Q. Windows 3.1 had an accessory program called Cardfile (.crd extension), a free-format index card system for phone numbers, addresses etc. I have a file of about 300 cards with phone numbers that I auto-dial. Unfortunately, Windows 95 does not contain this little program. What are my options? Thanks for your help.
Dave Meagher @wpo.it.luc.edu
A. Cardfile is simple and elegant and takes up a tiny 140,000-byte footprint on your hard drive. Naturally, Microsoft deep-sixed it at the first opportunity and left it out of Windows 95.
If you still have your machine with Windows 3.1 on it, just go to the Windows directory and copy two files, cardfile.exe and cardfile.hlp, onto a floppy, then copy them into the Windows directory in Windows 95. If you don’t have Windows 3.x, look for a friend who does and copy them (your license to use Windows 95 includes an upgrade from 3.1, so there are no legal issues involved).
If you can’t find Cardfile, there are excellent shareware programs that will read Cardfile data and even convert it into files that can be read by other programs. My favorite is a $20 shareware called Jot+.
You can find Jot+ and a long list of other Cardfile shareware by going to www.shareware.com and typing cardfile in the search box.
Q. While it’s fairly rare that I find myself in need of your column, I always enjoy reading it. On that note, I’ve seen people writing to you asking about Internet providers other than AOL in the Chicago area. And you often mention World Wide Access (www.wwa.net), MCS (www.mcs.net) and a few others. Well the choices are MUCH wider than they were just a year ago. Living out here in the boondocks of Joliet, I had a severely limited choice of providers just last year, but now there are probably more than 20 different ISPs with local dialups for me.
A terrific resource for finding a local ISP is a Web page provided by Randy Smith. You can just type in your area code and prefix and it’ll list all the ISPs that are A band calls for you.
Check it out: http://www.mcs.net/(tilde)wsmith/providers.html. (Editor’s note: Use the tilde character on your keyboard where indicated.)
John George @megsinet.net
A. The column is called “Ask Jim Why,” but some of the very best stuff that I get to offer readers in this space comes when folks like yourself decide to Tell Jim How. The Web site you cite is, indeed, a superb resource for just about every imaginable player in the Internet access business in this neck of the world wide woods. I would caution that the quality of the actual connection to the Internet that you get with various resellers of service varies widely, as does the asking price. Still, it never hurts to shop around.
Q. Using Netscape Navigator, how do you print out a hard copy of all bookmarks, including the file names under which they are stored, in which each URL of every site bookmarked is displayed on the printout? There is a tremendous need in our office to print out all the URLs in a given file and go through it, circling selected sites, and then turn it over to a research assistant to check out those selected sites for a specific research topic. I suspect other offices would appreciate learning how to do this.
David Hetzel, Chicago
A. You need to cheat a bit, but your scheme to print out bookmarks is just a couple of keystrokes and mouse clicks away from success. Choose the Bookmarks window in Netscape and you’ll get a display of all the URLs and folders holding URLs on the machine. Click on all of the folders one by one to list the contents of each.
Then, with everything displayed, you simply press the Control key and the A key for “select all.” Then press Control plus C for “copy all.”
Next call up your word processor and choose Edit and Paste. (You also can just press Control plus V).
The stuff pasted will be a list of every URL in the bookmarks, which you can print out and circle to your heart’s content.
Q. I recently restored my computer to its original factory condition. This was necessitated by grandkids’ activities on the computer. When I tried to restore the data files to my WordPerfect program using the backup/restore feature of Windows 95, all I got was error messages. I can locate the data files in the directory tree in Windows Explorer but cannot access them. Any ideas?
Jim Haverty @compuserve.com
A. Most likely your data files are no longer in the directory that WordPerfect used to save documents. So you need to point the “File/Open” box in WordPerfect to the directory where you are finding the *.doc WordPerfect files with Explorer.
You can either just leave the documents there and return to edit them as needed, or else load them into WordPerfect one by one and save them where you want.
Keep in mind, too, that when you load word processing files under Windows 95, shortcuts for the last dozen or so documents you work on are kept in the “Documents” folder, which you can always reach by clicking on the “Start” button in the lower left corner of your screen.
Q. I use Sprint as the provider for access to the Internet and e-mail. I would like to switch to Ameritech, as they have a local call number. I am currently set up with Netscape and Sprint e-mail. Is there any way to receive both Sprint e-mail and Ameritech e-mail until I cancel Sprint? I would like to keep Sprint until I have notified all of the people who e-mail me. I tried to set up the program to run both, but Ameritech “Netscape” wipes out the Sprint “Netscape.”
Steve Moore @sprintmail.com
A. This is a really tough nut to crack, because Ameritech requires its customers to dial in to an Ameritech number in order to send e-mail, which means that with an Ameritech account you can’t get full benefit from the powerful Internet feature called Popmail, which would have made your transition from Sprint to Ameritech much easier.
In this writer’s opinion this is a small glitch in light of the other benefits of Ameritech e-mail, most notably the fact that you always make a local call and the connections tend to be rock-solid reliable. But the Popmail remains a problem if you travel or use multiple accounts.
Popmail normally lets you connect to any Internet server you can find and then jump from service provider to service provider and take care of e-mail at each one.
For example, I often log on to my account at the Microsoft Network and then use that connection to handle my e-mail accounts at MCSNet and AIS Net in Chicago.
But this feature opens the door to a raft of security problems, and Ameritech doesn’t support it, which means that you can log on to Sprint and then read your Ameritech e-mail, but you can’t answer the Ameritech mail until you dial in on Ameritech’s lines.
Obviously Ameritech, which also is the phone company, benefits here, since you must use their lines in order to make the call if your Popmail is going to work in send mode.
So during the period of time when you plan to have both Sprint and Ameritech accounts, you will need to make an end run. Specifically, you must find the Ameritech e-mail settings and then manually type them in whenever you want to use the browser you set up for Sprint to do your Ameritech stuff. You will need to restore the Sprint settings afterward to use that service.
First of all, load Ameritech and let it overwrite Sprint. Next run Netscape and go to “Options” and select “Mail and News Preferences.” Write down the stuff that comes up showing your Popmail account information. My account at Ameritech, for example, is mailhost.chi.ameritech.net. This address should be typed into the boxes for both Popmail (receiving) and SMTP (sending).
Now load Sprint to overwrite Ameritech and, once again, write down the e-mail settings you find under “options-e-mail preferences” for Sprint.
Only one more step remains, so stick with me.
If you click on the My Computer icon in Windows 95, you will find a folder for “Dial-Up Networking.” In that folder will be icons to dial into both Sprint and Ameritech.
Click to dial the number for whichever one you want after you have inserted the Popmail and SMTP settings in Netscape.
This obviously is a short-term fix only, because it would make you crazy if you had to do this every time you wanted to check all your e-mail.
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Contact Jim Coates via e-mail at jcoates@tribune.com or snail mail at the Chicago Tribune, 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 www.chicago.tribune.com/go/askjim.
