Terry's Computer Tips - Newsletter
October 17, 2005

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Volume 1, Number 18 -- Monday, October 17, 2005
Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3

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3.  Games, CDROMs & CD Emulation Software

Reader Don Fratini wrote:

I have Tiger Woods golf 2003 and have loaded it onto my computer. If I want to play the game, I must put the Courses disk into the drive and then the game will begin. Since my Laptop has an external drive, I dislike carrying it around with me when I travel. I very seldom use it unless I am loading software. I remember hearing somewhere that if I copied the complete set of 3 disks to my HD, then it could run off there when it required the Courses disk. "However", obviously I am doing something wrong as this doesn't work as it still asks for the Courses disk. Is it possible to overcome this problem for me? Thank you.
Don Frattini

As I told Don, various CD Emulation software packages can solve this (do a Google Search for "cd emulation software" and you will find a number of them).   These work by making CD disk images and mounting them as if they were additional drives.  Sometimes, in order to make the software work, you have to that first and then install the software from that image -- e.g., if the software makes a note of which drive letter was used for the cdrom (hopefully they don't do that any more).

I had some CD emulation software under Win98 and was pretty happy with it, except for Print Shop Deluxe.  Anyway, that version broke with XP and the software company wanted a signficant upgrade price -- I declined.

I've read about "Alcohol 120%" CD emulation software, at http://www.alcohol-soft.com/.  They have a 30 day trial version.  Their system lets you set up up to 31 "disk drives" of CD disk images.  I have not used it, though.

I saw Don on Saturday at our computer club -- he said that he tried Alcohol 120% and it solved his problem.  Cool.

I don't normally run programs that require me to reinsert my original CDs, not from any particular aversion to such programs (although that style of copy protection is a pain in the neck), but just because the programs I use do not require them..  Also, my normal computer is my Dell 8600 notebook, which already is a dual-boot Windows XP Pro / Xandros Linux dual-boot machine, so I am restrictive about installing big files on the notebook's hard drive.  Maybe I'll give CD emulation software a try again -- for my wife's computer.

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4.  Breaking the "Microsoft Only" Mindset

Whether we are talking about operating systems or office applications or games, there are a lot of people who "buy Microsoft," for one reason or another. It is not always the best product, not always the easiest, and sometimes far from either one of those.

Recently, however, I have begun to see the ice breaking. I think a lot of the "Microsoft only" attitudes have been changing because of the positive press that the Mozilla Foundation's Firefox web browser has gotten. Independent security firms such as Secunia (www.secunia.com) have readily available links on their sites where we can see the security status of Internet Explorer versus Firefox versus Opera.

At the same time, we are starting to see breaks in Microsoft's almost exclusive hold on the lucrative "office applications" suites. Microsoft Office (Excel, Word, Powerpoint, Access, Outlook and a few less-known applications) are starting to take much more heat from the free open-source OpenOffice.org office suite. (Yes, that is really the name -- "OpenOffice.org" the office suite is from "OpenOffice.org" the foundation (www.openoffice.org).

We have already seen foreign city and country governments declare that they are going to move to open-source software. Microsoft has had mixed results in subsequently preventing those moves.

The Department of Defense was the first U.S. entity to break with the Microsoft Office oligopoly. In 2001, the DOD announced that it would require all procurement documents and all documents from its vendors to be in OpenOffice.org's format.

The State of Massachussetts is the first U.S. political entity that is officially moving towards Open Source. While they did not declare that they dumping Microsoft Office, they passed a State law that all State public records must be available in either the "OASIS Open Document Format for Office Applications" (OpenDocument format) or Adobe System's Portable Document Format (.pdf format) as of 2007. While the latter is not truly an open format, the readers are widely available and free and the files can be created for free by some free, open-source software (including OpenOffice.org).

Now, I'm even seeing changes in individuals who were previously staunch Microsoft-only advocates. Whether the issue is security or price, the walls between free, open-source software and the public-at-large are starting to see some cracks. Yea!

Read more about OpenOffice.org

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5.  Screen-Printing From Your Computer Screen

Once upon a time, there was a simple, text-based operating system called DOS. Most people don't realize, but DOS was for the Apple 2 series of computers. Then, along came the IBM PC and the "Microsoft DOS" (MS-DOS) disk operating sytem that many of us came to know and love.

One of the really neat features of MS-DOS was really part of its keyboard facilities -- IBM had put a "Prnt Scrn" key on the keyboard, and MS-DOS knew what to do with that. Just press Prnt Scrn, and you got a dump of the monitor screen's contents to the printer. Oh, by the way, printers in those days were also text handlers. To print an "E," the program sent the 8-bit value that meant E to the printer, and the built-in smarts on the printer knew how to print the E. Monitor resolution was similarly lousy — you could actually see each of the dots that made up an E, without trying hard.

And then, along came Windows. Windows took an entirely different view on the world. No longer was this a text- or character-oriented world, this was now a graphical world. The Prnt Scrn key was one of the first things to go...

Under Windows, then and now, if you press the Prnt Scrn key, you actually make copy of the screen into a part of memory that Windows calls the "Windows Clipboard." This copy includes all the dots and colors you are displaying -- if you use 800x600 resolution and 256 colors, then the copy includes all 800x600 (480,000) pixels and the corresponding information on their colors. If you use 1600x1050, then it includes all 1,680,000 pixels and their color information. And, it's all stored there as an image.

So, how do you actually print the screen when you are running Windows? The expensive way is to purchase a special screen-print utility. This is a program that intercepts that keypress and actually grabs the data itself. Screen-print utilities usually also have some other features, such as the ability to save the image to the disk.

For the more frugal user, we can still do both of these tasks. To print the screen, press the Prnt Scrn button to put the image into memory. Then, open up the built-in Windows application called "WordPad" and paste the image into it (Edit / Paste). If you are running Windows XP, Wordpad is no longer on the Start / All Programs / Accessories menu, but you can put it there. It is found as C:\Windows\Write.exe (if you are showing file extensions, as you should), if not, it shows as C:\Windows\Write. Once you paste the image into Wordpad, you can save or print it.

You can similarly paste it into Paint, or any other image editor, or into any other program that will accept pasted images. In this manner, you can paste into Microsoft Word, OpenOffice.org's Write, WordPerfect and other programs.

Special Tip: PrntScrn takes a picture of the whole screen. You can hold down the Alt button while you press PrntScrn -- this will copy only the active window!

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Continued in Part 3

Volume 1, Number 18 -- Monday, October 17, 2005
Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3

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Copyright © 2005 Terry A. Stockdale.  All rights reserved.