PCWize Vol 4, Issue 05 - The more the merrier! January 30, 2000 ______________________________________________________________________ "Holy cow Batman!" errr, you'd probably have to be using the same e-mail program (The Bat!) I am to have gotten that pun. Thanks to PCWorld's Tipworld newsletter, PCWize just picked up a little over 700 new subscribers this week. Welcome, and apologies to those who had one of a variety of difficulties in getting subscribed. Unfortunately, the subscription request address that was posted in the review, was not the correct one. However, a few minor adjustments to the filters, and everything was just peachy again. I do have to say that some of you were very impatient to get subscribed. A few of you subscribed two to three times, and there were a select few (Bill! ) who subscribed six or more times. Rest assured that no matter how many times you subscribed and received confirmations of that action, you are only subscribed once and will only receive one copy of the newsletter from here on out. On another note of the same chord, there were a couple who wanted to be entered into the random drawing contests but didn't want to subscribe to PCWize. I think I got most of you replied to, but I just wanted to make sure it was understood that to be in the random drawing contest, you must be a current subscriber. See this week's prize giveaway section for some other details on the giveaways. The sheer number of new subscribers that were generated from the review sort of caught me with my pants down. I do have to say that The Bat! performed most admirably, but I would have gotten much more sleep that first night if PCWize was already on the Lyris listserver. I hope to remedy that situation very quickly! :^) ------ Those of you have been with me for a while know of the occasional stories I throw in about my daughter Ashley. She just turned 25 months, and is well on her way to becoming fully potty trained. She still has the occasional accident, but now we have more spending money for things other than diapers (like more computer stuff for dad!) Ashley's even to the point that she can perform the entire process by herself, although, she definitely takes after me as she spends more time reading on the john than doing the deed. :^) Now, if we can just teach her to put away her toys, we'll be good to go! Hopefully she won't take after me on this issue as well, because I didn't learn to put away my toys until I was 25! ______________________________________________________________________ TOC 1. Voting Booth and Other PCWize Stuff 2. Software Review 3. Cool Sites 4. Tips, Tricks, Do's and Don't Do's 5. That's the news! 6. Security Issues, Hoaxes, Viruses and Other Urban Legends 7. PCWize Contests and winner announcement If the columns in the below articles appear misaligned, it's because you are using a non-fixed width font. If you would like to see them nice and straight, change your e-mail font to Courier New. ______________________________________________________________________ ** A word from our sponsors ** ------ http://www.freecreditanalyzer.com - Get your credit situation analyzed online without affecting your credit report. ------ Want to see your advertisement here? For more information, go here: ______________________________________________________________________ 1. Voting Booth and Other PCWize Stuff ------ Click here to vote for PCWize as one of the best newsletters in the "E-zines Top Ten Poll"! It's just a click, no need to fill anything out. ------ Come visit the PCWize forum and live chat. You may discuss anything computer related and it's a good place to get help with any computer questions you may have. ______________________________________________________________________ 2. Software Review ------ Name: Odigo by Novawiz Genre: Instant Messengers Platform: PC Win95/98/00/NT Type/Cost: Freeware Size: 3.26MB Homepage: Download: If you were one of the people who missed out on the early adoption of ICQ and got slammed with a number in the tens of millions, then give NovaWiz Odigo a whirl. It lets you message with other Odigo and ICQ users, and you can even import your current contact list from ICQ. I've since reloaded ICQ a few times, so I've lost my contact list. For those of you who wish to re-add me to ICQ or Odigo, you can do so with ICQ UIN 216395, or Odigo 228514. Here is a quick list of features: It's multi-lingual! So far, it supports: English, Portuguese, Spanish, Hebrew, Japanese, German, Russian, and French. It supports skins. This is the capability to change the look and sometimes the feel of a program. It supports faces. This lets you show a graphic of you, or use any of the installed presets to best match your personality. If another Odigo user is on the same web page or even the same web site as you, you can see them by setting the option. It'll even log what are the most popular sites visited by Odigo users in the popularity graph. Furthermore, you can even leave notes on that web page for other Odigo users to see. I've got mixed feelings about this option, because as fun as it is, there are some privacy issues involved. There were only a few shortcomings that prevented me from deleting ICQ outright, and they were: - Limited invisibility. Sometimes I just want to be invisible to everyone with exception to a select few on my contact list. - Having to either message or chat with someone before being able to request adding them to your friends list. This is further compounded by having to know someone's contact number (as opposed to searching for friends by name, e-mail address, nickname etc. like you can in ICQ.) - No option to see only those who are currently on-line in the friends list. - Some problems with file transfers between an Odigo and ICQ users. - Doesn't currently support IE 5.5 or Opera for seeing other Odigo users on the same web site/page. However, even with these shortcomings, the developers seem genuinely interested in listening to user suggestions. My personal opinion is that this service is going to take off and give ICQ a run for its... well, I can't really say money, because they are both free! :^) ______________________________________________________________________ 3. Cool Sites ------ Noah Says Ever wanted to know how to jump start a car, but never learned? Want to know how to repair scratches on your favorite CD using toothpaste? Want to learn more about the dangerous Latrodectus mactans? Noah Says is a really neat site with information on all sorts of categories, and according to them, it's "The Intelligence Renaissance". If you can't find what you're looking for, you can ask him a question, and he'll answer it. ______________________________________________________________________ 4. Tips, Tricks, Do's and Don't Do's ------ When you click the "Start" button and then scroll through your programs, does it stutter and take forever to display the contents? I'm sure it does. Even on my new PIII 500MHz, it was starting to do this. Here are two ways to speed that badboy up: First, using a utility like X-Setup (reviewed in issue 4.04), change the "Start" menu delay to zero ms. Depending on whether you are using a utility other than X-Setup, you may have to hunt around for this. If you would rather, I have written the .reg import file for you to use, which will change just this variable. You can download it at: Depending on your browser, it may open as a text page. Just click on File / Save-as to get it on your hard drive. Once this file is downloaded (80 bytes), you just have to double-click it and answer "Yes" when it asks if you want to add the information to the registry. For those of you who are paranoid , you can view this file with a text editor to see exactly what key it will change in the registry. The second and most effective way to speed up that sluggish behemoth is to get rid of all the unnecessary icons and folders that each software writer seems to think you'll need. For instance, do you really need the shortcut to the .HLP file? What about the uninstall, a link to their web site, the registration form, or the readme.txt file? These are just shortcuts to those files which already exist (most likely in the Program Files\application name directory), and if you really need to use that particular file (very, very rarely in my personal experience), all you have to do is navigate down to the actual installed folder, or in many cases, just open the program and go to the Help or Help/About menu. Here's the easiest way to clean up that Start menu. First, right-click the "Start" button and select "Open" from the context menu. You'll notice immediately, that in addition to a folder named "Programs" (it's got a funny icon, but it's still a folder), you'll see some other shortcuts to programs. Some of you may see just a couple, and some of you may see all sorts of stuff. The files that you see in this folder actually reside in "C:\Windows\Start Menu". Now if you left-click your Start button, you'll see that the icons displayed at the very top all the way down to the horizontal break line are the same as the ones shown in "C:\Windows\Start Menu". So let's start here. Think back to whenever you last used one of those programs listed up there. If it was a long time ago, or never, then you can most likely delete those shortcuts. You do this by selecting the icon in the folder view (the one that opened when we right-clicked the Start button and selected Open), and deleting it. *** Do not delete the folder named "Programs". After deleting those shortcuts that you don't need, go back and left-click the Start button. Notice that the deleted shortcuts no longer appear at the very top. Now, in the folder view, double-click the Programs folder. Do the same steps as above to get rid of any shortcuts that you don't need, and then open each folder under the Programs folder and do the same there too. *** Do not remove shortcuts from the C:\Windows\Start Menu\Programs\Startup folder. Once you have gotten rid of all the extraneous help, web page, readme, register etc. junk shortcuts, you might have just a single shortcut in many of the folders. Now here is where you get to be creative. Many of those shortcuts are related. For instance, ICQ, Netscape, IE, Opera, Agent, Outlook etc. are all Internet related applications. So in the Programs folder, create a new folder called Internet Apps or the one I like to use is Connectivity. Create other folders like, graphics, audio, games, utilities, and such. The easiest way to do the next step, is to again right-click the Start button and select Open. You should now have two folder views open. Place them side by side. Now, in one of the folder views, if you aren't already there, navigate up until you are at the "C:\Windows\Start Menu\Programs" level. You should be able to see all of your newly created folders here. This next step can be done two ways. The first is that because now most of your folders only contain one shortcut, it's easiest to drag and drop those single shortcuts into one of the new group folders (graphics, connectivity, utilities etc.) The pros to this are that the Start menu will open faster, the cons are that you will have a folder called say, Connectivity, which has the shortcuts for IE, Netscape, Opera, Outlook, ICQ, etc. in it If you don't mind grouping like this (I don't) then this is the best way. For those of you who are a little more "segregational" you can just drag and drop the folders that contain the single shortcut into the group folder. Here's a graphical representation to help: *** If you are not reading this using a fixed width font like Courrier New, then this could look really, really ugly! If you do it the first way, it looks kind of like this: C:\Windows (folder) - Start Menu (folder) - Windows Update (shortcut) - Windows Explorer (shortcut) - Programs (folder) - Graphics (folder) - Photoshop 5 (shortcut) - Gif Animator (shortcut) - ACDSee (shortcut) - Connectivity (folder) - IE5 (shortcut) - Netscape (shortcut) - ICQ (shortcut) etc... If you do it the second way, it looks kind of like this: C:\Windows (folder) - Start Menu (folder) - Windows Update (shortcut) - Windows Explorer (shortcut) - Programs (folder) - Graphics (folder) - Photoshop (folder) - Photoshop 5 (shortcut) - Gif Animator (folder) - Gif Animator (shortcut) - ACDSee (folder) - ACDSee (shortcut) - Connectivity (folder) - IE5 (folder) - IE5 (shortcut) - Netscape (folder) - Netscape (shortcut) - ICQ (folder) - ICQ (shortcut) etc... Of course, either way will work, but I recommend the first way as it is faster because you have less folders for the Start menu to display. Once you have moved the shortcuts to wherever you now want them, you can delete the old folders that the shortcut was originally in (if you chose way one from above.) Ok, you are now done! Left-click on your Start button, go to programs, and run your cursor over the folders. Ahhhhh, much, much faster now. Of course, YMMV (Your Mileage May Vary) depending on just how much junk you had on the Start Menu to begin with. ______________________________________________________________________ 5. That's the news! ------ Hey! Where'd my money go? I still haven't gotten up the guts to play with my bank account on-line. Here's one more missing entrail. ------ If you're thinking about buying an iMAC DV, you might want to see this first. ______________________________________________________________________ 6. Security Issues, Hoaxes, Viruses and Other Urban Legends ------ Please visit http://www.pcwize.com/tech/computer/secdef.shtml if you would like to know the definitions for hoaxes, viruses, worms and urban legends. ------ This week's hoax of the week is mainly for AOL users. If you receive the below message, you can ignore it. "Subject: AOL MESSAGE If you get a flashing IM, DO NOT reply or delete, but sign off immediately and re-sign on! Then change your password immediately. If you are unable to sign on, call AOL. The number is: 1-800-827-6364 The Flashing IM is a password stealer. This has been confirmed by AOL. PLEASE FORWARD TO EVERYONE YOU KNOW" You can see this bulletin on-line at: True to its nature, this message meets all of my criteria as a hoax which I wrote for you all in issue #13 (3.02 on the new numbering system.) For all the new people, here it is again: How to spot a hoax! 1. Does it say "Forward to everyone you know!!" 2. Does it say "If you open this e-mail, it will erase your hard drive"? So far there are NO viruses of this type. There is really only one way for you to get a virus from e-mail, and that is if you OPEN/RUN an attachment to the e-mail message (this includes Word documents macro virus). You will *not* get a virus just from opening the e-mail (Unless you have some oddball e-mail program that automatically runs any attachments when you open a message). A slight amendment to rule #2. There are some viruses/worms that can now be run automatically by Outlook Express just by selecting the message and having the preview pane enabled. 3. Does it say "I've fully checked this out, and I'm not lying!!", or something similar to it. Unless of course you get a message from me saying that I've checked it out, because I really will have. 4. Does it look like it was written by a ten year old (I'm not saying that a ten year old will never say anything important). Most people who write these couldn't spell their way out of a wet paper bag (However you do that! :^) Their are some thow that can spel really good, and are evun artikulate (grin), so their message sounds very real. This is called "Baffling with BullSh*t". :) 5. Does it sound incredulous??? I mean a personal letter from Bill Gates? Wow, you must be really special. He's a pretty busy guy, but he took time out to write you. I'm impressed. NOT! 6. Does it say "Don't accept any messages from so-an-so, he's been sending viruses!" This is mainly an ICQ thing, which they have been getting nailed pretty hard with. What can you expect, they are a relatively new service with almost 51 MILLION users. If you aren't using ICQ yet, you don't know what you're missing . An amendment to rule #6. See this week's software review for an alternative to ICQ. 7. Use common sense. If it looks buffaloneous, don't send it. I can almost guarantee that if the world does crumble because of this new virus or chain-letter, they wont find out that you were the weak link that caused the whole world notification plan to fail. ;) So on to the sites that will put you "In The Know" about hoaxes. If after checking everywhere else, you still aren't sure, send it to me. I'll give you the straight skinny on its authenticity. ______________________________________________________________________ 7. PCWize Contests and Winner Announcement ------ Each week, PCWize holds a random drawing contest and gives away free stuff (usually software) to its subscribers. We will continue to do this as long as there are advertisers who are willing to provide the prizes. If you are such an individual/company, then please contact me at editor@pcwize.com so that we can work a deal. ------ The winner of this week's random drawing contest is: Jason Reeves He'll be receiving a free copy of Clipmate 5. ------ While I generally give away prizes in a random drawing each week, I also make special exceptions for people who help me out. Here's some other ways for you to win. 1. Get your friends and family to subscribe. If you get five people to sign up, you'll get a prize. Some rules to this though: - No spamming! I will not award prizes to those who get me new subscribers by spamming a list or newsgroup. - The people who subscribe must include your name and e-mail address in the message so I know who to attribute it to. - Do not set up fake e-mail accounts and subscribe from them. Although it will be hard for me to tell, if I do find out, we're going to have a discussion. 2. Submit something that I use in the newsletter. It can be something as simple as a heads up to a cool web site, software, or news item. You can also try your hand at submitting an article for publication by sending a blank message for the submission guidelines at: mailto:submissions@pcwize.com ______________________________________________________________________ Well, that's it for this issue! Have a good week and I'll see you in seven days. Leif Gregory Copyright © 1997-00 by Leif Gregory. All rights reserved. You may share this copy of the PCWize newsletter with others as long as it is reprinted in it's entirety to include the copyright notice and subscription directions. If you've received this edition of the PCWize newsletter from a friend or colleague and wish to start receiving your own copy, then click the below link and send the generated e-mail message. I have made every attempt to ensure that all information contained in this newsletter is accurate to the best of my ability. Due to the myriad of possible configurations in the PC platform, information and software discussed here may not always work with your particular configuration. That being said, Leif Gregory and the PCWize newsletter can not be held liable for any damages you may incur either directly or indirectly from the use of anything contained in this newsletter. PCWize does not endorse any of the products or services provided by advertisers in this newsletter. As with anything in life, please check the credibility of the advertiser as well as to use common sense. If it sounds too good to be true, then it probably is. PCWize Editor PCWize Homepage Unsubscribe