Internet Fixes Weekly Windows Newsletter

Doing a clean install of XP instead of upgrading the Windows 98SE!

Doing a clean install of XP instead of upgrading the Windows 98SE installation you currently have on the hard drive. If you're going to use a new operating system, it's best to start clean. You must have the Windows 98SE and XP installation CD-ROMs.

Here's what you'll do.
1. Back up your data.
2. Format your hard drive.
3. Boot from the XP CD-ROM.
4. The installer will ask for your Windows 98SE install CD-ROM. Insert the disc.
5. Follow the rest of the installation instructions as they appear on the screen.

Use multiple Clipboard items outside of Office!

The Windows 2000 Professional Resource Kit includes a tool that gives you some of the same features as the new Office Clipboard. Specifically, the ClipTray tool lets you store and use multiple blocks of text across applications. This is a handy feature when you're writing program code, developing Web content, or even working in an application such as WordPad, Notepad, or other text editor that doesn't provide a multiobject Clipboard.

ClipTray resides in the system tray. When you double-click the ClipTray icon, the program opens a simple dialog box in which you enter a name for the text and the text itself. You can copy text to the Clipboard from any application and paste it into the ClipTray to create the entry. Simply repeat the steps to add other text items. (ClipTray defaults to 20 items, but you can create up to 99 separate items with it.)

When you're ready to use an item, right-click the ClipTray icon and select the item by name from the context menu. This places the item in the Windows Clipboard; then, paste it into your document.

The ability to create up to 99 entries wouldn't be very useful if you didn't have a way to save them, and ClipTray gives you that ability. You can save a set of items to a text file for use at any time. When you need its entries, just open the file in ClipTray and start pasting.

When you run Disk Defragmenter on a compressed volume in ME!

When you run Disk Defragmenter on a compressed volume, you see uniform boxes on the Show Details screen until Disk Defragmenter is 50 percent finished. After 50 percent, you see boxes of various sizes.

This occurs because Disk Defragmenter is defragmenting the actual physical hard disk during the first 50 percent, and the compressed volume during the second 50 percent. You see boxes of different sizes because of the way Disk Defragmenter reflects how files are stored on an uncompressed drive and on a DriveSpace compressed volume.