Hotdog colors and silly sounds - how to enhance Microsoft Windows display - Tutorial

Home Office Computing, Dec, 1993 by Kay Yarborough Nelson

It's in your face every day--Windows. It's your work space, your desktop, and your filing cabinet. It can also be an expression of your personality---or just a fun place to get the job done. Why not try something new? This month we'll first look at how you can customize Windows with no additional purchases, and then we'll cover a few programs that add wacky such features as talking and walking icons, strange noises, and even hoots and howls.

EASY MAKEOVERS

With no investment other than a few minutes of your time, you can change all your program icons. Start by highlighting the icon you want to change; press Aft and Enter and choose Change Icon; then browse for a file named MORICONS.DLL in your Windows directory. MORICONS.DLL is a collection of more than 100 icons (or choose the PROGMAN.EXE alternate icons file, which offers 40 additional icon selections).

If you'd like to change screen colors, go to the Control Panel and select Color. There you'll find 24 predefined color schemes (try Hotdog Stand--truly shocking!) and a color palette for creating custom designs. Windows even comes with five screen savers (accessible via the Desktop Control Panel), different formats for currency and the date and time, and eight sounds that you can assign to system events such as Start-up and Exit.

Another neat trick most anybody can do is to capture an image onscreen as a bitmap file and use it as your desktop background--called wallpaper. When displaying a photo or graphic image, press Alt and Print Screen. This copies whatever is on the screen to the Windows Clipboard. Fife up Paintbrush, paste, and save the captured image in BMP format. Now you can use that image as the Program Manager's backdrop--just select the file as wallpaper in the Desktop Control Panel. If you have a CD-ROM drive and a multimedia encyclopedia program like Encarta, you'll have lots of images to choose from. (Warning: Using wallpaper takes up a lot of memory, so don't do this if you're running Windows with the bare minimum of system resources.)

PLAY SOUND WITHOUT A SOUND CARD

You don't need a sound card to make Windows play sounds--you just need to install the PC Speaker Driver at the Drivers Control Panel. You can get this driver from CompuServe (GO MSL and then scan for a program named SPEAK in the WDL library) or directly from Microsoft ([206] 642-7676). Once the driver is installed, you can assign sounds to events using the Sound Control Panel. Sound quality will vary, however, depending upon your system's internal speaker.

THIRD-PARTY PROGRAMS

Customizing Windows can become an outright addiction, and a number of software publishers make a healthy profit by offering programs that fuel the habit. These programs provide effects that you'd find hard to create from scratch without an experienced guru at hand. Moon Valley Software ([800] 473-5509) makes three such packages: Icon Do It ($20) has neat animated cursors, more than 200 new icons, and a set of 10 wallpaper bitmaps; Icon Hear It ($50), which comes with the previously mentioned PC Speaker Driver but also works with most sound boards, includes 400 icons (50 of them animated), screen savers, animated cursors, and 100 sound clips you can assign to your icons; and if you have a CD-ROM drive, consider ROMaterial ($30), a zany collection of commands that are spoken in six different languages, as well as cursors, icons, wallpaper bitmaps, and screen savers.

Animated Desktop ($60) from DeltaPoint Inc. ([408] 648-4000) is another package that lets you go crazy customizing your desktop by offering an icon editor, animated cursors and icons, sounds, and a program launcher. You'll waste a lot of time--but have a lot of fun--with any of these collections.

Not to be outdone in the fun department, Microsoft Corp. ([206] 882-8080, [800] 426-9400) has released Microsoft Scenes ($30), a collection of wallpaper bitmaps and screen savers. Scenes comes with a free mail-in offer to convert three of your favorite photos into scenes that can be used with the program.

KAY YARBOROUGH NELSON is the author of Voodoo Windows (Ventana Press), The Little Windows 3.1 Book (Peachpit Press), and Friendly Windows (Random House).