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              PCM Online  August 1995 - BBSCON Edition

SOLUTIONS Contents:

   []  Customizing Windows 95: Your Personal Logo Screen
   []  How Much Free Space? A quick way to check disk space <PROGRAM: 
          FREESPC.COM>

Entire contents copyright 1995 by Falsoft, Inc.

PCM -- The Premier Personal Computer Magazine -- is intended for the 
private use and pleasure of its subscribers, and reproduction by any 
means is prohibited.

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Customizing Windows 95
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                       YOUR PERSONAL LOGO SCREEN


   So you just got that neat Windows 95 package and now you want to do 
some customizing? How about your own personal logo screen?

   Here's how.

   The standard logo for Win95 is included in a file called MSDOS.SYS. 
You can't do anything about that, but if you prepare a different logo 
and set it up just right, Win95 will replace the "standard" logo with 
your own when you boot up Windows.

   The simple way to do this is to create a 320x400 256-color bitmap 
(extension .BMP) file, draw, import graphics or do anything else you 
want with it, and then save it to the root directory of Drive C. Rename 
the file LOGO.SYS. Restart Win95 and you will see your file displayed on 
the screen as Win95 prepares to run.

   Looks a little jagged, doesn't it?

   Well, that's because Win95 stretches the bitmap to fit your screen. 
You can't eliminate all of the jaggedness, but you can fix some of it 
simply by creating the same file in 800x600 256-color mode, saving it, 
and then bringing it back in and resizing it to 320x400. That file will 
look a little squinched up, but it will size out to 320x400 with fewer 
jagged edges when Win95 runs than if you create the file in 320x400 in 
the first place.

   Note 1: if you want to keep the clouds as a background, there is a 
file on the Win95 CD called "clouds" that has this graphic. You can use 
it as a background to whatever you use for your main design.

   Note 2: some of the 16-bit graphic design programs (such as Picture 
Publisher 5.0, not the Win95 version) will append the appropriate 
extension to your save file in Win95 even if you have specified the 
extension in the "Save" or "Save As" dialog box. When this happens, you 
can get a filename that looks something like NEWLOGO.BMP.BMP. This is 
logical because, remember, Win95 supports long filenames, which can 
include spaces and punctuation. If this happens to you, just rename the 
file from the Explorer and, next time you save, do not specify the 
extension in the dialog box.

   Note 3: not satisfied with just changing the logo onscreen? Then you 
can also edit the two logoff screens as well, the one that asks you to 
wait while Win95 shuts down, and the one that tells you it is safe to 
turn off your computer. These two files are named LOGOW.SYS and 
LOGOS.SYS (even though they are .BMP files) and are located in the Win95 
directory. A word to the wise: make backup copies of these files before 
you try to change or overwrite them.

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How Much Free Space?
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                 DETERMINE YOUR FREE STORAGE SPACE


   Keeping tabs on the available disk space on all your drives can be 
tough, especially if you have a lot of drives. But when you're trying to 
install a new program, you've got to know where there's room to put it. 
One method of determining available drive space is to run CHKDSK on each 
drive. Unfortunately this process is time-consuming because the entire 
disk is checked to ensure its integrity. It also requires a lot of 
typing. If you have NDOS, you can reduce the amount of time required by 
CHKDSK by running FREESPC on each drive, but this still requires a lot 
of typing.

   FREESPC (a really handy utility!) provides a quick and easy way to 
determine the amount of free space available on each drive. Just type 
FREESPC and press ENTER. FREESPC shows you the size of each drive, its 
available free space, and the percentage of free space. The capacity and 
free space are indicated in numbers of bytes.

   Do note that although FREESPC does not check floppy drives (drives A 
and B) and network drives, it does check all other local drives -- 
including removable media such as SyQuest and Bernoulli drives, and CD-
ROM drives. Although checking CD-ROM drives is somewhat useless since 
you can't directly write to a CD, we found it easier to simply include 
CD-ROM drives. This is because DOS treats a CD-ROM drive just like any 
other type of removable media. Error checking is also built-in, so you 
won't see the dreaded "Retry, Abort, Fail" message if you don't have a 
disk in a removable-media drive. In such a case, FREESPC traps the error 
and bypasses that drive with no further ado.

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