2,001 Tips
Tips from the Top
Breeze Through Your Routine Tasks

-- by Mike Elgan Editor, Explorer Columnist

Speed Up Boot-up Win95 pauses for about two seconds during boot-up to give you the opportunity to press a start-up key such as F8. You can remove the pause and make boot-up faster. First, right-click on the MSDOS.SYS file and select Properties. Make sure the read-only attribute is unchecked. Now, open MSDOS.SYS in Notepad and add the entry BootDelay=0 to the [Options] section. When you're through, re-check read-only, for safety's sake.

Hot, Hot, Hotkeys Assign hotkeys to your most frequently used programs. Right-click on each program and select Properties. Click on the Shortcut tab and once in the Shortcut Key field. Type in the hotkey combination you want to assign, then click on OK. Assigning a hotkey this way will allow you to switch to the program if it's already running on your Desktop.

Fun with Find You can search more than one drive at a time using an undocumented feature of Find by separating the drive names with a semicolon. For example, if you want to search your A:, C: and D: drives, type A:;C:;D: in the Look In box.

Hotkey Secret A shortcut's hotkey combination will launch a program only if it's on the Start menu or the Desktop.

Quick! Put It on a Diskette! The quickest way to put a file or folder on a diskette is to right-click on it, select Send To from the context menu and choose 31/2 Floppy (A).

Quick-Close Trick If you give Win95 the ol' three finger salute (Ctrl+Alt+Del) you'll get the Close Program dialog, which gives you the option to close running applications one at a time. Task Manager, a holdover from Windows 3.x, lets you close any number of running applications-or all of them-at once. To launch Task Manager, select Start/Run and type TASKMAN and press Enter. From the resulting Task dialog, press and hold the Ctrl key, click on each of the programs you'd like to close and select Windows/End Task. To close all your running applications, press and hold the Shift key, click on the first application, then the last and select Windows/End Task.

Save your Findings If you find yourself searching the same folder or for the same kind of file (say, a Word document), save your search for future use. After you conduct a search, select File/Save Search. It'll place an icon on your Desktop, which, when launched, will bring up Find with all the parameters preset.

Find's wildcard The Win95 Find utility sports some unique-and undocumented-wildcard capabilities you can use in the Find dialog's Named box. For example, use a question mark to replace each unknown letter or number in a filename. Each question mark must replace exactly one unknown character, so you have to know how many characters are in the filename. Each asterisk, on the other hand, can replace any number of unknown characters. You can use combinations of question marks and asterisks to refine your search.search drives Search your floppy, hard and mapped network drives simultaneously by selecting My Computer in Find's Look In box.

Here's a Tip Tip Find the ultimate collection of Win95 tips at http://www.winmag.com/win95/m1.htm. Here you'll see the Win95 Tip of the Day. Below that, you'll find every tip we've ever published in WinTips, plus all the tips printed in this issue.

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