Changing Windows 95 registry settings
Change menu display speed
Restrictions
Rename Recycle Bin
Change long filename representation in DOS
New World of Dvorak keyboard
ACECAD has interface software for digitising tablets
Windows 95 and internal modems
Another possible reason for slow floppy drives
Creating bootable drive; Win95 32-bit disk access
Speeding up Windows 95
Answer to Rodney Hamelink's Stacker needs
One thing I have enjoyed about reading PC World is the Help Screen section, and I have found a lot of useful information here, so I hope that what I have to share will also be of use to others. The following tips are for Win95 users, and will let you do things like rename the Recycle Bin, increase menu display speed and others. To make the changes, you need to run RegEdit (just select Start-Run, and enter regedit), and then follow the appropriate path and make the changes as indicated. The changes will take effect after exiting from regedit.
If you are finding that menus do not come up quickly enough, the following changes should be quite satisfying:
HKEY_USERS\.Default\ControlPanel\Desktop
Name: MenuShowDelay
Value: 0 - 1000 ( 0 fastest, 1000 slowest)
One of the good features of Win3.x was the ability to implement certain restrictions through changes to PROGMAN.INI. The following will let you do the same thing under Win95:
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\Explorer
To enable a restriction, change the value to 1. EditLevel is an exception though, with values ranging from 0 to 4 (0 is all privileges, 4 is none).
The following change enables you to give the Recycle Bin any name you wish:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Classes\CSLID\{645FF040-5081-101B-9F08-0AA002F954E}
Right-click on (Default), select Modify and enter the new name.
When in DOS mode, long filenames end with ~1, which is unsightly and very annoying - the following change will alter that to display names normally, terminating at the eighth character:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Control\FileSystem
Right-click under Name, and select New-Binary value.
Call it NameNumericTail. Right-click on it, and select modify, giving it a value of 0 - from now on, any new files with long name will not end with ~1, but will simply terminate after the eighth character.
- Damien (Oinkman)
Editor's note: Great tips, Damien. Your assistance has been far from porcine. If you are going to try this at home, please back up your registry first. One way is to make a copy of all the files with a .dat extension in your Windows directory. This is slightly dodgy, as your registry is dynamically altered by Windows 95 and its applications, and the copy you back up could be mid-update. See our General Q&A section for details on the utility cfgback.exe, found on your Windows 95 CD-ROM, which can assist you with registry backup.
With the current digital technology and the benefits it brings, I'm surprised that we are hanging on to such an outdated Qwerty keyboard layout. Invented over a century ago, it was designed to slow typing rates down and prevent mechanical typewriters from jamming because your fingers had to travel further to get to most commonly-used keys.
The two-handed Dvorak keyboard layout appears to be a far more efficient, easier and logical choice. It can be chosen via the Windows 3.1 via Control Panel-International-Keyboard Layout and select US-Dvorak. This loads the KBDDV.DLL file in c:\windows\system directory. The layout is listed in Appendix A of the Users Guide for Windows for Workgroups, page 96.
Examining the layout, all the vowels are mostly under the left-hand home key fingers and the most common consonants are under the right-hand fingers. Letters of medium use are on the top line, and low-use consonants on the bottom line. Punctuation marks have been relocated based on their frequency of use. It all seems rather logical.
I haven't been able to find any typing tutor that uses this layout; it would have to make learning to type a lot easier.
Elementary typing lessons would consist of
the thin in is it on and ten net nut note
instead of
jaffa sad fads lads jjll;;
I've spent some time trying to learn this system and my hands hardly left the middle row. As it not quite as straightforward to change the key [tops] around [on the keyboard] there would be no benefit looking at the keys, [ and it would be preferable to work] with a small layout on the wall and [with] a fair bit of sweat. Touch typing would be inevitable.
- Paul Schlüter
Editors note: The Qwerty keyboard was designed in 1873 by Christopher Sholes, specifically to slow down typing so that the keys in mechanical typewriters would have time to fall back and avoid jamming. It has no place in an electro-mechanical world, and it has been implicated in repetition strain injury (RSI). Sholes himself tried to make the layout more efficient, but couldn't budge the touch typists. The Dvorak keyboard was invented in 1936 by August Dvorak with the intention of maximising typing efficiency.
The Dvorak versus Qwerty debate is an old one. It's very reminiscent of the other standards debates. Typically, there's a messy, short-sighted, time-wasting and ineffective standard in popular use and a sensible, efficient, well-designed standard that slowly dies from neglect. Why is that? It is people? Is it technology? Is it the two in lethal combination?
In Windows 95, you can change to the two-handed Dvorak keyboard by moving to the Control Panel-Keyboard module, Language tab, clicking the Properties button and selecting United States-Dvorak. If you don't want to go insane, don't look at the keyboard, or if you must, move the keys on your keyboard around according to the diagram. If you want to get hold of the left-hand only or right-hand only Dvorak layouts, you need to look on online services. They're distributed as Microsoft Application Note GA0650, in the file GA0650.ZIP.
There's plenty of information on Dvorak keyboards available on the World Wide Web. Try http://www.cs.washington.edu/homes/dylan/dvorak.html and http://www-acs.ucsd.edu/~jstrout/dvorak/dvorak.html. There are courses in Dvorak keyboard use. One by Dan Wood is at http://www.mit.edu:8001/people/jcb/Dvorak/dvorak-course/
According to one of the reference pages, from the Dvorak International group, the Winter 1993 issue of Delta Pi Epsilon carried a study done by Dr Scot Ober called Relative Efficiencies of the Standard and Dvorak Simplified Keyboards, which concluded that, with Qwerty, 31 per cent of typing is done on the home row. In Dvorak, that becomes 70 per cent. In addition, the Dvorak layout has 35 per cent more right-hand reaches, 63 per cent more same-row reaches, 45 per cent more alternate-hand reaches, and 37 per cent less finger travel than the Qwerty layout.
All the same, I'm reluctant to give up my Qwerty touch typing skills, absurd as the finger movements are. When your word processor control keys start wandering elsewhere, you can do some real damage. Just call me B.an. Mrpcorb
You can switch to the United States-Dvorak keyboard layout and completely lose control of your keyboard, but in the long run you could be typing more efficiently.
The Dvorak keyboard layout puts the most common letters directly under your fingers
Continuing the discussion of digitising tablets with Autosketch for Windows (August 1995, page 204, and October 1995, page 158), I have found that ACECAD, from Dick Smith, has the necessary Windows interface software. However, as mentioned by Geoff Harrod in October 1995, control of aspect ratio is an essential feature.
Of course, one can import a picture into a MS-Word document and use the Format-Picture command to modify the vertical and horizontal scales, and so control aspect. The disadvantage is that any text will be distorted and require correction by returning to Autosketch; a somewhat involved process.
ACECAD has Absolute and Relative modes of operation, and although the manual does not specifically explain the method, the aspect ratio may be controlled by only using part of the tablet working area. It is not a direct control and one needs to resort to trial and error.
- M L Possingham
Many thanks for the letter of reply to my problem in installing Windows 95 and trying to get it to work with an already installed internal modem.
The modem was originally installed with its jumper settings to COM4, as the computer already had an I/O card with two serial ports. This was fine under Windows 3.11; however, despite all the settings as per the book and your letter, Windows 95 refused to talk to the modem. The answer lay in configuring the second serial port on the I/O card as COM4, and setting the internal modem on COM2. After this everything worked perfectly.
I had read that Windows 95 can support a large number of COM ports but apparently they must be used in sequence, unlike Win 3.1 which does not care if COM2 and COM3 are not being used.
You might like to pass this on to your readers, so that those thinking about installing Windows 95 with a modem already installed as COM4 do not experience the same trouble that I had. The biggest problem in the final solution was chasing up the information necessary to change the I/O board settings so that the second serial port could be configured as COM4. I presume that COM3 might have been acceptable.
- J A Little
I am writing to you to offer a further and more likely solution to one of your reader's problems. Don't get me wrong - what you have suggested could certainly be the case - however in my experience (three years as a PC technician), I have found that whenever a computer is slow at reading things off a floppy, generally it is the AT Bus CLOCK SELECT setting in the CMOS setup.
This setting is found in the Advanced Chipset Setup section of an AMI bios. Factory default settings generally consist of higher values such as CPUCLK/8 in order to create minimal clashes/conflicts with other components, such as floppy controllers and other cards. However, in most cases this value can be decreased to CPUCLK/4 or even CPUCLK/2 which remarkably speeds up the floppy access time. I hope this solution can be passed on to your reader, as installing software from floppy disk at even slower than normal is just painstaking.
- Reuben Vella
Editor's note: Thanks for a great tip, Reuben. I'll be checking the CMOS settings on every machine that has a slow floppy drive from now on.
In the Hardware Q&A section of The Help Screen in Australian PC World, November 1995, you published a letter from Peter Dawson concerning the problems he was having in trying to create a bootable hard drive ("Slave to the hard drive"). I think that Peter's problem is that he tried to create the bootable hard drive whilst the hard drive was configured as a slave drive in his system. From my experience, this does not work.
The drive must be configured as the C: (master) drive in his system for it to be properly formatted as a bootable drive.
It is no help to FORMAT /S the C: drive from a bootable floppy. Peter must:
1. Boot his system from the A: drive
2. Use FDISK to delete the primary DOS partition on the C: drive
3. Create a new primary DOS partition on the C: drive
4. FORMAT /S the C: drive.
For some reason, unless the drive being FDISK'ed is the C: drive, the boot sector does not get placed in the right position for the BIOS to find it. The only hint at this comes from the CMOS settings, which give the option of booting from the A: or C: drive, but never the D: drive (or B: or any other drive letter). It is also advisable to configure the correct jumper settings on the hard drive for its status (that is, master/no slave).
What Peter has experienced is normal for a drive formatted as a D: drive. The drive is perfectly usable; just not bootable.
On another matter, "Windows 95 installation problems" from Paul Chang, I have experienced similar frustrations in attempting to get 32-bit disk access operative under Windows 95. In my case, I installed a new disk controller card after I had installed Win95.
The controller card used the Promise PDC60230 chip, and I thought that I would download the latest Win95 drivers for this chip from the Promise site on the WWW (http://www.promise.com).
However, after installing the driver, the Performance tab showed that both C: and D: were using the MS-DOS compatibility mode file system.
I contacted Promise Customer Support (support@promise.com) for help, but their suggestions did not amount to much. I examined IOS.LOG, but it did not tell me what was causing the problem. I fooled around with SYSTEM.INI, AUTOEXEC.BAT and CONFIG.SYS endlessly, to no avail. I even got rid of AUTOEXEC.BAT and CONFIG.SYS entirely; and surprisingly, Win95 worked perfectly without them. But file access was still 16-bit.
Eventually, I removed the vendor-supplied, "Win95-compatible" driver, and installed the "Standard IDE/ESDI" driver that comes with Win95. Lo and behold, 32-bit disk access was operative. The system performance was much snappier, and there does not seem to be any problem in accessing the full storage capacity of my 430Mb C: drive and 850Mb D: drive.
I suspect that a stray device=*Int13 line in my SYSTEM.INI may have been the culprit, but as it's still there, I am not so sure. The fact is that neither the Performance tab in the System folder, nor the IOS.LOG, could tell me what piece of software in my Windows setup was causing the problem, despite the fact that the Win95 documentation tells me that they should.
Plug'n'Play? Dream on!
- John Haynes
Editor's note: Thanks John. Your saga not only contains several valuable tips, but paints a dramatic picture of late twentieth century personkind in hot pursuit of the unattainable ideal configuration. Charles Dickens look out.
Although I don't really believe that I have reloaded Windows 95 for the last time, experience has finally enabled me to develop a quick way of optimising this operating system.
Speed is more important to me than anything else, and as I have only the upgrade package, reloading can be minimised by simply keeping a copy of the Windows 3.x setup disk, and using that as evidence for product ownership - pop it into a: when requested.
I have a Toshiba DX2-50 with 12Mb and 250 HDD. I loaded a basic Win95 system, and then installed Plus! with DriveSpace3 and Internet. Once that was finished, I unloaded DriveSpace3. This has the neat technique of eliminating all the disk compression code from startup, reducing the OS overhead. I don't use any disk compression, obviously.
The second way of speeding up the system is to reboot into safe mode once all your programs have been loaded, and then run defrag to defragment the hard drive. Rebooting back to normal then allows the dynamic swap file to use unfragmented free space, with obvious gains in performance.
I have finally settled on MS-Office Professional, and a minimal install of Word, Excel and Access takes up 32Mb. The system is quite fast and all I really need for now. Sidekick 95 is useful too, since who needs Groupware for heaven's sake.
Quarterdeck's MagnaRAM does really work, but I wonder whether the overhead in code is worth the perceived increase in performance. I don't know, but if the cache for MagnaRAM is set literally to 30 per cent of physical RAM, then it does speed things up. Virtual memory tends to increase too, eating up hard drive space. Perhaps one should wait for a rigorous test of this product. I suspect it may do odd things to my hard drive, since occasionally I get obscure problems that can only be solved by a full, clean installation, which means reformatting the HDD again!
What would really be a useful thing to do is to produce an in-depth article on the registry. I know that some problems are caused by odd settings in the registry, and if one knew how to adjust the entries, then . . .
Keep up the great magazine - I read it all the time.
- Louis Hissink
Editor's note: Thanks Louis. Optimising Windows 95 is an interesting topic, in view of the demands it places on a system and the lack of tweaks available. We're trying to include Windows 95 registry tips every month, mostly contributed by readers, as you'll see above. The registry in depth is a fierce proposition, but we'll think about it.
Re: the letter from Rodney Hamelink in the September 1995 issue - I have a copy of Stacker 4.0 for DOS and Windows complete with manuals that I no longer use. Rodney is welcome to it, as long as he can promise it a good home. If you are able to contact him, he can ring me and make arrangements for me to send it by post. He would have to pay only the postage. Re: SmartDrive in AUTOEXEC.BAT: I have found that it is best to load the CD driver MSCDEX as line 1 to allow SmartDrive to see it and load CD caching. Load SmartDrive as line 2.
- Tony Davidson
Editor's note: Thanks for the tip and the generosity, Tony. I
can't locate Rodney's contact details, but he's free to contact
us for your details if he reads this. Sometimes Help Screen feels
like a kind of digital Perfect Match, where people try
to find Mr or Ms Right Software.