Use the Windsor Senior Computer User's Group Tips Site -http://www.sonic.net/donna/TIPS.html

Use GOOGLE to determine what an error message means and how to resolve an error condition. http://www.google.com

Looking for tips, see the following sites

http://www.komando.com/help/tips - From the Kim Komando Computer Show

http://www.worldowindows.com/index.asp - Frank Condron's 'World O'Windows 

http://www.windows-help.net/windows98/ - Focus on Windows

http://www.sonic.net/donna/TIPS.html - Windsor Senior Center Computer Users Group. 

http://support.microsoft.com/directory/ - Microsoft

http://www.everythingcomputers.com/index.html - O'Donald on Computers

Official US Time for your Computer Clock - http://nist.time.gov/

Your computer hangs up, no mouse or keyboard.What is the first thing you should do

Control, Alt, & Delete to determine who is holding up the show.

End the task that is hanging up.

What else?

Start the program that failed without selecting the data that it failed with. Look in FILE for the first entry of file and sometimes Windows puts a copy of the last saved data with a temporary file name so that you can recover. 

Other times, the program will search out these temp files and start them so that you can recover. 

Organizing your FAVORITES and the START MENU

Ideas for Web Site organization - Build new folders move the shortcuts 

By Location - Santa Rosa

By Info type - News - Recipe

By Your Choice of Name by renaming

Move the most used favorites to the top of the listleast to bottom.Just Click and drag to the desired location in the list.

What is the most important tip that I can give you?

Right Click ---- Most novice users do not use right click often enough to quickly do the things that they want to do. The drop down lists provided accomplish most of the tasks that the user wants to perform and some unexpected tasks. It is normally the unexpected tasks that do so much for the user.

Right Click the Desk Top, Windows Explorer, etcSEND TOto ?

Send Files to Floppy

Managing Multiple Files on the Same Subject

Use today's date: JUNKMay25.txt 

Use the term JUNK to identify your own Tempory files so that you can quickly clean up after yourself. (Remember to save with correct name when you get finished.)

Add leading zeroes to numbers in file names so they end up in sequence in Windows Explorer

This illustrates a simple sorted directory listing. 

WithoutWith zeroes

SMIT1.TXTSMIT01.TXT

SMIT10.TXTSMIT02.TXT

SMIT2.TXTSMIT09.TXT

SMIT9.TXTSMIT10.TXT

Why more memory speeds up your computer 

Windows Operating System takes up some pages 

Background programs from Start Up and the closed Windows of programs takes pages 

The Active job takes the pages it needs, If it needs more space, it pages the data to the hard disk. 

If the job you are currently running has to page in and page out data to perform the tasks desired, that page in out is apparent as a slow running program. 

Briefcase

Anyone can simply right click a file in Windows Explorer and send the file to the 3.5 floppy: then reload in another machine.

But if data files must be the same or if both copies are being simultaneously worked on on both machines, synchronization is necessary. 

Briefcase solves the problems of two machines and different levels of the same data file.

DICTIONARIES source of a Thesaurus, Rhyming, Phrase, Synonym, Pronunciation, Acronym, Antonym, Homophone and Spelling dictionaries - http://www.yourdictionary.com/

Why should you defragment your hard drive

Hard drives store files in one or more "clusters" (groups of sectors). 

The problem is that files may be broken up and stored in any available cluster. 

As files are added, modified, and deleted, it's not uncommon for large files to be scattered across a drive. This doesn't really affect the file, but the drive itself must work harder to seek out and load all of those clusters later on. 

The added time it takes to seek these scattered clusters also slows down the apparent performance of the drive. 

The process of defragmenting a drive rearranges the clusters of every file so that they are all together (or "contiguous").

You can use Microsoft's Task Scheduler to run Disk Defragmenter while the system is idle. 

Why does my printer print colors wrong!

Quick way to the right folder -

Hitting Caps Lock instead of Shift

If you have trouble when you hit caps lock instead of shift and you keep typing capitol letters .Go to control panel, double-click on Accessibility Options and click keyboard, Toggle Key box and OK. Now when you press caps, scroll or num locks you will hear a tone. 

Keep you programs on you computer current!

I am not talking about up grades, just up dates. The programs that you purchase new, are usually out of date on the day you purchased the program. It requires updates from the publisher of the program. You can do this individually or you can have a shareware program examine you computer and list which programs need up dating.

See http://catchup.cnet.com/catchup/cu/index/index.htmlUpdates are FREE

Defrag you disk before you install that new program

Why? This will insure that the program is placed on the disk unfragmented.

Don't drag - Send your files to floppy disks

When you need to copy a file to a floppy disk, do you locate the file in Windows Explorer then monkey with the left pane to find the icon for the floppy drive?

Instead of dragging, send the file to the floppy disk. 

To do this, Right-Click on the filename and choose Send To 

3 1/2 Floppy (A) in the resulting shortcut menu. 

Add Notepad to Send To 

Create a shortcut to notepad.exe in the \Windows\SendTo Folder: 

1.Click Start, Select Programs and start Windows Explorer 

2.Select the \Windows\SendTo Folder 

3.Right-click an empty space in the folder, and from the context menu choose New > Shortcut

4.In the Create Shortcut window, enter C:\Windows\Notepad.exe in the Command line box 

5.Press Next 

6.We suggest removing the .exe from Notepad.exe in the Select a name for the shortcut box 

7.Press Finish 

Then you will have the option to view file contents by right-clicking on the file and "sending" it to Notepad

Wrong Program Starts Data

Example:You have more that one graphics program and Windows starts the wrong program some of the time.

– Multiple File Registrations 

To be able to open a file with more than one program, follow these instructions: 

1.From Windows Explorer's menu select View > Folder Options, select the File Types tab 

2.Find the file type you want to work with and double click it 

3.In the Edit File Type dialog that opens you will see a box marked Actions. This is where Windows 98 stores the actions to be taken when you double click on a file, drag it to a printer, and so on. You can have more than one Open, so long as each action is a unique character string. For example, you could edit the Gif file type registration so that you have one entry named Open and another named Open (Paint Shop Pro). For each entry edit the actions needed to open the file with the appropriate application 

4.To add an entry, simply press New and in the New Action dialog box, type the name of the action in the Action box 

5.You can use the Browse button to find the Application used to perform action 

6.Highlight one of the entries and click the Set Default button. That will be the application used when you double click on a file of that type. If, however, you right click the file, all of the entries you placed into the Actions box will appear on the context menu making it easy to open the file with the application of your choice 

Add leading zeroes to numbers

This illustrates a simple sorted directory listing.
 

Without	With zeroes
SMIT1.TXT	SMIT01.TXT
SMIT10.TXT	SMIT02.TXT
SMIT2.TXT	SMIT09.TXT
SMIT9.TXT	SMIT10.TXT

Add trailing underscores to text

Short parts of the name should be padded out. Lets assume for the purposes of this example that we have 5 characters for the name and two digits for department. By padding out short names with underscores (spaces won't work of course) we can sort by department or extract all those with a command such as 
DIR ?????22.TXT
 

No padding	With padding
FOX22.TXT	SMITH12.TXT
HO15.TXT	HO___15.TXT
JONES29.TXT	FOX__22.TXT
SMITH12.TXT	JONES29.TXT

Quick Restart of Windows 95

1. Click on Start > Shut Down
2. Select Restart
3. Click OK while holding down the Shift key