QuickPC The complete all-software PC speedup and customizing utility. Baggs Technologies 1125 W. Drake Road, Suite 102 Fort Collins, Colorado 80526 QuickPC 2 ______________________________________________________________________ SOFTWARE REGISTRATION This software package is made possible by the efforts of many people - programmers, designers, and others all dedicated to bringing you the finest product possible. The costs involved in making this product are recovered through software sales. Please abide by the following license agreement: This is a user supported product (often referred to as shareware). It is not public domain, and it is not free software. You are granted a limited license to use this product on a trial basis. If you wish to continue using the product after the trial period (2 weeks) you must register by sending: a) $25 for registration only (no disk), b) $32 for registration plus the latest version on disk, or c) $39 for registration, disk, printed & bound manual, plus a free copy of 'PC Speedup & Power Tips' to the address below. Colorado residents please add 5.75% sales tax. As a registered user you will benefit from receiving technical support, as well as being kept informed as to new versions of this product and new product announcements. Thank you for your support. Every effort has been made to test QuickPC in various environments to ensure the highest degree of compatibility. However, neither the authors nor Baggs Technologies are liable for any damages caused directly or indirectly through the use or misuse of QuickPC. Baggs Technologies 1125 W. Drake Road, Suite 102 Fort Collins, Colorado 80526 QuickPC 3 ______________________________________________________________________ COPYRIGHT and TRADEMARK NOTICE Copyright(c)1989,1990,1991 by Baggs Technologies. All Rights Reserved. QuickPC is a trademark of Baggs Technologies. The names of other companies and their respective products mentioned in this manual are trademarks of those companies. This manual is designed to be printed out on your system printer, as well as to be viewed from within your editor. If you are reading this from within your editor, you will notice the embedded linefeed printer controls (usually displayed as ^L, or possibly as a strange looking character). Please disregard these characters; they are necessary for printer control when you print this manual. The following files make up the QuickPC package: quickpc.com quickpc.doc qdisk.exe qdiskems.exe If any of the above files are missing, you may obtain the full package from us by registering (please see the above section, 'Software Registration'). QuickPC 4 ______________________________________________________________________ QuickPC User's Guide About QuickPC 5 Using QuickPC 7 Features 11 Disk Speedup (Cache) 17 Commercial Product Announcement: QuickPC Plus 20 QuickPC and Microsoft Windows 21 QuickPC and ANSI.SYS 22 Appendix A Answers to Common Questions 24 Appendix B If You Have Problems 27 Appendix C Table of Alternate Hot Keys 29 QuickPC 5 ______________________________________________________________________ ABOUT QuickPC Congratulations! You have discovered QuickPC, a powerful tool that ensures you get the absolute maximum performance out of your PC. QuickPC is an all- software speedup and customizing utility designed to give you complete system control with the following features: * Disk Speedup - Speedup your hard disk operations with qdisk and qdiskems disk caching software. Notice the faster load times and how much quieter your disk drives operate. * Fast Cursor - Your cursor will scoot across the screen faster than ever before, at a rate that you select and is comfortable to you. * Fast Screens - Your text screens will flash across your display up to 4 times faster than before - just do a simple directory listing and notice the difference. * Screen Blank - Will blank your screen after a period of inactivity preventing what's commonly called monitor 'burn-in'. You may also blank the screen instantly with the touch of a hot-key to keep prying eyes off your private data. Works with virtually all monitors - CGA, EGA, VGA, Mono, & Hercules * System Lock - Lets you lock your keyboard to prevent tampering with your work if you are called away from your PC temporarily. * Set Colors - Replace the drab gray-text-on-black-screen with colors that you choose; even set the border color, too. Works on any color system. * Screen Mode - Display 43 lines on your EGA and 50 on your VGA; even switch to an Italic font! (Requires EGA or VGA). QuickPC 6 ______________________________________________________________________ * Block cursor - You can change the cursor to a big, solid, block - easier to see than that skinny line cursor and great for laptop owners. * Clock Display - Display a clock on your text screen; you set the position * Keyboard Enhancements: Swap the Caps Lock & Control keys and disable the Num Lock key on boot up, if you want to. * Quick Beep & Key Click - Reduce the duration and volume of the DOS 'beep'; and give your keyboard a satisfying 'click'. * Pop-Up Control Panel - Pop-up over any text application to custom-tailor many of QuickPC's features to your tastes. Use QuickPC to make your PC look, sound, and act just the way you want it to. QuickPC replaces several separately sold utilities - screen blankers and "dimmers", cursor speedups, disk caches, screen coloring, "control room" type programs, and others - with one powerful and easy-to-use utility. QuickPC is easy. QuickPC works behind the scenes, quietly installing itself whenever you boot your PC (via autoexec.bat). QuickPC works automatically for you speeding up disk, screen, keyboard, and other BIOS activities. You don't need to do anything because QuickPC is a TSR (terminate and stay resident) program that remains in your PC's memory monitoring its actions and speeding up operations whenever possible. Of course, you are welcome to tinker with any of the settings by using the ever-ready pop-up control panel. In fact, this is where QuickPC really shines because you can tailor the settings from within your currently running program. QuickPC 7 ______________________________________________________________________ USING QuickPC To run QuickPC, enter the following line (all on one line): quickpc [/ka:n] [/bl:n] [/bk] [/sc] [/kc] [/cl] [+s] [-s] [/b:n] [/pu:n] [/sb:n] [/fg:n] [/bg:n] [/bd:n] [/sm:n] [/nl] [/sw] [/q] [/?] [/help] The brackets mean that each enclosed option may be omitted; don't actually type the brackets. Generally, this line should be in your autoexec.bat file so that QuickPC is loaded whenever you boot your computer. If you are not familiar with autoexec.bat, or how to edit this file, see your DOS manual. The following is a summary of the options: /ka:n Keyboard accelerator speed. The number n is in the range 0 - 5. 0 means 'off'. The keyboard speeds are 1 - 5: 1, lowest to 5, fastest. The default is 5. /bl:n Screen blank delay in minutes. The range is 1 - 60. The default is off. /sc Super cursor. Enable the big, block cursor. The default is to use the standard cursor. /kc Key click on. Default : no key click. /cl Clock on. Default: no clock. +s Fast Screen On. (the default) -s No Fast Screen. Default: Fast Screen on. /b:n Set DOS Beep to n, where n is: QuickPC 8 ______________________________________________________________________ 0)Off, 2)Standard Beep, 3)Quick Beep Default: Quick Beep. /bk Blank after Lock. Blanks screen when user does a System Lock. Default is not to blank. /pu:n Change pop-up hot key to value n.* /sb:n Change screen blank hot key to value n.* /fg:n Set foreground color to n; n is 0 - 15.** /bg:n Set background color to n; n is 0 - 7.** /bd:n Set border color to n; n is 0 - 7.** /sm:n Set screen mode to n, where n is: 1)25 line italics, 2)43 lines, 3)43 line italics /nl Num Lock off. /sw Swap Caps Lock and Ctrl keys on 'Enhanced' keyboards. /q Quit; uninstall (i.e. remove QuickPC from memory). /? or /help Displays a short summary of options without installing QuickPC in memory. * - See Appendix C for keystrokes and their corresponding n values. ** - Color values: 0 Black 8 Grey 1 Blue 9 Light blue 2 Green 10 Light green 3 Cyan 11 Light cyan 4 Red 12 Light red 5 Magenta 13 Light magenta QuickPC 9 ______________________________________________________________________ 6 Brown 14 Yellow 7 White 15 Bright white Foreground and border colors may be any value 0 - 15. Background colors are limited to 0 - 7. Examples: To start QuickPC with a keyboard acceleration level of 4 (rather than the default 5), you would enter (usually placed in your autoexec.bat file): quickpc /ka:4 To start QuickPC with the Super Cursor (block cursor) and a Screen Saver blanking delay of 10 minutes, you would enter: quickpc /sc /bl:10 To start QuickPC with white text on a blue background, red border, and 43 line mode, you would enter: quickpc /fg:7 /bg:1 /bd:4 /sm:2 NOTE: QuickPC is memory-resident program (also called a TSR, for Terminate and Stay Resident) and therefore should NEVER be loaded from within applications (especially if you have 'shelled out to DOS' from within an application). 'Loading' means typing in 'quickpc' to run the progam which is not the same as 'popping-up the menu' (which you may do any time, assuming QuickPC is already loaded). QuickPC 10 ______________________________________________________________________ Using the Pop-Up Control Panel If you wish to change some of QuickPC's settings, you may do so "on the fly", even from within programs by using the pop-up menu. Just press the 'hot key' combination, ALT-'=' (Press 'ALT' key and '=' at the same time*), and the QuickPC control panel will pop-up over whatever program you happen to be running.** You will see a list of features and the status (ON or OFF) for each feature. To enable or disable a feature, move the highlighted bar to the appropriate feature in the menu and press 'Enter' and you will see the status change (OFF to ON or vice versa). The default choice of hot keys may not seem incredibly mnemonic - but there is a reason! Some programs allow users to 'redefine' keys using macros (Alt-S for save, for example) and we didn't want to 'step on anyone's toes' by using Alt + an alphabetic key. Of course, you may redefine QuickPC's hot keys to your needs (see footnote). Complete descriptions of each of QuickPC's various features follows in the next section. * Hotkey combination is user-definable, see the Using QuickPC section. **To save memory, and because most of the features apply to text modes only, the pop-up-menu is available in text modes only. Of course, you may use the instant Screen Blank hot-key (default is 'Alt 0',i.e. Alt-Zero) from within both text and graphics programs. QuickPC 11 ______________________________________________________________________ DESCRIPTION OF FEATURES Keyboard/Cursor Speedup - This option doubles the type-a-matic rate of your cursor and ensures that when you release the key, the cursor will stop (commonly called run-on). If you are continually waiting for your cursor to scroll through a large document in a word processor or through the cells of a large spreadsheet, you should find this feature very handy. There a five speed settings for the keyboard speedup: 1, the slowest, to 5, the fastest. The default setting is 5 - full speed ahead! Fast Screen - You may have noticed when listing a file or directory to your screen that you spend a lot of time waiting, perhaps wishing that the process would move along a little faster (this is not as much of a problem on 386 PC's). Fast Screen does just that by replacing the slow BIOS video routines with quick, streamlined code that accelerates screen updates. Fast screen works with all 'well-behaved' PC programs. Unfortunately, some programs aren't very nice or 'well-behaved'. If you run a program and the screen comes up scrambled, then there is a conflict between that program and the screen speedup. In this event just pop-up the QuickPC control panel and turn Fast Screen off before running the 'problem' program. Fast Screen has the ability to be enabled or disabled from the command line when QuickPC is resident in memory. This means you can make a batch file, QuickPC 12 ______________________________________________________________________ for example, to disable Fast Screen just prior to running a program (perhaps a program that is not compatible with the Fast Screen) and then re-enable when finished. Here is a batch file to do just that (assumes quickpc is in your path & already loaded): quickpc -s aprogram quickpc +s Screen Blank - When this option is enabled, your computer's screen will be blanked after several minutes of inactivity. This prevents damage to your monitor's phosphors caused by long term exposure to an image ( commonly called burn-in ). Once your screen has been blanked, just press either shift key, space bar, or Enter key, and your screen will be restored. NOTE: Microsoft Windows users should press either shift key. You may change the screen blank delay time from within the control panel by moving the highlighted bar to 'Screen Blank' and pressing . Then use the up and down arrow keys to select the delay. The range is 1 - 60 (minutes). Press or once and you will be back in the control panel's normal operating mode. NOTE: Microsoft Windows users should open up a DOS window from which to pop-up the control panel. The default setting is off. QuickPC 13 ______________________________________________________________________ Instant Screen Blank - You may also blank the screen instantly, without having to pop-up the control panel by pressing (i.e. Alt-Zero); this is handy when you leave your desk or someone walks in while you have sensitive data displayed on the screen. Quick Beep - The standard 'beep' you hear in many DOS programs can be loud, annoying, and lengthy. This beep can last up to a full second - which doesn't sound like much but if you ever run a program with lots of 'beeps', they can really add up and hinder your productivity (not to mention drive you crazy!). You can replace this beep with the Quick Beep which lasts only a fraction of a second, resulting in less annoyance while still allowing you to get audible feedback from your program. If you want to eliminate the beep completely, you have the option to turn it off. Note that many programs don't use the standard beep - they make their own sounds by controlling the speaker directly. Those sounds will not be affected by the Quick Beep setting. Super Cursor - Turns the cursor into a big, solid block - easier to see for laptops. This feature can also be handy if you use 43 line (or greater) text modes - sometimes it's hard to keep track of the cursor in these modes. Just pop-up the control panel to enable or disable this feature. Clock Display - Displays a digital clock on your text screen which can be positioned in any of the four corners of your display. Use the Clock QuickPC 14 ______________________________________________________________________ Position function to change the location of the clock on the screen. Generally the top of the screen is the best place for the clock due to the fact that most programs scroll the screen up. NOTE: The four positions are abbreviated on the control panel - U Rt for upper right, L Lft for lower left, etc. Key Click - Many of us with PC compatibles have a keyboard that just doesn't quite 'cut it'. It doesn't have that solid feel and 'click' sound that the IBM keyboards have. And have you ever had your hands resting on the keyboard and found that you had inadvertently pressed a key, filling the keyboard buffer with garbage? Enabling the Key Click option gives your keyboard an audible click sound whenever a key is pressed - giving you the assurance of audible feedback. Colors - If your PC is equipped with color video, you may use this feature to select foreground, background, and border colors. Pop up the menu, move the highlighted bar to 'Colors' and press . You will see a prompt at the bottom of the menu telling you how to change colors. Press the up and down cursor keys to change the foreground, the left and right cursor keys to change the background, and the space bar to change the border colors. When you are done selecting colors, press either or and you will be back in the standard menu operating mode. Don't forget that when you hit on a combination you like, QuickPC can be made to start up with those colors every time you boot up - see the section 'Using QuickPC' for the appropriate command line options. QuickPC 15 ______________________________________________________________________ Many applications don't return the screen to its former state, so if you quit a program and find you've lost your colors - just do a CLS command to restore them. You can even make a batch file to run the application and do the CLS afterward. For example, to run 123 and restore the screen, put the following lines in a batch file: 123 cls System Lock - Lets you lock your keyboard to prevent tampering with your work if you are called away from your PC. When you select System Lock, you will be prompted (on the bottom line of the menu) to enter a password (10 characters or less); press at the end of your password and your keyboard will be locked until you re-enter the password. Be sure to pick a password that's easy for you to remember and type it in carefully so you don't accidentally lock yourself out! It's a good idea to save your work (if you are within a program such as a word processor or spreadsheet, for example) before locking your system - just to be on the safe side! You may optionally have QuickPC blank your screen automatically when you do a System Lock. To enable this option, add /BK to the command line when you run quickpc.com. QuickPC 16 ______________________________________________________________________ Screen Mode - If you have an EGA or VGA you can set your screen to display more than 25 lines as well as change the typestyle. When you select Screen Mode, you cycle through four modes - standard 25 line, 43 line, 25 line italic font, and 43 line italic font. If you have a VGA, the 43 line modes actually display 50 lines. As was the case with the screen colors, some applications won't restore the screen mode when they finish. Just use the CLS command (or batch file technique) described previously under 'Colors' to restore your screen mode. Note that if you are in a 43 or 50 line mode, and you switch back to a 25 line mode and your cursor was somewhere below the 25th line - your prompt and cursor won't be visible - just type in (you will be typing blindly; no visible feedback) CLS and hit . This should clear your screen and resotre your prompt and cursor. Num Lock Defeat - AT's usually enable the Num Lock at boot-up which can be frustrating if you use your keypad for cursor movement rather than numeric entry. By using the /nl command line option when loading quickpc.com, the state of the Num Lock will be set to 'off'. Use this option if your PC boots with the Num Lock enabled and you prefer it off. This is a command line option only (not in pop-up menu). Swap Caps Lock & Ctl keys - The so-called AT 'Enhanced' keyboard has driven many users bonkers because of the placement of the Caps Lock and Ctrl keys. By using the /sw command line option when loading quickpc.com, the functions of these two keys are swapped. Some early BIOS versions will not support QuickPC 17 ______________________________________________________________________ this option - if you have specified this option and it does not work then your BIOS does not support this function. This is a command line option only (not in pop-up menu). QuickPC 18 ______________________________________________________________________ The Disk Speedup - qdisk & qdiskems The disk speedup is actually a separate program called a disk cache. This means that when data is requested from the hard disk by your program, the disk cache stores the data in your computer's memory. The next time your program needs that data, the disk cache supplies the data directly from your PC's high-speed memory - bypassing the slower hard disk! The improvement in speed you will see varies according to the types of programs you run and how often they access the disk. Typically for disk intensive applications you should see a speedup of up to 3 times. You are certainly not required to run the disk cache supplied with QuickPC. If you are already using a disk cache, and are satisfied with its performance, you may skip this section. QuickPC Disk Cache Operation To run the disk speedup (cache) program using conventional memory, enter: qdisk [size] Or, to run the disk speedup (cache) program using expanded memory, enter: qdiskems [size] [size] specifies the cache memory size in Kbytes. Generally you will want to start the disk cache from within autoexec.bat, so it is automatically installed whenever you boot up. When running the disk cache along with quickpc.com, load the cache first, followed by quickpc.com. For example, to have a 1 megabyte disk cache in expanded memory and quickpc loaded at boot up, put the following lines in your autoexec.bat file: QuickPC 19 ______________________________________________________________________ qdiskems 1024 quickpc QuickPC 20 ______________________________________________________________________ Conventional Memory vs. Expanded (EMS) Memory The cache memory is used to store your hard disk data. The cache can use either standard DOS memory or Expanded memory (EMS): Conventional memory - this is standard DOS memory (i.e. below 640K) installed in your computer or on an expansion board such as the AST-SixPak, etc. You may use as much of available conventional memory as you like, but be aware this will take memory away from other applications. Expanded memory (LIM EMS) - this is extra memory addressed above conventional DOS memory on , for example, the AST Rampage, Intel Above Board, or 386 PC's with QEMM or 386Max. You may use all or part of available expanded memory for caching. For the maximum disk cache performance we recommend using qdiskems.com with at least one megabyte of RAM for the cache. Resident Memory Requirements Approximately 5Kb of conventional DOS memory is used by the disk cache control program. An additional 2Kb of conventional memory is used for every 128Kb of cache memory. QuickPC 21 ______________________________________________________________________ Commercial Product Announcement: QuickPC Plus Since we're talking about disk caching, we thought this might be an appropriate place to tell you about the commercial version of QuickPC (not shareware), called QuickPC Plus. QuickPC Plus includes all of the features of quickpc.com found in this package plus an enhanced disk cache, the all-new Vcache5 from Golden Bow Systems. Vcache 5 is one of the fastest and most compatible caches on the market (speeds up disk activities by up to 400% and more), supporting deferred writes, smart lookahead buffering, and other high-performance techniques. Vcache 5 can use all types of PC memory - conventional DOS, extended (XMS) and expanded (EMS). Vcache 5 supercharges Windows 3.0 and beats Microsoft's SmartDrive (the cache included with Windows 3.0) hands down. QuickPC Plus also includes DOS Command Instant Recall which lets you recall previously type DOS commands with the cursor keys; no more rekeying commands and typing mistakes. Editing the DOS command line is also improved with non- destructive backspacing (left arrow) and functional Home and End keys. The power-packed QuickPC Plus is only $69.95 (+ $3 S/H) and comes with everything you expect in a commercial product - a slick package, disk (of course), manual, free booklet 'PC Speedup & Power Tips' (packed with power tips, tricks, and shortcuts for DOS and popular PC applications), new product and update information, and full technical support. Colorado residents please add 5.75% sales tax. Baggs Technologies 1125 W.Drake Road, Suite 102 * Fort Collins, CO 80526 QuickPC 22 ______________________________________________________________________ QuickPC and Windows If you use Microsoft Windows (or other similar 'environment' such as Desqview), proceed as follows: Unload quickpc.com from memory and then run Windows. You may then, if you wish, run quickpc.com from within a DOS virtual window. If you have Windows 3.0 and you want disk caching (which is highly recommended), you have several options: Option 1) If you have expanded memory installed, use qdiskems.com with at least 512K allocated to the cache (1 megabyte is even better). If you have a 386 or 486 PC and at least 2 megabytes of memory, use emm386.sys (provided with Windows 3.0) to turn some of your extended memory into expanded memory for use by qdiskems.com. Use the following lines in your config.sys file to convert 1 megabyte of extended memory to expanded memory: device=C:\win30\himem.sys device=C:\win30\emm386.sys 1024 Then add this line to your autoexec.bat file to set up a 1 megabyte disk cache (using the converted expanded memory): qdiskems 1024 Option 2) Use 'smartdriv.sys', included with Windows 3.0, instead of qdisk or qdiskems. Option 3) For a version of QuickPC that includes a Windows 3.0 compatible disk cache and is faster than smartdriv.sys please see the previous section, 'Commercial Product Announcement: QuickPC Plus'. QuickPC 23 ______________________________________________________________________ QuickPC and ANSI.SYS We have found QuickPC to be generally compatible with ANSI.SYS (A DOS device driver loaded via your config.sys file; if you are not familiar with ANSI.SYS, please see your DOS manual). However, ANSI.SYS does have some peculiarities you should be aware of if you intend to use it with QuickPC. The first is in dealing with screen modes greater than 25 lines. ANSI.SYS just doesn't recognize anything but 25 rows. The solution is to leave your screen in the standard 25 row mode if want to use ANSI.SYS. Optionally, you can try one of the ANSI replacements found on PC BBS's. Many of these programs provide support for screens with greater than 25 rows. The second issue is screen colors. If you use ANSI.SYS and you want to set foreground and background colors, use the ANSI sequences and NOT the QuickPC Colors option to set your colors. For example, to use ANSI.SYS to set your screen colors to white letters on a blue background, issue the following commands (or include them in your autoexec.bat file): prompt $p$g$e[37;44m cls The $p$g tells DOS to show the current drive and directory followed by '>'. The $e is for 'Escape' which signals ANSI.SYS to interpret the following instructions. The '[' begins the instructions, followed by the color codes, and, finally, 'm' which finishes the command. QuickPC 24 ______________________________________________________________________ If, upon terminating an application, you find that your colors are not preserved, issue a CLS to restore the colors. Here's a rundown of ANSI codes and their colors: Foreground Background Color ---------- ---------- ----- 30 40 black 31 41 red 32 42 green 33 43 yellow 34 44 blue 35 45 magenta 36 46 cyan 37 47 white QuickPC 25 ______________________________________________________________________ Appendix A Answers to Common Questions This section contains answers to some common questions regarding QuickPC. Q: I get the message, 'Program too big to fit in memory' when I try to run one of my programs. What do I do? A: That message means DOS does not have enough memory to run this program. To solve this problem, you must make more DOS memory available by one of the following methods: -Remove TSR programs(memory-resident programs, such as Sidekick) from memory. Since the QuickPC suite consists of several TSR utilities, you may also need to unload one or more of them. -You can also reclaim some DOS memory by reducing the numbers for files and buffers in your config.sys file. See your DOS manual for information on how to do this. Q: When I exit one of my programs and return to DOS, my colors (set previously) are not restored, and sometimes my cursor is gone. What do I do? A: Use the DOS command CLS to clear the screen and restore your colors. See the 'Colors' section of the Chapter on 'Features'. If your cursor disappears (this should not happen often) use the DOS command: mode co80 (for color screens) or mode mono (for monochrome screens) This will reset your cursor (as well as the whole screen). You may follow this command with a CLS to restore any colors you have set. Remember, you may QuickPC 26 ______________________________________________________________________ also create a batch file to issue the above commands after any 'problem' programs you run. Q: When I change screen modes from 43 lines to 25 lines I lose my DOS prompt and cursor. Why is that? A: If you are in a mode with more than 25 lines and your cursor is located below the 25th line - then switching back to 25 line mode means your cursor is located off the screen (somewhere below your monitor!). Just do a CLS (you will be typing 'blind' at this point) to clear the screen and restore your prompt and cursor at the top of the screen. See the 'Screen Mode' section in the 'Features' chapter. Q: I have set my foreground and background colors the way I like them, but when I type characters at the DOS command line the colors of the characters I type are the standard gray-on-black. What's going on? A: You probably have ANSI.SYS loaded. Check your config.sys file for a line that reads 'device=ansi.sys'. Unless you are familiar with ANSI.SYS, and are sure you need it, we recommend not using it. Just remove the line in your config.sys file that reads 'device=ansi.sys' using a text editor (see your DOS manual). On the other hand, if you want to use ANSI.SYS you may, but please read the chapter 'QuickPC and ANSI.SYS' (in this manual). Q: When I 'shell out' to DOS from within one of my applications and run quickpc.com, my PC 'crashes' or 'locks up' when I exit the program. A: Quickpc.com is a TSR or memory-resident program - therefore it should not be run by 'shelling out' to DOS from within an application. Generally quickpc.com should be run from within your autoexec.bat file so it is present QuickPC 27 ______________________________________________________________________ for the duration of your computing session. For more information, see the 'Using QuickPC' section. Q: My PC is attached to a Novell network. Once in a while, I have left my PC unattended and when I returned my screen was blanked (to be expected because I had the screen blanker enabled). The problem is that when I pressed keys to restore my screen, the screen would not come back! A: The cause of this problem is that when you receive an eMail message (or other network message sent to you), Novell prints a line on your screen saying that you have a message and that you should press to clear the line. When your screen is blanked and you get a network message, you won't see the prompt - therefore the network software is intercepting your key presses (the ones that are supposed to restore the screen). The fix is to hit either key to unblank the screen. QuickPC polls the shift keys just in case some nasty program (as above) is stealing all the keystrokes. QuickPC 28 ______________________________________________________________________ Appendix B If You Have Problems If, after installing QuickPC, you discover problems running your various software packages, the steps outlined below should help resolve the problem. Note that we will use the term 'the QuickPC suite' to refer to all of the utilities that make up the QuickPC package. The first place to begin troubleshooting is checking for conflicts among any TSR's (Terminate and Stay Resident, or memory-resident programs) you may have installed on your PC. QuickPC has been tested with most of the popular TSR's (such as Sidekick) and these programs should work fine. However, if you find a conflict between one of the QuickPC utilities and another TSR, try rearranging the order in which these programs are loaded. (This usually involves modifying lines in your autoexec.bat file; see your DOS manual on how to do this.) For example, if you have a TSR that works fine without the QuickPC suite loaded, but has problems with QuickPC loaded, and the TSR is loaded before QuickPC, then try loading the TSR after the QuickPC suite instead. Rearranging loading order often clears up minor discrepancies between TSR's. QuickPC has also been tested and works with most of the popular PC applications programs (an applications program is simply any program you run from DOS, such as Lotus 1-2-3). In the unfortunate event that QuickPC is incompatible with one of your software applications, try to isolate the area of incompatibility and disable the appropriate feature. For example, with QuickPC loaded in memory, if a program shows a garbled screen, then try disabling the fast screen option. (See the Using QuickPC section of this QuickPC 29 ______________________________________________________________________ manual for information on how to load QuickPC with certain features disabled.) As the old(?) adage goes: When all else fails, read the manual! If you have read this manual and cannot resolve your problem, registered users (registration info is on page 2) may contact our technical support staff at: Baggs Technologies 1125 W. Drake Road, Suite 102 Fort Collins, Colorado 80526 Registered users will also receive our technical support phone number. Baggs Technologies is committed to excellence - our foremost concern is your satisfaction. Please do not hesitate to contact us with your questions and/or comments regarding this product. QuickPC 30 ______________________________________________________________________ Appendix C Table of Alternate Hot Key Selections Num. Hot Key Num. Hot Key Num. Hot Key 120 Alt-1 16 Alt-Q 30 Alt-A 121 Alt-2 17 Alt-W 31 Alt-S 122 Alt-3 18 Alt-E 32 Alt-D 123 Alt-4 19 Alt-R 33 Alt-F 124 Alt-5 20 Alt-T 34 Alt-G 125 Alt-6 21 Alt-Y 35 Alt-H 126 Alt-7 22 Alt-U 36 Alt-J 127 Alt-8 23 Alt-I 37 Alt-K 128 Alt-9 24 Alt-O 38 Alt-L 129 Alt-0 25 Alt-P 130 Alt-Hyphen 131 Alt-=