Helpdesk Hints #175

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142 Hack Windows! We show you how with a utility on the SuperDisc

142 How does horizontal scan rate affect your monitor’s display quality?

145 Are inkjet refills and compatible cartridges a safe way to cut costs?

146 How to fix incorrect case in names stored in an Access 2000 database

HELPDESK
, We solve your PC problems

PCPlus

T

he MS Paint hack in HelpDesk, issue 173, generated a heap of mail, revealing a desire to customise programs in ways the designers never intended. Read on if you want to change the supposedly unchangeable. A reader asks if he can safely save money buying ‘compatible’ refills for his inkjet. We really need your input on this. Would you love to ditch Internet Explorer, but Netscape doesn’t do it for you? You should take a look at Opera, a rather good alternative. There’s plenty more to discover, including help with Office, free software from GNU, and the truth about MiniDisc data drives. Keep your questions and tips rolling in. I can’t reply individually, but you could star in a future HelpDesk.
Ian Sharpe/HelpDesk Editor [email protected]

WEB BROWSING

Opera bookmark import
After a recommendation from a friend I decided to try out the latest version of the Opera web browser, now that it is free. I must say I’m impressed. It truly is faster than IE with many useful features. Seems stable too, and I haven’t yet experienced compatibility problems with web pages. Only time will tell on that count, though. Is there any way for me to transfer my IE bookmarks into Opera 5? Mark Greenwood

Q

Write in!
Email your questions to: [email protected] Or write to: HelpDesk, PC Plus 30 Monmouth Street Bath BA1 2BW Or fax: 01225 732295

Look out for these icons for useful extra information
Visit our forums at www.pcplus.co.uk and swap tips with other PC Plus readers See our SuperDiscs for useful software and extra tutorial files

When you see this, visit the website for more information, advice or support

Help us help you!
We get thousands of emails each month so please send your message to the right address. Email SuperDisc problems to

[email protected]

Open the bookmarks list in Opera (press [F7]). Click the Menu icon on the upper right of the list. Select File, Insert Internet Explorer Favorites. Pick the required folder. Opera is available from www.opera.com and makes a refreshing change from the Microsoft and Netscape offerings. Only the Windows version is supported by adverts, or you can buy an ad-free version. I have seen some seriously ill-informed comments about ad-ware recently. One chap was fuming away in a newsgroup about how ad-ware is evil, secretly stealing personal data from your computer. Full stop. No shades of grey. No exceptions. What a splendid example of a logical fallacy – see if you can spot which one in the gallery at http://datanation. com/fallacies/index.htm. Some ad-ware is spyware in the sense that it reports information you haven’t consented to. But not every program carrying a sponsored graphic is necessarily doing that. Bad things went on when ad-ware first appeared. They probably still do in some cases. I discussed this in an earlier HelpDesk and directed readers to http://grc.com/downloaders.htm for detailed examples. I also told

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how to get ad-ware removal software such as Ad-aware from www.lavasoft.de/aaw/ index.html. These instances of wrong-doing do not prove that all ad-ware is guilty of this. If we can take Opera’s public statements at face value, and I have yet to see anyone credible suggest otherwise, then what’s being done with this program is fine by me. The company has written its own advert management code rather than importing a black-box module supplied by the advert broker. You choose how much profile information you want to provide. Furthermore, Opera Software explains what happens with your data, right down to documenting sample exchanges with the server. All the advertisers see is the profile information you decide to supply, which ads have been displayed to you, and which ones you clicked on. It does not report your normal browsing or other activities, and the advertiser only knows you by an ID number allocated when you first use it. Opera’s interaction with the ad server is explained at www.opera. com/opera5/acp.html. Also see

nIE and Netscape are not the only browsers on the planet. Opera is free on Windows and is pretty good.

www.opera.com/windows/ new.html, www.opera.com/ press/faq.html and www.opera.com/privacy/. This won’t convince some people, and to them I say fine... you are free not to download the software. I haven’t analysed Opera with a packet sniffer so I cannot prove that the authors are telling the truth. The problem with ad-ware is not the concept. It can be done right and wrong. The problem is regulation and policing, but that’s true of the net as a whole. It’s frontier country – expect bandits.

WINDOWS

No installation disks
I read with interest the Windows Fresh Start feature in issue 173 and found it very helpful. However, I have an important piece of software for which I have lost the original installation disks. Is there anyway of doing a clean reinstall,

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HELPDESK
then copying the relevant files for this piece of software from a backup, and somehow registering it with Windows? I am running Windows 95 and have no plans to upgrade. Chris That’s a tricky one because the answer will depend on the way that the software was written. The simplest programs can be copied over without any problems because they are completely self-contained. A great many won’t be that easy. For a start, a program’s installer may have made additions and modifications to the registry. Some of these will be obvious if you poke round in Regedit, searching for things like the name of the programmer, the company and the folder the software is installed in. If you’re lucky, you will find a complete branch that’s clearly relevant to the application concerned. You can export this from the Registry menu in Regedit, then import it back into the registry on the new installation. Other registry changes could be subtler, and you’ll have a devil of a job finding them. You might be able to pinpoint these by monitoring what the program does with the registry when it is running. The tool for this is Regmon from www.sysinternals.com, but you can’t be sure of pinpointing some of the more advanced things that might have been done. Some programs make changes to one or more of CONFIG.SYS, AUTOEXEC.BAT, WIN.INI and SYSTEM.INI. You can look through these by typing SYSEDIT into the Run dialog. Your program’s installer could have put crucial files in the Windows folder and/or sub-folders. Filemon from SysInternals may give you some helpful clues on what these are, but probably won’t reveal a complete list. Examine the program when it is running using a process viewer such as PrcView from www.teamcti.com/pview/. This will tell you software modules that the software is dependent upon. Some of these will be standard Windows files; some may be specific to that program. Also get SpyGuru from http://ilia.reznik.home. mindspring.com/spyguru.htm. Run its ‘Files, Shell, Registry, Network’ section and load the application’s EXE file into it using the Open File button. Next click the Static Dependencies button and you’ll see a similar list of files that you should take note of. Doing your homework in this way greatly improves your chances of getting the program working again but, with a non-trivial program, it is impossible to be sure you’ve identified every file and every registry entry. If you can’t afford to break the software, don’t risk it. Find out as much as you can, and if possible try to get the software running on a different machine before burning your bridges on your own personal computer. You might also consider setting up a dual-boot system and putting the new installation in another partition. See if you can get the software working in the new Windows installation before deleting the old one. This would require a partition manager such as Partition Magic, or if you feel confident you could try one of the free but prickly alternatives covered in issue 172’s HelpDesk. problem and really know what you are doing. Access Control Lists are not used by the Windows 9x line. Acl files here are more likely to be autocorrect lists for Microsoft Office applications. Assuming you’re on a Win9x system, open Control Panel and double-click the Network icon. Change the Primary Network Logon field to Windows Logon. Pwl files store passwords. Deleting these can help when you need to reset passwords to their default settings in Windows.

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NETWORKING

Abolish network log on
I have recently installed a small peer-to-peer network at home between my PC and my brother’s using a combo Ethernet card. Every time Windows boots up I get the network login screen. How can I remove this so it automatically logs in? I’ve tried not setting a password just like the Windows login screen but with no luck. I’ve even deleted my .pwl and .acl files, still with no luck. Chris Bennett

Q

HARDWARE

Data on MiniDisc?
Is there a MiniDisc drive available for computer data storage? I know CD-RW is a useful piece of kit, but the multi-writeability of MiniDiscs really cries out to be used. Product cost is sure to be similar, with MiniDisc likely to have the edge. Jim

Q

I assume that you aren’t running Windows NT or 2000? On NT systems, .acl files contain Access Control Lists. These record which users and groups have access to objects such as folders, along with the permissions they have. Deleting ACLs is not a good idea unless, (a) you are intent on causing mayhem or, (b) you have an access control

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MICROSOFT WORD

Two Word problems solved...
The right way to set up a letterhead, and a dialog box with hidden talents

Controlling a letterhead
In MS Word I use the page header to print my letterhead. But the problem is that the following pages also print out the header. I used to place a headed paper in one tray and continuation sheets in another. Do I still have to do the same thing? I would like to print out the header just for the first page. Takeo Sawai

Three-level indexing
When I mark a word for indexing in MS Word 2000 (Insert, Index and Tables, Mark entry) the dialog box has fields for the entry and a subentry. I have complex material to index and could really use three levels – entry, subentry and sub-subentry. Is there a way to accomplish this? Richard Smith

Q

Q

This is easy to set up, though the required options don’t exactly hit you in the face. Go to File, Page Setup. On the Layout tab there is a Headers and Footers section. Tick the ‘Different first page’ checkbox. Put your letterhead in the first page’s header. Leave the second page header blank. This empty header will be used from page two onwards.

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Make an entry and subentry as usual. Append the sub-subentry to the subentry, separating the two with a colon. This works because the colon is Word’s internal delimiter between entry levels and can cope with more depth than the dialog box suggests. [Shift][Alt][X] is the quick way to the Mark Index Entry dialog - you can quickly select a word in the document by double-clicking it.

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I know a lot of people fancy storing data on MiniDisc, but it doesn’t look quite so tasty when you learn that the apparent size of these discs is due to ATRAC, a type of lossy compression. In other words, some of the sound data is thrown away in order to make the recording highly compressible and thereby fit on a disk with lower raw capacity. The discarded data is supposed to be the least noticeable, so the sound quality does not deteriorate unduly. A single lost bit in a program or data file can render the whole thing useless. MiniDiscs could be used for data storage but you wouldn’t get anything like a CD’s worth of capacity. The uncompressed size of a 60 minute MiniDisc is 140MB. This is in the same parish as Iomega Zip and Panasonic LS-120, but MiniDiscs are a fraction of the price so there would still seem to be merit in the idea. Sony and Sharp did launch MiniDisc data drives for computers. For example there was the Sony MDH-10 combined portable MiniDisc audio player and SCSI data drive. It cost about £500 several years ago, which may help explain why it didn’t hit the big-time and the data drives seem to have sunk without trace. MiniDisc has been used for data storage in other products such as digital cameras and a PDA. See the page at www.minidisc.org/ md_data_table.html for tech specs and photos.

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140/PCPlus.co.uk #175

YOUR QUESTIONS ANSWERED
PRIZE WINNING STAR LETTER

Win two PowerQuest programs of your choice!
Each month, the sender of the most useful or interesting contribution to HelpDesk will receive his or her choice of two of the following PowerQuest products: PartitionMagic 6 (the best known partition manager), Lost and Found (emergency data recovery), SecondChance (great safety net – rolls back to a previous disk state), DataKeeper (auto backups) and Drive Image 4 (clone partitions). Find out more about these and other products at www.powerquest.com or by calling 0118 945 0200. These are sought-after programs and the prize is worth at least £99, so what are you waiting for? Send a good question or tip, and the software could be yours.

OUTLOOK

Defeat the receipts
find it irritating to receive email with a read receipt notification request. If somebody sends me a message, I read it. All they are entitled to know is that their message arrived, not what I did with it and when. I have configured Outlook 2000 to send out my own message in response to a read receipt, but it goes out as soon as the email lands in my Inbox. My response tells them their email reached me and will be read within a few hours. I thought other readers may like to know how to get back in control. The read receipt request is a line in the message header beginning ‘DispositionNotification-To:’ without the quotes. Normally you don’t see this. Set up a rule (Tools, Rules Wizard) that looks for this text in the message header – ‘with specific words in the message header’ is the one you want. The rule should ‘reply using a specific template’. The template contains your message, and should have been prepared beforehand by composing it as a new email. Instead of sending it, go to File, Save As. Specify ‘Outlook Template (*.oft)’ in the Type field.

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,Two essential PowerQuest utilities could be yours.

n Stay on or off track with read receipts – it’s your choice

With the rule activated, whenever you get a message with a read receipt it will be automatically replied to without you necessarily having read it. Control of normal read receipts, both sending and receiving, is under Tools, Options, Preferences, E-mail Options, Tracking Options. You want to select ‘Never send a response’. Ron Kibblewhite Neat – a pet hate of mine, too, so Ron is this month’s Star Letter winner.

Data storage devices use a slightly different MiniDisc than the audio variety. You can find sources of 140MB data blanks if you hunt round, though they’re scarce and foreign, making it difficult to assess prices. The cheapest audio MiniDiscs I could find in the UK are about £1 each. I suspect data discs would be more expensive but, even so, CD-Rs can easily be bought for less than half that, and with four times the storage capacity they are eight or more times cost-effective. Although it is possible to pay over £2 per disc for CD-RW, they can be bought for £1 per disc if you search around, making them four times better value. MiniDisc’s cost per megabyte is way out of contention in comparison with CD-based technologies. Okay, CD-RW is imperfect but it is improving and becoming cheaper while DVD-RAM is creeping in at the top end. Sony has a site at www. storagebysony.com listing its

line-up of data storage products. From that you will see that its current thinking on removable storage is leading in different directions. For instance it has the HiFD drive – a 200MB 3.5-inch format – and a range of magnetooptical drives with capacities up to 5.2GB. It’s hard to see how MiniDisc would fit into the picture, except for applications in which compact media would be an advantage. At www.sel.sony.com you can find information on data MiniDisc media, and a few lead-nowhere links to data drives. The company says it is working on a 650MB version of data MiniDisc, so maybe it’ll make a comeback. Incidentally, the whole business of how CD-ROM, CD-R and CD-RW work, their limitations, why a CD-RW might be readable on one drive but not another, and jargon, such as UDF and packet writing can be confusing and not everyone has them at their fingertips. There is a good article at www.pctechguide.com/

09cdr-rw.htm which gives an overview of these technologies, how and why the various standards evolved and, most importantly, practical implications such as how compatibility problems can arise.

nArcheological evidence for MiniDisc data drives is plentiful on the net – photos, drivers and even this manual. But the trail goes cold after 1999 and I can’t find hardware or media for sale in the UK.
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HELPDESK
INTERNET EXPLORER
also work if you press the righthand [Alt] key – [Alt Gr] – plus the letter, without [Ctrl]. However, I much prefer a little program called WinKey, now up to version 2.8 and free from www.copernic.com/winkey. You can set up a shortcut to any file or program anywhere, and it works in combination with the [Windows] key.

WINDOWS

Sharing Favorites
Is it possible to share one Favorites folder between the three Windows 98 computers on our network? They share a modem through ICS, so the machine with the Favorites folder will always be turned on when it is needed. Jon Shipley

Q

Hack Windows into shape
Resource editing is the key to all manner of customisations that are difficult or impossible by any other means
I am writing in reference to HelpDesk, issue 173. On pages 48/49 you helped out Mr Harold Little with hex-editing Microsoft Paint. The first picture in the article is a screengrab of a program showing the resources of MSpaint.exe. What is this program? Andy Conroy

Q

1 Make calculator’s keys more legible
The minus button looks more like a dot at hi-res, and the multiplication symbol is hard to make out too. Run ResHacker.exe and load Calc.exe into it from \Windows. Open the String Table branch by clicking once on ‘String Table’ and press [*] on the numeric keypad. Click on each item until you find a list in the right-hand pane that includes “+/-”, “C”, “CE” and so on. Further down this list, select the asterisk, “*”. Hold down [Alt] and type 0215 on the numeric keypad. This should give you a proper multiplication symbol. Change the minus sign to an underscore, ‘_’. Press the Compile Script button. This compiles your edited resources back into the file in memory. Now save the file to disk. Run Calculator and you will have more legible keys. Remember that if you use the keyboard to operate Calculator, changing the symbols on screen won’t change the keys you press.

MONITORS

All you need to do is run Tweak UI (www.microsoft. com/ntworkstation/ downloads/PowerToys/Networki ng/NTTweakui.asp) and change the location in the Special Folders section of the My Computer tab. The Change Location button brings up a folder list in which there is a Network icon. Simply navigate to the shared Favorites folder from there.

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Horizontal frequency explained
I understand how a monitor’s vertical scan frequency affects the degree of flicker but what is the significance of the horizontal scan frequency? How does it affect picture quality? Chris Whitford

Q

\prog\files\helpdesk\reshack

WINDOWS

Lack of resolution
I have two problems. I recently formatted and reinstalled Windows 98. I was surprised to see that the screen resolution was low, and shocked to find that I could not change it. There is a problem with the video card. I don’t know what it is because everything else seems to be perfect. The other question I need answered is how to create shortcut keys to open applications. For example, Windows key+[E] opens Windows explorer, Windows key+[F] opens the Find box, Alan Gearys

Q

The usual cause of inability to change resolution immediately after installing Windows is that the video driver is incorrect. Either Windows is using a generic driver, or using a very basic feature-poor one for your video card. You need to get the latest driver, so try the manufacturer’s website. Otherwise, there should have been a disk with the video card containing a driver at least as good as the one on the Windows CD, and quite possibly better. Programming the Windows key came up in HelpDesk some time ago. Of course Windows 98 enables you to set up shortcut keys to programs in the Start menu. Just right-click an entry, bring up the Properties dialog and fill in the Shortcut Key field. However, these shortcuts give [Ctr][Alt]+letter, which

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For the benefit of those who don’t understand the relevance of the vertical scan frequency we’ll begin at the beginning. The electron beam that lights up the pixels on a cathode ray tube (CRT) screen scans the picture left to right, top to bottom, in the same way as you read a page of text. The coating that the electron beam illuminates is made of phosphor, and this only glows for a limited amount of time. To remain illuminated it has to be repeatedly refreshed with another shot of electrons. When the electron beam has scanned the screen, it goes back to the top-left and starts again. The number of times this happens every second is known as the refresh rate or the vertical scan frequency, and the figure is given in Hertz – cycles per second. If the rate is set too low, the phosphor’s illumination level fades too much between refreshes and you see a shimmering effect. There is no correct minimum frequency because the perception of shimmer depends on other factors. For example, different phosphors fade at different rates. A low-persistence phosphor requires more frequent refreshing than a long-persistence one. Some people are more sensitive to flickering than others. Ambient lighting has an effect, as does viewing distance. You have to find the correct refresh rate for you and your kit in your environment. A figure in the low seventies is the recommended minimum. Some people genuinely need 85Hz for a stable image. A very few may even need 90Hz.

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It’s Resource Workshop, part of Borland C++. If your PC Plus library stretches back to issue 163, a slightly different version of the Workshop program can be found on SuperDisc 163a in the \Workshop folder. Alternatives include SpyGuru (http://ilia.reznik.home. mindspring.com/spyguru.htm). Once installed and running, you open the SpyGuru dialog from the system tray. Select the ‘Files, Shell, Registry, Network’ section. Open the EXE file from the Open File toolbar icon. Click the File Resources button and all is revealed. Where SpyGuru can only view resources, Resource Workshop can edit them too, enabling you to do things that are not possible in a hex editor, such as extending resources beyond their original size Andy followed up his message to put me on to a freeware resource editor he’d located which enables you to change resources. It can be found on the SuperDisc and also at http://rpi.net.au/ ~ajohnson/resourcehacker/. Like SpyGuru, Resource Hacker only works with 32-bit program files, not 16-bit. Here are a few things you may like to try with it. Warning: This is not for inexperienced users. Any file you meddle with should be backed up first, and be sure you know how to reinstate it if things go wrong. In the case of files used by the operating system, this may involve rebooting in MS-DOS mode and using DOS commands. If you do not feel comfortable with this, please turn the page lest you be tempted down the path of ruin and damnation.

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2 Radical Run dialog customisation
I frequently find that the full file path in the Open field is longer then the field itself. This is a minor annoyance, but why live with it when it is the work of a few moments to put right? Open \Windows\System\ Shell32.dll in ResHacker. Locate the Run dialog in the Dialog tree – it should be the first item. Drag the dialog into the centre of the window then pull its right-hand side to widen it. Do the same with the Open field. You can move controls around, edit or delete the text, delete the ‘Open’ label, the icon, and even the Cancel button (press the X button or [Esc] instead). To delete a control, remove its line from the script and press Compile Script to update the dialog’s appearance. When you’re done, compile the script one last time. As Shell32.dll is a system file that will be in use, you can’t re-save it directly. Use Save As and call it _shell32.dll. Reboot to MS-DOS mode and type the following commands:

142/PCPlus.co.uk #175

YOUR QUESTIONS ANSWERED
The maximum refresh rate is determined by the design limits of the video card and the monitor. If your model of monitor is recognised by Windows, it shouldn’t enable you to go past the maximum recommended refresh rate, even though the card may be capable of it. However, do check the manual and avoid pushing the monitor right to the limit if you can, as this can shorten its life. Going past the manufacturer’s stated maximum can result in immediate or rapid failure. The refresh rate setting is made by right-clicking the Windows desktop, selecting Properties and then Settings and Advanced. The setting is on the Adaptor tab in Windows 9x and Me. In Win2K you have to press the List All Modes button there. The horizontal scan frequency is the number of times per second that the electron beam scans a horizontal line, from the left of the picture to the right. How many complete rows of pixels, in other words. There is a relationship between this and the maximum vertical resolution the monitor can handle. If the vertical refresh rate is 85Hz, for example, and you set the screen to 1,024 x 768 resolution, the beam has to scan 768 lines in one eighty-fifth of a second. So, in one second, its horizontal scan frequency must be 768 x 85= 65,280Hz, or 65.28KHz. If the monitor is not capable of that, you can’t have that vertical resolution at that refresh rate – one has to be lower. Another related attribute is known as the bandwidth. On every scan line the beam has to switch to a different value for every pixel. At 1,024 x 768 it has to change 1,024 times on every line. The bandwidth would have to be 1,024 x 768x85 =66846720Hz, or 66.85MHz. In effect, this is the number of pixels being drawn per second. 85MHz maximum bandwidth enables 85 million pixels per second to be drawn. If you can push a monitor past its maximum bandwidth, distortion and information loss is apparent in the form of a washed out or blurred image. The above figures are optimistic because within the horizontal and vertical refresh times also must also make provision for flyback – the time taken to return the beam to the start position. So the actual maximum number of pixels written will be less than the bandwidth. A fudge factor of, on average, 1.2 to 1.35 should be multiplied into the calculation of required bandwidth to obtain a given resolution and refresh rate – 1,024 x 768 x 85x1.35 = 90MHz bandwidth.

%My captionless Start button. Note that the Help entry has been removed.

nInterestingly, the selected refresh rate isn’t necessarily what you get. My other monitor’s on-screen display tells me the real refresh rate, and it is lower than selected here. Presumably this is a video card problem.

,Editing the key legends in Calc.exe to make them easier to read.

Let’s take a real-life example. The ADI G10 monitor has a maximum resolution of 1600x1200 at 85Hz refresh rate. From this, we calculate the bandwidth required: 1600 x 1200 x 85 x 1.35 = 220MHz The horizontal scan rate required for this is: 1,200 x 85 = 102KHz Actually it has to be a little bit higher, to give the beam time to move to the top left of the screen after reaching the bottom. The bandwidth quoted in the manual is 229.5MHz, and the range of horizontal refresh rates available start from 30KHz and peak at 110KHz, so the calculations agree fairly well.

!The standard Windows Run dialog, customised to suit my taste.

cd \windows\system ren shell32.dll oldshl32.dll ren _shell32.dll shell32.dll exit

String Table tree until you find the item whose text is “Start”. Edit the text to how you want it, or just delete the line. Explorer is another system file, so you will have to use a similar Save As and MS-DOS reboot procedure as above.

UPDATE

Windows will restart and use your re-engineered version of Shell32.dll. Oldshl32.dll is your backup. If you find that the combo box no longer drops down, give it more breathing space underneath. Then drag the bottom of the box downwards. The gap between the bottom of the field and the bottom of the marquee dictates the size of the dropdown list. Whatever you shifted to enable you to do this can now be moved back where it was.

4 Remove fixed items from the start menu
I can’t remember when I last used Windows Help. I do have a crowded Start menu, though, so I’d prefer to be rid of it. The Help entry is in one of the Menu groups in Explorer.exe. Simply delete the line that begins:
MENUITEM “&Help”

YourCPL – the missing file
How to add your own applications to Control Panel
\prog\files\helpdesk\yourcpl_1_1

5 On your own...
These are just examples of what can be done. Redesign dialog boxes in applications, delete items from menus, rearrange menus, change embedded icons, messages, graphics and cursors. You can even move controls from one dialog to another in some cases. Have fun, and let us know if you come up with demon customisations other readers should know about.

3 Remove the caption from the start button
We all know what it does, and it’s misnamed anyway. You can change the caption if you like, but removing the text altogether makes the button narrower leaving more room on the taskbar. Edit\Windows\ Explorer.exe. Look through the

Oh dear, what a calamity. YourCPL, the program I wrote to put the applications of your choice in Control Panel, was supposed to be on issue 173’s SuperDisc but somehow failed to make it through the production process. And unknown to me, reader Mark Hives had written a program to do the same job and had a letter about it published in Mailbox in the preceding issue. Judging by the blizzard of email I received over Christmas asking after my version, many of you hadn’t noticed. Not to worry – an updated version of YourCPL is on this month’s disc.

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HELPDESK
MS-DOS DELVING DEEPER

A GNU perspective
It always amuses me to see MS-DOS and Windows users attempting to reinvent the wheel, and usually making it square! The functionality you describe for Sweep.com in issue 172’s HelpDesk is just a small subset of the capability of the Unix Find command (not the crippled Grep clone which Microsoft ships as Find for use in its MS-DOS environment). Thanks to the efforts of D J Delorie, and other contributors to the GNU project, an MS-DOS port of the GNU/Linux implementation of Find may be found, for free download, at: ftp://ftp.simtel.net/ pub/simtelnet/gnu/djgpp/v2gnu/ find41b.zip If you get this, save to C:\GNU, and unzip it using WinZip (or get ftp://ftp. simtel.net/pub/simtelnet/gnu/djgpp/ unzip32.exe if you don’t have WinZip). Your example Doshorts.bat can be replaced with the single command: c:\gnu\bin\find / -name “*.lnk” -exec c:\shortcut.exe -s {} \; The ftp://ftp.simtel.net/pub/simtelnet /gnu/djgpp/ site also contains a number of other MS-DOS ports of GNU/Linux utilities, which are useful for both MS-DOS and Windows users. D J Delorie’s site at www.delorie.com, and the GNU project site at www.gnu.org provide further information on getting, and using, these free utilities. Keith Marshall

FREE SOFTWARE

What is GNU? It isn’t Unix, that’s for sure...
When Richard Stallman started the GNU project in 1983, his intention was to oversee the development of a free non-proprietary replacement for Unix. Stallman is the author of the famous EMACS text editor, and GNU is his alternative model for producing and distributing software. He was concerned about what commercial practice was doing to programs and programming. The restrictions of this system bother him deeply – the fact that having obtained a useful item of software, you cannot increase the benefit derived from it by giving away copies and modifying it to better suit individual needs. But instead of settling into a lifelong litany of ‘somebody should do something’, he set up an alternative system and gathered support for it. Whether or not you subscribe to Stallman’s philosophy, you have to admire his ability to go against the flow and make something happen. GNU is about free software, but has a specific definition of ‘free’. It is not free in the sense of not having to pay. ‘Free’ refers to certain freedoms – essentially the freedom to use, copy and redistribute it without restrictions, and the freedom to study and modify the source code. A programmer who is not the author of a program may modify it and distribute his or her own version of the software, either gratis or for a fee. The freedom under which the software was obtained and used must be passed on to recipients. All this is explained at www.gnu.org. By 1991, much work had been done on GNU. The main gap in the edifice was the lack of a Unix-compatible kernel – the very core of the operating system. Out of the blue, Linus Torvalds’ Linux kernel appeared. Released under the GNU General Public License, it became the principal kernel for GNU systems. The GNU movement is developing another kernel known as Hurd. Work began on this before Linux appeared, and continues even now. The reasons are explained at the GNU website. So a GNU system almost always uses the Linux kernel, and Linux distributions include many GNU programs. Not all Linux-based programs are released under the GNU license, though, so a typical Linux distro includes non-GNU software. Taken as a whole, such a Linux distro cannot be regarded as pure GNU, even though the GNU people would like us to refer to the operating system as GNU/Linux and reserve bare ‘Linux’ for the name of the kernel. This is a hotly controversial issue in some quarters, and a matter of complete indifference in others! Although GNU began with Unix (the name stands for GNU’s Not Unix), it is a philosophy that could be applied to any program or operating system. That’s why we can have GNU ports of Unix utilities. Even Windows could be GNU if Microsoft chose to make it so. Realistically, you have more chance of finding snowdrifts in Hell than you do of finding Bill and Richard in bed together. If you want to know more about GNU/Linux, in addition to the sites already mentioned visit www.debian.org/intro/about.

INTERNET

When Ping fails
I was mooching through the HelpDesk articles for this month. I noticed you have a section on the Ping command as a diagnostic tool. I have an observation you may wish to share with the readers... I find these days that Ping is frequently a victim of remote firewall configurations, which disallow ICMP traffic (like Ping). Using the Windows ‘Tracert’ (AKA traceroute – Linux/Unix) program can be a better debugging tool in that it’s checking each step in the path to the remote system. For a dial-up connection, replies from beyond the first hop are enough to tell you that it’s somebody else’s problem – possibly the ISP , or further upstream. It’s also a useful indicator of where the delays are on a slow connection. Derek Milliner

Q

Tracert shows you the route that data takes between you and a remote computer, and the response time of each place it passes through. It’s interesting to run this test from different ISPs, and for different telephone numbers for the same ISP. The early part of the route enables you to compare internal network speeds. Tractert will also highlight sticky patches along on the way – slow response is not always the fault of the computer you are contacting. A friendlier alternative, VisualRoute, was included on issue 170’s SuperDisc.

A

n Tracert is probably a better alternative to Ping for troubleshooting Net connection problems.

WINDOWS

XCOPY warning
My backup system uses batch files containing XCOPY commands to copy important files to a second hard disk. As many readers probably use something similar, could you please tip them off to a hidden snag I have discovered. After the latest restoration, I found that a couple of programs would

Q

not work. The problem was eventually traced to a subtle feature of the file system. A file or folder with a long filename also has an alternative name that is compatible with MS-DOS when Windows is not running. These names are shortened to eight characters maximum, followed by a dot and then up to three characters. The last two characters in the first part of truncated names become a tilde and a digit. 'Program Files', for example, becomes PROGRA~1. If another file or folder is created which has the same extension, a name more than eight characters long (or containing a character illegal under the old naming rules, such as a space) and the name begins in the same way, it becomes PROGRA~2. The digit is assigned in order of creation. When XCOPY copies files to another location, and later copies them back, the order of creation may change and the

144/PCPlus.co.uk #175

YOUR QUESTIONS ANSWERED

, Further help resources
How to get information direct from manufacturers and help from fellow users

INKJETS

Are compatible cartridges safe?
Inkjet printers are cheap but the consumables are horrendous. Can you help?
I recently bought an Epson 880 after reading a good review in PC Plus. Epson advises that only original Epson cartridges should be used. If I use compatible cartridges will they have an adverse effect on the quality of my prints or the operation of the printer? I understand printer manufacturers make high margins on consumables, hence this friendly advice from Epson. Lee Hawthorn can burn out and repair will be very expensive. Other than that, the main thing you need to worry about is clogging the nozzles. An inkjet printer tips site at www. netwares.com/esc-tips.htm has preventative information on this, which is useful even though the owner has a vested interest. Some time ago in HelpDesk we had a thread of mail about unclogging nozzles which we can revisit in a future issue if people ask. If you look round the newsgroups, you will find a few I wish I could give a people attributing clogged heads definitive answer, but I know no comprehensive to the use of third party inks. independent research that would Others say they’ve had years of trouble-free service from give an accurate picture. compatible refills. A printer fitted I consulted my colleague Simon Williams, who is our main with the genuine Epson cartridge can clog, too, so a few such printer reviewer and has a anecdotes prove nothing. longstanding interest in printer Printer manufacturers put a technology. We’re pretty much in huge amount of research into agreement on the subject of compatible cartridges and refill kits. formulating inks and paper coatings, tailoring the chemistry of It is highly unlikely that you the two for optimal results, and would do serious mischief to a tailoring the ink to the machine. printer in which the nozzles are integral Other people are unlikely to do this so well. Factors such as ink-bleed, with the resistance to light and fidelity of colour reproduction may be inferior, and will vary between brands. But how significant a difference is it, and which are the good brands and which are best avoided? I’d be very interested to hear as many reader experiences as possible – both good and bad – so that I can look for patterns and publish anything nThe Stylus 880 won a Best Performer that emerges in a future issue. We Award in issue 172, but like all inkjets need to hear about head/ink/ it’s an expensive beast to feed – nearly cartridge problems with both 40p per A4 page at 80 per cent original equipment and pattern coverage if you stay loyal to Epson. parts, and how the print quality replacement cartridge. If the worst compares. While the results happens, just fit a new part. With won’t be scientific, a good printers such as your Epson, where response could give us all some the nozzles should last the life of useful pointers. Please send your experiences the machine, we reckon you’d be to me at ian.sharpe@ unlucky if a third-party cartridge futurenet.co.uk. Specify the caused serious problems but of make and model of printer, the course we cannot guarantee it. brands of cartridge/refill used, There will be safe products, but how you rate text and graphics there may also be duds. quality in comparison with the Whatever you do, don’t be tempted to run an ink cartridge so OEM part, and any problems you dry that it no longer prints. Without have experienced with OEM or ink to pump, the head electronics third-party inks.

Q

\prog\files\helpdesk\sites\hsnet.htm If you need an updated driver or other help direct from a manufacturer, first check its website. One of the search engines will help you locate it – for example www.google.com, www.northernlight.com or www.mamma.com. I have compiled a list of internet addresses of many leading hardware and software manufacturers. It is in the file hsnet.htm which you will find on the SuperDisc every month. Copy the Sites folder to your hard disk and bookmark hsnet.htm for instant access. If what you want isn’t there and the general search engines turn up tons of irrelevant links, try www.service911.com/content/SupportHelp.asp which has a searchable database of tech support contacts. If you find a site I haven’t listed but which could be useful to other readers, please drop me a line at [email protected]. Newsgroups are also a great source of help and advice. It is likely that your question has been asked and answered before, so before posting a message search previous postings at www.deja.com. And don’t forget PC Plus’ own newsgroups and forums at www.pcplus.co.uk.

A

digits change also. If this happens to a filename or part of a folder path, restored files may not work if anything is set up to use the '8.3' form of the name. Run Regedit and search for ~1. Many entries will be found to contain paths described by short filenames – dozens on my system, including parts of Office 2000. David Sands XCOPY, and other DOS commands such as COPY and MOVE, process files in the order in which they occur in the directory structure on the disk. This order should be preserved when copying files back and forth, so normally there won't be any trouble. Create two files with similar long names, so the short forms are the same apart from ending with ~1 and ~2. Note which short name belongs to which full name. Move the files to another folder (i.e. the originals are deleted after

A

copying). In the original folder create a third file following the same pattern. This will be ~1. Copy the other two back and they become ~2 and ~3. Now delete the ~1 file. When the other two are copied elsewhere, the gap in the numbering sequence is closed up. Another mechanism is to change the order of the entries in the directory structure. Move the ~1 file to another folder. Fill up unused directory entries by copying several files into the current folder. Copy the ~1 file back. Because there are no free directory entries before ~2, it will be listed later. The ~1 and ~2 names have not changed, but their original directory order has been reversed. Copy these files to another folder and ~2 will be sent first. This becomes ~1, while the old ~1 becomes ~2. A defragmenter may have the option to change the directory order, so that's something else to watch for.

#

175 PCPlus.co.uk /145

HELPDESK
DATA TRANSFER
the bottom right of the Toolbox. Select ‘Microsoft Office Spreadsheet’, and drag out a rectangle on the form. When run, you will be able to type:
=PROPER(B1)

ON THE CASE

Parsing text data
In response to David Snell’s problem of parsing mainframe reports (PC Plus, issue 173), I’d like to mention Monarch For Windows because this task is exactly what the product is designed for. It is not cheap, but it’s good. It’s probably cheaper than getting a programmer to reformat the report. Essentially, for each report, you set up a template so you only need to do the job once. It exports to loads of formats, including Excel. www.datawatch.com/docs/soluti ons/index.html is the homepage. Lyndon Hills

Q

The Access 2000 proper case code
These Visual Basic for applications routines will prevent most mistakes with upper and lower case in name fields
The ProperCase function converts a given text string into proper case
Function ProperCase(strText As String) Dim i As Integer, iSlen As Integer Dim strCapAfter() As Variant strText = StrConv(strText, 3) i = InStr(2, strText, “-”) If i <> 0 And i <> Len(strText) Then Mid$(strText, i + 1, 1) = _ UCase$(Mid$(strText, i + 1, 1)) End If strCapAfter = Array(“mc”, “m’”, “o’”) For i = 0 To UBound(strCapAfter) iSlen = Len(strCapAfter(i)) If StrComp(Left$(strText, iSlen), strCapAfter(i), vbTextCompare) = 0 And iSlen < Len(strText) Then Mid$(strText, iSlen + 1, 1) = UCase$(Mid$(strText, iSlen + 1, 1)) i = UBound(strCapAfter) End If Next ProperCase = strText End Function

The function is part of the control. Outside it, you must use Access’ equivalent, which is StrConv. This takes a string to work on, plus a number that tells the function which action to perform. But what are the numbers? The help file of doom strikes again... if the information is there, it isn’t obvious. Fortunately, it does appear in the VB help file. The magic number for proper case is three. Applied to the surname field, it looks like this:
StrConv([Surname],3)

Several people wrote in about Monarch – thanks to you all. Mark Stephens told me that his company’s product should be able to do the job too. See www.idrsolutions.com.

A

If you build an update query (not a standard query) you can apply this function to both fields, by entering formulae in the ‘Update To:’ row. While this works well for most records, there will be special cases

ACCESS

Correcting case in fields
I have an Access 2000 database and in one of the table I am storing information like Forename, Surname and so on. Some of the records are in caps, some others are in lower case. What I would like to do is to use a function in order to update the forename and surname fields and capitalise the first letter of every surname and forename. The reason I want to do that is because I can use all the records to do a mail merge. So if a name is stored as FRED I want to update it to Fred and so forth. I had a look at Access 2000 help and I found some worksheet functions like PROPER, UPPER, LOWER but there is no further help on how to use them. I am not VB expert. I tried some plain SQL but I was unsuccessful. Alex Panaretos

Q

This method checks the forename field whenever the user leaves it...
Private Sub Forename_Exit(Cancel As Integer) Dim strTemp As String strTemp = CaseChange.ProperCase(Forename.Text) If StrComp(strTemp, Forename.Text, 0) <> 0 Then If MsgBox(“Change <“ + Forename.Text + “> to <“ + strTemp + “>?”, vbYesNo, “Case change?”) = vbYes Then Forename.Text = strTemp End If End If End Sub

nThis update query will change the text in the Forename and Surname fields to proper case.

\prog\files\helpdesk\CaseTest.mdb

The help file is useless on this point and pretty bad generally, often leading to dead ends and sending you down false trails. You could perform the conversion using a query. PROPER won’t work here because it’s a worksheet function available inside a spreadsheet control. If you want to play with it, in form design view click the More Controls button on

A

where it doesn’t give the right answer. McTavish will become Mctavish, for example, and unlike PROPER, StrConv will lower-case the first letter of the second part of a hyphenated surname. A number of these problems can be rectified automatically if we wrap up StrConv inside a user-defined function which also applies a list of corrective rules, such as when Mc occurs at the start of the string, always capitalise the following letter. Some of these general rules would be fairly safe. Other obvious ones would do as much harm as good. For instance, a similar rule for Mac would work for MacDonald but upset Mace, Macey and Mackleworth. To get it mostly right you’d have to program a dictionary of special cases, which is difficult. Not the programming – that’d be a easy. Constructing the list would be very tedious. The ProperCase function is in the boxout. Once you’ve dealt with the existing items, you may want to

avoid having to repeat the exercise by correcting the case at the time of data entry. To do that, open your data entry form in design view. Right-click in the window title bar and select Build Event then Code Builder. In the Object field (left side) select Forename. In the Procedure field (right) select Exit. Make the empty procedure look like the second piece of code in the boxout. This assumes that you put the ProperCase function inside a module called CaseChange and that the forename and surname fields are called Forename and Surname. A similar function will work for the Surname field. The code is triggered when the user leaves the field. If the case-adjusted version of the text is not the same as what was typed, permission is asked to change it. All the code along with explanatory comments is in a

sample Access 2000 database on the SuperDisc. Try entering some new names in the Enter Name form and see what happens when you get the case wrong. Note that if you type two initial capitals, Access’ AutoCorrect function will change the text before the macro can get to it, also, there will not be a warning issued. To view the code, press [Alt][F11] and find the Project window. In there, fully expand the CaseTest branch and double-click the CaseChange module, and then ‘Form _Enter name’.

nA bit of VBA code watches over input on a form and asks the user to confirm changes.

146/PCPlus.co.uk #175

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