A great little housekeeper - using Microsoft Windows to clear out hard drives - Windows Watcher - Tutorial

Home Office Computing, April, 1993 by Kay Yarborough Nelson

Plus: Computer Chat and OS/2 vs. Windows NT

There are a few things Windows does better than DOS. You may not want or need Windows for running programs, but give it a try for doing disk housekeeping. Start this month by spring-cleaning your hard-disk drive. Take the time to go through your files and delete all those old .BAK (backup) and README (instructional) files that you no longer need. Move files you haven't touched in a year to floppies for long-term storage, and free up some disk space. Make backup copies of program disks that you stashed away somewhere after you installed the program on your hard disk. Here's how.

Start with the File Manager. If you want to use Windows just for disk housekeeping instead of organizing and running your programs, bypass the Program Manager. At the DOS prompt, type WIN WINFILE and press Enter. You'll come up in the File Manager, ready to try out some of these tricks.

One-pass disk copies. If you have only one disk drive and have used DOS to copy disks, you know how long you have to sit there and swap disks until the copying is done. Not so with Windows. It reads the entire disk into memory and then asks you to insert the destination disk, which it writes in one pass. Choose Copy Disk from the File Manager's Disk menu to use this neat feature.

Easy formatting. If you're formatting floppies through Windows, you don't have to remember the obscure switches to format a double-density disk in a high-density disk drive. In fact, you don't have to know the disk's capacity at all. Just choose Format Disk from the File Manager's Disk menu and make your selections from a dialog box. Windows figures out the disk's capacity for you.

Copying large numbers of files onto floppies. If you've ever tried to move a bunch of files off your hard disk onto floppies for long-term storage, you've probably experienced DOS's "Disk full" message when it stops filling up the first disk and leaves you wondering what's been copied and what hasn't. There's a DOS way around this situation, but it involves using the ATTRIB command with odd switches and then using the XCOPY command.

Instead, do your copying from Windows' File Manager. Just click on all the files you want (you don't have to use wildcards to figure out a pattern to their names, because you can press Ctrl and click on individual files), then drag the files to the floppy drive's icon to copy them. When the first disk is full, Windows asks if you want to retry. Put a fresh disk in the drive and click Retry. It will go on filling up the second disk and will stop when that disk is full. Continue until you've copied all the files you want.

WAR OF THE OPERATING SYSTEMS

By the time you read this, you'll be able to run Windows 3.1 under a new version 2.1 of OS/2. (OS/2, of course, is IBM's candidate for the next mainstream operating system.) Microsoft's contender is the next generation of Windows, called Windows NT. The industry newsletters are buzzing with the question "Will Windows NT or OS/2 be the operating system of the future?" I say neither will until the rest of us get a lot more hardware than we have now. (Both operating systems require 8MB of RAM and 40MB of storage space.) But with prices dropping, who can say what's to come? The 486 machine I just bought has 16MB of RAM and a 200MB hard-disk drive, and I paid less for it than I did for my 386 a couple of years ago.

TALKING COMPUTERS

Monologue ($80, from First Byte ([310] 793-0610), lets you proofread Windows documents by reading them back to you in synthesized speech. For instance, the program can read Excel spreadsheets, so have it read back boring columns of figures while you read the hard copy. For best results, you'll need a Sound Blaster card in your system. Regardless, Monologue sounds rather like a fellow with a bad head cold, but you'll get used to heating synthesized speech or teach the program how to say some words more clearly.