| September 1997 | Volume 7 • Number 9 |
Tips and tricks for Windows users ... by Tom S. Bair Jr.
My wife and I operate a computer consulting service, and over the past two years our clients have tended to be home users -- people who buy a brand new computer with all the neat add-ons, and wonder how to put it to use. We are typically hired to show them ways to make use of their expensive investment.
It is from this experience that I have learned ways to make Windows 95 perform better. Now, you can too. The cost? Whatever effort it took you to pick up this copy of Computer Bits.
Old DOS users remember being able to perform a screen dump to a file or printer by hitting the PrintScrn key on the keyboard. Things are a little bit different in Windows 95: pressing the PrintScrn key results in Windows 95 copying the screen to your clipboard. There it will stay until either the PrintScrn key is hit again, causing Win95 to update your clipboard with the latest screen dump, or you shut down your computer.
Go ahead, from your Windows 95 desktop reach down and press that PrintScrn key.
Nothing happened, right? Wrong. Windows 95 just took a picture of your screen and placed it on the clipboard.
So what can you do with this screen dump? Well, let's try taking the screen and pasting it into Paint, and printing it out to the printer.
It's easy to do. After you press PrintScrn, open the Paint program in Windows 95 by selecting Start | Programs | Accessories | Paint. From within Paint, click Edit | Paste.
You will get a dialog box which asks "The image in the clipboard is larger than the bitmap. Would you like the bitmap enlarged?". If you click the No button, you will get only the upper-left quarter of your screen dump. So you want to click on the Yes button.
See your screen? Pretty neat, huh? What you are looking at is a snapshot of your desktop at the time you pressed PrintScrn. Now let's print it out to your printer. Click on File | Print, and your printer's control box will appear. Just click on the OK button at the bottom right of the box (making sure that your printer is turned on), and your printer will come alive, churning out a page with a picture of your desktop on it.
Now here's an interesting item I discovered while messing around with screen dumping. If you hold down the Alt key while pressing PrintScrn, Windows 95 will only dump a shot of the active window, not the whole screen. This can be a very useful trick to avoid screen clutter in your graphic image.
If you look at the lower-right corner of your screen, you might see a little speaker (which appears yellow in color on your monitor), in the tray on the right side of the taskbar. It is just left of the time. If you were to click on this speaker icon, it would display the volume control. You could then adjust your sound level by dragging the volume control up or down with your mouse.
I've found that most of us, however, like to use the volume control on our speakers, sound card, or elsewhere. So this tiny icon is just taking up room in our taskbar tray. Fear not! There is a simple way to remove it.
First, select Start | Settings | Control Panel. Up pops your Control Panel window, filled with several different icons. Look for, and double-click on, the Multimedia icon. Your Multimedia Properties Window is displayed. Under the Audio tab, in the Playback section, uncheck the box marked Show volume control on the taskbar.
Move your mouse pointer down to the OK button at the bottom of the "Multimedia properties" window, and left-click on it. This will put you back to your Control Panel. To finish, all you need to do is click on File | Close. Now look at your taskbar tray. No more speaker.
Maybe you've seen other folks' desktops filled with things other than the stock images Microsoft provides -- mine is a small waterfall surrounded by rocky terrain. You can change your desktop wallpaper as often as you like. Here's how.
The wallpaper is actually a bitmap image file. You can recognize these files by their three-letter file extension .BMP. You can get these BMP files most anywhere, from photo CDs, BBSs, friends, and the Internet.
You can even load your favorite game, and do a screen dump to your Paint program as described at the beginning of this article. Then, instead of printing the screen dump, you can make it a wallpaper BMP file. First, save the file by clicking on File | Save As and enter a filename followed by the .BMP extension. Now click on File | Set as Wallpaper (Centered). You have just changed your desktop appearance. Exit the Paint program to enjoy your new image.
To change back to your original image, or another image; click on Start | Settings | Control Panel. Next double-click on the "Display" icon. On the right side of the Display Properties Window is a box listing all available wallpaper bitmap files. Click on one and select OK to finish.
Notice that as you select different files in the list, the image in the computer monitor screen (located in the upper center of the window) changes to display what you have selected.
The first thing I always do when trouble-shooting a client's computer is to set up a hotkey for the MS-DOS prompt. This way I can switch back and forth between the DOS command prompt and the troublesome application. If you like to enter quick commands in DOS, then follow these ten easy steps to ensure DOS is always readily available.
Practice hitting your hotkey (Ctrl+D) to bring up DOS while running different applications to get a feel for it.
Instead of going through the My Computer icon on your desktop to access your drives, you can go into My Computer and drag the Icons for each of your drives to your Start button. From then on you will have all your drives on the Start button menu. I find this comes in handy when I have lots of windows open, and I don't want to close them all just to get to the desktop so I can access a drive.
Many home users will get started in computing by purchasing a used Pentium computer with 4 megabytes (MB) of memory installed. Windows 95 is either already installed, or they install it themselves. Usually the very next upgrade is adding more memory to the system. Home users will add memory for a total of 8, 16, or even 32MB to gain increased performance out of their computer -- but no change in performance is noticed. Windows 95 continues to use the original 4Mb to run on. Unable to solve the dilemma themselves, I get called in.
The solution? Re-install Windows 95 on the upgraded system. When Windows 95 was installed the first time, only 4MB of memory was available. So it installed one set of files that operates fairly well on only 4MB.
However, when your system has more than 4MB of memory, a different set of files are installed. That is the reason why you must re-install Windows 95 if you upgrade your RAM from 4MB.
Re-installing is unnecessary if your computer contains 8MB or more of memory when you upgrade.
My wife tells me I should end this article with finesse. However, since I haven't the slightest idea how to perform this feat, I will close by saying I hope you enjoy the learning process involved in trying these tricks and shortcuts on your own computer. More tips will follow. Until then...happy computing.
Please feel free to email the author with your comments about this article: Tom Bair