Time format in Windows

This is not documented in the Help files, but this is how it’s done. From Control Panel, Regional settings, Time, select Time style. You will probably see either HH:mm:ss or H:mm:ss. Alter it to read H:mm:ss and then click on Apply. To get more help on the various formats, click on the question mark next to the X in the top corner and then click on the time panel to get more options.

 

     How do I close all open windows?

There is a keystroke to minimise all. The Windows key + m will minimise the lot. Use Shift + Windows + m to restore them all. To actually close all active programs you can use a free program called EndItAll available from www.freedownloadscenter.com/Reviews/r91.html.

 

     More strange hidden files

The Help files create these files. When Help for a particular program is first used it builds up the topic for that program. Depending on the options selected, these files can grow to be up to about a third of the size of the help file but they do not grow further. Although they can be deleted, the next time you use Help with that particular program, the .GID file will be re-created. It is only worth deleting these files for the topics that you do not intend to revisit.

 

      Illegal Operation: should the police be involved?

The "Illegal operation" that you refer to is the result of an instruction in a computer program that tries to perform an action which would cause some other programs or even the operating system to fail. The operating system, Windows, detects this action and stops the errant program from continuing.

Unfortunately there is no easy generic fix for these "illegal operations". A search of Microsoft’s knowledge database revealed many hundreds of these errors in the Microsoft products alone. Excel alone can have over one hundred conditions that will give this dreaded "Illegal operation". All are caused by different conditions and there are different ways of overcoming each problem. There are only five of these problems reported in Internet Explorer and are all different and require different specific fixes.

My recommendation is that if it is a rare occurrence, you have to try to live with it. This is because it may be not worth the effort of trying to track down an obscure intermittent fault and there is no guarantee that you will succeed. Some of these faults can be caused by the most obscure set of combinations that may never be repeated during your normal work.

You should click the Details button to find the program name that is actually responsible, as often it can be an overlay file. If it always happens with the same program then it is possible that this application may have been corrupted. In that case, un-install it via Control Panel, Add/Remove programs and then re-install it. If it always happens when performing the same function then consider doing your work in a different sequence if possible, as your problem may be data dependent.

 

     How to show full file details in Windows programs

You can set this in an unlikely place, namely the Windows Explorer. Open Explorer then select View, Option, and make sure that the box labelled “Hide MS-DOS file extensions for file types that are registered” is NOT ticked. Now you will be able to see the full file name.

Another box that helps significantly in identifying the file when you are editing files many sub-folders down using Windows Explorer is the “Display the full MS-DOS path in the title bar”. Figure 18 illustrates both the file extensions and the full path.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

      Deleting entries from the Start, Programs menus

The programs that appear when you select Start, Programs are controlled by a separate menu and not by what Explorer shows. To remove unwanted Program entries in Windows do the following:

·      right-click in the task bar (the one with the Start button) on the empty space,

·      select Properties on the screen that pops up,

·      select the Start Menu Programs tab,

·      select Remove...

·      then click on the program that you wish not to appear in the list and select Remove and close the windows. (See Figure 19 .)

Now that program will not appear in the "Programs" list.

 

 

 

 

 

           How to eliminate a Windows Startup error   

This error is being caused by Windows trying to reference a program that has been deleted or moved to some other location but some reference to it in the Startup sequence is left behind.

You have two choices, the best option is find what is requesting that file and remove that reference or program from the Startup, as it is not working anyway, or find what program requests that file and find and install the file into the appropriate folder.

If you are running Windows 98 or higher then it is quite simple to find the culprit by using a program call Msconfig. To start this program click on Start, Run type Msconfig and press Enter and when that program starts click on the Startup tab and you will see a screen similar to the one shown in Figure 20 and all the programs that are started, or are attempted to be started, are shown. Just remove the tick from the program causing the problem and you will not see that error message again.

If you are running Windows 95 then you must do the search manually as this useful tool is not available. In your particular case, as Win.ini has been mentioned, I would use Notepad to open that file and search for AM. If a reference is found, place a semi-colon (;) in front of the line to make it a comment. Also look in System.ini. If that does not help, use the procedure outlined below. The general approach to find out what program is requesting that particular file is to step file by file through the starting process. You do this by pressing the F8 key as the computer is starting, just after the memory test is completing and a menu will appear. Choose the Step-by-step confirmation option. Windows will show each line in Config.sys and Autoexec.bat and ask if you wish to execute that command. You should answer Yes to all prompts and observe which program gives the error message.

Having discovered what program is giving the error message, you must fix it by removing the line that refers to it in either Autoexec.bat or Config.sys, editing the relevant file using Notepad (which is found under Accessories).

It is possible that the error message will occur after Windows itself has started. In that case you must look at all the programs that are automatically started by Windows.

To determine what programs are automatically started by Windows:

·      right-click on the task bar in the empty space,

·      select Properties,

·      select Start Menu Programs,

·      select Advanced..,

·      then on the left hand side of the split screen select Programs,

·      then click on StartUp.

 Now in the right hand side you will see all the programs that start automatically when Windows starts. Double click on each one of these in turn to find out which is the culprit. Now you can either delete that shortcut, or re-install the program. To find out what the program actually is, right click on the shortcut, select Properties and then the Shortcut tab.

If the program is still not there then you must delve into the depth of Windows and this involves modifying the Registry. As the Registry is a critical file, it may be prudent to copy it into another folder before starting. See Changing the registered user in Windows on page 44 for a detailed explanation on how to back up the Registry.

Run Regedit  and search for the string am. It is likely to be found in the following areas:

\HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE \Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run or in the several entries immediately below this one.

If the entry is found, then carefully delete just the data entry only. Having searched in all these places will most likely solve the problem, but not always. It is also possible that something is just referring to the file. Thus I would do a search for the file (Am.exe) through the whole Win.ini file, other sysedit files, and then the whole registry. This should locate the culprit. If for some reason it does not, then click on Start, Find, Files or folders, Advanced - Search for files containing text am.exe. It is possible some other program is calling Am.exe but this is only as a last gasp.

 

     Removing names of deleted programs

Your problem was caused by deleting the programs themselves rather than deleting them via the Add/Remove programs option found under Control Panel. Using the Add/Remove programs option is the preferred way to delete unwanted programs because many programs add files to the Windows and/or to the System folders. When you manually delete these programs, the other files remain behind, filling the hard disk.

According to Microsoft, removing the unwanted entry in the Add/Remove programs table is a major exercise and not recommended. Yet Microsoft have released a program called TweakUI, a part of the Powertoys  suite of programs that have been developed by Microsoft programmers to fill in gaps in Windows functionality. TweakUI will do the job. The Powertoys program is available as a free download from the Microsoft site on: www.microsoft.com/ windows95/downloads/contents/WUToys/W95PwrToysSet/Default.asp Read the ‘readme.txt’ file as to how to install these programs after clicking on the Powertoys program. (See Figure 21 for a TweakUI screen.). For Windows XP go to:

www.microsoft.com/ntworkstation/downloads/powertoys/networking/nttweakui.asp

 

If you cannot obtain Powertoys, in many cases deleting a few lines in the Registry  will get rid of that unwanted entry. As the Registry is a critical part of Windows, care must be taken and I would strongly recommend that everyone back up the Registry before attempting to modify it. Indeed, I recommend that users perform regular backups. See: Changing the registered user in Windows on page 44 for detailed instructions on how to backup  the Registry.

To modify the Registry double-click Regedit  in the Windows folder then click on Edit, Find and type in the program name. Whenever a reference to it is found, delete that entry and continue searching (press F3) and delete all entries. This should eliminate that entry in your Add/Remove programs dialogue box.

If you are not confident in performing the above steps then do not feel concerned about leaving a reference in the Registry to a program that is no longer there. I believe that there is no real need for concern as the overheads in having the odd spurious entry are minuscule.

 

 

      I have too many programs starting when Windows starts

You can do this several ways but probably the easiest is to use Explorer and open Windows, Start Menu and Programs. At the bottom of the list in the right hand window you will see the programs that appear at the end of your Start, Programs. You can delete any that you don’t want. These are just the shortcuts to the programs themselves and the actual programs will remain intact.

If you wish to delete the programs themselves then you should do this via the Add/Remove Programs icon on the Control Panel or better still check to see if an uninstall program exists either in the software's created directory or on the installation disk. The uninstall software often can do a better job at removal than the Windows Add/Remove option. In this way all the software will be removed, as well as any software in the Windows or system folders plus the entry in Windows\Start Menu\Programs folder plus the Registry entries. Just deleting files in one folder manually will leave all the other remnants behind.

While you are removing entries you may consider adding your commonly used programs to that list, or create a new folder, say Misc, and put your collection in that folder. Suppose you would like to have Scandisk more accessible, because that is a program that should be run regularly and it is buried in the menu structure. From Explorer open Windows, then right-click on Scandskw.exe and select Copy. Now open the Start Menu, Programs folder and press Ctrl + v or, if you prefer using the mouse, click on Edit, Paste. Next time you click on Start, Programs you will have less clutter and have Scandisk, in this case, readily accessible.

     Drive's content changed: restarting problems

This is a Frequently Asked Question (FAQ). The reason for the restarting is that there are one or possibly more programs that are interfering with the defragmentation process by writing something to disk while defragmenting  and therefore causing it to restart.

I suggest that you close all programs except Explorer and Systray. Do this by pressing Alt + Ctrl + Del once, highlight a program that you wish to close by clicking on End Task, and then repeat until all other programs are closed. A common culprit is Find Fast  that creates index files and is one of the main causes of disk activity when the computer is idle. See What are these hidden *.FF files? on page 42 for more information and on how to stop this process.

When all but the two programs are closed, run Defrag. If the program seems be stuck on the 10% mark for a long time, (but not hours) this is normal behaviour. Eventually it will continue but at least it has stopped the restarting.

The other way that always works is to start the computer in Safe Mode  then run Defrag. The best way to start in Safe Mode is to hold the Ctrl key or F8 down during the booting process and this will bring up a menu. Select Safe Mode then run your Scandisk. Reboot after Scandisk has finished and the computer will start normally.

Remember to delete any unwanted files before starting this process, as there is no point in wasting time to defragment files that are going to be deleted later. One quick way of achieving this is to right-click on the hard disk icon in My Computer, select properties and Disk Cleanup.

Although defragmenting does improve performance, except in extreme cases the improvement is small. If you have defragmented your drive three months prior then with normal domestic use it is unlikely that you will be able to tell the improvement in performance even with a stopwatch. In one extreme case one of my clients was running a large database and the computer had never been defragmented. The main file had over 3,000 fragments and the index file had just over 1,000. As a test I ran a report that had to read every record and timed the result before and after defragmenting the drive. The improvement was 30%. This is certainly worth having, but with smaller and less fragmented files the improvement will be much less. If you have considerable memory installed, the effect will be diminished as much of the file will already be cached in memory and does not have to be read off the disk.

 

     What is the strange folder Mscreate.dir?

The Setup program for Microsoft Office products creates a 0-byte hidden file called Mscreate.dir in each folder that Setup creates, to indicate that the folder was created by Setup. When you decide to remove all of that software, via Add/Remove programs, Setup uses this file to determine whether an empty folder can be removed. When you run Setup in Maintenance mode (as opposed to a new installation), Setup will not remove an empty folder within its sub-folders if it does not contain this file as this is a flag to indicate whether or not a user has created this folder.

For example, if you create the folder MyFiles in the Microsoft Office folder and later you run Microsoft Office Setup and click Remove All, the MyFiles folder is not removed by Setup even if it is empty.

These files are not consuming disk space but are just an entry in the directory list, so they have a negligible effect on disk space. If you don’t mind having your empty folders deleted when you are de-installing programs, then you can delete all the Mscreate.dir files.

 

     How much memory is too much?

There is an old saying dating from the late eighties that states you can never have too much money or too much memory. However, the cost/benefit ratio concerns most of us. How much memory you require is determined by the applications you run under Windows and the number of them that you run simultaneously. The performance improvement from more memory is achieved because Windows does not have to write to a disk swap file.

Accessing data from memory is thousands of time faster than from disk. When Windows is low in physical memory it will write part of the current memory to the hard disk. This swapping of physical memory to disk makes more resources available to Windows but at the expense of performance. At the time of writing, 256 MB probably represents the best cost/benefit ratio, although 512 MB may be considered as memory is cheap. However, as the price of memory drops or you use more simultaneous programs, more memory will give better performance.

Many of the smaller programs in Windows will not give better performance with more memory. With programs such as wordprocessors or spreadsheets there will be little improvement if you mainly work with small files. When working with large documents with large graphics a 256 MB system would result in much more swapping to disk and will run noticeably faster with 512 MB. Programs that manipulate large graphic files may continue to show some performance improvement with memory over 512 MB.

Additional memory can be used to increase the disk cache size, and in doing so improve disk access for all programs. All versions of Windows use a good dynamic cache. If you are not sure about the memory requirements of the programs that you wish to run, start with 128 MB and observe the disk activity by watching the light on the computer front panel. If you notice a lot of activity when in Windows, this means that a lot of swapping is occurring, and additional memory will reduce much of this time consuming activity. Memory prices vary considerably with time, going up and down in price by 100% or more. If memory is cheap when you are buying or upgrading your computer, add more as this will help with performance.

Depending on the dealer, there may be an additional charge for installation of extra RAM. If you intend to install it yourself, read the motherboard manual to determine the type of memory required. Before installing it, make sure that you discharge static electricity from your body by touching an earthed metal object such as the inside of your computer or the frame of a metal desk lamp before removing the memory from its protective packaging. The front of the case is usually plastic and will not discharge static electricity. Only then should you handle the chips. The classic "electric shock" can destroy the chip, even one shock too small for you to feel.

 

     How can I utilise my entire RAM?

You probably are getting optimum performance. Your perception that the computer is not running any faster may be correct depending on what program you run. If you usually run only one application, say WordPad which does not place large demands on memory and will happily run in 16 MB, then adding more memory will not make any difference to performance.

The fact that a systems check shows that only 60% of your memory is being utilised at a given point in time means that you can open other programs without causing any degradation to the programs that were running at that time.

I tested the effects of RAM by measuring how long it took to perform tasks such as replacing several hundred occurrences of a phrase in a 300 page Word document. I then doubled the memory and it took 1.1 seconds both times. The extra RAM made no difference because the full document was in memory. However, with less memory and having multiple files and programs open the loading time of Word itself was slower and resulted in far more disk activity as the programs were being paged in and out of memory to the hard disk.

 Windows has good memory management algorithms and will allow you to make full use of the extra memory as you open more files. It will not fill its memory immediately on loading because it would have to page out programs and therefore slow things down as you start opening applications.

 

     My scrolling is way too fast

Unfortunately there is no adjustment of which I am aware. The only reliable way that I have found to overcome this problem is to use the keyboard when highlighting the text. First click on the point from where you wish to highlight then hold the shift key down and use the down arrow to select the text. You can also use the Page Down key to move in larger increments while holding down the shift key. Pressing F8  is the same as first clicking.

Another method involves using the mouse and will achieve the same result but does not highlight as you go. Do this by clicking on the beginning of the text to be selected, use the mouse and scroll bar to bring the end of the desired text into view, and then hold the shift key down and click on the last letter of the text to be selected. This will highlight all the intermediate text and works just as well whether the text is all on the one page or extends over many pages or screens.

 

    Using Send To option to improve productivity

 

He most likely did this by using the SendTo option and adding Notepad to the default selections. You can add your often used destinations to the SendTo folder so that you can utilise this from Explorer when you right-click on a file. You can add a text editor such as Notepad, or a more advanced shareware editors to view unknown file types or even printers that you may use.

To have your often used program appear in the SendTo list just drag a shortcut of that program into the SendTo folder which is found under the Windows folder. Windows XP users will probably have to use the folder C:\Documents and Settings\username\SendTo. Just copy your required shortcuts there. See Figure 22 for a SendTo with a few additions.