|
[ Go to February 1997 Table of Contents ]
WinTips
Put Your Screen Saver on Hold Here's the fastest way to temporarily disable your screen saver (if you're defragmenting a drive or doing something similar). Click on the Start button and bring up the Start menu. When the menu is up, your screen saver won't launch. Jason Paluszak. via the Internet Custom Drive View If you want Explorer to show by default all your drives with none expanded and the C: drive selected in the right pane, then change the shortcut for Explorer to read explorer /e,/root,,/select,c:\. Be sure to type the commas. Joseph A. Dziedzic via the Internet Selection Shortcut You can select a bunch of files by clicking near them and dragging the mouse pointer over them. If you do that with the right mouse button, however, you automatically get a context menu that offers the Open, Send To, Cut, Copy, Delete, Rename, Create Shortcut and Properties commands. Andrew Clelland via the Internet Send to Your Send To Menu Make it easy to beef up your Send To menu by creating a shortcut on your Desktop to the C:\WINDOWS\SENDTO folder. Once you've done that, you can drag and drop folders and applications to the shortcut, which puts them on your Send To menu. Wim Kerkhoff via the Internet Kill the Arrow Here's how you can remove shortcut arrows without editing the Registry or installing Tweak UI. First, right-click on the Desktop, and bring up the Properties dialog box. Then select Appearance and choose Icon from the Item box. Select a size of 30 or less, click on OK and voila, they're no longer there. Set a size of 31 or bigger and poof, they're back. David R. Officer via the Internet Have a Cleaner Control Panel If your Control Panel is cluttered with icons you don't need, here's how to clean it up. In the C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM directory, you'll find a CPL file that corresponds to each Control Panel item. Move the ones you don't want to a safe place on your hard disk. Now, when you open Control Panel, those icons are gone. Shaun Lyle via the Microsoft Network NT Power Toys Some Power Toys previously mentioned in WinTips are now supporting Windows NT 4.0. These include Find X 1.2, Send To X 1.4, Shortcut Target Menu 1.2, Tweak UI 1.1 and Explore From Here as well as Command Prompt Here 1.1. 'Web' Your Schedule Internet Assistant for Microsoft Schedule+ lets you save your schedule as an HTML document you can publish on your company intranet or on the Internet. You choose which information is available or hidden. Download the software free from WinMag's Web site at http://www.winmag.com/win95/software.htm. Extra! Extra! Read all about it! Here's a utility for you news junkies who have constant Internet connections. MSNBC News Alert, which is available free from the WinMag Web site, polls the MSNBC news site as often as you wish, looking for news items with your keywords. When it finds matching stories, it alerts you immediately. Cool CoolSwitch Tip The most recently "CoolSwitched" application is always the first choice. That means that by selecting via Alt+Tab item A, then item B, you can toggle between them regardless of how many applications or folders you have open by repeatedly pressing Alt+Tab and letting go. Remove Read-Only We've run tips in the past that involved editing the MSDOS.SYS file. Some readers sent mail saying the file is "read-only" so they couldn't edit it. Here's how to remove the read-only and other attributes of MSDOS.SYS. Open Explorer, select View/Options and click on the View tab. Select "Show All Files" and then OK. Now, use Find to search for the MSDOS.SYS file. When you find it, right-click on it and select Properties from the Context menu. When the Properties dialog appears, remove all the check marks in the Attributes section at the bottom. Then use the instructions above to "Hide these types of files." Got a hot tip? Send it to melgan@cmp.com or Mike Elgan, Windows Magazine, One Jericho Plaza, Jericho, NY 11753.
|