This Week's Tips

When I wanted to stay over at Jimmy's house, I had to ask for
permission. When I wanted to have ice cream after supper, I had to
ask for permission. When I wanted to open and edit my wife's
documents, I didn't have to ask for permission. She was using an
unsecure system! Thank goodness for FAT32, eh? We receive
countless e-mails from people asking how they can password-protect
their files and folders. The quickest way to do it is to ZIP up
the objects in question, and then place a password on that
archive. That's not the most convenient route, however. If there
are multiple people using one machine, Windows 2000 and XP make
protecting your data infinitely easier. With either on an NTFS
hard drive, you can set user-level permissions. Depress ALT while
you double-click a file or folder, flip to the Security tab, then
set how you want to allow your users to interact with the data.
Give 'em full control, the ability to modify, read & execute,
read, write, etc. If you're worried about a young one (or novice)
deleting your documents, this will help keep your bases covered.
In Windows 9x, you'd need to find a third-party utility to do the
same thing.

Word is wonderful. PowerPoint is powerful. Outlook is outlandish.
Yes, there are a few free “office” productivity applications out
there, but everyone seems to compare them to Microsoft's suite.
Excel is excellent, too. To launch it, you can enter “EXCEL” in
the Start Menu's Run field (tap WinKey+R for quicker access). The
last time you created a chart from some range of numbers, did you
step through the wizard (by pressing the appropriate icon)? Next
time, highlight the section and tap F11. No muss, no fuss. You can
always go back and tweak the graphic's format if it's not to your
liking (right-click on the newly-created chart and select the
“Chart Type” option). Now, let's say you want to create a range of
numbers without putting forth much effort. Start by entering
something into a cell - let's go with “27″ right now. Select the
cell, depress the CTRL key, hover over the lower-right corner of
the cell until you see the cursor change into a big plus sign with
a little plus sign. Now, click and drag vertically or
horizontally. Down or right will increase your initial number; up
or left will decrease it. You'll have effectively created a range
of scaled numbers. Run through the same task without the CTRL key
to merely copy the initial cell's contents.

They keep saying that Windows XP will run “indefinitely” without
requiring a restart, but you can only fix disk errors when you're
not inside Windows. To correct discrepancies, you'll need to check
for them and then reboot. Either run “CHKDSK /F” from a CMD line
or open My Computer, right-click on a drive (AKA volume), select
Properties, flip to the Tools tab, and press the “Check Now…”
button. Place a checkmark in the “Automatically fix file system
errors.” It will prompt you to schedule a scan before the next
Windows session. Do it, folks. Do it often. If you haven't
upgraded your FAT32 volume to the NTFS file system (I know, that's
redundant), you can run the command line “CONVERT” utility.
Remember, with NTFS in Windows 2000 or XP, you can compress files
and folders to save on disk space. Right-click a file or folder,
select Properties, flip to the General tab, click Advanced, put a
checkmark next to the “Compress contents to save disk space”
option, then click OK. Click OK again (to close the Properties
dialog). To Confirm Attribute Changes, select the option you
desire. Wham! You just saved some space.

No, I'm telling you - it doesn't look like you've edited my term
paper. “Yes, I did.” Can you prove it? “Well, I forgot to turn on
the Track Changes feature. That's found in the Tools menu.” I know
where it's located, but it doesn't help me at all now that you've
completed the changes. Now, I have to manually compare the two
documents side-by-side, and that's going to take hours. Or will
it? Not on your life, buddy. Word has a “comparison” feature
hidden away within the deep recesses of its structure. Right-click
on a toolbar, select Customize, flip to the Commands tab, select
the Tools category, then scroll through the right-most pane until
you see the “Compare Documents…” option. Drag and drop that bad
boy somewhere (either in an existing toolbar or a menu). Now, open
your original document, press the newly-created icon, browse for
the newer document, and guess what Word will do? Automatically
highlight the changes in red. Perfect for when you need to know
what once was sitting inside those paragraphs. If your teacher was
looking for a rough draft, now you can show him or her in style.

We're all used to the way Windows 9x works, but if you're
searching for superior security on the same platform, then Windows
2000 or XP are your only choices. For the Home (regular) user, XP
is perfect. Does it have a Safe Mode, though? Kinda. Tap F8
immediately before you see the Windows splash screen pop up. What
if you can't get into Windows that way? Time to run the Recovery
Console. Insert the original operating system CD, boot from it,
then step through the “blue screen” wizard until you can tap “R”
to shell into the Recovery Console. Here, you must first enter
your Administrator password (if you have one). Now what? Type
“HELP” for a list of possible commands. FIXBOOT writes a new boot
sector on the system partition; FIXMBR repairs the boot
partition's master boot code. DISKPART manages partitions on hard
disk volumes (kinda like FDISK); BOOTCFG is used to manipulate the
BOOT.INI for boot configuration and recovery. This may just save
you from having to do a complete reinstall of the OS. Be careful
what you do here, though. For more information, please refer to
MSKB Q307654.

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