Windows Watcher

A worthy competitor to Zip drives ... by Tom S. Bair Jr.

It was roughly one year ago that I decided to buy an LS-120 Super disk drive instead of a ZIP drive. The winning feature was that, unlike a ZIP drive, the SuperDisk drive was downward compatible. It not only could read/write to 120-megabyte floppies, but to 1.44-megabyte disks as well. I thought this made the drive twice as useful as a ZIP drive.

Since then, the SuperDisk drive has become a worthy competitor to Zip drives. The new LS-120 model will write data about 22 times faster and read the data 15 times faster than a standard floppy, yet it will fit in a standard 3-1/2 floppy drive bay.

Now Panasonic has come out with a camera that has a built-in SuperDisk drive. One LS-120 disk will hold an amazing 1,500 VGA-resolution photos. By contrast, a 1.44-MB floppy disk will hold only a dozen medium-resolution photos. Under Windows 98, a USB-equipped PC will recognize the camera immediately and treat it as an additional disk drive. This allows you to not only load the pictures to your PC, but also to back up data from your PC to an LS-120 disk. Rarely am I amazed by technological versatility. But the Panasonic PalmCam PV-SD4090 is worth looking into if you would like to get the most use out of a digital camera.

Alter My Documents Path

[W98] Would you like to store your document files somewhere besides the Microsoft default of the 'My Documents' folder on Drive C? You might want to keep them on that second hard drive, or in a folder named 'My Stuff.' If so, then do the following:

1. Right-click on the 'My Documents' icon on the desktop.
2. Highlight and click on 'Properties'.
3. Type in the drive and path to your new location in the 'Target folder location' box. An example would be "D:/My Stuff", or "C:/Work Files".
4. Click on the 'OK' button.

When you use Microsoft applications such as Paint, Microsoft Works, or Office, your files will be saved in your new default location.

Activate Mouse Sonar

[W95] [W98] [W98SE] Have you ever had trouble locating the I-bar (the 'I'-shaped pointer) in your word processor and other applications? You might be able to make it easier to spot by using Mouse Sonar. It's possible you have this option on your computer if you use a wheel mouse, or even if you have a PS2 mouse.

1. Left-click the 'Start' button.
2. Highlight 'Settings' and click on 'Control Panel'.
3. Double-click on the 'Mouse' icon.
4. Click on the 'Visibility' tab. (If you don't have a 'Visibility' tab, your computer doesn't have this feature. Click the 'OK' button to exit the 'Mouse' menu. Exit 'Control Panel' by clicking on the X box in the upper right corner)
5. Under 'Sonar', click the box next to "Show Location of Pointer When You Press the CTRL Key". A check mark will appear in the box.
6. Click on the 'OK' button.
7. Exit 'Control Panel'.

Whenever you need to find the mouse pointer, just press the CTRL key. You will see concentric circles that will zero in on your pointer.

Defrag Multiple Hard Drives

[W98] Does your computer system have more than one hard drive? Are you repeatedly firing up the Defragmenter utility for each drive? Did you know you could defragment all your hard drives in one session? Try this:

1. Click the 'Start' button.
2. Highlight 'Programs', then slide your cursor over to 'Accessories', 'System Tools', and click on 'Disk Defragmenter'.
3. Scroll down to the bottom of the list in the 'Select Drive' dialog box and click on 'All Hard Drives'.
4. Click the 'OK' button.

Defragmenter will start first on your C drive, and work its way through your hard drives alphabetically.

Remove Auto Arrange Option

[W95] [W98] [W98SE] Paula LaRose likes to arrange her desktop icons around a bitmapped photo background of her children. Yet each time she turns her computer on, she is annoyed to discover that the icons have gone back into neat little rows. Although she doesn't know why this occurs, she has asked me if it can be fixed.

In Windows, the Auto Arrange Icon option is the default. To turn this option off and keep the icons in a place of your choosing, proceed with the following:

1. Right-click on an empty spot of your desktop.
2. Highlight 'Arrange Icons'.
3. In the pop-up menu, you will see a check mark next to 'Auto Arrange'. Left-click on 'Auto Arrange' and the check mark will disappear.
4. Now arrange your icons to your liking.

Change DOS Prompt Path

[W95][W98][W98SE] Justin Lowe asked the question, "When going to the DOS prompt, it comes up C:\WINDOWS. Is there any way to get it to start up in the hard drive root directory (C:\)"?

Depending on how you access the DOS prompt, from a shortcut on your desktop, or from the Start menu, just:

1. Right-click on the DOS prompt.
2. Left-click on 'Properties' in the pop-up menu.
3. Left-click on the 'Program' tab (looks like the top of a file folder).
4. Delete the word 'WINDOWS' under the "Working:" dialog box so that the line reads "C:\".
5. Click the 'OK' button.

DOS Diskcopy Command

[W98] Windows 98's Copy Disk utility will allow you to make duplicates of floppy disks. This utility is limited, though, when compared to DOS 7's Diskcopy command. Copy Disk will only make one copy at a time, requiring that the original disk be copied to memory for each duplicate made.

DOS 7's Diskcopy command will allow you to make multiple copies of the original disk without having to repeatedly reload the original disk to memory. To use this command from within Windows:

1. Click on the 'Start' button.
2. Click on 'Run'.
3. In the dialog box, type DISKCOPY A: A:
4. Insert your original floppy disk into drive A and follow the prompts.

If you have two floppy drives:

1. 1. Click on the 'Start' button.
2. Click on 'Run'.
3. In the dialog box, type DISKCOPY A: B:
4. The following will appear:

   "Insert SOURCE diskette in drive A:"

   "Insert TARGET diskette in drive B:"

   "Press any key to continue . . ."

   Place the original disk in drive A, a blank disk in drive B, and press a key on your keyboard. Diskcopy will duplicate the disk in drive A to drive B without you having to swap disks.

5. When completed, Diskcopy will prompt you with "Copy another diskette (Y/N)?"
6. If you press 'Y', you will be taken back to step 4. Pressing 'N' will terminate the program. You will then need to exit the DOS window.

Logitech Scanman Bug

Logitech reports that you may get an "insufficient system resources" error message when using a handheld Logitech Scanman on a PC with more than 16MB of memory. Seems to be a bug in the driver, which does not recognize system memory correctly. You can download the updated driver, scanupt.exe, from the Logitech Web site.

Win98 Corrupts Micronics

Although I have not been able to test and verify this information, the word is out among computer techs that installing Windows 98 on a Micronics motherboard that contains a flash BIOS will cause BIOS corruption. The reported fix for this is to make sure you have set the BIOS read/write jumper to the read-only position.

Correction

In the December 1999 issue of this column, I gave a tip titled "Print a Folder Listing." I stated that if you wanted to print out a listing of the 'Program Files' folder, you had to enter

DIR C:\PROGRA~1\>PRN.

Otherwise, you would get an error message stating "Too many parameters - Files\".

Rich Tietjens corrects me by stating, "That's not always true; just enclose the path in double quotes to make DOS 7 do its own interpretation, like so:"

DIR "C:\Program Files\" >PRN

"You could also get a 'bare' listing (without the DOS filenames, dates, and file sizes) by adding a /b in the command line thusly:"

DIR "C:\Program Files\" /b >PRN

I somehow forgot this procedure and developed a work-around to the problem. Although both commands work, I recommend you use Rich's method. As soon as I can stop laughing at myself, I intend to crack open the books and refresh my memory on the simple basics of DOS commands.