T 'n' T: Exasperations 'n' Irritations Fixing Five Flea Bites That Bug Windows Users Gregg Keizer
Mon 2/4/02 -- Windows has a way of getting under your skin. Just as with a bad bug bite, you scratch and you scratch, but get no relief. In fact, if you're not careful, you'll go crazy. That's Windows in a nutshell.
Maybe your itchiest Windows irritations are big ones -- like the way it takes forever to load, or how it has more breakdowns than Anne Heche and Mariah Carey combined. Me? I have a long list, too, but most of my gripes are on the minor side. And luckily, many of them can be fixed one way or another.
For example, here are five Windows stings that really get me scratching, and the tips 'n' tricks salves that make them go away.
Have it your way. Argghh! You go to all the trouble to arrange a Windows Explorer folder just so -- the view you like, the order of the icons -- and then the next time you open the thing, it's turned traitor and snapped back to the operating systems' default iconic display format. Here's how to force folders in Windows Me, 2000, and XP to remain as you left them: click the Start menu's Settings entry, then open Control Panel. Select Folder Options and click the View tab. Scroll down the "Advanced settings" list, find and check the "Remember each folder's view settings" box, and click OK.
To do the same in Windows 98, open Windows Explorer and choose Folder Options from the View menu. Click the View tab, check "Remember each folder's view settings," and click OK.
Playing peek-a-boo with programs. Perhaps not wanting Windows to look even more Mac-like than it already does, Microsoft stuck the taskbar at the bottom of the screen (the Mac OS equivalent has been at the top of the display since 1984). But for my money, the top is the smart spot. As you know, you can move the Windows taskbar there (or to the left or right side of the display) just by dragging and dropping it.
One problem, though: Once the taskbar leaves its usual bottom-of-screen location, some applications -- including several from Redmond -- turn stupid and try to hide part of themselves under the taskbar. You can't move these program windows without first hiding the taskbar so you can see the title bar -- the part you drag and drop -- of the window beneath. Major migraine.
Although older editions of Windows -- 95 and NT in particular -- are most susceptible to this irritation, I've had it happen to me even in XP. The fix? Try Shove-It 1.5, a $15 shareware utility that loads into the system tray on startup and automatically prevents program windows from wandering off an edge of the desktop or under the taskbar.
Let my taskbar go! Windows XP's taskbar can be locked, sayeth the Help file, so that "it cannot be moved to a new location on the desktop." Yeah, right. As if we're all constantly dragging the taskbar from the bottom to the top of the screen by accident.
My beef with this feature is that a locked taskbar prevents you from expanding the QuickLaunch toolbar to the right of the Start button to accommodate more program icons. (Assuming you've enabled it -- right-click the Taskbar, select Toolbars, and check QuickLaunch -- you can drag icons to the toolbar, but unless there's room to show them, they vanish off the right edge, where you must click the arrows to summon a pop-up menu.)
Unlock the Win XP taskbar by right-clicking anywhere on it, then select the Lock the Taskbar item so the checkmark beside it disappears. Now you can drag the line separating the QuickLaunch toolbar from the rest of the taskbar to make the former big enough to display all your favorite apps' icons.
Don't tell Bill. Someone at Microsoft thought this was a good idea: Every time an application crashes in Windows XP, you're asked if you want to send an error report to Microsoft. No, thanks, I have better things to do with my bandwidth than help Redmond figure out why Internet Explorer works about as often as those guys leaning on shovels around construction sites.
To turn off this irritation, right-click My Computer and pick Properties. Click the Advanced tab, then the Error Reporting button, and check the "Disable error reporting" box. (I leave the "But notify me when critical errors occur" box checked, so Windows warns me when my PC's ready to really melt down.)
I can't see you. At last -- Windows XP is the first Microsoft OS that lets you hide items in the system tray (often called the systray; it's the part of the taskbar at the far right, including the clock), so that you don't waste precious space on icons representing utilities that launch automatically each time Windows boots. To configure this, right-click in the Win XP systray (on an empty spot between two of the icons) and choose Customize Notifications. Select an item and then pick from the three options in the drop-down list: "Hide when inactive," "Always hide," or "Always show." The first is my favorite, since then the icon appears only when the program's in use (or has been used recently).
Other editions of Windows don't offer this nifty feature, so you'll have to lean on a piece of shareware, called -- hey, this is original -- SysTrayX. This utility lets you assign rarely-used systray icons, such as the volume control, to a pop-up menu; you can download and try it for free and, if you like it, pay just $15.
Note that neither XP's Customize Notifications tool nor SysTrayX prevent programs from loading at Windows boot and putting icons into the system tray; they simply disable the display of icons. To review (and optionally disable) the stuff loaded at startup, you can use Start/Run and enter MSCONFIG; that utility's Startup tab lets you uncheck items on the self-launching list. Windows 2000 and NT, alas, don't have MSCONFIG, but you can get the same functionality from a nifty utility called Startup Control Panel.
