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player ready...Q. Can you help me get rid of the annoying prompt that comes up every two or three minutes if I haven’t touched the mouse or keyboard asking “do you wish to disconnect. …” No one seems to have a solution for this, including my Internet provider and Microsoft people, so I need some help, pretty please, etc.
Don Otis @ips.net
A. This bug that is driving you to distraction is supposed to be a feature that will prevent running up phone bills if you forget you’re on-line and walk away from your computer. But, as you note, Mr. O., when it gets set too low it can reduce a grown man to the state of pleading “pretty please” for relief.
To disable the nagging, you need to change the settings in your Web browser for issuing the time-out warning. Click on the Tools menu and then pick Internet Options. In the menu that comes up next, pick Connections and then look for a choice marked Settings. Select Advanced in the next menu and you will have two check boxes–one for setting the length of time before issuing the warning and the other to turn the warning on and off.
Q. Because they are too large to fit on a floppy disk, I am having big troubles moving some very big word processing files from my old computer onto my new IBM Aptiva with Windows 98 installed. Do I need to get a Zip Drive? I have a tape drive at the office for backup, but not on the one at home, just a floppy and a CD drive.
Joe Ottenheimer @aol.com
A. Hang on to your wallet, Mr. O., instead of a $150 Zip drive, you just need a free piece of shareware called WinZip 8.0 to crunch that fat word processing file down to size so you can copy it to a floppy on the old computer and then move it on to that spanking new Aptiva.
Thanks to the late Phil Katz, the Wisconsin-born genius who invented the file zipping process called PKZip, it is possible to squeeze certain files (particularly straight word processor documents) into one-tenth of their original size, allowing a mere floppy to carry huge amounts of data.
Better yet, WinZip even allows users to span particularly large files over multiple floppies, so you’re covered no matter how big your files get.
Log on to www.winzip.com and get an evaluation copy of the software and use it to get yourself past the current glitch. You can always pay the $30 registration fee later if you decide you must have it.
Q. Every week or so I upload an HTML page to AOL (City Council agenda to http://members.aol. com/Saratogans). I’ve been doing this for several years and about 5 percent of the time the result is hash. The upload appears to go just fine, but when I turn a browser to look at the result, it’s garbage. Suggestions? Explanations?
Tom Moran, Saratoga, Calif.
A. Your problem almost certainly stems from the fact that you are inadvertently cutting off the first character in the Web page’s coding document, the so-called hypertext markup language computer code that controls the display on the browsers of people who visit your site.
The code for all Web sites must start with the code at the top, and many people have lopped off that first carat during the editing process. Computers display everything that happens after a dropped initial carat as hash.
Click on View in your Web browser and then select Source to look at the coding of your errant pages. Make sure that they start with and end with the proper coding and once again all will be sublime in Saratoga on-line.
Q. My computer has quit printing maps from the Internet. It prints all of the information on the page including the cardinal directions, but it does not print any part of the actual map.
Jack Williams @earthlink.net
A. Try these two things and your printer should be popping out maps once again, Mr. W. First press Control+P for print with the browser running, then click Properties, then Image Options to check the settings for your printer regarding brightness, contrast and such. There is a good chance the brightness setting is wrong and the computer is not ordering the printer to pump out ink for the bright yellow used by Mapquest.com for those map pictures.
If that doesn’t do the trick, change your browser’s printing settings by clicking on Tools/Internet Options and Advanced and then scroll down to Print. There is a single box labled Print Background Colors and Images. If this choice is not checked, change it while printing maps.
Q. Do you know of any Windows program, freeware, shareware or retail, which is comparable to the Scrapbook that is built into the Macintosh’s control panel? I use the Scrapbook frequently and find it convenient for storing my favorite graphics.
Mary Galvan, San Jose, Calif.
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A. My candidate for the Windows version of Apple Computer Inc.’s superb Scrapbook multimedia file holder is superslick software called MultiMedia Explorer 2.0 by Moon Software Inc. (www.moonsoftware.com).
Both Scrapbook and MM Explorer run in the background while you are using a word processor or other program and allow you to quickly retrieve photos, sounds, movies or animations from elsewhere on your computer and paste them into the work at hand.
MM Explorer is a far more ambitious program than Scrapbook because it offers things like slide shows of photos, conversions among graphics formats and such file management features as batch rename and the ability to tag groups of files for moving or deletion. At $25 MM Explorer is a bargain–but that’s $25 Mac owners don’t have to spend.
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Contact Jim Coates via e-mail at [email protected] or via snail mail at the baiduhai, Room 400, 435 N. Michigan Ave., Chicago, IL 60611. Questions can be answered only through the column. Add your point of view at chicagotribune.com/go/askjim.