 The magazine of the Melbourne PC User Group Tips and Tricks George Skarbek gskarbek@melbpc.org.au |
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Two caps problems
I like the feature in Word that eliminates two initial caps but on rare occasions when I need the first two letters capitalised, as when referring to PCs, Word will "correct" it. To overcome this, press the undo keys, Ctrl+Z, immediately after the "correction" has occurred and the text immediately reverts to what was originally typed.
Find wasted space on a Win 95 system
To find how much wasted space there is in any given folder, open a DOS box and type DIR /V. This command will not work in DOS 6.x, only with Windows 95. A folder with many small files, such as .BAT files, will show the worst result. Typing DIR C:\ /S /V will eventually show how much wasted space there is on the entire hard drive. The bytes figure shows the usual size given by the DIR command. The bytes allocated figure shows how much disk space is actually consumed by these files.
Having found out that you are wasting heaps, what are your options?
- If you have lots of disk space left, relax and do nothing.
- If you rarely use the files in a folder that has lots of wasted space, use PKZIP to compress them into one file.
- If practical, use Partition Magic to create two or more partitions of your hard disk so that you have drive C and D etc. (Smaller drives have smaller cluster sizes and less space is wasted.)
- Enable DriveSpace on Windows 95 or DoubleSpace on Windows 3.1. With Win 95 you can set the compression to zero and have no noticeable effect on general performance, except when defragmenting. To compress a Win 95 disk, consider using Microsoft Plus, as it has significant improvements.
Click the Start button and from the Settings menu select the Taskbar. Select the Auto hide checkbox and click OK. Once it's hidden, you can see the Taskbar at any time by moving your cursor quickly to the bottom edge of the screen. In this way you will always have more of your applications visible, such as Word, Netscape etc..
Moving between documents in Word
When editing two or more Word documents simultaneously, my fingers are on the keyboard and thus it is relatively slow to use the mouse to switch documents. Keystroke toggle keys are Ctrl+F6 to go the next document window and Shift+Ctrl+F6 (or Alt+F6) to go to the previous one.
How to save pictures in Netscape
Saving pictures is easy but perhaps not as intuitive as saving text. Just place the cursor over the picture and click the right mouse button. With most recent program releases, right clicking the mouse invokes a program manager that enables you to view or manipulate the object's properties. In Netscape this will bring up a menu. From the menu, Save this Image as. If there are several images, then you must save each individually.
Reprinted from the April 1997 issue of PC Update, the magazine of Melbourne PC User Group, Australia
