Glen Cove Computing News

Welcome to the February Issue of Glen Cove Computing News. Happy Valentine's Day to all you incurable romantics out there. I've surfed high and low for Valentine's Day sites. Every once in a while we have to drag ourselves away from our computer and spend some quality time with our significant other. So here's some links to help you woo his or her heart.

This fourth issue of the Glen Cove Computing News also features some helpful Tech Tips, the Internet Site of the Month, the Internet Technology of the Month, and the Cartoon of the Month.

• Make A Personal Valentine's Web Page. For only $9.95, you can assemble your own Personalized Valentine's Web Page for your loved one! It can be shown worldwide over the net, or it can be kept private.

• Sugarplums!. Informative resouce on how to make Valentine's Day into an incredible experience.

• The Valentine Thief An illustrated Valentine's day story for the kids.

• Valentine's Day. The History of Valentine's Day.

• One of the major problems I have with the Windows 95 interface is the way submenus appear and disappear on the Start Menu. Clicking the Start Menu and moving your mouse vertically causes submenus to automatically pop out. On a notebook computer this can make navigating the Start Menu extremely difficult. Here's an easy way to have your Windows 95 menus work like Windows 3.x menus.

1. Run C:\WINDOWS\REGEDIT.EXE
2. In the Windows that appears click the plus sign to the left of Hkey_Current_User, then click the plus sign to the left of the Control Panel subfolder. In the items that appear underneath the Control Panel, click the Desktop folder to select it.
3. Right-click a blank space in the right-hand window of RegEdit. In the pop-up menu that appears, click New then click String Value.
4. Type in the variable name MenuShowDelay. Press
5. Right-click the word MenuShowDelay in the right pane, then click Modify. In the dialog box that appears, type in the value 65534. This sets the maximum delay before submenus pop out. The default value is 250 if you ever want to set it back.
6. After you've set the variable to 65534, click OK, then exit RegEdit.
7. You must restart Windows 95 for your change to take effect.

• You can use the right mouse button to drag and drop objects to Win 95 applications, Explorer, and the desktop. It works just like dragging and dropping with the left mouse button, but when you let go of the button, a context menu pops up asking you how to drop the item. What list of actions you can perform depends on the type of object you're dragging and its destination. For folders you get Move Here, Copy Here, and Create Shortcut Here.

• The easiest way to copy files between overlapping windows on the desktop is to drag the file from the source folder (the foreground) to the button representing the target folder on the Taskbar and hold it there. After a short delay, the target folder gains the focus and comes to the foreground, where you can easily drop your file. With this method, there is no need for jockeying to try to keep part of both folders in view.

• You can run Windows apps from a DOS window and avoid navigating through menus to find the program. Enter the executable name at the DOS prompt, and if the file is in your path, the app will load into a new windows.

The Internet Site of the month for February is ALTA VISTA: THE LARGEST WEB INDEX. Find pointers to your home page; find an old friend; find out what the other indexes missed. You have access to all 8 billion words found in over 16 million Web pages.

ALTA VISTA is the result of a research project started in the summer of 1995 at Digital's Research Laboratories in Palo Alto, California. By combining a fast Web crawler with scalable indexing software, the team was able to build a large index of the Web in the Fall of 1995.

After two months of internal testing, they produced an even larger index consisting of the full text of over 16,000,000 pages. Digital made the site public on the 15th of December 1995. Within three weeks of launch, they were handling over two million HTTP requests per day.

The Internet Technology of the month for February is Smart Bookmarks from First Floor Software. Smart Bookmarks is the first Internet monitoring solution. Smart Bookmarks brings changed or added Internet information directly to your desktop. You can Download Smart Bookmarks for a 30 day evaluation.

Smart Bookmarks can help you keep an eye on your competition by monitoring their press releases and product information published on their Web sites. You can also use Smart Bookmarks to stay on top of pricing and special programs from business partners or vendors. It’s also the fastest way to keep on top of Internet news services and publications without having to spend a lot of time browsing for news articles.