... Windows Tips 'n Tricks 13 ...
As he teaches, so he learns.

Paint comes with a row of drawing tools along the left side of the window. If you hold the mouse pointer over a mysterious-looking tool, a box pops up listing the tool's name, and a description of the tool appears along the bottom of the Paint window.

Here's a quick look at what some of the tools do:

• Free-Form Select: Grabs irregular chunks of the screen for cutting or copying to the Clipboard and pasting elsewhere.

• Select: Grabs a rectangular chunk of the screen for cutting or copying to the Clipboard and pasting elsewhere.

• Eraser: Rubs out everything, leaving nothing showing but the current background color.

• Medicine Dropper: Allows you to copy the exact color from any part of the painting.

• Magnifier: Enlarges a portion of the picture for easier viewing of details.

• Pencil: Just like it sounds, this pencil draws freehand. Very hard to use.

• Brush: Works more like a felt pen with an adjustable tip.

• Text: Enables you to add text, along with standard effects like bold and italics.

A hard drive is a single physical item to Windows, a single physical drive, no matter how many discs and other items are inside the drive's case. But you don't always want to treat that physical drive as a single huge file drawer. And Windows won't make you. It allows partitioning of the hard drive to make logical drives. It's as if you and a friend agreed to use a single small-town post office box by adding A to your address and B to your friend's address. All incoming mail still lands in the same box, but you could ask the postmaster for only A mail from that box, or from your partition. Windows is the postmaster for the hard drive.

Shame on you for not having TweakUi; but it's your puter and if that's the way you want it, (italics are my words) you can start here:

1. Click on Start, select Settings menu, choose Control Panel.
2. Double-click on Passwords.
3. Click on the 'Change Windows Password' button.
4. Type in your old password (if any), but do not type ANYTHING for a new password.
5. Click on the OK button and then close the Passwords window if it's still open.

If this doesn't work, you can try:

1. Click on Start, select Settings menu, choose Control Panel.
2. Double-click the Network icon.
3. Make sure that the Primary Network Logon is set to Windows Logon.
4. Go back to Control Panel and double-click on Passwords icon.
5. Click on User Profiles tab, make sure "All users of this PC use the same preferences and desktop settings" is checked.

And if this doesn't work, then try:

1. Click on Start, select Find and enter *.pwl (that's an asterisk, dot, and pwl)
2. Highlight all the *.pwl entries and delete them, making sure that you only delete files in the C:\Windows directory
3. Restart your computer. When prompted for a new logon and password leave the selections blank and press OK.

And if that also doesn't work, then try:

1. Click Start then select Run
2. Type in: sysedit and click OK.
3. Close the first three windows until you see the window marked System.ini Scroll to the bottom of the window. Now slowly start scrolling up and stop when you see [Password Lists]
4. Delete all the entries under [Password Lists] that look similar to: (USER=C:\WINDOWS\USER.PWL) but leave [Password Lists] alone.
5. Close all the windows and when asked to save the file click Yes.
6. Restart your computer. When prompted for a new logon and password leave the selections blank and press OK.

Using the Find utility (type in *.pwl … that's an asterisk, dot, and pwl) locate a file with the .pwl extension with your Login ID as the name, i.e. buddy.pwl, delete this file, next time you login it will prompt you for you username and password, leave the password blank and click ok, it should not bother you again... another way to do it, after you've deleted the .pwl file is to use TweakUi to autolog you in.

Weak passwords make your computer or network vulnerable to intruders. Strong passwords must meet all of the following criteria:

• Be at least seven characters long -- preferably 10 or more.

• Have at least one character that is uppercase, lowercase, a number, and a symbol like $, %, or &.

• Have at least one symbol character in the second through sixth positions.

• Be entirely different from a user's previous passwords.

• Contain no names or usernames.

• Contain no common words or names found in a dictionary.

If you remove the Windows 95 startup logo (that cloudy screen that appears whenever you start Windows), you'll see a whole bunch of text narrating the boot process every time you start your system. Want to actually read this text? Unless you can read really, really fast, you'll need this trick: You can bring the boot process (and all the text on screen) to a screeching halt by pressing the Pause key on your keyboard.

All done reading? Press any key on your keyboard to boot things along.

Countless glitches, from out-of-date drivers to a lack of system resources, will keep your Plug-and-Play hardware from working properly. Luckily, Windows 98 comes with helpful hardware troubleshooters that offer dozens of step-by-step solutions.

To find the troubleshooters, press the Start button and click Help. Inside Help, click Troubleshooting, then Windows 98 Troubleshooters. For most installation problems, try the Hardware Conflict troubleshooter first. It walks you through a number of easy-to-understand dialog boxes to determine what's causing your hardware problem, then offers eight possible fixes.

If that doesn't work, drill down into Windows 98's bevy of more specific troubleshooters. Problems with a sound card? Try the Sound troubleshooter. Can't get your modem working? Use the Modem troubleshooter. I don't guarantee that Windows' troubleshooters will solve all your peripheral problems, but they make a great place to start before you chuck your Windows 98 CD out into the street in frustration.

If you have several printing devices (e.g., a networked printer, a local printer, and faxing software), you may want to set the device you use most often as your default printer so you don't have to select that specific printer each time you print. Click the Start button, point to Settings and select Printers. Right-click the icon for the device you want to use as your default and select "Set As Default" from the context menu. Now when you print a file, it will print to this device automatically without further intervention from you.

Printer won't print equals frustration. Don't know why it won't print equals more frustration. Take a WordPad for relief. Copy part of your document to a WordPad window and then try to print from there. If WordPad CAN make it print, the trouble is in your word processor. If WordPad cannot make it print, then the trouble is in the connection to the printer or the printer itself.

Who needs a better way to print documents from a PC? You do, of course.

Sure, you're never more than a Ctrl-P away from printing that chart, letter, or GIF, but wouldn't you like to print the way you want without meddling with the printer settings every time? How about printing via drag-and-drop or tinkering with the spooler settings so your applications don't freeze whenever you start printing? If so, we've got some printing tips and tricks to help.

1. SETTING UP VIRTUAL PRINTERS

With Windows, you can set up a number of "virtual" printers, each with its own set of printing properties. For example, you can create a virtual printer that always prints in landscape format, another that always prints in grayscale, and so on. Just use the Add Printer Wizard to create additional printer settings for your current printer.

1. Click the Start button, select Settings, and then Printers.

2. Double-click the Add Printer icon and go through the same steps you did when you first set up your printer (adding the same driver, either from the listings or from disk). When the Wizard tells you that a driver for that printer already exists, make sure the radio button in front of "Keep existing driver" is checked and click Next.
3. Click Next in the following window (which is about using the LPT port), and then, in the subsequent window, enter a name for your new virtual printer. Click the Finished button.

4. Now right-click the icon for your new printer in the Printers folder (Start/Settings/Printers) and select Properties from the pop-up menu.

5. Adjust the settings appropriately. With your landscape printer, for example, click the Paper tab and check the radio button in front of Landscape under Orientation.

Now, any time you print from an application, just select the virtual printer you'd like to use from the pull-down menu in the Print window, and all the settings you want will already be selected.

2. TRY DRAG-AND-DROP PRINTING

Printing documents in Windows is a pretty easy process--just open a document, hit Ctrl-P, and voila. But you can make printing even easier by creating a desktop shortcut to your printer.

1. Click the Start button, select Settings, and choose Printers.

2. Right-click and hold your printer icon, drag it to an empty spot on your desktop, then release it.

3. Select "Create shortcut here" from the pop-up menu.

4. Drag and drop a document onto the shortcut, and Windows will automatically open the appropriate application, print the document, and then close the application.

Once in a while, a hard copy of a folder's contents is required. Maybe you want to keep a list of files handy for future reference? Or, perhaps you care to keep a detailed list of what's stashed away on that Zip disk. No need for special tools, since a simple batch file will do the trick. Create a new text file in your favorite text editor and enter/paste the following: "@dir /a %1 > lpt1" (sans quotes). Save the file as Dirprint.bat in your SendTo folder. Now, when you right-click on a folder, you can send it right to this batch file.

You worked on that report in Word and told it to print. Then you massaged a few numbers in Excel and printed that. Next you went back to Word and printed a letter.

If your printer is slow, or busy with something else, all of those print jobs are waiting in line. You can see their status and even change the order in which they'll roll into the printer.

1.Click on Start, Settings, Printers.
2.Double-click the icon of the printer you're using.
3.You'll see the list of jobs waiting.
4.To change the order of the jobs in line, just click on them with the mouse and drag them to new positions.

Reducing a document and then printing it in that form, for example, a schedule that you'd like to carry in your billfold like a small calendar."

1. If you're looking to print a single small sheet, you can just use Page Setup to set your page size small, print it on a regular-size sheet, and then cut out the results.

2. If you have lots of single small pages to print, you need a printer driver that offers an N-tuple option. Few do. If yours does, you can print a bunch of the small sheets on a single sheet, and then cut them out.

3. If you want to make a little folded booklet out of those pages--or just simplify the whole page-setup-and-cutout process, you should use a print utility such as ClickBook (Bluesquirrel.com).

For fast drag-and-drop printing, place a shortcut to your printer on your desktop. Click the Start button, point to Settings, select Printers. Right-click on the icon of the printer you print to and drag it to your desktop. When you release the mouse button to drop the icon, you'll be presented with a context menu. Choose Create Shortcut(s). To print a file, simply drag it from Windows Explorer (or if the file has a shortcut on the desktop, drag that) and drop it on top of the printer icon.

Pressing the Print Screen (Prt Scr) key sends the current screen to the clipboard (not to the printer, as one would expect). To print the contents of the clipboard, you'll need to use a separate application, such as Paint. Open Paint--select Start, Programs, Accessories, Paint--and select Edit, Paste (or Ctrl+V as I like to do). If you see a message stating that the image is larger than the current bitmap, click Yes to confirm that you'd like to enlarge the bitmap.

The image on the clipboard now appears on screen. From there, you can use Paint's Print command to print the screen.

Now on to a couple of pointers: Hold down Alt as you press Print Screen to send only the currently active window to the clipboard. If you're printing an entire screen, switch to Landscape mode first--select File, Page Setup, Landscape, and click OK--so the image will fit on a standard letter-size page.

Though the Passwords control panel lets you officially turn off User Profiles, it can't remove their settings. They're still around for anyone who wants to look up old passwords and such. You can dump them using the Registry. After backing it up:

1. Click Start, Run.
2. Type regedit and click OK.
3. Click through the list down to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\ and then to ProfileList.
4. On the left side of the Registry, right-click on the user profile you want to eliminate.
5. Click Delete and click Yes. Or you can remove them all in the Registry: right-click the ProfileList, click Delete, click Yes.

When you start a program, its window opens in a default mode: sometimes maximized on your desktop, sometimes centered. But perhaps you prefer some programs, such as a browser or your CD player, to always be minimized when launched and thus out of the way until you need them,. You can easily set this mode through Windows. Right-click the program's shortcut and choose Properties from the context menu. Click the Shortcut tab and then select Minimized (or your preferred mode) from the Run drop-down menu. Click OK to save the setting. The next time you start the program from this shortcut, it will open minimized on your taskbar.

Quickly access the Properties sheet of a file (document or program) from My Computer, Windows Explorer, or the Desktop by holding down the Alt key as you double-click the file or shortcut. This method provides an alternative to right-clicking the file and choosing Properties from the context menu.

Buried deep in a series of menus cascading from the Start menu are some of Windows 98's most useful disk maintenance tools: Disk Cleanup, System Information, and Registry Checker, to name a few. But you don't have to dig for the buried treasure when you need it. Windows 98 lets you create many desktop shortcuts simply by dragging and dropping items from any of the Start menu's submenus.

If you want to place a whole folder from the Start menu onto the desktop, though, you need to do it the Windows 95 way: right-click the Start button, and select Open or Explore. Navigate through the Program folder to the subfolder with the stuff you want. Right-click the appropriate folder, and before releasing the mouse button, drag the folder onto your desktop. Select Create Shortcut(s) Here from the pop-up menu.