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I find the "shortcut" facility of Windows 95, which was described briefly in a previous column, very useful. As mentioned before, the DOS Editor, EDIT.COM, is one of my shortcuts. Another is Windows Explorer. (Why put up with all this in order to start up Explorer, surely one of the most important and often-used parts of Windows: click on the Start button, maneuver your mouse pointer to the "Programs" item, then over to the new menu that "cascades" down, then down to the bottom-most item on that menu, where you click in order to choose Explorer? If you make a shortcut to Explorer on your desktop, then all you have to do is move the mouse over to the new icon and then click twice...)

I also use ScanDisk and WordPad quite regularly, so I've created shortcuts for them. (Both normally require you to progress through several nested cascading menus to access them.) You should run the ScanDisk utility fairly often because it's like sending your hard disk drive to a medical doctor and giving it a physical exam. Various tests are performed in order make sure your system is operating up to par, and any minor problems found can be corrected right on the spot. WordPad is the New and Improved ("with green crystals!") version of the basic word processing program Windows Write that came free in Windows 3.x. One of the books about Windows 95 I've read -- I believe it was Que Books' "The Complete Idiot's Guide to Windows 95", by Paul McFedries -- referred to WordPad as "Windows Write on steroids". Nice way of putting it, and pretty accurate, too. Maybe I'll write a future column or two on WordPad...