• If your PC is not 2000-ready, R-Y2KFIX.EXE from the Rosenthal Utilities suite may provide a cure. Make a directory for the utilities, copy R-UTIL.EXE into it, and run the program. The utils will be decompressed for you.

To extract R-UTIL.EXE to your disk.

A cooler computer
Some CPUs run very hot indeed. Hot-running chips have a shorter life, waste power, make the inside of your PC hotter, and so reduce reliability (especially in hot weather). CPUidle v2.53 will cool down your CPU. It does this by running a background task which puts the CPU into power saving mode whenever possible. For this to work you need a CPU with power-saving features: Intel P5/Pentium II, AMD K5/K6, Cyrix M1SC/ M1/M2 IDT C6. You also need to be running Windows 95/98. A few systems may become unstable with CPUidle running, so be sure to test it for a while before beginning important work. There may be a reduction in performance with certain programs. Read Help Screen for more details and a suggested workaround. Just copy the CPUIDLE253 folder on to your hard disk, and put a shortcut to CPUIDLE.EXE in your start-up folder (normally C:\WINDOWS\Start Menu\Programs\StartUp). The program will then be run every time you start your PC. It puts an icon in the tooltray through which you can enable/disable it.


To Copy CPUIDLE.EXE to your disk.

Entering the time in Excel
If you're entering a lot of time values into Excel, some assistance from a macro could make life easier. INPTIME.XLS (for Excel 5 and upwards) demonstrates the technique – see Application Workshop within Help Screen for the juicy details.


To Copy INPTIME.XLS to your disk.

Directory quick-change
My DOS command-line program CCD.EXE is provided to help with a problem with illegal directory names, but it's very handy away from that specialised use. Locate it in a directory named in the PATH statement in AUTOEXEC.BAT. Instead of using the CD command, use CCD. It enables you to enter abbreviated path names, for example this one to take you to \WINDOWS\SYSTEM:

\WI SY

Use spaces to separate the subdirectory names, and type just enough characters to uniquely identify each one. So if \WINDOWS is the only directory name beginning with a W, the 'I' isn't needed. But if you had \WINDOWS and \WINK, then \WIND would be required by CCD to pin down the target to \WINDOWS.


To Copy CCD.EXE to your disk.

You can use unique character combinations away from the start of the name – 'CCD 1' would take you into FOLDER1 if no other directory began with a 1 or contained a 1. Typing CCD without parameters takes you back to the directory you were in when you last used the CCD command.

Other stuff
As usual, our Windows 3 help file[WIN3HLP.HLP] and HTML page of useful Internet sites[HScrnNet.HTM] are included. This month's excuse for not updating the Windows 3 help file is number 17 in Ma±ana: The Homework Non-Delivery Survival Guide: 'The dog ate it, sir'. Actually, the reason for all this procrastination is that the file has become difficult to maintain, owing to the way help files are constructed, and I'm looking into using decent help authoring software instead of word. Or I may go for HTML instead. It WILL happen, I promise.


To Copy WIN3HLP.HLP to your disk.


To open the Win Help HTML Page.