Q. In September's Help Line, Brett Glass said he partitioned a 1GB hard drive into eight 127MB logical drives to create more efficient 2K clusters. I remember reading somewhere that each drive letter requires a small amount of conventional RAM. Eight hard drive partitions, one floppy disk drive, and one CD-ROM make ten letters. Where is the balance between storage efficiency and RAM? Also, does Windows 95 suffer from the same cluster-size conundrum as DOS?
A. Drive partitioning is a matter of taste, and with hard disk prices continuing to fall, often a moot point. Depending on how you use your hard disk, one scheme may make more sense than another. If your files are generally small, choosing smaller partitions may be more efficient.
Personally, I prefer to create partitions just under 512MB because to me, the inconvenience of partitions smaller than that outweighs the few megabytes lost to 8K clusters. (Clusters are the units of space allocated to files on the hard disk. All the clusters on a disk are the same size, but that size depends upon the size of your disk's partitions.) Larger partitions and their concomitant larger clusters (16K for 512K to 1024K partitions, and 32K for 1024K-plus partitions) are a big waste. Formatting an entire 1.2GB drive as a single partition squanders hundreds of megabytes, since every file, no matter how small, eats up 32K. But if you're only using 500MB of your hard disk anyway, who cares?
As to the RAM cost of drive letters, it's small--ten drive letters cost only a few hundred bytes. And yes, Win 95 still uses DOS's File Allocation Table file system, so it suffers from the cluster-size problem.
Q. As I understand it, Windows 95's Plug and Play needs three items in order to work: Windows 95 itself, PnP devices, and a PnP system BIOS. My PC doesn't have a PnP BIOS. My system manufacturer told me that no BIOS upgrade is available and so I need a new computer or a new motherboard. Is this really true?
A. You don't need a PnP BIOS to enjoy the benefits of PnP's automatic configuring, and you shouldn't let the lack of such a BIOS prevent you from upgrading to Windows 95.
As long as you've correctly installed all existing non-PnP hardware under Windows 95, you should be able to plug in a PnP card, turn on your system, and sit by as Windows 95 checks its roster of free resources against those the new card demands (IRQ, I/O address, DMA channel, or whatever).
Usually this works--Win 95 simply assigns the new device the resources it requires. But if the new card needs resources taken by a non-PnP device, you may need to reconfigure that non-PnP device manually, which is a pain.
A. PnP BIOS also makes it possible for you to add certain PnP devices that must be functional before Windows 95 boots, by temporarily shouldering Windows 95's configuration tasks. For example, Windows 95 can't configure the hard disk interface because the operating system must boot to configure it--one of your classic chicken-and-egg problems. In this instance, a PnP BIOS can hold the information about which resource goes to which device and can configure the hard disk interface and all other devices before Windows 95 boots up.
Additionally, a PnP BIOS ensures that your system will configure PnP devices properly--even if that configuration information is temporarily missing because a hard disk problem forces you to boot from the A: drive. But Windows 95 can always rebuild that information, so even here a PnP BIOS isn't vital.
Gemini Thunders passes along this tip for clearing the Other Folder
Shortcut when using the Any Folder Powertool app:
If you want to clear the list of directories in the Any Folder...Other
Folder shortcut go to
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Other Folder
and delete all the keys except (default). The directories are sorted in the
list box by the MRUList (Most Recently Used) key.
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Q: I saw in one of your tips/tricks that you could drag shortcuts to your Sendto directory other than the A: Drive which is already there. In your example, there was a folder named Any folder....Otherfolder. Does this shortcut allow you to send a file to any folder or directory on your harddrive, and if so, how do you set it up?
A: The Any Folder shortcut is part of the Microsoft Powertoys add-ons. It allows you to specify where you would like to copy or move the specified file or files. It’s available at http://www.windows95.com/apps/toys.html.
Printer icon in Start/Settings: While a document is printing, a
printer icon appears next to the clock on the taskbar. When this icon
disappears, your document has finished printing. can d/click on Printer
icon in Taskbar to see print queue.
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Wanna print something right from the desktop (or the Explorer?) Don't waste
time opening the file, then choosing the print command from within that
application. Windows 95 will do all of this for you in one go.
Click whatever it is you want to print with the right mouse button and if
you see the Print command, grab it. (If you don't, you can't. Certain file
types not included.) Now run to the printer!
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Setup Multiple Printers
Bill Davis sends this little printer trick. If you have the need to print
in draft, normal, and presentation modes, you can go to the Printers
folder
and add new printers, customizing each one for the various types of
priting
you need to do. That way, they will be preset and availible from your apps
without having to adjust the print quality or other customizations.
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To print text documents quickly use non-TrueType fonts.
Many older laser printers have to render TrueType fonts as graphics,
especially printers that clone early HP LaserJets. To print unformatted
text documents more quickly use WordPad. Select all the text in the
document by pressing Ctrl-A, then select Format|Font. By default the
Courier New TrueType font is used for documents. Many printers print
TrueType fonts as graphics. If you choose Courier (or any other font that
has a printer icon next to it) the document will be sent to the printer as
a text stream instead of being rendered into TrueType bitmaps. The result
is much faster printing for unformatted documents. This technique will
work
with other programs as well, but the steps may be slightly different.
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Printing to Files
Desktop Publishers and other Windows users often print jobs to files. To
print the file, you simply copy it to PRN. If you create a file named
COPYTOPRN.BAT in the Windows folder that contains the single line: COPY %1
PRN /b
You can place a shortcut to this batch file in your Windows\SendTo folder,
so that all you have to do to print a disk file is to right click the file
and choose Send To in the context menu.
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Q: I'm working as a Support engineer regarding for Novell products and I'm looking for a remote printer solution (instead of rprinter), without using the real mode (NETX/VLM) drivers, I just want to use the NDIS driver. I know that Novell is working on it, but is there something else already? - Maurice Pronk (info@lan-services.nl) A: Windows95 has a substitute for rprinter called Microsoft Print Services for Netware. To install this option you must have the CD-ROM version. In Control Panel, Networks click on Add, click Service, click Have Disk, type :\admin\nettools\prtagent. Once installed, go to the Printers folder and right click the printer you want. In Properties there should be a print server tab. Enable the Print Server in this dialogue box. ------- Print Directory listing:
Can't do in Explorer. Use Dos: D/6/p to print out (6 columns).
If want Subs as well: Dir/s/p.
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Printing 4 Pages On One Page
If you have good eyesight and want to save trees, you can print four pages to one page from any application under Windows 95. Here's how:
Quickly Seeing Properties
Retrieve files: To retrieve deleted files or shortcut: select (Ctrl+click each one) then File menu-Restore. If you restore a file that was originally in a deleted folder, Win95 recreates the folder then restore the file to it.