Tips Of The Day For January 1999

Tip Of The Day For January 26, 1999: Some PCs, especially laptops, have a suspend/resume feature that will let you place the PC into "stasis" until you tell it to wake up. This can be a very useful feature if you need to turn off the machine while in the middle of doing something important. However, some software does not react well to being suspended, so always save important documents before suspending. Sometimes suspend/resume can save time over shutting down and rebooting the PC, but check the time required carefully, as some machines take almost as long to resume as they do to boot from scratch!

Tip Of The Day For January 14, 1999: Most older DOS programs will run in a Windows 95 DOS box. However, some DOS programs will detect that they are running under Windows and refuse to operate. In many cases, especially if the software is from 1994 or earlier, the software thinks it is running in a Windows 3.1 DOS box, and under Windows 3.1, it is true that many DOS programs did not work properly, so this refusal to run was reasonable. However, many of these will run fine under Windows 95 (though not all!) To trick the DOS program into not seeing that it is running under Windows, open "Properties" for the DOS box, then under the "Program" tab click "Advanced...". Place a checkmark next to "Prevent MS-DOS-based programs from detecting Windows". Close the DOS box and then reopen it to activate the feature. (Note though that some programs will not function properly if you do enable this feature, so it is best to set up two different DOS box profiles if you experience problems.)

Tip Of The Day For January 7, 1999: If your Windows 95 install is using default virtual memory specifications, you can get a small but free performance boost by optimizing them. See here for instructions.

Tip Of The Day For January 2, 1999: Hard drives continue to increase in size, and sizes over 8 GB are now common. Before you purchase one of these large drives for even a moderately older system, however, it pays to do some research. Many systems cannot handle the larger drives because they lack native BIOS support for Int 13h extensions, the protocol used by newer machines to access these larger drives. The result is that the drive may be truncated to 8 GB, or may not work at all. Software BIOS translation software can be used to get around this problem, but a BIOS upgrade may work even better; contact your motherboard or system manufacturer if this situation occurs.

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