Rich's Ramblings
By Rich Schinnell
Windows 95 is still a new beast (after almost two years on the market) that many have found difficult to tame, or at least come to some happy accommodation. Remember that DOS is not dead. Mild understatement of the year by Rich.
Here are a few tidbits of information that might prove helpful for those of you who are using Windows 95, some against your wishes and better judgment. <G>
Many DOS programs will run fine under Windows 95 in what they call a DOS box. First, you need to bring a copy of the DOSPRMPT icon to the desktop or a folder. Using Windows Explorer, left click on the file DOSPRMPT icon located in your C:\WINDOWS directory. Then press the right mouse button and select COPY. Now move your cursor to the desktop or the directory where you wish to place this DOS shortcut. Right click and then select PASTE. This places a copy of the DOSPRMPT icon in that location. You can change its name and modify the properties of this icon by selecting the icon. You can insert the name of a DOS batch file or other program from the second screen of the properties window. To do this, select the icon by left clicking on the icon, then pressing the right mouse button, select Properties, and you should have five tabs at the top of the window. You can look at each of the tab screens and make changes to suit your requirements.
You might also select FULL SCREEN for the operation as this makes viewing the screen much easier. I also disable the screen saver option in DOS as most of the DOS programs that I have tried seem to stop dead in their tracks when the Screen Saver kicks in, especially communications programs. If you need to load any special drivers for this DOS program, you also can change which AUTOEXEC.BAT and CONFIG.SYS files are loaded. Try to remember that each of these DOS windows can run a separate configuration of DOS. Most will respect your printer selections as long as you have opted for printing from DOS in the printer selection window of the Control Panel. You are asked this question when you install the printer as to whether you wish to allow printing from DOS. Always select Yes if you are running DOS programs and expect to do some printing from them.
I recommend that you not garbage up your computer with all the latest handy dandy programs that like to install themselves in your Startup folder. Less is better. Also, please make that emergency recovery disk by going to Control Panel | Add-Remove-Programs, and select startup-disk. This will format and copy to a floppy in your A drive all the files necessary to restart your system if you have messed it up beyond booting from your C drive.
If you have the room on your hard disk, and if you want to be able to fetch files from your original Windows 95 CD-ROM, you might want to create a subdirectory on your hard disk called WIN95. Then you should copy all the files from your CD-ROM's \WIN95 subdirectory to your hard disk directory \WIN95. Then, if you install some new hardware or change software parameters or add a printer, you don't have to insert your CD-ROM for Windows 95. Just point to this directory when Windows 95 tells you that it needs some files to install something. Also, these files combined with your emergency start-up disk will allow you to run SETUP from this directory for when you have to completely re-install Windows 95.
Now that 1.6 Gigabyte drives are below $200, it's time to put in a bigger one. While you're at it, why not go out and get one of those new tape drives, or better yet, go for one of the (relatively) inexpensive CD-ROM writers which do a good job of backing up 600MB at a time.
Hint # 231a: I have found in my travels that some hard disk
partitioning program has installed a volume label on the C drive
that actually has lower case letters in it. This makes it
impossible to remove that partition with FDISK, since it asks you
for the label before allowing you to remove any partition or
drive. The DOS program LABEL automatically converts everything to
UPPERCASE and will not allow you to change the volume label name
on a drive where the name was really entered into the directory
in lower case.
I found that formatting the partition with the DOS FORMAT command using the /v command line switch will do a mandatory change of the label. In fact, it was the only way outside of using one of the low level disk editing programs, like Norton Utilities, to change that darned label. Then I could remove the partition with FDISK and resize my partitions. Maybe some neat program like Partition Magic could change this, but I haven't tried it.
The maximum individual DOS disk drive size is 2.1Gigabytes using the DOS FAT method. What this means is that the largest C drive that DOS will allow is 2.1Gigabytes. You can break these large drives into smaller partitions using the DOS FDISK program. Doing this sets up your hard disk with 32,000 bytes as the lowest file allocation size. Kind of a waste of space for a 100 byte CONFIG.SYS or batch file.
I now have changed my mind about minimum allocation sizes and recommend that you partition your hard disk in 1,023MB partitions. This uses 16,000 byte sector allocations, but with the hard disks getting bigger and bigger, go for it and waste a bit of space. Remember that you have to backup all this data, so a little house cleaning should be the watchword of the day.
If you don't like that menu bar at the bottom of the screen, or it interferes with one of your programs that likes to put its own menu bar at the bottom, you can hide this bar by going to the Start menu | Settings | Taskbar, and check the box that says Auto hide. This then slides the task bar down below the bottom of your screen allowing you full screen access. To make it visible, all you have to do is move your cursor to the bottom of the screen, and it will pop back up. You can also move the Start menu bar to any of the four sides of your screen. Experimenting with this can be fun and productive. Also aggravating until you get used to it.
Hint 231B: Please don't try to run some old DOS utilities on your
Windows 95 machine. Running an old copy of Norton Utilities can
ruin your whole day. I still don't know why someone would want to
sort their directories in alphabetical order. The DOS command DIR
/O:N will list a directory in name-sorted order.
As with most DOS commands, you can get help by using the /? Option after the command. The command DIR /? will show you the different parameters available with the DIR command. In fact, the DIR command will obey some environmental parameters, if you wish to set them in your AUTOEXEC.BAT file. DOS 7 under Windows 95 has a couple of different parameters, such as the /V command which will give you more information on programs in your default directory. One neat thing about the /V command is that it will tell you the last time the program was executed or a file was accessed. It gives you the file time, date, size, allocated size, attributes and -- an interesting one -- Last Accessed date. You can sort the list in date last accessed sequence. Now you parents can really verify that the kids have not been doing their homework on the computer by looking at the last accessed date on your word processor. <G> It also can come in handy to determine whether any of your DLL files have been accessed lately. Something tells me that those commercial programs that allow you to delete old .DLL files use this Last Accessed date to offer up for deletion. Your mileage may vary. As with the XCOPY command, there are lots of new options available in the DOS 7.0 that comes with Windows 95.
For those of you who don't have machines capable of running Windows 95 or NT: Don't fret. As long as you are doing real work, don't listen to all those who want you to part with your money and upgrade. Keep it simple, and if it's working, don't change anything.
Rich Schinnell is back again as the First Vice President of CPCUG
and enjoying all the perks of office. He is retired from the USN,
Vitro Corporation, and now does a bit of selective consulting to
small businesses. He can be reached via e-mail at
schinnel@cpcug.org, and he has his own
home page at
www.cpcug.org/user/schinnel. He
enjoys helping others with their
computer problems. His new toy is a Pentium Pro 200 which has
Windows NT, Windows 95, and regular DOS installed on removable C:
drives in mobile racks. He has ISDN for downloading those real
big upgrades. Call him at (301) 949-9292 in the evenings for
help, only if you're a member of CPCUG, unless you are in the
mood to pay his consulting fees.
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