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Microsoft Windows OS Guides

Windows is better known to us as Windaes a Scottish pronunciation of the word. This page and those that it links to contain articles, guides, how to, issues and topics we at Total Support have logged.

Many problems we encounter with windows happen for the same reason or as a result of the same action. Meaning logical problems. For instance 'every time a user does x, y happens. 'Every time I use the computer this happens'.
Knowing the last function the computer correctly performed or the last time the computer was working and what did I do next gets to the bottom of the problem quickest. Trying to remember exactly what it was that changed the computer configuration is made more difficult when many changes are made simultaneously.

Our personal choice of operating system is Windaes NT. We like the (false) sense of security the system gives us. In all fairness we use it as a deterrent to put of casual nosey parkers from easily accessing our info. Lacking decent faxing software (integration) we use Windows 95 for that purpose. Defraging isn't really necessary with NT but occasionally we dump our files to another identical hard drive then swap the drives when the machine is switched off then power back up with a nicely defragmented hard drive.

We at Total Support like networking for networking sake. Sharing drives, CD writers, printers, modems, fax machines is what we wanted networking for. The faster the cabling and cards the better. We use our network to video conference with each other and play the occasional Rally Masters race (recommended), as a backup store for all our work and best of all every single album we all have is on MP3 format stored on a hard drive, nine gigabytes, over two hundred albums, about two thousand songs. All day intranet music. We each have our own play lists which we use in Xing and some nice compilations have been created from the many songs. A web server pushes the MP3 songs and keeps track of the most popular songs, dates and times played, number of times played etc, stored in an SQL table. We have also scanned all the covers and shrunk them to thumbnails displayed on a web page. Clicking The thumbnail starts the album streaming over the network through fairly decent sound blaster live cards and four point speakers (also standard on our own PCs).

In the early PC days none of us liked windaes. Particular hates about windaes were how easily you could delete the contents of your hard drive or how accidentally, files or folders could be moved or copied. The massive (at the time) overhead of windaes put us off and the swap file just ate your hard drive space (about 40MB total on our best PCs). Then there was the time it took to boot the machine to start actually doing any work (if you had any RAM left and it wasn't swapping to the hard drive already). In DOS only and a line added to autoexec.bat we could switch on, dial in to our mail server download messages and log off in nearly the same time Windows needs to boot to and the hour glass to disappear.

Things about windaes we like are multitasking, not having to relearn programs and application user interfaces (although that is changing, software authors are writing their own GUIs) and OnNow which works on most of our PCs.

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Copyright © 2000 TotalSupport Computer Workshop
Last modified: December 16, 2000