| Now hosted by Crosswinds |
|
Volume:00 Issue:002 February 28, 1999 |
|
This one is good. This one is HOT! 100% free, no setup fee, unlimited, lifetime, free(did I mention that?) internet access from NetZero, a nationwide provider in most major markets. The only hitch: a small, always on top, ad screen which you can postition anywhere on the screen. Over the Start button is good since you can always activate Start with Ctl+Esc or the Win95 key anyway. One other minor inconvenience: to connect to the net, you'll need to log on through the NetZero program icon. After you've logged on you can use any of your internet software normally.For a few ads, NetZero provides an email address and unlimited surfin'. You can't beat that! Since this article was first written a number of others have joined the game, from Alta Vista to K-mart. If you decide to sign up with a free ISP, be sure to read their privacy policy first. It seemed like Freei wanted me to agree to everything up to and including a webcam in my bathroom! Ferrets! You need information and you need it fast. You fire up your browser, call up your favorite search engine, type in your query and wait... And hope that some of the 10 or 20 listings will be relevant. If you'd prefer to quickly get back a list of hundreds of sites gleaned from a number of search engines without even opening your web browser, give WebFerret a try. WebFerret resides on your (Windows) system and has an explorer like window giving you a choice of views: list, small or large icons. A description of each site pops up when the mouse cursor glides over it and you can save the search results to keep the whole list for future reference. And there's no need to keep hitting the back button to return to your search engine. Double click on a site and it loads in your browser leaving you free to keep looking through the list. WebFerret is the search tool of choice and you can download it directly from this web site HERE (732K) or from FerretSoft. (For Win9x only)Price: Free.
THE JOY OF HYPERTEXT. Someone asked me if there is an easy way to create a web page with just a few mouse clicks. Well, of course there is! If you have Internet Explorer, you can right-click on a free area of your desktop, choose "New," and then "HTML document" from the drop-down list, and voila! Now open it and what do you see? A blank page. If you open it in a text editor such as Notepad, here's what you'll see: <HTML> </HTML> Nothing to write home about, but if you type a few words between <HTML> and </HTML>, and reload the page, your words will appear! If you want to get some control over formatting your text, you'll have to learn a few HTML tags. You've already seen two: <HTML> and </HTML>. "HTML" stands for HyperText Markup Language. These two tags tell a web browser that everything between them is a web page. To make a paragraph, surround the text you want in it with these two tags: <P> & </P>. There are lot of paired tags in HTML, but here are a couple that can stand alone: <BR> creates a new line or "break". <HR> creates one of these cool horizontal lines or "Horizontal References":If youd like to learn more HTML, you can patiently await future installments of this column or check out Joe Burns' HTML Goodies Website His HTML tutorials makes it easy to understand and he has some great tutorials on Javascript as well. |
Now open your control panel (Start/Settings/Control Panel). Click on "Regional Settings." Click on the "Date" tab. Where you see "Short date style," make sure to choose a date style with "yyyy" in the year field: "M/d/yyyy" or "MM/dd/yyyy". Now when you choose the "details" view in Explorer, you will see the year in unabbreviated form and when you choose to sort files by date, they will still be sorted in the proper order after 1999. Otherwise a file with a 00 year would be sorted as an older file. If you're not familiar with hot keys, let me clue you in to this computing convenience. Hot keys are key combinations of your choosing that you can use to quickly launch programs or open documents. An example of a hot key combination would be " Ctl+Alt+N" to start NotePad. Hot keys save you time you would spend searching through your Start Menu or getting to your desktop to click on a shortcut. You can even use hot keys to clean up your desktop. Hot key how to:"c:\Windows\Start Menu\Programs." To assign a hot key to a shortcut, open its properties (select it and press Alt+Enter or right click it and choose "Properties"). Choose the "Shortcut" tab. Click in the box labeled "Shortcut key:" Now press a key that you would like to use for the shortcut. In most cases your choice will automatically be preceeded by "Ctl+Alt." Now click "OK" and you can begin using your new hot key--usually. If the hot key combo is being used by another shortcut, you will have problems assigning it or getting it to work. Make sure the hot keys you choose are unique. Just try pressing them before assigning them to a new shortcut. If nothing happened, they're most likely available. You may also encounter problems if a hot key was reassigned from one shortcut to another or if the shortcut was moved after the hot key was assigned. In those cases your hot key won't work untill you restart Windows. To subscribe or unsubscribe from Knat's Knews click here:
[Knat's Knews
Subscriptions] |
| CRASH CLINIC |
Dedicated to the smooth and efficient operation of your Win9x system because there's nothing so irritating as a computer CRASH! #@*%!~`#/$›ø!! :( :( :(
INSTALL WITH CAUTION! After installing a few programs recently, I began getting error messages almost every time I touched a key. I clicked on files and got "file not found." I would be informed that programs not been shut down after I had shut them down. Ctl+Alt+Del failed to bring up the task list. Almost all of my applications were making "illegal operations" and were being shut down. These illegal operations often involved the kernel and that meant rebooting, BUT even Windows wouldn't shut down properly so I'd be reaching for the reset key, often several times a session. Then I'd need to run ScanDisk again to fix the resulting lost clusters. In short, my computer had gone completely haywire and I was almost ready to type "format c:" at the DOS prompt. (ATTENTION NOVICES!!! DON'T DO THAT!!!) Fortuneately, with a little carefully applied trouble shooting and some luck, my operating system has been re-stabilized and my computer is no longer in danger of being shot.
Here's how I solved the problem: I had installed two new programs on my system, MemTurbo and NetSonic. Both of these have some nice features. MemTurbo has the neat ability to free up system resources to increase the RAM available to your application. NetSonic is a web accelerator that improves your web browsing by preloading the text from links on the current page, as well as efficiently caching the pages you've visited so you can quickly return to them, instead of waiting for them to reload as is often necessary even if you've tweaked your browser's cache settings. NetSonic--available from Web 3000, Inc.--really did speed up my browsing, but when I got the following error message, I knew it had problems: "Web3000QueueClass has not been closed." This was appearing when I attempted to exit Windows, even after I removed NetSonic from my startup group and had not been running it. I didn't exactly know what Web3000ClassQueue was, but after failing to find it in the Registry or any where else and discovering no way to prevent it from loading, I decided to uninstall NetSonic. After doing so from the control panel and rebooting for the changes to take effect, I am happy to say my OS has been relatively stable. (Windows is NEVER completely stable.)
The NetSonic uninstall was not entirely without incident. The program did remove a critical *.dll file (msvcrt40.dll) necessary to run FrontPage Express which I was using to write Knat's Knews. (Now I work in the DOS Edit program) Fortuneately, it announced what it was about to do, which allowedg me to copy the *.dll first, so I was easily able to replace it.There are several lessons here. When installing new software, go slowly. If I had installed a dozen programs and then began having problems... I might never have sorted the mess out. Programs often run invisibly, quietly wrecking havock in the background and causing conflicts where you'd least expect them. Don't panic. Read your error messages carefully. Often you can press the "details" button to find out more about what happened. While most of the details may seem unintelligible, often you may see a pattern emerge if you just note the names of the programs involved in the error. In future "Crash Clinics" I'll be including tips on backing up your system and safely installing and removing software.
Copyright ©1999 Ken Natco