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SHORTCUTS
Those of you who have purchased Windows 9x/ME or have
seen it in operation, and are familiar with Windows 3.x,
may be wondering where all those icons for individual
programs and program groups have disappeared to. You
might appreciate the new interface, called
"cascading menus" that Microsoft has come up
with, where, after you click on the "Start"
button, a series of menus come bubbling up one after
another like a bunch of interconnected geysers. But you
still miss the ease of clicking twice on an icon for your
favorite and most-used programs.
Well, in Windows 9x/ME you can still do this, using a
facility called "shortcuts". When you first
boot up a working Windows system, you will undoubtedly
see several icons already lined up along the left edge of
your screen. These will be labelled such things as:
Setting Up MicroSoft Network, My Computer, Recycle Bin,
and others. These icons aren't really
"shortcuts", except the one about setting up
the Microsoft Network (you can tell by the absence of the
tiny boxed "bent arrow" in the bottom left-hand
corner), but they act similarly to shortcuts in that you
click twice on the icon in order to start up the
accompanying program. A shortcut will be an entity that
is "linked" to the actual program or directory
or file or other resource somewhere else.
I find myself constantly using the DOS editor, called
EDIT.COM, to create batch files and the articles for this
column and my other column "Nibbling at Boca
Bytes", so I created a shortcut for that program on
my desktop. Here is how you do it: go into
"Explorer", the Windows 9x replacement for
Windows 3.x "File Manager", which you find on
the Start Menu by going into "programs" and
then clicking on Explorer at the bottom of the second
menu. Then find the icon for "EDIT" in the
directory \WINDOWS\COMMAND. If you have not chosen to
turn off the Windows default for hiding MS-DOS
extensions, that's what you'll see in
"Explorer" or "My Computer" instead
of EDIT.COM. Hold down the secondary mouse button
(usually the right button, unless you've configured your
mouse for left-handed use), and drag the icon to a
convenient empty space on your desktop. After releasing
the right button, up pops a menu which includes among its
options "create shortcut(s) here". After
clicking on that option, you're all done.
I'll be giving you more ideas for using shortcuts in
future articles. Incidentally, the version of EDIT.COM
available with Windows 9x is much improved over what
you're used to in Windows 3.x. For one thing, you can
edit more than one file at a time!
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