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More cleaning up hard drives and other neat things you can do with Windows 95

Toronto Star Fast Forward column for July 3/97

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© Copyright, Myles White, 1997

Every once in a while, readers' letters begin to overflow my in basket. This week, some replies.

The first section of my two-part column on hard drive cleaning and refurbishing (June 19 and 26) drew some queries after gremlins tinkered with the sections on clearing out the Internet Explorer and Netscape Navigator cache directories to create more room. Several people wrote to point out that the gremlin(s) had included the wrong directory information.

Internet Explorer's default cache directory is C:\WINDOWS\TEMPORARY INTERNET FILES, not C:\EXPLORER\CACHE. To clear the cache, however, you don't need to know this. Right click on the "The Internet" icon on your Windows 95 desktop. Select "Properties." You can also get to the same tabbed properties dialogue from Internet Explorer while it's running by selecting Options under the View menu.

Once the Internet Properties dialogue box is on screen, click the Advanced tab. About half-way down the page, you'll find a "Settings" button. When clicked, it produces another page, on which you can set the size of the cache, move it to another folder, view files in it, set its behaviour and clear its contents.

Netscape Navigator (up to 3.01) has a cache directory/folder, too. By default, it's C:\PROGRAM FILES\NETSCAPE\NAVIGATOR\CACHE (again, not whatever the gremlin said it was). Unlike Internet Explorer, you can use your default file manager to view files directly in the cache and you could, of course, also simply select them all and press delete. However, you don't have to do it directly. When Navigator is running, select Network Preferences from the Options menu. Click on the Cache tab. On the displayed page, you can set the size of the cache and there's also a "Clear Disk Cache Now" button that will empty the stored files on disk.

Hello?

Leo Chappel wrote to report that he, too, had his Internet dialler disabled after uninstalling Microsoft Money 97 and asked how I'd fixed mine. Like me, he could tell the dialler to call his Internet account manually, but it no longer responded automatically when he started an Internet application such as a browser or e-mail program.

I'm afraid my solution wasn't elegant. At the time I was using Internet Explorer 3.0 and decided to download and install the more recent version 3.01. During the installation, the dialler's disfunction was fixed -- although when the dust cleared, I had to re-enter the dialup information such as phone number and domain name server (DNS) address for my account.

Desktop woes

Long Do writes with a problem that may be puzzling a lot of Win95 users who bought systems from companies with funny ideas about our right to determine our own working environment. "I bought a computer from NEC and I can't change the wallpaper. No matter what I do, it continues to display NEC's name on the desktop. NEC technical support won't help."

When I got his first message, I sent back the simple answer. If you select "Display"from within Control Panel (or right click anywhere on the desktop and select Properties), then click on the "Background" tab, you can apply patterns to the desktop or bitmapped graphics (known as wallpaper). Alternately, under the Appearance tab, you can set the colours for various Windows features, including the desktop. Patterns will overlay the colour selection and wallpaper will overlay both, so I suggested he reset both patterns and wallpaper to <none> and start over.

Alas, a second note came back. While he could override the NEC wallpaper for a single session, it came back whenever he restarted the system. Finding the solution took a while, but here it is. If wallpaper that won't go away is a problem you have, someone has tinkered with Windows 95 using the System Policy Editor to prevent a user from permanently changing the desktop appearance. If you have the Windows 95 CD ROM, look in the Admin\Apptools\Poledit folder. If not, the System Policy Editor can be downloaded from Microsoft (www.microsoft.com) under free software, shareware, utilities. I'm told it's a little complicated to use, but it's the only way to fix the problem.

By the way, I can see where a business might wish to employ this practise, both to keep a consistent look to its systems and to discourage employees from wasting time playing with their desktops, but I can't think of a single justification for a computer manufacturer to do the same. It's even worse when the company's technical support won't help the user fix the problem. Long Do reports that he's called NEC Canada's technical support about this problem numerous times to get help, but without success. Perhaps, despite company protests to the contrary, the PC World service and reliability survey that placed NEC among the "worst" category may be accurate for Canada after all.

Logo fun

While tracking down the wallpaper problem, I came across another bit of fun you can have with Windows 95. By default, in the c:\ root directory, there is a file called logo.sys. In the c:\windows\ directory, there are two more files, logow.sys and logos.sys. All three of these files, the Windows 95 startup screen (logo.sys), the Shutdown Wait message (logow.sys) and the Shutdown Safe screen (logos.sys) are actually bitmap graphic files and they can be anything you want them to be.

Copy all three files to a safe location (just in case something goes wrong). Using any bitmap editor such as Windows Paint, Corel PhotoPaint, Adobe PhotoShop, Fractal Design Painter or any other program that will output to a bitmap file format (.BMP), create your own screens. The results must be at a resolution of 320 by 400 (Windows stretches the bitmaps to 640 by 400, but the actual file can't be that large) and must use 256 colours (i.e., 8-bit colour). Once you've saved the new files, rename them so they all have the .SYS extension. Place logo.sys in the c:\ root directory. Logow.sys and logos.sys go in the c:\windows directory. Restart Windows.

To restore the old logo files, simply copy the saved copies over the new files (or rename the new files and move them elsewhere, then copy the old files back to where they're supposed to go).

Additional notes: If you are using a compression utility such as Stacker 4.01 or DriveSpace 3, the logo.sys file must be in the uncompressed host drive.

If you cannot find logo.sys in the c:\ root directory, it may be embedded in another, hidden, file called io.sys. In this case, creating a new logo.sys file will still work. It will take precedence over the version in io.sys. To restore the old logo, simply rename your new logo.sys file to something else (or delete it).

You don't have to change all three files. You can pick any of them.

For some ideas, check out Karl McMurdo's Animated Logo Sample Page. If you want to create your own animated startup logos, instructions on how to do so can be found at Karl's Windows 95 Animated Logo Page.

Thanks to John Swinimer at Hill & Knowlton, Microsoft's Canadian public relations firm, for the answer to both Long Do's question and the logo tips above.

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