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[ Go to February 1997 Table of Contents ]
News
At the time Microsoft unveiled its current slogan-"Where do you want to go today?"-some wondered if cab drivers would have to pay a royalty every time they uttered the line. The company's Internet Explorer 3.0 for Windows 3.x takes the point a little further: As we recently found out in our labs, the much-touted Web browser just doesn't know how to decompress ActiveX controls embedded in Web pages as CAB files. You can boot an NT machine from a floppy, which you have to do when your system's boot sector or root directory gets trashed. Technical Editor Serdar Yegulalp recently figured out how when he got into just that predicament. First, format a floppy under NT. Then, unhide and copy BOOT.INI, NTDETECT.COM and NTLDR from your boot-volume's root directory to the floppy. Now, you're ready to go. By the way, you can set it up so that this diskette is the only way to boot your machine-just remove the contents of the hard drive's root directory. And if you use NTFS and lock up the floppy, no one can boot up your PC and gain access to your files. You may have heard that the only way to see whether your PC is packing Intel's MMX technology is to pop out the processor. Well, there's another way, and it involves, we're proud to say, our very own in-house, homegrown software, Wintune95. Go to the Details screen and look at the second hex value listed under CPUID1. If the hex number starts with 0x8 and has five characters after the 8, bingo-you've got MMX. You could also look at the CPU type, which appears in the Details screen. If you've got MMX, the CPU type will appear as "Pentium OD" (for Pentium OverDrive), as it will if you have any OverDrive chip. This spring we'll release the next version of Wintune, with a CPU type field that clearly indicates whether or not MMX is anywhere around.
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