This page contains tips, tricks and neat stuff I have picked up over the years. If there is something you'd like to see or want to know if it can be done drop me an email or use my Guestbook!
And yes, I still run Windows 98! It will run pretty much any Windows program out there and that is why I run Windows in the first place. If I wanted performance and rock solid reliability I'd be permanently running Linux but then I wouldn't
be able run "pretty much any Windows program out there." And also, let someone else test XP for a year or so and discover the 'undocumented features.' ;-) One thing I do find interesting and am curious to see how well it works is the fact that XP doesn't share DLL's or other files like other versions of Windows. This way when you install a program it should pretty much eliminate a lot of potential hassles with previously installed programs.
This page has given Window's tips on the seven continents! (Not counting Antartica as my stats doesnt cover Antartica.)
Windows 95 Tips and Trick's
Windows 98 Tips and Trick's
After running Windows 95 for a while and occasionally having problems where it wouldn't
recognize my CD-Rom I discovered that copying the installation files onto a directory on your harddrive can save a LOT of time and hassles. If you are having problems with your CD and are trying to change things so that they work Windows would often ask for the CD-Rom to be inserted. Yech! :-)
To do this, simply make a directory on your harddrive called Windows 95 or Windows 98 and then copy the installation files (the setup.exe, .CAB files etc) into it. Then when Windows asks you for the installation CD simply point it to the directory and you'll never be prompted to insert it again!
I think everyone has lost data at some time or another. Sometimes this doesnt have to be such a painful process. Often times when Windows won't boot or function properly a fairly safe (and sometimes just plain good) idea is to simply re-install Windows over your old copy. This process can be a lot quicker and safer if you first install your Windows install files (the directory with all the .CAB files in it) on your harddrive. You can find out how to do this in the section above this one. This will rebuild a lot of the registry and and overwrite missing/corrupt DLL files. Make sure if you do NOT or can not load Windows on your harddrive that you can access your CD-Rom or wherever copy of Windows from MS-Dos's real mode. NOT a Windows dos prompt! If you format your harddrive you will have to figure out how to re-load Windows the fun way! :-) If this still doesnt help your problem there are a few more tips and tricks to try before re-formatting but at least with just a simple re-install most of your programs and even settings will be intact afterwards. If this doesnt work some more drastic measures are called for. There are some hidden files that might need to be deleted. User.dat is hidden in the Windows directory and contains user profile information and passwords. SYSTEM.DAT is also hidden in the Windows directory and contains hardware information, Plug and Pray (play) configurations. If you would like to try restoring these from their registry backups you will have to copy USER.DA0 and SYSTEM.DA0 in place of the DAT files. An even older copy of the SYSTEM.DAT is stored in the root directory when Windows is first installed and is called SYSTEM.1ST. Why can't you see these files you may ask? Well they are hidden! If you would like to view or copy over these files just drop into dos and go into the directory where they are hidden and type DIR /AH. This will give you a list of the hidden files in that directory. Now to copy over or delete them type ATTRIB SYSTEM.1ST -h -r -s. This will remove the hidden, read-only and system attributes. A good clue for a screwed up registry is the "Fatal Exception Error" during booting. If a Windows install doesnt help try renaming or deleting SYSTEM.DAT and USER.DAT in your Windows directory and then re-booting Windows. Windows will know these files are gone and will restore them from the .DA0 copies. (Windows ME also has a CLASSES.DAT file)
Everyone has or will have to upgrade harddrives sooner or later. This is usually a simple process. Company's even sell programs to copy Windows and your files for you. I guess they don't want people to know that there is a simple dos prompt command to do this that comes with windows for free! This command is fairly simple to use. First you need to have a formatted but otherwise blank harddrive. If you need to format your harddrive you can click here for information on formatting. You can overwrite old stuff on it but with Windows it is usually safer to start off with the harddrive being mostly blank. You will also need to temporarily configure your new hard disk as a slave or put it on your secondary IDE port. Your old hard drive will still need to be your boot drive for now. In the following replace C: with your source volume and D: with your destination volume. Once you add in the second hard drive please be advised that your C: drive will be the first partition on your OLD hard drive, D: will be the first partition on your NEW hard drive, and then the system will add in the extended partitions from your old and then new harddrives in order. Double check volume's before copying and if you feel squeamish about this please email me first or ask someone more knowledgeable than yourself!
First, drop into a dos prompt, click START, click PROGRAMS, and finally click MS-DOS Prompt.
(Dont be scared! The mouse doesn't usually do a whole heck of a lot here!)
Type "XCOPY32 C:\*.* d:\*.* /E /F /H /R /K /Y"
This will start the copying process. You will get a sharing violation if you are trying to copy the volume that your swap file is on. Either manually move the swap file to a partition on the new harddrive or add /C to the Xcopy32 (not recommended as this ignores errors but can be useful if trying to restore a harddrive that is on its way out).
Once you are done with this the only things left to do is to remove the old drive, make your new hard drive the master and make sure the boot partition on it is marked active and you should be able to boot on your new hard drive once done!
I'm sure everyone will need this one day or another. You get an old laptop at a computershow or someone just gives you an old one and you'd like to surf while in bed or outside in the good weather. Very few laptops where made with removable IDE drives and even then most of the ones that where had mini IDE connectors. Well here are a few nifty ways to copy an operating system on its hard drive and get it working again! Another useful idea for this tip may be to play a game on your laptop that requires a CD. Just get the network going and player over networked connection!
The following methods will require either a laplink (parallel or serial version), a serial cable with at least pins 2 & 3 (transmit data and receive data) crossed over and the appropriate connector's at each end of the cable, or two modem cables and a crossover adapter or breakoutbox between these two cables. The parallel cables will be much faster and if you feel like spending a few bucks you can get a parallel cable that allows you to use EPP or ECP printer ports on both ends for speed rivaling a 10base/t ethernet!
If both machines are using Windows 95 or better you should be able to fairly easily use the Direct Cable Connection which is listed under your Control Panels, Add/Remove Options, Communications and finally Direct Cable Connection. This will add an entry under your Start Menu, Programs, Communications. First, you must have some shared resources on your host machine otherwise the connection may error out. Second to make the actual connection, select this on your HOST machine as it will await a connection from the guest machine. More help is available by pressing F1. Or this link!
No operating system at all on that laptop? Maybe it just won't boot up fully? You can always reformat that harddrive with a startup disk and then use the INTERLNK and INTERSVR utilities that came/come with Windows. Usually when I use this I create two startup disk's, one host and the other the guest. These files can be found on your Windows CD or perhaps an old Windows CD they may be under the OLDDOS.EXE archive as well. Also if you use a FAT32 or NTFS as the host make sure the guest uses the same! Otherwise you may screw up directorys on both machines! Please use this site for further information or get in touch with me.
If you know you will never want a file back and don't want it to stick in the recycling bin try holding down the trusty old SHIFT key while deleting with the delete key or mouse.
If you are in a tinkering mood and don't want to wait for your machine to go through the POST test's and simply want Windows to reload so you can see if you have 'fixed' your copy of windows hold down the trusty old SHIFT key while restarting Windows. This will keep Windows running in the protected mode and prevent your machine from doing a warm reboot. Give it a try next time you try the next trick listed on this website and need to reboot!
I never gave this much thought until I switched over to a cable modem. After installing a old USR 28.8 Sportster Faxmodem (to send fax's) I noticed that when it was looking for drivers it actually went out to the Windows update site and tried to find them. I guess that is one of the nice things about having permanent Internet access! :-) This service is pretty much worthless with a single PC and dial up access. One trick that may work if you have more than one PC in your house is to use Windows 'Internet Connection Sharing.' Just log on the net from another PC and then re-boot your machine that needs the drivers.
I believe it is a good idea to check the Windows Update website from time to time as they provide patches and fixes for security and other problems on a fairly regular basis. They also provide updates for other Microsoft products including Office. For the Office update to work automatically you will need to have Office 2000 installed however. They also provide access to various converters, add-ons and more for free from this site.
Need to help out a distant family member with a Windows problem but they can't quite describe the problem over the phone? Need to control other computers on your network remotely? Well there is a *FREE* gem that does all this! Real VNC (Virtual Network Computer) even allows you to control cross platform, what this means is: you can view a Macintosh from Windows, a Windows machine from Linux etc! The home page for this is located at www.uk.research.att.com/vnc
This is another neat feature I overlooked for several years. You are able to set your background to an HTML document as well as BMP or other image file. You can either directly set the background and manually enter the location an HTML document or go under 'web' from your desktop properties and add in several HTML documents. Once you have them displayed on your screen you can re-size and drag them around so that they arent in the way of your icons. These will be refreshed when you re-boot or press >F5< after clicking on a blank spot of your desktop.
One useful thing you can use this for is stock reports or weather updates.
If you would like to change your startup and shutdown screens for windows you will need a BMP picture (preferably 320X400). Your startup screen for Windows 98 will be LOGO.SYS in your C:/ directory. Just rename the BMP extension to SYS. For the Shutdown screens you will be working in C:/WINDOWS/. The file names will be LOGOS.SYS & LOGOW.SYS. LOGOS is the "You may now shut down your machine" and LOGOW is the "windows is now shutting down." If you want to have to have some just COPY C:/WINDOWS/LOGOW.SYS C:/LOGO.SYS
Then just wait for a friend to boot your machine up! :-)
I seem to remember Windows 95 being stored slightly different. I believe all the files where in your C:/ directory but hidden. To view these just drop into a dos prompt and do a DIR /AH to view files with the hidden attribute set. To edit these just use ATTRIB LOGO.SYS -H and when you are done use the reverse to re-hide your new logo.sys with ATTRIB LOGO.SYS H
BTW, if you would like to temporarily bypass your splash screens, press the ESC key when they come up. This will allow you to see what is going on during your boot with the Autoexec.bat file
This handy utility can be used to see if your system files have been changed. This can be useful if a program alters your windows programs. It will displays versions of DLL, COM & EXE files that your windows is using with what was installed and allow you to either restore the original or update the information that SFC uses. To access this utility click Start, then Run and type in SFC. Its that simple!
To access this handy utility that comes with Windows just click on START, Programs, Accessories, System Tools, and finally on System Information. Once here you will have a screen with information on your copy of Windows. If you click under Tools you will have a list of handy items you can use to help fix and customize your copy of Windows. You can use the Registry Checker, and System File Checker, Dr. Watson and other utilities to check your system out. The System Configuration Utility allows you to diagnose things, shorten your boot time and others. If you are unsure of just when to be pressing <F8> during windows booting process you can even tell Windows to prompt you on how to boot each time.
Recently I was working on a friends Windows 98 machine. I knew the TCP/IP was working fine but I couldnt get the network neighborhood to display anything including itself. Everything appeared fine and I could ping the other network machines, the router was pingable. Not once did I see an error from Windows. (Surprised?) I dropped into the Dos prompt and tried typing NET VIEW which quickly brought up "Error 3787 You Must Log on before Performing this Operation". After digging around on Microsoft's website I tried Google and came up with a page that sounded like it had the answer. As with most good pages it was no long on the web so I used Googles cache. :-)
Click on Start, Run, type in Regedit,
Go to key:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Network\Real Mode Net","autologon",1,00000000
You will want to change this value if it is a 0 to 1. Re-Installing Windows sometimes resets this value. On the plus side if you don't want to share anything on your network and only wish to use the Internet this will save you from having to press <ENTER> at the password prompt when you boot up.
Need to network your home PC's? One easy and affordable solution is to purchase a Netgear ethernet card package at Staples or other retailer. I know they used to (and still might) have a nice package of Netgears SB104 which comes with a 4 port hub, two ethernet PCI cards, some cabling and documentation for a reasonable price. If you know someone who has a crimper and can customize a cable for you, you can switch the TX and RX pairs and get 10 times the normal speed and full duplex by using this cable in place of the hub. Just plug both ends into their respective cards and your in business! To check your cabling you should have one light on your card for LINK with the special cable the 100M and FULL lights should be on.
To install these just open your PC and place them into an unused PCI slot. A lot of people unplug their computer from the wall. If you have an AT type power supply shutting the switch off on your PC is enough to disconnect any high voltages. If you have an ATX type power supply just shut off the rocker switch on the back of the power supply. The reason for leaving the machine plugged in is to keep it grounded. Every once in a while make sure and touch the metal chasis to dissipate and static electricity. If you have a static proof work station you can unplug the machine if you feel safer. Once you put your machine back together and re-boot Windows 95/98 will recognize this as a network card and will prompt you to insert the driver disk into drive A:. Once this process is completed the hard part to networking your home PC's is over! Next you will want to click on START (In the lower left hand of your screen unless you moved it somewhere else), SETTINGS, CONTROL PANEL and finally on NETWORK. Your Ethernet card should show up with the little green adapter icon next to it here. What we want to do next is to add the NETBEUI protocol so that your machine can talk with other machines on your network. You will want to click on ADD, protocol, MICROSOFT and finally NetBEUI. Other protocols will work just fine but NetBEUI is simple to set up and works just fine. Next you will want to click on IDENTIFICATION and enter a unique name for each computer. The network name (to simplify things) should be the same to save you some hunting later. Next you will want to click on FILE AND PRINT SHARING on the machine you want to share resources. Once this is done click on OK and after a few moments it should prompt you to reboot. Once you have rebooted go under MY COMPUTER and right click on the file, folder, drive or printer to be shared then click under the sharing menu. Once this is done give it a few seconds to send out the information and your networked!
If you have a permanently (and even if you don't but want to be a bit safer...) you may want to read and try this. By default when you add in a new adapter (say a Ethernet card for a cable modem or DSL) Windows binds every protocol you use to this new device to make sure it 'works.' This may or may not be a bad thing depending on your setup. But in my particular setup I use two protocols for safety and somewhat for performance. NetBEUI (which Microsoft initially worked hard to promote at one time) is a non routable protocol. This protocol doesnt carry an actual address like TCP/IP and simply works off the MAC hardware address. This has the effect of smaller network packets and overhead which makes it significantly quicker on simple networks. Another good (or bad depending on how you look at it) is that this protocol is non routable. Once a NetBEUI gets to a router it stops because there is no logical address information. This makes NetBEUI a real gem for file sharing on a simple network such as most homes. The smaller packets will boost the speed of your file sharing and printing as well as help guard your files from prying hackers. On my system I use TCP/IP for my Internet connection while only allowing file and printer sharing over the NetBEUI transport. To set this up click on START, SETTINGS, CONTROL PANEL, & finally on NETWORK. You may have to add in NetBEUI or TCP/IP depending on your initial setup. Once this is done check the Bindings for each protocol. On NetBEUI's bindings you will want to have "File & Printer sharing" checked as well as "Client for Microsoft Networks". Next, check on the bindings for any of your other protocols and make sure both of these are unchecked. Each adapter may have its own set of protocols as well. If you have a dial up adapter make sure only TCP/IP is checked as well. This will help speed things up in other ways as well. If Windows knows you won't be trying to use NetBEUI over a modem it won't bother loading any connections for that transport.
Ethereal will allow you to monitor an ethernet, token-ring or dial up PPP connection. This handy little utility will allow you to interactively filter captured data from your network card or dial up connection. Of course, since this is being posted on my website it has to be at my favorite price *FREE!*. I've used hardware protocol analyzers before and for portability and ease of use I would have to say that Ethereal would be my choice for debugging. Even though it is too big to fit on a disk if you have a CD or the network isn't too bad you can load it over a network. Feel free to check it out and let me know what you think!
Ever wonder how people are able to cut and paste an entire screen into a slide , presentation, Word document or webpage? Well the way to do it is probably right under your nose! There is a button that probably hasn't done what is actually says since the last time you booted up in Dos. To capture an image of the entire screen just press the <PRINT SCREEN> button and then simply paste (Using <CONTROL>-<V> or the paste command) the captured image into whatever document you wish. (This document has to support graphics so use a program such as Word or Paint) Another little trick even these hot shots might not know is that if you press <ALT>-<PRINT SCREEN> you will capture just the Window you are working on.
If you have several PC's on your network and would like the time to be exactly synchronized among each PC you can use this handy *FREE* utility that comes with windows! The Dos command prompt you will want to use is "NET TIME \\AMD420 /set /y". An easy way to set this up if you want to use it often is to create a shortcut pointing to NET.EXE in the windows directory, then right click on this shortcut to edit the properties, click on programs and enter in "C:\WINDOWS\NET.EXE time \\amd420 /set /y" on the Cmd Line prompt. Of course amd420 will be replaced with whatever computer you want to use as a 'master clock.' If you would like you can put this shortcut in your startup folder and it will set the time every time you reboot your computer. This can be especially useful if you have an older computer that doesnt keep very good time anymore on your network.
The NET program also allows you to do some simple diagnostics with the /DIAG command but I believe that if your computer can get ONTO the network it is probably working pretty good. :-)
Once again Windows has provided a perfectly useful utility that needs to be run from a Dos-Prompt window. This one is called NETSTAT. To use this open up a dos prompt window and type in NETSTAT! Most address's with :80 after them will be web pages. The eighty in this case is the port number. POP3 (Point Of Presence) and SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer protocol) will be email connections. If you see something connected that you don't recognize it may be someone hacking in or perhaps a scumware *SPAM* connection.
Netstat example:These most undocumented semi-secret switches may speed up your install, prevent setup from asking for a startup disk you probably don't need and eliminate those pesky setup screens! These switches will also allow you to bypass the check for CPU speed, memory amount and a few others for older machines.
Windows setup switches:This has happened to me more than once before. I sometimes like to 'tweak' and play with settings to see if I can't make my machine run 'better.' Well sometimes when trying activate the DMA setting for a CD-Rom (or other IDE device) you may notice that the device may not show up to Windows after you reboot. Well Windows trys the device with the DMA setting and if it doesn't work it figures it probably just plain doesn't exist. This is not good when you want to turn the DMA setting back off so you can use the device. Well you may ask, if Windows thinks it isn't in your system, how can you change the setting back since you can't see it?? Well they have included a nice little utility called Regedit which allows you to make changes behind the scenes! What you want to do is click on START, RUN and type in REGEDIT. Be careful what you type in here! It can make a nice mess if you arent careful! Once you have this handy utility running, click on EDIT, click FIND and finally tell it to search for IDEDMA. Once you get to the primary or secondary IDE controller (depending on where your CD or IDE device is plugged into) you will see settings for IDEDMADRIVE0 or IDEDMADRIVE1. Just click on the entry for your errant CD or IDE device and then click under EDIT and then MODIFY and delete out the 01 (Which means ON) and replace it with 00 (Which means OFF). Once you close down Regedit and reboot things should be back to your 'pre-tweaking' state!
Even Microsoft has given you some free tips on useful tricks. Just view TIPS.TXT which should be in your Windows directory for some additional tips and tricks!
TELNET Free telnet (Remote login) client from Microsoft
PING Free ping (Packet Internet Gopher) client from Microsoft
FTP Free FTP (File transfer protocol) client from Microsoft
Recently a good friend of mine was applying for a job and the jobsite had a close deadline and they required an Adobe PDF document to be returned to them with the information filled in the boxes. Unfortunately they didnt go to the extreme of making it an editable Adobe document. One solution would be to print the document, type over it with a typewriter and fax it back. But who has a working typewriter now a days?
My solution after spending a half hour or so was to save the Adobe document as an image. To do this click on the picture of the camera on your Adobe toolbar "Snapshot Tool" and then left click on the page you wish to save and right lick to "Select All" then right click again to "Copy Selected Graphic". Then open your copy of Microsoft Word and paste it!
We are almost done here, just a few steps left. Left click the middle of the document after insuring it is all there and right to "Format Picture". Make sure you leave "Lock Aspect Ratio" checked unless you want the Adobe to look stretched or squished. You may have to play with the values here depending on how the original Adobe was formatted. A good rule to set the size properly to fit on an 8.5"X11" page is to set the height for 10"'s. Lastly, you will want to set the layout of the picture to "Behind Text" as this will allow you to type over it in Word. The last step will be to click on Advanced and set the Horizontal and Vertical alignemnts to be centered relative to the Page.
Well I promised myself it wasn't worth adding an AOL section but after helping a friend get AOL running on their new Gateway laptop I figured this idea might too good not to share. My friend was having problems recalling their password so I used one a family member gave me. Unfortunately AOL believed we wanted to use that account on the laptop and wouldn't allow me to switch accounts. The help files of course offered no help. Next I tried the live 24 hour tech support which only gave me a headache. Most of these folks on AOL's call center are there because they couldn't get jobs anywhere else and simply try to match up a persons problem with a list they keep in front of them. I even got a copy of this emailed to me by a frustrated customer service pseudo technician once. Since this was a fresh install I was going to try deleting all the files in AOL's sub directory created or modified that day and figure one of them should have the password stored in it. But while on the phone trying to get my friends password I just for the heck of it asked how to get a copy of AOL de-associated with an account. It seems they keep a copy of MAIN.NDX in a backup sub-directory and copying this in place of the regular MAIN.NDX fooled AOL into thinking it was a fresh install. I guess the backup copy is overwritten once a month. Hopefully this will save someone the trouble of de-installing and then re-installing a copy on the idiotic advice of the online live pseudo tech support staff at AOL.
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