You Asked Us (PC) April 1998

by Alan Zisman (c) 1998. First published in Computer Player, April 1998

Adam Maybank asked:
 
 I JUST GOT NEW HARD DRIVE ( FUJITSU MPB3021AT 2.6G )  BUT I CAN'T GET IT TO WORK.
 
THE CMOS SETUP WILL RECOGNIZE THE HARD DRIVE, BUT WIN95 WON?T.
THE JUMPER SETTINGS ARE SET FOR PRIMARY SLAVE.
 
DO YOU HAVE ANY SUGGESTIONS?
 
Alan Zisman replied:

What version of W95 do you have (check by going to Control Panel, clicking on System, then General.)

If you have either 'Microsoft Windows 95 4.00.950' or '...950A' your problem is that those versions only support FAT16 file system, which can only support a maximum of a 2.0 gig drive partition.

In that case, you may want to run the DOS FDISK (you can do this from a DOS prompt within Win95), make sure it's set to look at your second drive (I think it looks at Drive 0 and Drive 1)... and create new partitions.

Afterwards, you'll have D: and E: hard drive partitions, and will need to run DOS FORMAT (FORMAT D:    and then FORMAT E: )... then, Win95 will support your drive.

If you're using WIn95B (4.00.950B), FDISK will let you switch to FAT32, and partition the whole drive as a single large partition... you'll still have to format it afterwards... Win 95/95A don't support FAT32.

(And do me a favor-- next time, please turn off CAPSLOCK... it's the e-mail equivalent of shouting!)

Sara Craven wondered:

I switched to Win95 a while ago and since I have an old 486 am running out of disk space. If I don't use any dos programs is it ok to delete the whole DOS directory? Will windows still work?
 
Alan commented:

Win95 is not dependent on the C:\DOS directory... it adds its own version of DOS to a \Windows\Command directory... so yes, you can safely delete C:\DOS and still even run DOS programs/DOS commands.

Win95 and Win95 programs are very hard drive space demanding. If you?re running low on drive space, you may want to look at adding a second hard drive (cheaper than ever), or compressing your existing drive with Drivespace (included with Win95).

The version of Drvspace included with the original Win95 can create compressed partitions as large as 512 meg... in other words, it is only useful on drive/partitions up to about 350 megs.

DrvSpace 3 is included with the Win95 Plus Pack, or with Win95B... it can create compressed partitions as large as 2 gigs.

In either case, it can be accessed from the Start Menu: Programs/Accessories/System Tools.

Robby Dittmann queried:

I've noticed several meg of *.tmp files floating around my Win95 directory.  Can I erase these?

If they don't have today's date, feel free...

Win95 or applications needs to create *.TMP files during many operations;
if you shut down properly, they should be cleaned up automatically. If your
system crashes or is turned off without being shut down, they may be left
behind.

For tidiness sake, you may want to make sure that you have a folder where
they go when created, and that any uncleaned TMP files are automatically
deleted at bootup... you can do that by:

1) Make sure that you have created a folder of your choice for such files... it
can be named anything, but I'd suggest C:\TEMP or C:\WINDOWS\TEMP

2) Add the following three lines to your boot AUTOEXEC.BAT file:

SET TEMP = C:\TEMP (or whatever)
SET TMP = C: \TEMP
IF EXIST C:\TEMP\*.TMP DEL C:\TEMP\*.TMP

Leon Van de Veegaete asked:

Can you run a Windows 95 program from a .BAT file ?

Yes... under Win95, batch files can start DOS programs, Windows programs  (16 bit as well as 32 bit), and  (using the START command) registered data file types.

The START command can be very handy. The command:
 START Mydoc.doc

would load the data file Mydoc.doc into Microsoft Word, for example.(You can use long filenames as well, by enclosing them in quotation marks:
 START ?My long filename.doc? )

As well, using the START command, you can make a batch file wait until you quit a program before processing the next line in the batch file. (Using the START /W parameter).

Note that it's often useful to set the properties for the batch file so that it will run minimized, and so that it will close upon exit-- otherwise, you end up with a terminated DOS window cluttering up your screen when the batch file is finished.