Number 197 - October 1999

UPDATE
Outsmarted By My Computer     In a tale of disaster, panic, and recovery (see Disaster Recovery) your editor cries over spilt coffee, how the machine and Windows98 outsmarted him when he tried to recover, and how the experience and calm of a dispassionate outsider saved the day. It happened. You'd be wise to read it. Finally! A Piece for Gamers?     Computer games aren't all fun and games to developers and promoters or even retailers. Some real world problems and realities of the marketplace are discussed in a longer-than-normal article, The Business of Computer Video Games. You gamers may think the trials and tribulations of game developers are of no concern to you, but if you want better, more original and challenging games to play, you're advised to look for the game author's name rather than the marketer's logo. Read the article for a developer's point of view. Registry Clean Up Not New     RegClean is not new. (See Yeeeehaaaaa! I Did the Registry! in the Table of Contents - press the BACK Button below). We wrote about this months ago and have a shareware version of RegClean in our disk library. But we have several new members who may not be aware of this neat utility so we are running another version of the same article. See Librarians Tom or Dave Stepanek for a copy, maybe even a later version.	Carl is Back!     Carl Tenning never left really--just hasn't written articles for a while. He has three contributions in this issue. This first one harks back several years to newsletter items variously labeled "Stunned Silence" and "Blank Stare" -- the reaction of a fellow computer user when told of an obvious, often simple, solution to a problem that the user should have thought of himself. Blank Stare Collection     Carl Tenning, Tacoma Open Group     Here are a couple for the blank stare collection.     1. When viewing a drive in Windows Explorer, press the * key on the numeric keypad to expand all the sub-folders on the selected drive.     [But caution! You may have to manually collapse them again. -ed]     2. On a Windows 95 keyboard, pressing the Windows logo key together with the letter e key will bring up Windows Explorer.     [In our Windows 98, it brings up Explore My Computer and displays the Desktop with My Computer directory tree displayed. -ed.]
Number 197 - October 1999