to', which brings up a menu of choices, not just formats but bitrates and destination dirs. Very handy. DbPoweramp has all the necessary codecs on their site. There's also a music player - a good one - and a lot more. Highly reco'd."

&

"My first Jukebox was a Creative Jukebox 3 20 gig. It would handle WAV, WMA, MP3. I use my jukebox for audio books so I was looking for the smallest file size with the best sound. I ended up using 32 kps wma but found that most CD player that would play both wma and mp3 wouldn't read a wma file smaller than 60 kps. Some of my audio books were compressed to 32 kps. I use Cakewalk to record my cassette based audio books to CD. I had to convert from WMA back to WAV and then comvert it to 32 kps mp3. In all of the articules I have read they warn not to try and convert an mp3 to wma or wma to mp3. So what you need to do is convert your WMA files to WAV and then convert them to MP3. My Creative Jukebox died and I replaced with an Archos Studio. I hope this helps."

&

"Winamp down around vers 2.22 or thereabouts (before M$ made 'em quit) will convert directly from WMA (at least the non-drm version) to any other format there is a plugin for. MP3 and WAV for sure."

- from email on Archos Yahoo group

Enabling ClearType

  1. To turn on ClearType, go to Control Panel > Display > Appearance > Effects and turn on the checkbox for "smooth edges of screen fonts," making sure that the popup menu reads "ClearType." [2]
  2. Tune ClearType Settings

Automatically Log Off Inactive Terminal Server Users

  1. Start - Programs - Admin Tools - Terminal Server Configuration
  2. Double Click on RDP-Tcp in the right pain
  3. Select the Sessions tab
  4. In the first section, check the 'Override Users Settings' box
  5. Then use the pulldown to set End a disconnected Session time

You might want to set this to like 5 or 10 minutes, that way if there was an accidental disconnect they will be able to come right back and get their session, and if not they will be logged off.

Note, of course, that if you do this there's no way to gracefully exit programs. So if they leave Word open and disconnect, they will lose the unsaved data in Word when it terminates the session.

- fom usenet posting

Vi/Vim Paragraph Justification

  • gq} to justify from cursor to end of paragraph
  • gqap to justify entire paragraph

Winamp Tweaks

By default, the media player loads every plugin in the Plugin folder (even though all of them are not needed). Each (obviously) consumes system resources. "I created a sub-folder named 'Not in Use' and moved the plugins that I'm not currently using into it. WARNING: you have to make sure you know which filenames go with which plugins. Luckily, most of them install a text file with the same name. WinAmp may still load slowly, but at least I know I've done the most I can do -- and saved some memory and resources in the process." Along those WinAmp tweaking lines, how many skins do you have? Instead of keeping each in a separate sub-folder, ZIP them up to save disk space. Don't worry; WinAmpwill unzip them automatically when you want to use them. But that's not all! Change the extension from ZIP to WSZ and you'll be able to apply the skin automatically by double-clicking it!

Throttling Bandwidth In Windows 2000

Despite the hammering that my free time took this week, I found a couple of things of specific interest to Win2K users.

First up is a quick way to limit the bandwidth on a given machine or network adapter without funneling everything through a proxy server or configuring each program separately. Many people ask how you can do something like this without resorting to some kind of third-party or hardware-based solution. I know that a couple of NICs? have a firmware-configurable way to throttle bandwidth (in fact, one of them is the punchline to a joke: “Switch to full duplex on a half-duplex line”), but not everyone can resort to this sort of thing.

Mercifully, there is an OS-level solution for those of us running Windows 2000, although it requires the presence of the Quality of Service Packet Scheduler driver in the network stack. This is installed by default, so chances are it's already there if you haven't diddled too much with the network settings. If by some error you wound up removing it, you can re-add it without too much difficulty. In the properties for the network adapter in question, click Install, select Service, and then choose QoS Packet Scheduler. The QoS driver has no configuration options and should kick in immediately, but you should reboot after doing this anyway. If it's in the stack but not enabled, enable it and reboot.

Once the driver is in, open up RegEdit and navigate to the key HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet?\Services\Psched\Parameters\Adapt ers\[GUID], where [GUID] is the GUID number of the adapter you want to set limits on. If you have more than one adapter and you just want to set the same limits for them all, then you can just edit each GUID separately, but if you want to find out what adapter is assigned to a particular GUID, you can search the Registry for that GUID string and see what hardware it matches up with by expanding the keys it appears in.

In that key you'll need to add a DWORD value: NonBestEffortLimit. This is a number from 1 to 100 that indicates how much of the total percentage of bandwidth for that hardware device to use. The default is 20 percent. Once the value is in place, reboot the computer.

Query Video Card

Open a command prompt. Enter the Debug command. At the - propmt type D (for display), then memory address c000:0000. If that dosen't display the card info, select the next range of memory (C000:0080). To exit the debug command, type quit. Example

C>\debug -dc000:0000 -dc000:0080 quit

Lock PC From A Shortcut

(from Win2kpowerusers newsletter) Another tip comes to me this week courtesy of Azeddine Jakib, who has a quick way for you to create a shortcut that can be used to lock your Win2K or [=WinXP workstation.

  1. Create a new shortcut.
  2. Place the following in the Target line: %windir%\System32\rundll32.exe user32.dll,LockWorkStation
  3. Use your favorite icon from shell32.dll (I use the lock icon, naturally) to modify the shortcut.
  4. Place the shortcut anywhere.

The same command line can also be issued from within a batch file, with the same results. =]

Security Tips

  1. Impress on all your users under the pain of death by torture that they only open up attachments THEY ASKED FOR. If they get one from some one they know but was not asked for, send an email back to check what it is. Violation is asking for a pink slip.
  2. Religiously patch all your systems. Servers of course are much more important than workstations, but still. Security is more important than the inevitable downtime that patching your systems generates.
  3. Monitor your systems for normal performance. Establish a baseline, and program in alerts so that you get warned if things start to peak suddenly. Good chance these machines are being hit by something, or worse, are already infected and are now trying to penetrate other machines. A good tool to set this kind of thing up is ELM. For instance, you can make ELM ping you if CPU is over, say, 75% for 3 minutes or of RAM utilization gets over 1Gig. Over at: http://www.w2knews.com/rd/rd.cfm?id=100801-ELM
  4. If you have people working from home or hotels, make sure that they use personal firewalls on their machines. Especially if they have either a cable modem or DSL. Make sure that these firewalls are also stopping hackers to get out of that machine into your corporate systems by using something like ZoneAlarm.
  5. You should start looking at your own firewalls and make them block traffic that uses spoofed IP addresses. You can do that with the so called egress and ingress filtering.
  6. Enlighten your management that budgets should be made available with high priority for two flashpoint areas: Security and High Availability.

Add Domain Users Via A Script

Add many domain users from a spredsheet or a comma delimited file? 

 ====userlist.csv====
 name;password;fullname
 hdampf;secret;Dampf, Hans
 jdoe;found;Doe, John
 ===run_this.cmd====
 for /F "skip=1 tokens=1,2,3 delims=;" a in (userlist.csv) do net
 user a b /add /Fullname:"c" /DOMAIN

Word Scrolling

If you use Microsoft Word 97, you may have noticed that when you peruse a document using the scroll bar, the visible page doesn't "change" until you let go of the scroll bar button. Well, if you apply this registry tweak, you can click & hold the scroll bar button and get "live updating" in the document window! WARNING: Registry hacking is NOT for novices (proceed with caution). Open Regedit, navigate to HKEY_CURRENT_USER > Software > Microsoft > Office > 8.0 > Word > Options. Create a new String value and name it "LiveScrolling" (without the quotes or any spaces). Then, modify it and enter "1" (without the quotes) as a value. The next time you use Word 97, it should work!

Netscape Command Line

Netscape is a lot more command line user friendly than Internet Explorer. What's that all about? It's about getting below-the-surface information quickly from the browser. See what you get when you enter these on the 'Location' line:

  • about: (browser info)
  • about:cache (disk cache)
  • about:document (current page info)
  • about:global (global history entries)
  • about:image-cache = (memory cached images)
  • about:license (license agreement)
  • about:logo (Netscape logo)
  • about:memory-cache (memory cache)
  • about:mozilla (killer quote)
  • about:plugins (installed plug-ins)
  • about:XYZ (Substitute 'XYZ' with real URL).

You can try these in IE, but the results won't be the same.

Windows Terminal Services Client

On Windows OS CD: d:\i386\adminpak.msi

Create A Virtual Cd Drive

Windows programs sometimes require a particular CD-ROM to be in a specific CD drive. Reader Anthony Cimorelli describes a workaround for this kind of behavior in Windows 2000.

Step 1. Create a hard disk folder with a name such as

C:\VirtualCD.

Step 2. Copy your CD (or the portion you need) into this folder.

Step 3. Right-click the folder, then click "Sharing." Share the folder using a name such as VirtualCD.

Step 4. In Windows Explorer, pull down the Tools menu, then click Map Network Drive. Select an unused drive letter, such as V, then browse to the VirtualCD folder and select it.

Step 5. Install the program from drive V or change the software's references so they point to drive V.

Cimorelli says this method works well for programs with a lot of CDs?, such as Printmaster (http://www.printmaster.com).

As another example, one mapping program I've used has a huge database of streets on one CD, with bodies of water on a second CD. To include both streets and rivers on the same map, Cimorelli's method allows you to assign one or both CDs? to different drive letters, although they are merely different folders.

Remote Registry Service

The Remote Registry Service is described with these simple words in the Services panel: "Allows remote registry manipulation." Meaning that if you run RegEdit on one machine, you can connect to another machine running Remote Registry Service and make changes.

The implications of this should be fairly obvious. If you WANT to be able to remotely manipulate a machine's registry (aside from doing it by connecting via Terminal Services and running RegEdit locally), then that's one thing. On the other hand, the vast majority of system admins will consider this to be a security hole just begging to be exploited, whether you're running Workstation or Server.

Unless you're running a machine that you have closely observed or behind a NAT scheme or firewall, I would recommend against running RRS. Shut it down and disable it as well. When I set up a server, this is actually one of the first things I turn off -- since, as I mentioned earlier, it makes more sense to make Registry changes using a utility I launch locally in a Terminal Services session.

Speeding Up Slow Pages In Netscape

Netscape isn't my favorite browser on the 'Net, but it does have one rather nice feature that can be invoked with slow loading pages to find out what's gumming up the works. Navigator has a habit of preventing the display of a page if JUST ONE image is broken, sometimes hanging up for up to 2 (or more) minutes. By hitting Control + Alt + T, Netscape will show you a list of pending items left to download and their full URL, giving you a good idea of what the problem may be. Banner servers are notorious for breaking completely or failing to respond in a timely manner, thus you may see ad links / images listed quite often. You'll also see your connection status, which tells you precisely how many connections are required to finish the page as well as the concurrent connection limit that your browser is currently configured to handle. If you're looking for a viable browsing alternative (without dropping any more money or putting up with internal ad rotations), check out the Mozilla project at MOZILLA.ORG. Now that Netscape is no longer in the browser business (which they publicly stated last week), you may be wise to grow attached to another product.

Anti-Pop Software

http://www.wired.com/news/ebiz/0,1272,45306,00.html These programs come in a host of assorted flavors with names including AdsOff, Close Popup, Mr. KillAd, Advertising Killer, PopNot, AllGone, PopUp Hunter, Nagger, AdDelete, AdPurger, AdStopper, Pop-Up Stopper, Pop-Up Killer and PopUp Eraser.

Share Mounting Syntax 

 net use * \\IP.ADDRESS\c$ /user:DOMAIN\USERNAME
 net use * \\MACHINE.NAME\c$ /user:DOMAIN\USERNAME

Windows Key Hotkeys

  • Windows: Display start menu
  • Windows + D: Minimize or restore all Windows
  • Windows + E: Display Windows Explorer
  • Windows + Tab: Cycle through buttons on taskbar
  • Windows + F: Display find: all files
  • Windows + Ctrl + F: Display find: computer
  • Windows + F1: Display help
  • Windows + R: Display Run command
  • Windows+ break: Display system properties dialog box
  • Windows + M: minimize all windows
  • Windows + shift + M: Undo minimize all windows
  • Windows + U: Utility Manager (usability tools)

Wipe Drives

There's No Such Thing As a Good Worm Win32.All3gro.A is the name of a new worm that tries to help you in all the wrong ways. The worm claims it will clean up the bad worms on your hard drive, but all it does is mess up your files. If you see it or get a file attachment labeled "antivirus.exe" and a subject line stating "New Antivirus Tool", don't open it. Of course, you should not be opening attachments from people you don't know, but in case you forget, just delete the file. You will save yourself some time and effort. Remember, there are no good worms. http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1003-200-6962764.html

Point Windows To CD Data

This should only be done if Windows frequently asks you to insert the system CD. To proceed, copy everything sitting in the system CD's SETUP folder over to a new location (e.g., C:\Windows\Options\Cabs), fire up REGEDIT, then navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE \ Software \ Microsoft \ Windows \ CurrentVersion \ Setup. Edit the SourcePath string and enter the new file path (e.g., C:\Windows\Options\Cabs). The next time your OS needs to access any of those files, it'll know where to find them first. This should work fine for all 9x/ME versions of Windows.

Windows Clipboard

  • CTRL+X = cut
  • CTRL+C = copy
  • CTRL+V = paste.

TCP/IP Optimization

My friend Hubert pinged me with something amazing. A registry tweak that increases broadband download speed big time. At the moment at home I'm running a few different machines. One of these is a Dell Dimension with a Pentium II, 256MB Ram, still on NT 4.0 SP6?. I'm hooked up to a roadrunner cable modem.

The registry tweak consists of adding a key in the TCP/IP section that makes the 'RECEIVE WINDOW' 32767 instead of the default which is way too small. So, I ran a simple test. Went to a space-related site and downloaded a 13Mb file called quasar.avi, impressive ani-mation BTW. It's over at: http://oposite.stsci.edu/pubinfo/mpeg/

The download took 90 seconds. Next I created the new registry key, rebooted, went straight to the same site, and downloaded again about 2 minutes later. It's relatively early in the morning so the cable segment I'm on is not busy yet. Guess what happened to my pleasant surprise? Second download came in at 45 seconds instead of 90... WOW! Linden DeCarmo wrote it, way to go Linden! Link at: http://www.sunbelt-software.com/redir.cfm?id=cblspeed102000

Thumbnails Of Word And Excel Documents

Thumbnails are awesome -- especially when you're in a hurry and "DSC01043?.JPG" isn't a terribly helpful file name. GnomeHUGS to the person at Microsoft who built this functionality into the Windows Explorer. While W98 users must pull up a folder's properties to turn on this feature, W2k/ME rugrats have the option built into the View menu (and toolbar icon). When you encounter a folder containing countless images, thumbnails will help you sort through the selection. Here's a secret: you can make thumbnails for Office documents, too. PowerPoint presentations will work without intervention, but Excel spreadsheets and Word documents require a bit of tweaking. Open one up in its respective application (Word or Excel), then select Properties from the File menu. At the bottom of the first sheet, there's an option to "Save Preview Picture." Put a checkmark in that box. There ya go! It now has an associated thumbnail.

Find Word Cursor Positions

I always seem to forget which one you're supposed to do first: point or click? Let's see... clicking gets me nowhere unless I point to where I want to click. Okay. Problem solved. But wait, where was I? My cursor was somewhere else about two seconds ago. Have I lost my place in Microsoft Word again? Will this madness ever end?! And just how many licks does it take to get to the center of a Tootsie Roll Tootsie Pop? Well, only a real sucker would forget this keyboard shortcut; when SHIFT+F5 is used, you can quickly recall the last five cursor positions in the current document. Perfect for when you're editing your already-overdue term paper -- or when you need to get back... get back... get back to where you once belonged. Of course, tapping F5 without the SHIFT key will pop up the "Go To" dialog. Again, if you already know where you're going, you'll be golden. And wherever you are, there you'll be.

Reboot Windows 2000 Fast

Coming from Serdar Yegulalp's very awesome Windows 2000 e-mail newsletter (found at THEGLINE.COM), here's an awesome tip for instant shutdown gratification in (duh) Windows 2000. "To shut Win2K down fast, hit CTRL-ALT-DEL, and then hold down the CTRL key while clicking the Shut Down button. You'll get a warning dialog: 'If you continue your machine will reboot and any unsaved data will be lost. Use this only as a last resort.' (They're not kidding) If you click OK, the system will reboot IMMEDIATELY -- no shutdown screen, no 'It is now safe to turn off your computer' splash. Upon rebooting, I found all was well, and the 'dirty' bit on my NTFS drives was not set, meaning that any pending writes to those volumes had been flushed." This technique is not recommended unless you're caught between a rock and a hard place. Still, for sticky situations, this click trick is quite slick.

Fast Access To Microsoft Knowledgebase

Help with numerous problems caused by Microsoft's operating systems and applications comes in the form of Microsoft Knowledgebase (MS KB) articles. Once you have an article number in hand, you have to surf to the Knowledgebase search page, then enter the article number. If you're using Internet Explorer 5.x, shave a few steps off of the process by typing "MSKB Q286043" sans quotes. You'll instantly be whisked away to the exact missive you're after, and nary a click has been rendered to get there.

Verify Disk Writes

Sneakernet is still in common use around many offices, which is a bit of a shame with all of the things technology can do these days. Even if you aren't one to sneakerize your data between two PCs? sitting next to each other, there still comes the need for a floppy diskette once in a while. Using Floppies will ultimately lead to bad data once in a while, but with the help of the Verify command, you can add one more step to the floppy write process to help ensure the readability before the diskette leaves the source machine. Simply launch a DOS box and type "verify" sans quotes to see the current status of the verify flag, normally off. Type "verify on" to force data to be read back from the diskette after writing, ensuring the integrity of the information. Note that this also affects hard disk writes, which can cause a bit of a performance drag. Windows 9x will leave verify on even if you exit the DOS window so be sure to type "verify off" when you're finished, though a reboot will reset the status to off as well. Windows NT/2K will both forget this setting once you close the DOS window.

Windows Media Player Usability

Question: How do I make the player Better, More Usable?

Answer: For me, I did the following...

  1. turned "Start Player in Media Guide" off
  2. turned "When in compact mode, display anchor window" off
  3. turned "Enable Personal Rights Management" off
  4. increased Copy music quality to 128kbps
  5. turned the graphic equalizer and visualizations off
  6. turned CD Audio "Error Correction" on (I have a flaky CD-ROM drive)
  7. Plus I wrote some skins, but that's because I have specific tastes. <grin>.

Windows Explorer Shortcuts

Open up your Windows Explorer and put the cursor's focus into the Folders pane. Don't have a Folders pane on the left side? Turn it on by clicking View | Explorer Bar | Folders. Or, ya know... click the Folders icon in Explorer's toolbar. Now, let's say you wanna see all the subfolders of your Windows folder. Select it in the left (Folders) pane first, then tap the keypad asterisk. Just like pulling a rabbit out of a hat (albeit, with much less fur). And even though we covered it a few months ago, you can use another key-combo to resize field widths when your Explorer view is set to Details. Hold onto CTRL and tap the plus sign on your numeric keypad. Ah, each column is optimized for the longest data string within it.

Making A Windows 2000 Boot Floppy

We covered this in detail in the Mastering NT Server 4.0 book, but it kind of slipped through the cracks in the 2000 book.

Many people are surprised to hear that it's possible to make a Win2K? boot floppy. After all, the OS is waaay too big a system to fit on a floppy, right? Right. But you can use a floppy to help a wounded system START the boot process. For example, take the case we're looking at here, a mirrored drive in a system of all EIDE drives. 99 percent of what you need to boot 2000 can sit on any drive. But you need a few files to get things moving. The exact files that you need vary depending on how your system accesses its boot disk -- what you'll soon come to know as the MULTI() versus SCSI() issue. Let's first build a boot floppy that will work for EIDE-based systems, and take up SCSI in a bit

Format a blank floppy, using Windows 2000. (NT will do -- but it can't be Windows 9x or DOS. You need the boot sector to want to load a file called NTLDR, and Win 9x/DOS don't do that.) Copy the files NTLDR, BOOT.INI, and NTDETECT.COM to the floppy. That's it. What's that, you don't believe me? Try it with a working system; it'll work for any system that boots from an EIDE drive, and in fact will work for most systems that boot from a SCSI drive. And by the way, those three files are hidden on the root of the "system" drive, which is probably drive C: on most systems. And BOOT.INI is usually read-only, but we'll want to edit it, so un-check the read-only attribute. If the GUI doesn't let you do it, type this from a command line

attrib -s -h -r c:\boot.ini attrib -s -h c:\ntdetect.com attrib -s -h c:\ntldr

Format the floppy, copy the files, and boot from it. You'll see that you get the normal boot picker and the system boots. But this boot floppy only knows how to make the drive 0 partition boot. To teach Windows 2000 how to boot from the mirrored drive, you'll need to mess with ... ugh ... ARC definitions.

Alphabetize Your Start Menu

Keep things in order and sort your Start menu alphabetically. To do so, right-click any item in your Start menu and select "Sort by Name" from the pop-up menu. This will place items alphabetically within your Start menu. However, when new items are added, they won't necessarily appear in alphabetical order. To ensure that all folders appearing in your Start menu will remain alphabetical, you must first access the Registry Editor by typing REGEDIT in the Start menu's Run command. Once in the Registry Editor, access the HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\MicrosoftWindows?\CurrentVersion\Explorer\MenuOrder directory. Click the StartMenu\Menu subdirectory and delete the Order key that appears in the right-hand pane of the Registry Editor. Restart Windows to effect the change.

Clear Word/Excel Document Formatting

If you see a spreadsheet that's too loud (visually), press CTRL+A to select all, then click Edit | Clear | Formats. This also helps take care of those rogue formatted cells. You can do the same thing for Microsoft Word documents, although you'll have to take a slightly different route. The easiest way (I've found) is to save a copy of the file as "MS-DOS text with Layout" and then re-open it. From there, you can format the document to your liking without stumbling across any previously used styles.

Control Panel Extensions

Control Panel extensions. If you've moved beyond Windows ninety-whatever, you may have noticed a few new file types on your system. It's a Microsoft Common Console Document. And much like an EXE file, you can launch an MSC simply by entering it on the Run command field in the Start Menu. COMPMGMT.MSC pulls up the Computer Management console (which contains all of the other console documents). DISKMGMT.MSC gives you quick access to disk properties (which you may configure). DEVMGMT.MSC is the Device Manager (which looks a lot like the one in 9x). DFRG.MSC launches the built-in disk defragmenter. EVENTVWR.MSC is your system Event Viewer (error records and such). FSMGMT.MSC will help you manage your Shared Folders. LUSRMGR.MSC manages Local Users and Groups (those LUSRs?). PERFMON.MSC is your Performance Monitor. SECPOL.MSC shows Local Security Settings. SERVICES.MSC lists all the registered Services (be careful with this one).

Viewing Source & Opening Urls

In Internet Explorer's Address field, you can enter: "view- source:[URL]" (sans quotes). Replace the [URL] variable with the full Web address of the page in question. Now, in newer versions of Windows, you can enter a Web address in the Open File dialog of any program. Fire up Notepad, click File | Open and enter a full URL (including the obligatory "http colon slash slash"). Presto! There's your source."

Task Manager Information

Windows 2000 and XP have a simple way users can summon the Task Manager. A right-click on the taskbar is all you need to do. There's a list of running processes. But are any of them safe to close? Be careful! Some of those suckers are critical; closing the wrong one could hose your OS. Click View | Select Columns | and put a checkmark in the PID (Process Identifier) field. Now, let's go through them. Services.exe (208) handles: AppMgmt, Browser, Dhcp, dmserver, Dnscache, Eventlog, lanmanserver, LanmanWorkstation, LmHosts, Messenger, PlugPlay, ProtectedStorage, seclogon, TrkWks, W32Time?, and Wmi. That's a mouthful, eh? Well, each one of those components takes care of a different part of the operating system (yet they're all under the same process). Need to know what else is going on inside? Click Start | Run and enter: "CMD" (sans quotes). Now, if you're in Win2k, at the command prompt, enter: "TLIST -S" (sans quotes). If you're running WinXP, at the command prompt, enter: "TASKLIST /SVC" (sans quotes). Remember, you can use that vertical scroll bar to view bumped command screen data. You couldn't do that in 9x, ya know.

Excel Hotkeys

While ALT+EQUALS will invoke the AutoSum feature, the rest of his click quickies rely on pressing CTRL and SHIFT simultaneously. With the '$' (dollar sign), the field's format is switched to Currency. The '%' (percent symbol) modifies the cell's value to a Percentage. The '^' (caret) turns the selected location into an Exponential. The "!' (exclamation mark) toggles the use of commas or decimals. The "@' (at sign) automatically inserts the current Time. The '#' (number sign) adds today's Date. The '&' (ampersand) draws a border around the current selection. The '_' (underscore) removes the border from the selection. The '*' (asterisk) selects the current region. Soon your mouse will be collecting dust (and your co-workers will be eating it).

Office 2000 Speller Update

http://office.microsoft.com/downloads/2000/o2ksu.aspx "The Office 2000 Speller Update refreshes the dictionary of words referenced by Microsoft Office 2000. This update includes approximately 13,000 additional words. Some of the updated terminology comes from the following targeted improvement areas: Surnames, street names, and company names; computer and communications technology terms; geographical place names and language names; and improved quality of replacement suggestions. Once you have installed this update, use Office 2000 as you normally would. There is no uninstall feature with this download."

Wireless Roaming

Hark, the herald router sings! When the Ricochet network died, I was left without a wireless Internet connection for my Pocket PC. As soon as a low-power Wi-Fi (802.11b) option was available for my PDA, I snapped it up. As this new technology saturates the market, it will change the way we access information. Imagine being able to do price comparisons, get up-to-the-minute weather and traffic reports, and view public transportation schedules on-the-fly. So, how do you know when there's a wireless Internet connection in the vicinity? Check out what Jason Dunn from Pocket PC Thoughts forwarded to me: "I was taking to a developer / friend about the [sniffing] issue, and one of our ex-coworkers found a answer when programming a driver for FreeBSD. Use 'ANY' (sans quotes, case sensitive) for the ESSID; it's an 802.11b standard. It will find the nearest available access point. So far, my Symbol card seems to be switching to the closest network. For me, it switches to the network's ESSID automatically." Much to my surprise, this works! Of course, I'm not recommending that you hijack someone else's connection on a long-term basis. It's really more for those of us who are always on the go (and want to stay in the know).

Saving Links

When I'm looking for cool new stuff to feature, I like lurking in the Lockergnome newsgroups and chat room. There's great stuff in both places, ya know? Well, sometimes I'm faced with a plain link that I'd like to keep as an Internet Shortcut. It's not easy to do if all you have is plain text. You can't right click and "Save Target As" an MP3 file; it should start streaming in your default media player when you single click the link (that isn't a proper hyperlink on a Web page). Have you ever needed to create a bare- bones HTML document with just that single link in it? Put down Notepad, folks. Here's a spin on an earlier GnomeTIP, as suggested by TGC (The Gnome Collector). Either in Internet Explorer's address bar or the Run command field in the Start Menu, enter: "about: <A CLASS=URL HREF="link"> name </a>" (sans spaces and quotes). Obviously, you'll replace [link] with the full URL, including the "http" part. The [name] variable can be just about anything, as it's what you'll be right-clicking on to "Save Target As" after the impromptu page pops up. It's an ingenious workaround.

Install Real Codec

We've talked about we how really don't want Real on our systems. A few third-party players were developed to bypass the RealBeast, but they still require the Real codecs to be installed. Never fear, Josh Waggoner says; you just need to copy over a couple of files and Registry settings to be set. Find an old (or virtual) machine to install RealPlayer onto. In the C:\ Program Files \ Common Files \ Real hierarchy, grab the contents of \Codecs, \Common, and \Plugins. In the C:\ Windows \ System (or System32) folder, grab pncrt.dll. Now, navigate to the machine's registry: HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT \ Software \ RealNetworks \ Preferences. Be sure to export three of its subkeys: \DT_Plugins, \DT_Codecs, and \DT_Common. In each case, they should point to the appropriate folder hierarchy (the ones you just copied from the Program Files folder). Copy the three folders and the DLL file back to their original locations (on your primary machine this time). Double- click the REG file to merge its contents into the Registry. Now any third-party player that requires the RealStuff should play your RealMedia without a RealHeadache. RealCool!

Restart Windows Without Rebooting

Start button -> Shut down -> Restart Hold down the SHIFT key while you click the OK button

URL-Completion In MSIE

Try to type "ykwong" (of course without quotes) in the address bar, and then press Ctrl-Enter. You will be brought to here immediately. This is auto-completion, in which Internet Explorer automatically adds "http://www." and ".com" to the word you just typed in.

Right Click On Right-Click-Disabled Webpages

There are many ways to work around websites where right clicking is disabled. Here is the simplest way. When the popup window appears, don't close it at once. Right click on the webpage first and hold your right mouse button. Then press the "Enter" key to close the popup window. When the popup window got killed, you will see the popup menu!

Google Search By File Types

Quite possibly the best "hidden" feature of Google is its ability to index and query against non-HTML pages: Adobe Portable Document Format (PDF), Adobe PostScript (PS), Microsoft Office (XLS, PPT, DOC), etc. To narrow the search to a specific type, enter: [terms] -filetype:EXT (with EXT being the appropriate file extension). When it finds a non-HTML file, Google still gives you the option to view it as an HTML document!

Document Summary In Word

When someone sends me a Word document over 2 pages long, I often ask Word for a synopsis. Click Tools | AutoSummarize. Then, select how you want it to parse your document: Highlight key points, Insert an executive summary, Hide everything BUT the summary, or Create a new document with only the summary. Tweak the percentage before running it through the wringer (I wouldn't recommend anything more than 25 percent). Granted, Word won't rewrite the document for you, but it'll at least provide (what it believes to be) the key points from the original structure. Use this feature to reverse engineer just about anything you've ever written. Forget to read that book chapter for today's Classic American Literature quiz? If it's available in an electronic format somewhere, all hope may not be lost.

Word Document Comparison

Word has a "comparison" feature hidden away within the deep recesses of its structure. Right-click on a toolbar, select Customize, flip to the Commands tab, select the Tools category, then scroll through the right-most pane until you see the "Compare Documents..." option. Drag and drop that bad boy somewhere (either in an existing toolbar or a menu). Now, open your original document, press the newly-created icon, browse for the newer document, and guess what Word will do? Automatically highlight the changes in red. Perfect for when you need to know what once was sitting inside those paragraphs. If your teacher was looking for a rough draft, now you can show him or her in style.

Exchange Delivery Debugging

Then you can use Restest.exe to see if it worked. This utility can be found on the Microsoft Exchange Server compact disc in the Support\Utils\I386 directory.

Paste Plain Text Into Word

You can set up Word 97 or 2000 to insert unformatted text with a keystroke. In Word, select some text and press <Ctrl>-C to copy it.

Click Tools•Macro•Record New Macro (in Word 2000, you may have to extend the Tools menu to see the Macro option). In the Macros dialogue box's name field, enter PlainPaste. Click the Keyboard button to get the Customise Keyboard dialogue box. In the "Save changes in" drop-down menu, select Normal. Put the cursor in the "Press new shortcut key" field, and press <Alt>-V. Click the Assign button, then Close.

There will now be a small, TV-shaped floating toolbar on Word's screen. Select Edit•Paste Special and double-click Unformatted Text. Click the Stop Recording button (the solid square) on the toolbar. Henceforth, <Alt>-V will act as a keyboard command to paste unformatted text.

Javascript Tricks

  • returns web page date: javascript:alert(document.lastModified)
  • resize window: javascript:resizeTo(800,600);

Clearing Registry Entries In Batch Files

Forever have I been plagued with not knowing how to remove Registry keys via REG files; merging them is not a problem. Recently, folks have been trying to clear Microsoft's Windows Media Player History with ease. A quick download of the free "Windows Media Bonus Pack" from WINDOWSMEDIA.COM will give you a tool to clear the MRU list quickly, but here's a way to do it without any additional software. Navigate to HKEY_CURRENT_USER \ Software \ Microsoft \ MediaPlayer \ Player \ RecentFileList - and export this "Selected branch" to a REG file. Now, edit that REG file in your favorite text editor, insert a minus sign between the opening bracket and the "H" in "HKEY." This should effectively remove the branch (and all subkeys) whenever the REG file is "merged." Create a shortcut to it, add the "/S" switch to the Target field to "silence" the task, then place it in your Startup folder to clear "the list" every time you boot into Windows. Another key which may hold an MRU: HKEY_USERS \ .Default \ Software \ Microsoft \ MediaPlayer \ Player \ RecentFileList. NOTE: be very careful when employing this tactic. Messing with the Registry is NOT for the faint of heart. You could hose your system in one quick click, slick.

Disable CD Auto-Play In Windows 2000

Change HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\Cdrom\Autorun from 1 to 0.

Installing Windows CD From Hard Drive

You've probably got your Windows installation CD sitting somewhere nearby; if not, check for the Windows > Options > Cabs folder. Assuming you have enough disk space (or another hard drive), copy the files from the CD's \Win9x to \Win9x on your hard drive. From there, you can run SETUP.EXE. This'll make your Windows installations fly! Once fully installed, you can keep the \Win9x on your hard drive -- or you remove it and modify the registry key: HKLM \ Software \ Microsoft \ Windows \ CurrentVersion \ Setup \ SourcePath="X:\WIN95\" (X represents your CD drive letter). This way, if Windows needs the setup files in the future, it'll look for them first on the CD.

NT Command Line Help

Did you know that besides typing help from a command line to display the list of commands and typing command /? to get specific command help, Windows NT has a command help file? \System32\NTcmds?.hlp provides a quick handy reference in a small help window. Create a shortcut and place it on your Desktop and/or on the Start menu.

Disable Screen Saver During Defrag

It's smart to run the Disk Defragmenter every so often. Once it starts reorganizing your data, the last thing you want is your screen saver to kick in. Tired of having to move the mouse every other minute (or forgetting to temporarily turn it off)? Run REGEDIT.EXE, navigate to HKEY_CURRENT_USER \ Software \ Microsoft \ Windows \ CurrentVersion \ Applets, and create a new key: "Defrag" (without quotes). Now, within this newly created key, create the key: "Settings" (without quotes). In the Settings key, create a string value and label it: "DisableScreenSaver" (without quotes). Next, edit the value "(Default)" and change it to: "YES" (without quotes). The next time DEFRAG is run, screen savers will be disabled.

"Send To" Recipients

Question: How can I add a shortcut on my Send To menu so that I can right-click a file and send it as an email attachment to a particular person?

Answer: As you probably know, Windows generates the Send To menu from a group of shortcuts in the user's SendTo folder, which typically is in the user's Windows profile folder. To create a Send To shortcut that points to a particular person, create a Windows shortcut in the SendTo folder that uses as the target the command 

 "C:\program files\microsoft office\office\outlook.exe" /c ipm.note /m somebody@somewhere.com

where the path to outlook.exe reflects that file's location on your system and somebody@somewhere.com is the name or address of the person you want to send to. If the name or address contains spaces, enclose it with quotation marks. You can then right-click any file, choose the recipient's name from the Send To menu, and send the file to that person.

Open Windows Explorer To A Specific Folder (Directory)

%windir%\explorer.exe /e,c:\temp\

DVD Playback In Windows 2000 / XP

I just finished reading your sample tip for Windows 2000 and I thought it was great, I also thought it was something that most people could use. Getting proper DVD playback can be a tricky thing on some systems. I love my W2K? system and have no plans of switching platforms anytime soon. This is not out of any romantic notions that I am a crusader against the "evil" WPA; in fact, it is just that I am a broke university student and I have not yet run into a situation that W2K? could not handle. I have found two other things that seriously hamper DVD playback to the point of wanting to chuck this $2500 piece of metal across the room. The first one is fairly simple. Make sure that you do not have "Enable digital CD audio for this device" enabled - I found it severely impacts playback. The way you can check to make sure this is off is to jump into your handy-dandy Windows Explorer, right click on any drive, select properties, scroll down to your DVD drive, click on it, select Properties, and under "Digital CD playback" you can check or uncheck that option. The other tweak is a little more complicated; if it is not done, you could be seriously hampering your system performance.

Do ya know what DMA is? Well, it stands for Direct Memory Access - and it allows for smoother sailing (in respect to the drive's communication with the CPU). If your IDE controllers and drives are capable of this, you should definitely have it enabled. What you do is head into you friendly-neighborhood Control Panel, select System, tap the hardware tab, click on Device Manager, scroll down to IDE / ATA / ATAPI Controllers and select it. You should see two: a primary and a secondary channel. Now, right- click on each, one at a time, and select Properties - hitting the Advanced Settings tab, look at transfer mode. You will have a couple of options like "PIO only" and "DMA if available." As a side note, "DMA if available" will also seek out Ultra DMA systems. So, make sure that you enable DMA if your system is capable of it. This greatly increases the transfer speed between your DVD drive and your CPU - giving you smoother, less choppy playback. Like Chris always responsibly points out, these are system tweaks - if you don't know what you are doing, you might want to do some research first. It took me quite a while to narrow down these two individual problems, so if I could save any of you good folks some time, that's great. I will definitely be buying at least the W2K? tips and hopefully more. Thanx for all the great newsletters.

Keeping Tables Together In Word

Try forcing Word to keep the table rows together. Insert your cursor into a field, then in Word's menu bar, select Table | Select | Table. Once the table is highlighted, go back to the menu and select Format | Paragraph. Flip to the Line and Page Breaks tab, and put a checkmark in the "Keep with next" field. Don't you hate it when the table is split across two pages? Yeah, me too. Again, select the table, then pull up the Table Properties (which can be found at the bottom of the Table menu). Flip to the Row tab and deselect the "Allow row to break across pages" option. You could also try the "Shrink to Fit" feature in your Print Preview window. This is best left for documents where the table (or paragraph) spills over by a few lines. Word will automatically reformat the page(s) for you.

DNS Info From Ipconfig

When you send an instant message to a friend, pull up a Web page, or download your e-mail, you're establishing a network connection with a remote computer. These connections are cached; the next time you reach out to touch someone, the communication will be quicker. Sometimes, as Lockergnomie Brian Kowald points out, it's proper to flush this cache. Windows 2000 / XP users are well aware of IPCONFIG, the command line network tool. It's time to switch on the switches! Use "/flushdns" (sans quotes) to clear the stored connection data. Use this when your Internet connection is working, but one or two locations aren't resolving. You also might consider doing this before you walk away from the computer (to cover your tracks). So, how can someone see where you've been recently? IPCONFIG, in conjunction with the "/displaydns" switch, will tell all. Now, do you miss the GUI- driven WINIPCFG? You'll want to get WNTIPCFG, which can easily be found through Google.

Application Focus Tricks

You use the SHIFT key to open multiple items in your Start Menu without losing your position. Now, let's say you don't want to lose your foreground app's focus. While double-clicking on a desktop shortcut icon to launch the associated target, hold down the CTRL key. It'll load it behind all other open windows. Be it a document or be it a program, it should hide behind everything else on the screen. Why would you want to do this? Well, if what you're currently working on is super important, or if opening the second application is necessary (and it doesn't need your full attention), this will help. If you want to keep programs from stealing foreground focus, consider using X-Setup (available from XTEQ.COM). The plug-in is currently located in: Appearance \ Desktop \ Options \ Taskbar options. This may not work in your OS. You might also use the latest version of Microsoft's TweakUI (if they ever release it again).

Word Table Formating

"I found a neat feature in Word 2000. Create a list of items with tabs separating the values. To quickly convert this to a table, simply select the different lines and click the 'Insert Table' button in the toolbar. This is a shortcut to navigating to the 'Convert Text to Table' menu item and going through that dialog box." Very cool! Now, let's talk about formatting that thing, shall we? Hover your cursor over the table and you'll see a boxed cross appear in the upper left-hand corner. Right-click it to auto-select the entire table. See how you can distribute the rows or columns evenly? Perfect for when you're playing with FOUSes? (Fonts Of Unusual Sizes). Be sure to check out the Cell Alignment option, too. Left, center, right, up, middle, or down - set your table evenly. If you want the text surrounding the table to flow differently, pull up the table's properties (last option) and tweak the text wrapping.

Restore Show Desktop Icon

Copy the bold text here to a new text document ... save it to your desktop as Showdesktop.scf then drag it to the quich launch bar.

[Shell] Command=2 IconFile=explorer.exe,3

[Taskbar] Command=ToggleDesktop

Drag And Drop Text In IE

Fire up Internet Explorer, navigate to a page which contains some kind of form, select a string of text, then drag and drop that selection into a field.

Batch Start

"This tip is for those who load many programs at startup which are not always needed - but they're still loaded just so that they do not have to launch the program when it IS required. For example, I used to have my IM Client, a program that counts my time online, and DUMeter? (which shows instantaneous connection speeds) all run at startup - even though I only needed them if I planned to go online. Now I double-click on a shortcut which loads these three programs simultaneously and then dials my ISP. Here's how to do it: (1) Create a new text file. (2) Change the extension from TXT to BAT. (3) Edit the file in a text editor and insert 'START [Path]' on separate lines for each program, sans quotes, with [Path] being the full disk path of (and up to) the EXE file. (4) Create a shortcut to this batch file. (5) In the shortcut properties dialog, select Run / Minimized, then tick the checkbox labeled 'Close on exit.' You could also change its icon and place this shortcut on the desktop or Quick Launch toolbar." Very cool, very easy. Beats the heck out of having to click on several sets of icons.

IE Full Screen Mode

Occasionally I like to view the web or Windows Explorer in Full Screen mode... to do this I just hit F11 on the keyboard and there I am in Full Screen mode. Hit it again and I am back to regular mode.

Hotkeys

Atl-Esc cycles through open windows

Quicklaunch Bar

If you right-click on the taskbar (I did this in XP), disable the Quick Launch bar, and then re-enable it, the Quick Launch icons will be alphabetized.

IE Home Page Hotkey

Want to jump quickly to your home page? Press Alt-Home to go there. Another handy use of the Home key: Press the key to jump to the beginning of the document. It's not rocket science, but it can help you save a little time each day.

IE Forward & Back Hotkeys

If you use Microsoft Internet Explorer, you know that you can click the back or forward arrows at the top of the window to move to other pages. But, this is not the only way to move backward or forward. You can press Backspace to move backward and Shift + Backspace to move forward. You'll also find that Alt + left arrow will work to move backward and you can press Alt + right arrow to move forward.

IE Right-Clicking Via Keyboard

The right-mouse click is an invaluable way to speed your browsing in Microsoft Internet Explorer 5. Right-click a link, for instance, and you'll see options to open the link in a new window or to add the link to the Favorites menu. If you prefer to open this menu from the keyboard, select Shift-F10. Once the menu appears, select the underlined letter from any of the menu items to launch that command. You may find using keyboard commands in this way helpful when your mouse isn't working, when you want to avoid mousing, or when you're working on an unfamiliar laptop with a touchpad you find difficult to use.

Intellimouse Font Change In IE

If you have a wheel moust and use Microsoft's IntelliMouse software, did you know you can customize your web pages? You can hold down the Ctrl key and scroll your mouse button to change the size of the text. This is great if you have to print something. Just make the text smaller, then increase it again.

Unmark Spamassassin Messages

If a message is accidentally tagged as spam and you would like to keep it, you can hit e to edit the message and in vim type :%!spamassassin -d to remove all SpamAssassin markup from the message. Then, just quit out of vim and your new message will have replaced the old one in the folder.

Winscp Keystroke Function

Spacebar Select or deselect the file at the cursor. +/- (number pad) Select/deselect files using a mask you specify. Ctrl +/- Select/deselect all files. Alt +/- Select/deselect all files with the same extension.

  • Reverse selection.

Mutt Index Codes

Controls the character used to indicate mail addressed to you. The first character is the one used when the mail is NOT addressed to your address (default: space). The second is used when you are the only recipient of the message (default: +). The third is when your address appears in the TO header field, but you are not the only recipient of the message (default: T). The fourth character is used when your address is specified in the CC header field, but you are not the only recipient. The fifth character is used to indicate mail that was sent by you.

Floppy Disk Recovery

"Users come to me with their damaged floppies and I recover the good data from their corrupt floppies 90% of the time without the Norton Disk Recovery program. All I do is insert the bad floppy into the floppy drive and right click on the floppy icon in My Computer and choose the 'Copy Disk' option. The trick is to keep hitting "Retry" every time it fails. Eventually it will work! I have clicked "Retry" 50-100 times to eventually read the entire disk. Then just put in a new blank formatted floppy and Windows will create a duplicate of the original. This even works on floppies that a directory listing fails. Also another neat trick I do is 'Copy *.* nul' from the command prompt (Make sure to type a: and press enter to switch to the floppy drive). This will copy all the files into the 'bit bucket'. The advantage is that it will read all the files and stop on the corrupt ones." Thanks for the tip Charles! Another trick that I do is run a Scandisk on the corrupted floppy disk. Many a times this has gotten the disk to a readable state so that I can copy the disks to a desktop and then to a new disk. From there it is up to you what you do with the corrupted floppy. I have found that most of these disks are OK after a full format.

Continuing A Search In Microsoft Word

Here are some keyboard shortcuts for continuing a search in Microsoft Word after the Find dialog box has been closed. The shortcuts even change the search's direction. Press Ctrl- Page Down to have Word search for the next occurrence of your last search string, and press Ctrl- Page Up to make Word search for the previous occurrence. If you haven't searched for anything since you loaded Word, these keystrokes move the cursor to the next or previous page.

Search-Menu Shortcuts

Use the FindX utility in Microsoft's free PowerToys package to add shortcuts to my Search menu, and to set Search to open with the parameters I specified. Unfortunately, FindX isn't in the latest versions of PowerToys, though it still works with every version of Windows.

Quick Launching

Keyboard launches: I assign a keyboard shortcut for the files and applications that I launch many times a day, such as the volume control. Simply right-click an application shortcut in the Start menu or on the desktop and choose Properties. Make sure the Shortcut tab is in front. Click in the 'Shortcut key' box and press your desired shortcut keys. Windows requires that your shortcut use at least two modifier keys ( Ctrl, Shift, or Alt), unless you press a function key or a key on the numeric keypad. Click OK, and your new keyboard shortcut is finished. If you change your mind later on, just return to this dialog box, click in the 'Shortcut key' box, and press Backspace. Then click OK and restart Windows.

Quick Launch openings: Second-priority items I access via the Quick Launch bar. (If you don't see it, right-click the taskbar, choose Toolbars, and make sure Quick Launch is checked.) Drag any application, folder, or document icon to the toolbar to create a tiny icon that launches that item. I prefer to limit the Quick Launch toolbar to between six and eight icons to keep it from becoming cluttered and to make spotting individual icons easier. Keeping Quick Launch small also allows more room on the taskbar for other items.

Custom menus: To handle third-priority items, I make custom submenus off the Start menu. Begin by creating subfolders inside the Start Menu folder. Right-click Start, choose Open or Explore, and select File, New, Folder. Then add a sensible number of shortcuts to each subfolder you create. Those shortcuts will appear on a menu when your new Start menu subfolder is highlighted. If a menu gets longer than 20 or so icons, it may be time to break that folder into two separate folders.

RSS Readers

Question: I keep seeing these little orange XML buttons on the Web, including on Lockergnome.com. What are they for?

Answer: It indicates the site offers an RSS (Rich Site Summary) feed. Clicking on it reveals top-secret code. OK, not really. The code is similar to HTML that uses XML (eXtensible Markup Language). Feed the feed (the URL you receive after clicking on the orange button) into free aggregators like NewzCrawler [http://www.newzcrawler.com/], AmphetaDesk [http://www.disobey.com/amphetadesk/], and FeedReader [http://www.feedreader.com/], and you'll stay updated on any fresh news from that site. The nice thing is that you can keep track of updated sites all in one place. Typically, the feed provides a brief summary. If the story sounds interesting, click on the link to get the rest of the story. Boring? Move on to the next summary. There is a similar button that's blue with RSS that functions in the same way. Large Web sites with news coming from different sources use these feeds to update their pages with the latest news from the various sources. News Is Free [http://newsisfree.com/] is an ultimate news portal that has many XML and RSS feeds for your use. There's a good introduction to RSS Feeds at Webreference.com [http://www.webreference.com/authoring/languages/xml/rss/intro/]. Time to go feed the need for news! [Meryl]

Illegal Operation

Question: What do I do when I get the message, "Illegal Operation?"

Answer: Well, this really depends on the situation. If the first and only time you got this error was while doing the particular tasks you were performing right before the error, then I would say just shut down for a few seconds and boot your machine back up. In most cases, this is just a case of an error in your memory, and by shutting down, the memory is cleared. If you notice this happening a lot with a particular program or task then you may want to go to the program manufacturer's Web site and see if they have a patch to repair this problem. If these errors are just happening at random and frequent intervals, then you may want to back up your data and reinstall your operating system. If you are still getting these errors after re-setting up your machine, and if you don't have any external devices like a scanner or CD-RW drive, then you may want to look at your memory. Memory for your computer is cheap and all you need to do is take the machine to a local computer store and they can help you find the right memory for your machine, or they may have a memory chip tester for your current system memory. If the memory fails in the tester, then you just need to replace it with new system memory. If they don't have a tester, then I would say buy a 128 MB stick of memory and then take all the rest of your memory out of your system. See how it operates and if it is fine, try putting in the original memory, one stick at a time. The second you run into trouble then you know it might be that particular stick of memory. Just put that to the side, and move on to the next stick. If it all works fine in the end, then you know you just need to get rid of that one bad stick of memory. [Brian]

Right Click Menu Registry

Question: How do I change the items that show up in the menu that appears when I right-click on the Start button?

Answer: Funny you ask that question, because I had all this Winamp garbage in this menu and wanted it out, and I wanted to put a few frequently used programs into it instead. Right-clicking the Start button typically gives you Open, Explore, Search, and Properties options. If you have other stuff there that you never use, or you want to add something, go to the registry and get busy! (A quick reminder on how to get to the registry: Start | Run | Regedit.)

  1. Go to HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT and expand it.
  2. Find the Directory folder and expand it.
  3. Right-click on "shell", select New | Key, and give the key a name. In this example, I want to add a favorite freeware program called NoteTab, so I'll call the key "NoteTab."
  4. On the right pane, double-click on the "(Default)" value, and add a title with an ampersand (&) in front of the letter as an accelerator key. In this case, it would be "&NoteTab." Click OK.
  5. Right-click on &NoteTab (NOT Default), and select New | Key.
  6. Call this key "COMMAND." Double-click on COMMAND and enter the full path and program you want to execute into the Value box. In this example, I entered "C:\Program Files\NoteTab Light\notetab.exe".
  7. Close the registry editor. Now, right-click on Start, and the new program is there waiting for your click! [Meryl]

Disk Capacity Comparisons

Question: How much data or information can the 1.44MB floppy disk hold in practical terms, such as a number of pages in a book?

Answer: 3.5-inch floppy diskettes hold 1.44 megabytes of information, which is about 1.5 million text characters, or 700 pages of straight text. When using compression software, the floppy's storage can increase five-fold. Using uncompressed files, one disk can hold six seconds of low-quality video.

A CD-ROM stores 650 megabytes, which is equal to 450 floppy diskettes, or roughly one hour of low-quality video. A DVD-ROM holds 4.7 gigabytes of information, or 2 hours and 13 minutes of full-screen digital video.

Final tally: 1 DVD-ROM = 7 CD-ROMs? = 3,157 floppy diskettes

I don't think I've ever owned 1000 diskettes at one time, have I? I'm all for dumping floppies and the drives that hold them. Instead, we can use USB or card readers to transfer data. [Meryl]

Easy Disposable E-Mail Addresses

Disposable E-Mail Addresses Every time you give your e-mail address to a Web site, you risk the chance that it will be sold to a rabid spam monger. You can reduce this risk by using disposable e-mail addresses (DEAs?). Such addresses are generally provided by a paid service company that forwards mail from a DEA to your actual address. In general, you name the DEA so it can identify the recipient. If you start getting spam on a particular DEA, you know which recipient to blame, and you can terminate that DEA and report the abuse. We reviewed five such services in "Slam the Spam" (February 25).

Depending on the way your e-mail is handled, you may be able to create your own DEAs? without paying for the service. Many e-mail servers ignore certain additional characters in e-mail addresses and deliver the messages regardless. You can use this bit of information to your advantage.

The only way to find out whether this will work is to try it. Ask a friend to send you two e-mail messages using modified versions of your e-mail address. For one, insert a plus sign (+) and a word (with no spaces) before the @ sign. For the other, insert a word in parentheses. For example, if your address is nobody@nowhere.com, you could specify one address as nobody+monkey@nowhere.com and the other as nobody(monkey)@nowhere.com.

Once the messages are sent, check your e-mail. If either message reaches your in-box, it means you can create DEAs? using the format that succeeded. When you place an order with www.whatevercom, insert +whatever or (whatever) in the e-mail address you submit. If you begin to get spam on that address, use your e-mail client's message rules to delete messages with that address in the To: field.

Sure, a human could extract your real address from this poor man's DEA at a glance, but spam mongers don't spend time looking at individual addresses. Of course, if you want a greater degree of separation from your DEAs?, you can use one of the subscription services.

Make Control Panel Applets More Accessible

(from http://www.annoyances.org/exec/show/article02-013)

  • Select Settings in your Start Menu, and then select Taskbar & Start Menu.
  • In Windows Me and Windows 2000, choose the Advanced tab, and turn on the Expand Control Panel option. In Windows XP, choose the Start Menu tab, choose Classic Start Menu, and click Customize.
  • Now, the Control Panel menu (in Settings) will display a list of its contents, rather than just opening a separate window.

Favorites And Start Menu Sort Order

(from http://www.duxcw.com/faq/win/favsort.htm)

  1. Where it says Files, Edit, View, Favorites, in the IE (I'm using IE 6) main menu click Favorites.
  2. Move the mouse past Add to Favorites... and Organize Favorites...
  3. to the folders and shortcuts below those entries.
  4. Right-click anywhere in that area.
  5. Select Sort by Name from the resulting menu.

Keyboard Control Of Desktop

I've always had trouble getting keyboard control of the desktop without having to use the mouse. Here's how to access icons on the desktop using the keyboard:

Press the Windows Logo key, which brings up the Start menu. Press ESC (this makes the Start menu disappear, but keeps the taskbar active). Press SHIFT + TAB one time (this toggles between the taskbar and the desktop). Your desktop will now be active, although you may not notice any visual indication of it. Press the Down cursor key and you will see which desktop icon is active, and continue to use the cursor keys to move to the icon you want to use. Press ENTER to run the icon, or press SHIFT + F10 to see the context menu for that icon.

Shortcut To MMC

Right click My Computer | Manage

X-Up Printing

Printfile (http://www.lerup.com/printfile/) does n-up printing of text files and any file if printed on a postscript printer. The latter I use the workaround of first creating a pdf document (I use FreeDist, http://home.hccnet.nl/s.vd.palen), and then printing the pdf document.

Ghostscript has abilities for printing n pages on one sheet as well.

Maximize IE Windows

There's a quick fix in the registry to make Internet Explorer always be maximized without having some program running. Open REGEDIT and navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE \ SOFTWARE \ Microsoft \ Internet Explorer \ Main. In the right- hand pane, you'll find the "fullscreen" value. Double-click it to change the "no" to a "yes" (or vice versa). From what I can tell, everything else in this key can be changed within the regular Internet Options dialog. As is the case for every other system tweak, I wouldn't suggest "optimizing" settings you don't understand.

Hotkeys To Home In Internet Explorer

Have you ever clicked the home icon in Internet Explorer's toolbar? It takes you... home. Pretend (for a moment) that you've lost your ability to use the mouse's buttons. How on Earth are you gonna get home now?! First, tap F6 to shift focus to the Address bar, then enter: ".." (sans quotes) and press ENTER. Success! You're always two periods away from being home... much like Chemistry class in high school. What's sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander; trip through the same trick in Windows Explorer and you'll find yourself in the folder for your Desktop. And what about two dots in the Run command line? Ah, then you'll be launching an Explorer window showing your root folder. Who knew that such a small character could do so much? Yeah, my parents were thinking the exact same thing. Although, I wish I could have done better in Chemistry. Gretchen, of course, aced it. Here's another tip: never try to outsmart your wife. Especially when she's wearing your pants.

Outlook File Sharing

Q. How can I give users an image-file-sharing option that doesn't entail sending 30MB attachments with email messages?

A. You need a shared storage location in which users can put image files that they need to share (e.g., an image that a supervisor needs to approve). The storage location could be an Exchange Server public folder or a folder on a network volume. Which option works best for your organization might depend in part on the permissions granularity that you require. Public folders support access control only at the folder level, so consider using a folder on an NTFS volume when you need to set permissions on individual files.

If you use public folders, users can insert shortcuts to files or items after you set up the shared location (or locations, if you need to segregate data for different users). To insert a file, users select Insert, File, then choose Shortcut from the "Insert as" drop-down list on the Insert File dialog box. To insert a shortcut to an Outlook item, users choose Insert, Item from the Outlook menu.

Users might encounter one problem: HTML and plaintext message formats don't support the addition of shortcuts through menu commands. Don't let this problem stop you. Users can still type in hyperlink shortcuts such as these 

   <file://server\sharedfiles\myfiles\image1.tif>
   <file://S:\myfiles\image1.tif>

Recipients who use Outlook can click such hyperlinks to open files. Note that for a drive-letter shortcut to work, all recipients must have the same drive-letter mapping. This rule also holds true for shortcuts that users insert with the Insert, File command.

Sorting Messages In Outlook

You probably already know that in Outlook you can click on a field title to sort the items in a folder (ascending or descending), but perhaps there are many emails from user@acme.com and you want to sort them by those which came with an attachment. First, select the From field, then hold down the SHIFT key and click the Attachment field, to help you do just that. Holding down the SHIFT key allows you to sort by multiple fields. In case you weren't aware, clicking a field title a second time orders the contents in the reverse order.

Outlook Configuration

As opposed to Outlook Express, Microsoft Outlook supports the use of several mail service types (which are typically used in corporate environments). During initial configuration, if you chose to use Corporate / Workgroup features, then you've got more functionality than you'll actually need or use (such as Exchange Server and/or Microsoft Mail support). You may also be lacking features that you'll want (such as IMAP functionality). A switch to "Internet Only" mode is probably best unless you require multiple profiles... in which case, the Corporate / Workgroup mode is your only option. You can check the current mode you're using by clicking Help | About Microsoft Outlook. If you find you are indeed using the Corporate / Workgroup mode, click Tools | Options | Mail Services tab | Reconfigure Mail Support button, then choose the "Internet Only" option. Have your Office / Outlook CD handy, as you'll likely need it to complete the conversion. I'd recommend "Internet Only" for 99% of y'all.

Ignore Receipt Requests In Outlook

Now, I don't use Outlook with Exchange, I just use it as an Internet mail client, so perhaps my copy (Outlook 2000) will behave differently than yours, but to tell it to ignore read receipts, just do this

Click Tools, then Options On the resulting property page (which is simply called "Options"), choose the "Preferences" tab. It'll probably be up front anyway. In the section "E-Mail," click the button labeled "E-mail Options..." In the resulting dialog box ("E-mail Options"), click the button labeled "Tracking Options..." That will raise a dialog box labeled "Tracking Options" with a section labeled "Use this option to decide how to respond to requests for read receipts;" click the radio button next to "Never send a response."

Voting Buttons In Outlook

Voting buttons work in all versions of Microsoft Outlook to let you easily collect responses to questions (e.g., where to have dinner or which image to put on a T-shirt). Simply open a new message, click Options, and select the "Use voting buttons" check box. Although the adjacent drop-down list provides three choices for buttons--Approve, Reject; Yes, No; and Yes, No, and Maybe--Outlook doesn't limit you to these selections. You can type in any combination of choices, separating them with semicolons. For example, you can use Pepperoni; Cheese; Supreme; Anchovy if you're canvassing a group about their pizza preferences for an upcoming working lunch.

When sending voting-button messages, prefixing the subject line with "VOTE:" is a good idea. Otherwise, users might see the message in their Inboxes and click Reply, not realizing that they need to open the message and click a voting button.

After you send a voting-button message, don't move it from your Sent Items folder. If you move the message to another folder, Outlook won't be able to process the responses. If the original message remains in the Sent Items folder, Outlook will automatically display responses on a Tracking tab in the original message. Automatic processing takes place when Outlook is idle. If you're busy sending messages, Outlook might not get a chance to process the responses, but it can catch up while you're away from your desk. When Outlook has processed the first response, the sent message's icon will change to an envelope with a blue "i" to indicate that tracking information is available. To change the automatic-processing settings, click Tools, Options, E-mail Options, Tracking Options.

At the top of the Tracking tab on the sent message, Outlook maintains a running total of responses (e.g., Pepperoni 8; Cheese 0; Supreme 5; Anchovy 10). In the grid below that information, you'll see each person's response. Outlook provides no obvious way to extract voting-button responses from a message, but you can easily paste the information into an Excel spreadsheet. Open a new Excel spreadsheet, then open the voting-button message and click the Tracking tab. Choose Edit, Select All, then click Edit, Copy. Switch to the Excel spreadsheet, and click Paste. The responses paste into the spreadsheet in neat rows and columns, ready for further analysis or printing.

Voting-button messages have some limitations. You can't use the Options dialog box to create a voting-button message in Outlook 2000 or Outlook 98 in Internet Mail Only (IMO) mode. However, you can write code in Visual Basic Scripting Edition (VBScript?) to add voting buttons to an IMO message by setting the message's Voting Options property to a semicolon-delimited string of button choices.

You can send voting-button messages over the Internet to other Outlook users who don't work in the same Exchange organization. The key is to make sure that the recipient address is enabled for Rich-Text Format (RTF). For Outlook 2000 and Outlook 98 in IMO mode, check the Outlook contact and ensure that the "Send using plaintext" check box isn't selected. In other versions, you can double-click the email address on the contact record to see whether the recipient is set for "Send using Outlook Rich-Text Format." If you're sending from an Exchange mailbox, the Exchange server must be set to respect the user's choice for mail format and not convert RTF messages to HTML or plaintext.

Organize Outlook Messages

How can I use Outlook to organize messages from particular people and companies?

If you want a solution that works with all versions of Outlook, you have two choices: You can either create a separate folder for each person or company, or you can use one folder but organize the information in the folder with categories. I use both techniques. For the handful of people with whom I communicate daily about important projects, I keep a separate subfolder under my Inbox. I use the Outlook Rules Wizard to move new messages from each person into the appropriate folder. A separate rule puts a copy of each item that I send to that person into the folder.

You can also use the Outlook Rules Wizard to apply categories to incoming and outgoing messages, while retaining them in the Inbox and Sent Items folders. Alternatively, you can manually assign a category to either an item or a group of items in a folder. Right-click the item or items, then choose Categories. After you've assigned categories to messages in a folder, you can use the By Category view to see items by category or create filtered views to show you information related to just one category at a time.

In Outlook 2000, you have a third option: the built-in Activities page on each contact item. The Activities page lists items related to the current contact. The page can search multiple folders, as long as the folders are all in your mailbox. To designate which folders the Activities page will search, bring up the Contacts folder's Properties, then switch to the Activities tab and either modify an existing folder group or create a new one.

Re-Enable Outlook Attachments

A few weeks ago, I upgraded Windows on Oogie Boogie (the big, bad, beige beast who now belongs to Gretchen). As usual, I had to add all of my favorite shell extensions and shareware apps ASAP. Microsoft Office 2000 was the last in line; my copy was the release version, so I had to head to the Web to get SP1? (the first service pack). I was careful not to get SP2?, as it comes with the dreaded Outlook E-mail Security update that halts EVERY type of questionable attachment. Oops. I inadvertently installed it (and there's no way to uninstall it). Time to do a little hacking! If this has happened to you, here's what you need to do. Find OUTLLIB.DLL and open it in any hexadecimal editor (I prefer UltraEdit). It's nothing but code, baby. Be sure to make a backup copy first! Now, do a Find for the first "URL" string. You should see it surrounded by other familiar file extensions, like ZIP, VBS, and SHS. Guess what you're going to do? That's right! Change "URL" to "LOL" - "ZIP" to "OMG" - "EXE" to "CJP" (or some other tri-lettered farcical aquatic ceremony). Save your changes and full access to those files in Outlook 2000 should now be restored.

PST File Size

If you've been archiving to the same archive.pst file for a long time (e.g., since Outlook 97 came out), you might want to search your computer for all .pst files and check their sizes. If a .pst file exceeds 2GB, Outlook can't open it. The pst2gb.exe tool, which you can get from Microsoft Product Support Services (PSS--see the URL below), can help you recover most of your data, but you probably won't get it all back. Try to keep any .pst files well under that 2GB limit. To maintain reasonably sized .pst files, delete messages you don't need to keep, empty the Deleted Items folder regularly or automatically, and occasionally compact the .pst file to remove the empty space that remains after you delete items. To compact the .pst file, right-click your folder's top level (Outlook Today if it's your main data store), click Advanced, and click Compact Now. Unfortunately, you can't schedule the compact function or launch it from a command line.

Must you import a .pst file to access your archived Outlook data? Importing is a spectacularly bad idea because you must archive everything all over again to get the old data out of your main Outlook folders. Instead, click File, Open, Personal Folders File (in Outlook 2002, Outlook Data File), then click View, Folder List to see the entire folder hierarchy from the .pst archive.

"OL: Oversized PST and OST Crop Tool" http://support.microsoft.com/?id=kb;;q296088

Disable Adaptive Menus (Outlook)

To turn off the adaptive menus so that you always see all available commands the first time you pick a menu, choose View, Toolbars, Customize. On the Options tab, select the "Always show full menus" check box.

Turn Off Automatic Image Downloading In Eudora

Tools | Options | Display | uncheck "automatically download HTML graphics"



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Page last modified on February 12, 2006, at 11:04 AM EST