Q. I have asked several computer gurus how I can correct a problem I’m having with printing out e-mail. When I send a message the printout does not follow what I see on my desktop. In other words, the sentences are printed out erratically, starting and stopping all over the page, which makes for a herky-jerky reading. What can I do to correct this? E-mail from other parties is sometimes received in the same erratic way, but not always.
Warren Ojibwa @sierranet.net
A. Ah, Mr. O, I can only tell you that I wish I had a magic bullet to fix the phenomenon of line feed burping in e-mail. The problem is that e-mail is produced in programs that vary greatly in width and the software often uses traditional paragraphing to make the sentences wrap to fit its window. When you call these notes up in different software, the paragraph cutoffs get out of synch, giving that annoying herky-jerky look.
Best advice I can offer is to load the e-mail into a word processor and set it to display all paragraph marks. You can then either clean them up one by one or do a search and replace.
You will note when displaying the paragraph marks that each line ends with one of them but at the places where real paragraphs should occur there are two paragraph signs instead of one.
First, do search and replace for two paragraph marks together and replace these with something like zzzzz.
Then replace all single paragraph marks with a blank space. Finally do a search and replace to change all zzzzz occurrences to a single paragraph mark.
Better yet, do what I mostly do: Just put up with the herky-jerky.
Q. First, you have a great column–no technobabble, just the goods. Second, my problem:
I deleted Greetings Workshop from my computer, but now every time I start up, I get a message that says that it can’t find gwremind.exe to run Greetings Workshop (DUH!). I click OK, then I get another message that restates the obvious and then says “remove any reference to gwremind.exe in the WIN.INI file.” How do I keep these messages from appearing, and how do I remove the above stated reference? I have Win95 (of course, or else I wouldn’t have these problems!). I know enough about computers to know one shouldn’t mess around needlessly with .INI files.
Help! This is driving me nuts.
Linda Barnes @aol.com
A. Gulp, your praise about avoiding technobabble likely will get withdrawn when I get done telling you what to do.
Just as the machine says, you will get that irksome error message every time you turn the machine on until you bite the bullet and do what Bill Gates tells you to do. To wit:
Click on Start and then Run. Type in the program name “sysedit.”
A window will come up with the .ini file and several others waiting to be edited.
All you need to do is browse through the .ini file and find every line with gwremind.exe in it. Then type “REM” in front of each of those lines and save it when prompted.
On the off chance you do something wrong you can run sysedit again and restore things by removing REM.
It’s not anywhere near as scary doing this as it is reading about it. Give it a go.
Q. This is in response to a question William A. West submitted to your April 27 column. He had asked if it were possible to record a CD track and play it backward and you were only able to supply him with half of the answer; how to play it backward. Here is how he can record a CD track without extra software.
1) Start Sound Recorder (Start/Programs/Accessories/Multimedia).
2) Start CD Player (Start/Programs/Accessories/Multimedia)
3) In CD Player, select the desired track and press play.
4) Once the track has begun (or even before if you don’t want to miss any part of it) click Record in Sound Recorder.
5) Click stop to stop recording and select Reverse in the Effects menu.
6) Click Play and revel in your new, reversed audio track.
By the way, you can also click Save in the File menu to save your new .wav file for posterity.
Hope this helps everyone out. . . . By the way, love your column.
Peter Quinn Fuller @ ripco.com
A. You’re a good man Mr. F. I am sure readers will get a kick out of making .wav files out of snatches of music using your very nicely crafted advice.
This won’t answer Mr. W’s full needs, however, because the Windows software restricts these snatches to just 74 seconds. But if you’re just after some neat computer sounds, you can do an awful lot in 74 seconds, which is 14 seconds longer than it takes to play the Minute Waltz.
Q. In your reply to a question regarding Paperless Office, 30 March ’98, you mentioned PaperPort scanner/software combination. Does Visioneer Inc. just sell the software to use with any scanner as an OCR?
Howard R. Oswald @juno.com
A. I am delighted to report that Visioneer, which makes what is hands-down the slickest document-imaging software to be had, now incorporates the so-called TWAIN standard in PaperPort 5.x and other products, which means you don’t need a Visioneer brand scanner to use the software anymore. Almost all scanner-related software now is TWAIN compliant so that you can use anybody’s scanner to suck pictures into PhotoShop or sheets of text into TextBridge for optical character recognition.
The new PaperPort software works wonders organizing everything from your snapshots to your family recipes into a Mac or PC making the dream of a paperless world far closer than a lot of people might think.
Q. I’m using Windows 3.1 on a 486 PC, which has DOS 6.2. In the directory under Windows there is a file named OLDDOS3.1, which uses about 1.5 MB. Is this required, or could it be deleted with no adverse affect?
Willis Sarraf (E-mail lwsarraf@juno.com)
A. As Commodore Dewey might have put it, you may delete at will, Mr. Gridley. That OldDos directory is an even bigger antique than is your machine itself. Back in the dreamy days of DOS, the protocol was to make a backup directory to hold the old operating system in case something went wrong and your machine wouldn’t work with a newer version. Since 6.2 obviously has served you well for a goodly long time, you can remove that 3.1 version without a care in the world.
Q. I’ve been using the fax program that came with Windows 95. I have a U.S. Robotics Sportster fax modem. However, after a number of months I found that I would receive a fax, but it would not be converted to a viewable document. I’d be sitting at my computer and see that the fax was received, but it was as if it got lost somewhere in the computer. When it didn’t display in the incoming messages box, I couldn’t find the file somewhere else to read.
At first I thought this was a hardware problem so I took my computer in to be serviced. A new fax modem was installed, but after about a month the same thing happened again. I even had Windows 95 reinstalled, but that didn’t solve the problem.
Now I’m nervous to rely on my computer for receiving faxes. Is there a glitch in the Windows 95 program? How can I get around this problem?
Valerie Kretchmer, Evanston
A. Something you are doing seems to be changing the directory where your fax software stores the image files for incoming files. It’s pretty easy to find where the fax is going by giving it an unusual name when it arrives and then using the Windows search function to find the file, and thus the proper directory where your other lost faxes lurk as well.
Call your next fax zzzzxzz. Then click on Start and chose Find and then Files/Folders. Type in “zzzzxzz” and you’ll see the file in a window that includes the entire path. To read the other lost faxes just type the name of the folder in the Find window and then double click on the folder icon when it comes up in the search window.
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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.
