(including, but not limited to, your virus protection programs that are always working in the background except in "safe" mode.) When you arrive at the desktop in "safe" mode, go to "start," then "programs," "accessories," "system tools," and finally, select "disk cleanup."
Select the drive to be cleaned by highlighting the down arrow to place it in the operations box and then click OK. The next screen will have three tabs. The "settings" tab has a box that can be check to do an automatic clean-up if the drive runs low on disk space. This tab need only be visited once. Another tab is for "more options, " under which you can find, "removing Windows components" or "removing unused programs." Again this tab is used infrequently.
The default tab is labeled "disk cleanup," and this one you will use continually. Here you can check or uncheck boxes wherein files are labeled showing, for example: "temporary Internet files," "offline Web pages," "downloaded program files," "old scan disk files in root files," "temporary files" and "recycle bin." This screen also shows the size of the files in MB and the total expected recaptured space in MB. You have an option of viewing the files for final review or you can execute the disk cleanup by pointing to OK and left clicking once.
The next step is ScanDisk. Go to "start," "programs," "accessories," "system tools," and then click once on "ScanDisk." First highlight the drives one at a time or all of them simultaneously. Using the held down shift key and hitting the down arrow, you can choose the number of drives to be scanned. You next have the option of choosing a standard scan or a thorough scan. (It tells you the difference.) There is a box you can check to automatically fix errors. Execute the scan by hitting "start," and then watch as it scans and reports its findings and fixings.
The last portion of the checkup is to make sure data is packed together to maximize space allocation and to have the reading head optimize its speed by not having to look the entire drive over completely for the files you want. Go to "start," "programs," "accessories," "system tools," and highlight and left click on "disk defragmenter."
Select the drive to defrag and click OK. I like to see what is going on, so I select both "show details" and "legend" to allow me to physically see the re-packing of data that belongs in the beginning of the drive, from that which belongs in the middle or the end of the drive. Optimizing and repairing clusters will enable you to see weaknesses in your drive and to monitor if you have damaged sectors wherein no storage can be made.
If you follow this health regimen for your computer, you can keep things running in good shape. And if you have damage, you can store around it and write data to other sectors or even other drives. If I have drive failure in one of my partitioned drives, I can restore files from backed-up data to another partitioned drive without having to replace the whole hard drive.
I hope your frequent checkups result in a consistently clean bill of health. And consistency is the rule of the day for workstation maintenance.
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(David Clark is the Senior Partner in a consulting firm, Clark & Partners in Dundee, Illinois. He can be reached by email dmclark@clarkandpartners.com or phoning 847-220-5246.)
By Todd H. Flaming
http://myhome.tf
What's so great about a modern word processor? WordPerfect 5.1 for DOS was a great program, and there was little reason to change it. But then Microsoft built Microsoft Word, which worked very well with its overwhelmingly predominant operating system and featured WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get). Later WordPerfect versions also adopted this feature. Thus a document would appear on your screen the way it would appear on paper.
That was a great addition. But that's not the best reason to use a modern word processor. What is? I'll focus on Microsoft Word, which is the program I use. The best reason is the concept of paragraph styles.
Somewhere, hidden behind what you see on the screen, are hidden codes that tell the computer the indentation of the paragraph, its font, its spacing, and other such properties. Microsoft wisely decided to lump all these things together under the heading "properties." Like a person can have properties (green eyes, 5 foot 8 inches, penchant for programming computers), a paragraph can have properties too. You can see these properties in Word by clicking on the "format" button located toward the top of your word processing window and then the "paragraph" item.
Why are properties so great? Because you can define a bundle of properties for one paragraph and have them apply to another paragraph with a two-to-four-key action. This saves time and makes life easy for people who want to edit their own documents.
Here are examples of styles. We have pre-defined styles for:
1. Our standard brief paragraph (first line indented one inch, double-spaced);
2. A block quote paragraph (whole paragraph indented one inch, single-spaced, full line automatically inserted after); and
3. A standard letter paragraph (no indent, single-spaced, full line after).
To activate the ordinary brief paragraph, I hit CTRL-s (for Schopf & Weiss) and whatever paragraph I'm in magically converts itself into the proper style.
Where styles really help is for outline points. Word has an outlining feature that allows you to define outline points for particular paragraph styles. They are called "Heading 1-9." We had to take Word's pre-defined format and seriously adjust it (all Times New Roman font, all 12-point font just like ordinary text, boldfaced, and numbered in traditional outline style). But once we did, we turned the outlining for a brief into a simple combination of keystrokes.
You can also change the outlining features. In a Crazy Style paragraph click on "format" then "style" then "modify" then "format" and then "numbering." You can select one of the numbering formats (like the one on the top right) and click "customize" to change things, like the indentation for the numbering (this sometimes is difficult to figure out in conjunction with paragraph indentation, so be patient). You can also change the font for the paragraph and for the number. Play around with it for a while to get the hang of it.
Once you're comfortable, change the "heading" styles (they're in the list) and you can have automatic numbering. Just hit the ALT and SHIFT keys and the left or right arrow keys to move up and down levels.
Once you're ready, you can check on the "add to template" box in the "modify style" pop-up box. That will apply it to the template you're using (most likely "normal"), which is really just a style for the document itself. Templates work when you make a new document, taking already formatted material and applying it to that document--that is, except for the shortcut keys, which rest on your computer. But we'll leave those topics for another day.
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