Q–At work I use a standard 28.8 kbps modem connection for Web access and e-mail. At home I’m on a cable modem. I’d like to set up a LapLink or pcAnywhere-type hookup so I can send files between the two machines.
E-mail doesn’t work very well because of the large number of files I have to send. No one seems to know how to establish this hookup. (I even called my cable service, and they had no idea at all.) Any thoughts?
Bill Bilbro, Elk Grove Village
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A–A great many Web services have sprung up to solve your quandary over moving files from work to home and back again in today’s work-everywhere-you-hang-your-hat-or-else world, Mr. B.
I favor www.mydocsonline.com, which lets users store up to 20 megabytes on the company’s server machines for free, and then starts charging $10 per 50 mb. You log on from either your high speed cable modem at home or your 28.8 kbps clunker at work and the software lets you select large numbers of files for uploading.
The great thing here is that with all of your files on a Web server you can treat that server as though it were a huge hard drive that you can use to just access those files you need each day rather than worrying about total backups each day.
Other ways to do this are to sign up for the superb Yahoo! Briefcase service at http://briefcase.yahoo.com or to take advantage of the FTP (file transfer protocol) services that Internet service providers (including America Online) offer their customers for storing files on-line.
Q–I am a jazz musician (based in Chicago) who is attempting to make fullest use of e-mail to notify my current audience base, venues, producers, labels, etc. of upcoming performances and the release of my first CD. I am currently an AOL member. I use the entire suite of Microsoft Office products and am pretty precocious in using Access to manage a growing database. Effective marketing requires sending specialized messages and information to as many as 10 different groups within that database.
As you know, because AOL and Microsoft do not play well together, I must do double entry of all e-mail addresses and double creation of address books, maintaining and updating in both Access and in AOL. Do I really need AOL? Where shall I turn to do what I want to do?
Julie Volkmann, Munster, Ind.
A–You just need to cool out a tad and try a different riff with your computer, Ms. V. Instead of getting complicated and trying to set up a process where you set up address books to mail-merge addresses onto a form letter as one does in word processing, you can vastly simplify things by using the CC feature in the AOL e-mail software.
Set up a query in Access to extract just the e-mail addresses for everybody in your mailing list by whatever categories you want.
Next use the mouse or Control+A command to select all of the e-mail addresses in the data listed in the report created by your Access query.
Go to the AOL e-mail software, open a new message, click in the CC window and paste the entire contents of your query report.
By saving the queries you need for calling up various categories of people in your Access database, you can simply use the cut-and-paste trick with the reports each query produces to eliminate any need for double-entry address bookkeeping.
To make your e-mails quicker to read, use the BCC, or blind carbon copy, feature on AOL. Just put your whole list of recipients (separated by commas) within parentheses. That will send notes to everybody in the list but without those pesky headers showing everybody to whom the e-mail was sent.
Q–I just installed Windows 98 and Windows shuts down fine, but on rebooting I am forced to get back via the ScanDisk route. Is there a fix for this niggling problem?
Dr. Richard Messina,
Saugerties, N.Y.
A–Here’s what’s up, Doc: A component of Windows 98 called the Scheduled Tasks Agent has been set to run that pesky ScanDisk routine every time you turn on your PC. ScanDisk is a fine tool that checks the physical surface of the hard drive and the way that each bit of data is stored to ensure that everything is A-OK.
But it takes several minutes to run and can become the bane of one’s existence if the machine starts crashing a lot because Windows is set to run ScanDisk after every crash.
In your case, though, the culprit is just a bad setting you can change. Click on Start, then Programs and Accessories and System Tools. Open the icon called Scheduled Tasks and look for the one named ScanDisk . When you open that icon you will find an option to turn off the schedule that runs the program each time the computer starts.
Q–I read your column in today’s paper about how people who decide to try Windows computers can move their files created on a Macintosh onto a PC but will lose the formatting. I was a Mac user who moved to a Windows machine and solved the compatibility problem by buying two boxes of the AppleWorks software, one for the Macintosh and one for Windows. This lets me move word processing, database, spreadsheet and picture files between my Mac and my PC. That program is the best kept secret in the computer industry.
Eileen Nowicki,
South Amboy, N.J.
A–You were the first among a goodly number of people who chided me in a nice way for not suggesting to reader Natalie Rosenbaum that she buy software to solve the problem when she wanted to use on a Dell PC files that she had created in ClarisWorks on a Macintosh Performa.
While I told Ms. R. how to extract the data from those Claris files as ordinary text files that can be imported into either Macs or PCs, many readers said I should have suggested more expensive but also more effective software solutions.
AppleWorks is just superb, and I have written rave reviews about the new 6.0 version that just shipped. It can be bought at www.apple.com for $79. She would need to spend another $79 for AppleWorks for Windows, of course.
Other readers complained that I didn’t mention Conversions Plus from DataViz (www.dataviz.com), which costs $100 and converts files nicely between the two platforms.
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Q–I’m sure you’ve probably gotten a hundred messages on this, but in your answer to Ron Rosensweet the other day you mentioned that Microsoft had cut QBasic from Windows98. This is true for the typical installation, but insert the Windows98 installation CD and select Browse this CD.
When the window opens, double-click the Tools folder. In the new window you will find a folder called Oldmsdos. If you open this folder you’ll find qbasic.exe and qbasic.hlp.
If you drag these two files into c:
windows
command folder, you will have QBasic. I got this from “SAMS Beginning Programming.” Thanks.
Gene Eldridge, San Jose, Calif.
A–Thank me? No, thank you, Mr. E. I got just a few messages telling me about how Microsoft sneaked a copy of the DOS-only QBasic programming language into Windows 98 after deciding to drop it from the advertised contents.
Your note, however, was hands down the clearest, most concise description of how to find QBasic on that CD and make it work.
Thanks right back at you.
———-
Contact Jim Coates via e-mail at [email protected] or via snail mail at the baiduhai, Room 400, 435 N. Michigan Ave., Chicago, 60611. If you think you’ve got a better answer to any of these questions add your point of view at chicagotribune.com/go/askjim