Basic instincts
I used to do a lot of things on my old Acorn BBC computer using Basic: solving complicated equations, statistical mechanics etc. Do you know of anything that would do the same on a PC? PeterRowland
PeterRowland@compuserve.com
Jack Schofield: Those were the days, and they haven't quite gone. Although BBC Basic appeared first on the Acorn BBC, an Intel-compatible version has been on sale almost unchanged for 14 years. It was written by Richard T Russell and others at the BBC, and costs £50. You can download an evaluation version of BBC BASIC (86) Plus from Russell's website at www.rtrussell.co.uk, or try an alternative implementation called BBCBASIX at www.bbcbasic.com. The drawback is that both were written for MS-DOS, not Windows.
If you are nostalgic for the BBC B Microcomputer, there are lots of emulation programs for PC. There's a useful list on The BBC lives! website at www.nvg.ntnu.no/bbc/emulators.shtml.
But if your nostalgia is for the Basic language, why not go back to the source? Basic was created by John Kemeny and Thomas Kurtz at Dartmouth College in the US in 1964. They offer several versions of True Basic for different platforms, including Windows and Mac OS. Prices start at $39.95 for the Bronze Edition. You can download a trial version from www.truebasic.com.
Use this
My photos open by default in Adobe Business. I wish them to open in Adobe Photoshop or Corel. Can I change the default program? Yvonne Kedge
y.kedge@lineone.net
JS: This is a frequently-asked question (FAQ) because Microsoft has put the control panel where few people think to look for it.
First, find one of the photos you want to open in Photoshop and check the three letter extension (it's probably .jpg).
Then open an Explorer Window by, for example, double-clicking the My Computer icon. Select View and then Options, and click on the tab for File Types. Scroll down to select the entry for the program that "owns" the .jpg extension (Adobe Business in your case), and click the button that says Remove. Use OK to close the tabbed dialogue box.
Go back to the photo you wanted to open in Photoshop, and double click the file. You'll be asked to choose the program you want to load it, so take your pick (Adobe Photoshop or Corel in your case). A tick box lets you make that choice for future files too.
You can "associate" each type of file with only one program. However, you can still load a file into a different program by, for example, using the mouse to drag the file from Explorer and drop it on the open program or on its icon.
Exit Excite
I have another email address in Excite and would like to be able to get my mail from Excite in my Outlook Express inbox. How do I do that? Lily Mcloughlin
Lily@rocastle35.freeserve.co.uk
JS: Sorry, you can't do that: Excite has not made its POP3 mail server publicly accessible, and nor have most providers of web-based email. You could, however, switch to Yahoo, which does let you collect email with Outlook Express.
Cleaning up Windows
Our PC has been upgraded from Windows 3.1 to Windows 98. It is functioning well, but the Windows directory is huge. It seems not to have deleted any old files, but just left them there. Because it is on a relatively small 1GB disk, the disk is nearly full. The PC has another disk onto which I load any new programs.
How can I reclaim some of the space taken up by unused W3.1 files?
Hannes Botha
hannes.botha@ntlworld.com
JS: Microsoft gives each file in each version of Windows its own time and date stamp. If you sort a Windows Explorer directory by date (go to View|Details then click the Modified tab in Explorer), you will be able to see how many files belong to which version. For example, all the W95 files on my W95 PC were created at 9:50 on 11/07/95.
However, deleting files that may still be in use is not recommended. The best approach is to do a "clean" install of Windows instead of an upgrade, but this means reinstalling all your applications too.
There are many programs that will analyse the contents of your hard drive and try to identify surplus files. The one I've used with some success is Quarterdeck's CleanSweep, which is now owned by Norton/Symantec. It costs about £35, or half the cost of a bigger hard drive.
Deleting temporary (.tmp) files manually may save some space. To do this, close down all programs and restart your PC. Go to Sart|Find|Files or Folders and type *.tmp next to Named. This will find all the temporary files on C:. You can delete them by using Ctrl-A (select all) then hitting the Del key.
