... Windows Tips 'n Tricks 7 ...
As he teaches, so he learns.

You can shove anything that's small and flat into a disk drive ... your kid sibling may have tried a Pop-Tart ... but the computer recognizes only one thing: a floppy disk. Here are a few disk do's and don'ts for you:

• Do label your disks so that you know what's on them.

• Do feel free to write on the label after it has been placed on the disk.

• Don't leave disks lying in the sun or in your car on a hot day.

• Don't leave disks next to magnets.

If you're viewing the contents of a floppy disk, and then insert another disk into your floppy drive, how do you view the new disk's contents? I hope not by opening My Computer and double-clicking the Floppy Drive icon. There's a much faster way. Simply hit F5 to refresh the open floppy disk window's contents. The contents of the old disk will disappear from the window, replaced by those of the new one.

When Windows 98 boots up, it wastes time scanning for new floppy drives. You can reclaim these lost seconds via the System Control Panel applet (Start/Settings/Control Panel/System or right-click My Computer and choose Properties). Select the Performance tab, click the File System button, select the Floppy Disk tab, and uncheck the option "Search for new floppy disk drives every time your computer starts." Voilà.

Looking for something in a folder holding a sea of files? Don't strain your eyes scrolling through everything inside. All you need is one vital piece of information--the date on which the file was last modified, the file's approximate size, or its type--and that file is as good as found.

Inside the open folder window, select View, Details. The result will be columns of information. (You may need to enlarge the window to see them all.) Click the column heading that represents what you know about the file--for example, if you know the date you last worked on the file, click Modified, and Windows will sort the contents accordingly. Scroll down to find the correct date, size, or type, and there's that file! (Click a heading twice to sort by that column in reverse order.)

This one is easy and very important. Many times you want to save or move a file onto your desktop, and want it in its own folder, which of course, you also name. How do we do it?

1. Right-click on a blank space on your desktop.
2. On the drop-down menu, select "New"
3. Select "Folder" and it's ready to be named. … job done.

Liven up the look of your file manager by changing that same-old-same-old folder icon to something else:

1. From either My Computer or Windows Explorer, choose View, Options (or Folder Options) from the menu.

2. Click the File Types tab.

3. Double-click Folder in the Registered File Types list.

4. Click the Change Icon button.

5. Select a new icon from the icon gallery and click OK to save the new setting.

In Win98 (or in systems with the Windows Desktop Update installed), different folders can have different view options. To quickly set the same options for all of your folders, open a folder window and select your viewing preferences, then choose View, Folder Options from the menu and click the View Tab. Click the Like Current Folder button, choose Yes to confirm your selection, and click OK.

Quickly access a folder's properties and options from Windows Explorer or My Computer by right-clicking in a blank area of the pane. The context menu will contain options to arrange the folder's files by different criteria, change the view of the window, and display the folder's properties.

My Computer offers you the option of opening each folder in a new window or opening it in the existing window. Regardless of the setting you're using, you can choose the opposite option whenever you open a folder by pressing the Ctrl key as you double-click the folder name.

To quickly determine the amount of space a folder and its contents occupies on your drive, open Windows Explorer (right-click the Start button, choose Explorer), select the folder, and press Alt+Enter. The Size: and Contains: items in the Properties dialog box's General tab provide the details you're looking for.

When using My Computer as your file manager, opening a new folder means opening a new window as well. To automatically close the parent folder when opening a subfolder, hold down the Ctrl key while you double-click the subfolder.

If there's a particular folder on your system that you frequently work from, consider taking advantage of one of Win98's cool new features: display the folder and its contents as a toolbar on your desktop.

1. First, create a shortcut on your desktop to the folder by opening Windows Explorer

2. Right-click and drag the folder to the desktop.

3. When prompted, choose Create Shortcut(s) here.

4. Minimize all open windows so you can see your desktop.

5. Left-click and drag the shortcut to one edge of the screen. When you drop it, the shortcut will become a toolbar displaying its contents. (Note that if you drag it to the taskbar, it will become a part of the taskbar).

6. Now to open a document, simply click on its icon in the toolbar.

If the toolbar is taking up too much space, you can set it to auto hide so it stays out of the way when you're not using it.

1. Right-click on a blank area of the toolbar.

2. Choose Always On Top.

3. Right-click on it again and choose Auto Hide.

To remove the toolbar completely, right-click and choose Toolbars, then unselect the name of the folder. The shortcut on your desktop will remain.

If you have more fonts than you use, you're wasting precious disk space. To find out how many fonts are on your system, open the Fonts Control Panel (Start/Settings/Control Panel/Fonts). There you'll find a list of all your installed fonts. Double-click a font's name to get copyright info and file size, as well as an example of what the font looks like at sizes up to 72 points. Delete any unnecessary fonts and you'll free up a bunch of disk space.

Some applications install a lot of fonts without informing you, and over time, your system's performance may eventually start to suffer. 200 fonts are usually no problem, but once you reach the 1,000 mark (and some office suite and graphics programs will install hundreds at a time if you're not careful), it may be prudent to clean out a few of the fonts you'll never use. To quickly delete a font, click Start, point to Settings, choose Control Panel, and double-click the Fonts icon. The status bar will show the number of fonts currently installed (if the status bar isn't showing, choose View, Status Bar from the menu). Right-click on a font's icon in the list and choose Delete from the context menu.

Be selective of the fonts you delete, however. Never delete a font from the Arial, Courier, Times New Roman, and Comic Sans families. Likewise, don't remove fonts with "MS" or "symbol" or "phonetic" in the font name. These may be system fonts whose removal will affect the way text appears on your screen.

If installing fonts sounds like an intimidating job best left to your friendly neighborhood computer guru, you'll be happy to know that it's really as easy as dragging and dropping a file from one folder to the another.

Unlike installing applications, which require you to perform a specific install process before you can use it, adding a font to your system takes much less fuss.

Fonts are simply files, much like your document files, stored in your Windows\Fonts folders. If the font is a True Type Font (i.e., if the font's filename has a TTF extension. "Arial," for example, is a True Type Font, and its filename is arial.ttf), simply placing the font file in the Windows\Fonts folder is sufficient to add the font to your system.

Many applications come with a selection of "bonus" fonts that you're welcome to install. Locate the font file and drag it (or copy it) to the Windows\Font folder. The font will be immediately available to your applications.

If you're ever curious about the appearance of the fonts that are installed on your computer, you can view or print a sample page right from Windows. Click the Start button and go to Settings, Control Panel, and double-click Fonts. To view a font, right-click on it and choose Open from the context menu. Windows will display a comprehensive sampling of the font in various point sizes. To print the sample, click the Print button in the upper right corner of the dialog box. To return to the font list, click Close.

I know you have lots of fonts that you'll never use, and why take up memory. The truth is that you have to be very careful about which fonts you send to cyberspace. Three I wouldn't touch: Times New Roman and Arial (they are so popular in word processors and spreadsheets), and Courier (a favorite of e-mail). Keep your hands off those three. As for the others, just use your judgment.

When you are formatting disks, make sure you don't format your C: drive. When you format a disk, you also effectively erase everything on the disk. If you do that to your C: drive, you will be erasing everything on your computer!

Fraction characters are yet another goodie hidden in the Character Map. Character Map is found by clicking Start, Programs, Accessories, System Tools, and Character Map. Fraction characters let you type 1/2 or 1/4 as single characters, with the 1 up above the 2 or 4. To make these symbols, hold down the Alt key while you use the numeric keypad to type 0188 (for 1/4) or 0189 (for 1/2).

Keep tabs on your hard drive's remaining free space with My Computer or Windows Explorer. Click once on the drive's icon, then note the "Disk space free" value shown in the status bar at the bottom of the window (if the status bar is not displayed, select View, Status Bar to turn it on). For a graphical view of the space on your hard drive, right-click on the drive's icon and select Properties from the context menu. This provides a pie-chart layout and detailed data on the drive's capacity, used space and remaining free space.

E-mail this tip to a friend - Browse the Archives When a system freezes frequently, the possible reasons for the problem are infinite. Often, it's a problem with the graphics card. A temporary fix is to disable hardware acceleration for the graphics. This slows down the computer, but it can save your sanity until you get it fixed.

To disable the acceleration, right-click on My Computer and then click on Properties. Once the window opens, click on the Performance tab. Then click on the Graphics button to change the acceleration. You can set it to "None" for more severe problems. Restart your computer to see if this fixes the problem.

When nothing on-screen moves except the mouse pointer, the computer is frozen up solid. Try the following approaches, in the following order, to correct the problem:

• Press Esc twice. This usually doesn't work, but try it anyway.

• Press Ctrl, Alt, and Delete all at the same time. You see an error message that lists the names of currently running programs -- including the one that's not responding. Click the name of the program that's causing the mess and click the End Task button. If that still doesn't work, try clicking the Shut Down button that's next to the End Task button or pressing Ctrl, Alt, and Delete again. That shuts down your computer and lets you start over.

• Push the computer's reset button.

• Uh oh, even the mouse pointer doesn't work (or you've tried all the above) ... turn off the computer, wait 30 seconds, and then turn it on again. Don't ever flip the computer off and on again quickly. Doing so can damage its internal organs.

FTP ('File Transfer Protocol') is a way to upload and download files on the internet. Whenever you are updating your Web pages you would use either a text editor or an HTML editor to create the changes to your pages. When you are ready to transfer your changes to your server you will use an FTP to upload the pages.

Typically a site on the internet stores a number of files (they could be application executables, graphics, or audio clips, for example), and runs an FTP server application that waits for transfer requests.

To download a file to your own system, you run an FTP client application that connects to the FTP server, and request a file from a particular directory or folder.

Files can be uploaded to the FTP server, if appropriate access is granted. FTP differentiates between text files (usually Ascii), and binary files (such as images and application executables), so care must be taken in specifying the appropriate type of transfer.

Older graphics cards often have trouble displaying their colors correctly. Sometimes Windows assigns incorrect display drivers for your card, resulting in only a 16-color display. To fix this problem, try using the Windows default driver to get your card to display 256 colors. To change your driver to the default one:

1. Go to the Display icon in the Control Panel and click on the Settings tab.

2. Once you're there, look for the Advanced Properties button and click it.

3. After that, go to the Adapter tab and click on the Change button. The Device Driver Wizard will then load.

4. Check the "Display a list of drivers" box and click Next.

5. Check the radio button labeled "Show all hardware."

6. Click on the Standard Display types and then check the model that applies to you.

7. Click the Next button continuously to select your model for use.

8. Restart your computer to see if more colors appear.

If your screen redraws slowly or you experience other video glitches, your video card may be working too hard. Some video cards claim to offer screen resolutions and color depths they can't actually support. If you think your card might be maxed out, try bumping down the color depth or screen resolution a notch in the Display Control Panel (Start/Settings/Control Panel/Display) or right-click the desktop and choose Properties. Unless you're a graphic designer, you probably won't notice the difference between 32-bit true color and 16-bit high color, anyway.