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Instant Replay: December 1999

Bruce Preston, Moderator

Q. I have a two-computer peer-to-peer LAN with a hub. My modem is connected to the server machine. How can I determine from the client machine if the server is connected to the Internet via Dial-Up Networking (DUN) and Internet Connection Sharing (ICS) and at what speed? How can I cause a disconnect? A. We don't know how to do it via ICS. You can control it using an inexpensive third-party application such as SyGate Server (reviewed in the December dacs.doc), which has the additional benefit of providing a firewall service. Q. My Windows 98 boot is very slow. Is there any way to find out what is taking so long (after the blue flag comes up) and perhaps speed it up? A. There is a lot happening during boot, such as identifying all of the fonts on the machine, etc. In W95 and W98, one of the options off of the F8 key is to generate a boot log. This will take even longer, but at least it will tell you what was happening. You might find that it is starting some application or service. For example, you might be starting anti-virus software, which is doing a scan of the hard disk, or a fax manager, etc. Editor's note: Check out April Miller Cripliver's article, "Windows 98 Startup and Shutup," in this issue. Q. I had Real Player working very nicely with Netscape. I then upgraded Netscape, and now Real Player doesn't work. Yet in Netscape it shows Real Player is there. Is there some setting I have to change? A. The newer Netscapes (4.5 and later) installs a newer version of Real Player. Unfortunately, if there had been a previous installation, it breaks the old version and doesn't install the new one correctly. The cure is to download and reinstall the newest RealPlayer outside of the Netscape install process. Q. Speaking of boot log, is there any way to get documentation of the boot process itself? A. There are several books out there aimed at the MSCSE exam that should cover it. For getting down into the real low level, take a look at one of Andrew Schulman's "Undocumented" books, or Norton's "Inside the IBM PC" series. Q. I am using Word for Windows 95, and I get a page to a page-and-a half of nonprintable stuff at the end of the screen page. What is it? A. We are going to guess that you are seeing the formatting characters, which Word places at the end of the file rather than interspersed in the body of the file (which is the method used by WordPerfect, for example.) Subsequent discussion revealed that the files that you are looking at were not generated by Word for Windows 95, but rather by a different word processor (publisher best known for a spreadsheet) and that perhaps the conversion wasn't being done properly, perhaps it introduced Word for Windows 97 items. It was suggested you see if documents created on a different computer, but using Word for Windows 95 are properly constructed. If not, then you have somehow corrupted your installation (a corrupted NORMAL template, or less likely, a virus) and will need to reinstall. Q. My printer reports that it is "Out of Paper" when it isn't. It is an HP 870Cse. A. Make sure that you have the latest driver, which you can easily download from the HP Website. Also make sure that you have an IEEE 1284 specification bidirectional cable. Recently I had a similar problem with an Epson color printer. It turned out that the cable was not quite seated in the back of the printer, so most of the pins were touching, but a few were not. As a result, the PC could "see" the printer, but the disconnected circuit was incorrectly interpreted as an out of paper situation. Also make sure that your paper size in property sheet matches what you are using, as the sensors may be falsely reporting a paper problem. Q. Do you have any suggestions, recommendations, tips, etc. for upgrading from Windows 95 to Windows 98? A. This answer is also pertinent to those who might be considering installing Windows 2000, so we will go into a bit more detail. First and most important, back up your data. You don't need to back up your programs, since you can (and probably will) reinstall applications. But the data that you created (documents, spreadsheets, e-mail messages, etc.) only exists on your system or backup tapes/disks and is irreplaceable. Back up your registry. If you have a tape drive, then configure the backup software to copy the registry (usually an option). If not, there is a utility on the Windows 95 update CD in the directory"d:\OTHER\MISC\CFGBACK" (where d: is your CD-ROM drive) called CFGBACK which lets you create (or restore) up to ten registry backups. To install it, copy the two files to your C:\Windows directory and then create a shortcut or add it to your START menu. Make sure that you have enough room on the hard disk (about 340MB available, although some of it may be given back when completed.) There are several upgrade "plans" you might consider, each with pros and cons: (A) Install to a clean hard disk; (B) install as an "upgrade in place"; (C) install into a new Windows directory; or (D) delete old registry, then install into the old directory. A) Clean Hard Disk: The best and in the end most reliable way is to install to a clean hard disk. You will have to back up all of your data to a tape or large-capacity media such as a ZIP disk. You will also have to reinstall all of your applications. For plans A and D, when the upgrade checks to see that you are doing an upgrade, it will need to see that you have a previous edition of Windows. This can be satisfied by putting your previous Windows 95 CD in the drive when prompted. If you don't have a clean hard disk to work with, are not changing your hardware configuration, have not done a lot of uninstalls of applications, and have about 350MB of space on your hard disk, then you may consider method B. You may come out of the upgrade with a few obsolete files or registry entries, but they can be ignored or cleaned up with a utility. If you have added and deleted a lot of applications over the years, or are changing hardware, consider plan C or D so as to get a clean registry. Why is this so complex? Because uninstalling applications does not guarantee that obsolete components and/or registry entries will be removed, so you run the risk of inheriting obsolete registry information if you do an upgrade in place. Obsolete or inconsistent components cause applications to crash. The problem exists because when an application installs, although it usually puts most of its programs and data in the "application directory," such as \Program Files\Vendor Name\ApplicationName, it will also place components (usually dynamic link libraries, or DLLs) into the Windows "system directory." It does this so that the DLLs may be shared, even for the case of applications from different vendors. But because of the sharing, Windows doesn't keep track of which applications use a shared component. When you subsequently uninstall an application, if the shared component is removed, some other application will probably "break." The ugly solution is that shared components are typically not removed, thus cluttering up the registry and system directory with "orphan" DLLs. Usually uninstallers take the conservative approach and leave the shared components in the Windows system directory, thus creating "orphan" DLLs. B) Upgrade In Place: If you elect to do an upgrade in place, please delay hardware changes (other than adding a non-booting hard disk) until after you have done the O/S upgrade. For plans C or D, you are going to have to reinstall applications. Fortunately, if you put the application into the directory suggested by SETUP (such as C:\Program Files\VendorName \Application Name,) the application essentially overwrites itself but still registers the components in the new registry so that things will work. The process of overwriting does not erase your data (documents, spreadsheets, etc.) so when the application starts, you will find things where you left them. When reinstalling, you may get a message that says SETUP has found a newer file on the drive. SETUP will then suggest that you keep the newer file. Keep the newer file; it was probably put there by an upgrade. But to ensure that things work correctly, be sure to also apply any updates/service releases, etc. Otherwise you will be out of synch with only half of the upgrade. C) Install into a new Windows directory: If you install into (say) "C:\Win98" instead of "C:\WINDOWS", then you know that you will only have things that you have explicitly installed. You will have to reinstall all of your applications. A caution: Some applications place data in the Windows directory (or a subdirectory thereof) and the data will no longer be available unless you move it. The application knows the location of its data relative to the actual Windows directory (say Win98) and will look for it there. For example, your browser may have stored "cookies" in the directory "COOKIES" under the Windows directory. Where previously it was in C:\WINDOWS\COOKIES, it will now look for it in C:\Win98\COOKIES and not find it. You can move the data by dragging the folder to the new location. If you aren't worried about this, you may delete the \WINDOWS directory and subdirectories below it when you are all finished. You will then reclaim a lot of disk space. D) Force a new registry, then install in place: The registry consists of four files: USER.DAT, USER.DA0, SYSTEM.DAT, and SYSTEM.DA0. There is also the original installation file C:\SYSTEM.1ST that Windows uses if you use the emergency recovery disk. You may want to get rid of it as well. To delete them you need to remove the hidden, read-only, and system attributes from the files. You can only do this if they are not open, so you must boot the machine via the F8 key and select "Command Prompt Only". Then enter these commands: cd\Windows attrib -r -s -h user.da? attrib -r -s -h system.da? del user.da? del system.da? cd\ attrib -r -s -h system.1st del system.1st Then start the installationby typing D:SETUP, where "D:" is your CD-ROM drive letter. This will give you a clean install, and application data stored within subfolders of Windows will be found by the application. However you may end up with orphaned .DLL files-files that aren't used by any applications. If you ever have to call Microsoft for support and the result is that you have to reinstall Windows, this is the method they walk you through. It works fine for upgrades too. Whenever you do any installations, be sure to disable antivirus software before you begin. Norton antivirus is especially prone to think that anything that tries to change the operating system, such as the boot tracks, is a virus. Also be sure to disable anything in your StartUp folder. I do this by creating a sub-folder called "Start Not" and dragging the contents to it. After I have finished reinstalling all of my applications, everything that is now in "Start Not" should have been placed into "Start Up" again. Leave installing the antivirus software for last. Lastly, for any install other than "clean hard disk" we would recommend using a utility such as "Clean Sweep" in Norton Utilities to find and remove these orphaned DLL files for you. Q. Last year I used a serial cable to move data from one notebook to another and it worked just fine. I am now trying to do it again with another notebook machine, and it doesn't work. I have the same cable that I used last time. A. If you are using the "direct cable connection" method that is in Windows 95, then you have run into a known bug that requires both machines to be using the same serial port, i.e. COM1 on one machine to COM1 on the other, or COM2 to COM2, etc. Often you can switch the identity of the physical comm ports via the BIOS setup screens (the physical ports are often known to the BIOS as Port A and Port B). Write down the current settings before you change anything, since your communications software probably expects the modem to be at, say, COM2. Q. What alternatives are there to using the "direct cable connection"? A. If this is going to be a day-to-day event, then you might consider putting in network capability via PC Card network adapters. For direct machine-to-machine connections, you do not need a hub; instead, get a Category 5 crossover cable. A crossover cable switches the transmit and receive wires for each for the four pairs in the cable. Another alternative is to use LapLink, which supports just about any type of connection you can imagine: direct cable, infrared, wireless, network, Internet, modem, or USB ports. You can purchase the software with or without cables. The USB cables are expensive (about $50). The LapLink cable works with serial or parallel ports and costs about $10. LapLink also has very intelligent "synchronization" software, so it will automatically move only files (or even parts of files) that have changed. This is especially nice if you are synchronizing over a relatively slow connection. We do not know of any other software that supports USB port connections. Q. I have a machine running Windows NT 4.0 with a set of internal SCSI drives. I have added a scanner and now things don't work. The scanner has the termination switch turned on. Suggestions? A. Almost all SCSI problems have to do with termination. A SCSI card can support up to seven devices, and may be anywhere in the "chain" of devices. Previously, your SCSI card was on the end of a chain, and all of the devices were connected to the internal connection on the card. The connection on the back of the machine had to have been terminated; since you didn't remove a termination plug when you connected the scanner's cable, it was probably terminated via a setting in the SCSI's BIOS setup. Now the card is in the middle of the chain, since there are disks connected to the internal connector and the scanner is connected to the external connector. With newer cards this can be examined and changed via the card's BIOS software, which is usually accessible during the system boot. For Adaptec cards, you type Ctrl-A when prompted to get into the SCSI's setup. Look for "internal termination of external connector." For older cards, you may have to move a jumper or resistor block on the card.