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Thursday, September 14, 2000
At today's Windows Millennium Edition launch, you won't hear Patrick Stewart make Star Trek puns, or have the pleasure of seeing local Microsoft celebrity Dave Conrad preside over a showcase because Microsoft is going to the Web and the malls (locally, in South Hills Village) to launch the product.
Windows ME doesn't look much different from Windows 98. And if you've kept up on your Web updates of Windows and Internet Explorer, you already have many of the new features. However Windows ME does provide a few new features that separate it from Windows 98.
Most important is the new restore feature that allows you to quickly recover your original settings if something causes your computer to crash and burn. There's also a suite of digital editing tools, bringing us one step closer to the multimedia Internet. Now, anybody with a new home computer will be able to edit and catalog his or her own home movies -- without expensive software because it's in the box. (This may remind many of the way Internet Explorer became part of the operating system.)
Windows ME also comes with Internet Explorer 5.5 in the box, offering you the ability to preview how a Web page will print -- a feature that is long overdue in IE. You can download IE 5.5 or save the time to download 17 MB by getting it on disk when you buy Millennium.
Q: I want to download a screen saver and the directions say to "click on the links below to download
Have a question for David Radin? Contact him at his Web site
the PC version. Unzip the file and then double-click on it to automatically install the screen saver." My question is: how do you unzip the file?
A: A zipped file is a file that has been compressed using a compression utility such as pkzip, cutezip or winzip. When a file has been compressed, it takes up less disk space. So it is used by many companies to create files that can be downloaded in a fraction of the time that it would take to download the same file before compression.
To uncompress the file, you'll need to run it through one of these utilities again, this time in extraction mode. For instance, suppose you have winzip. As soon as you have downloaded the file, place it into its own folder.
If winzip is set up on your system as the default compression/decompression utility, all you'll need to do is double click on the compressed file (in My Computer or Windows Explorer), which will open winzip and automatically point it at the file you want to decompress. Highlight all the components of the software that show up in the window, then click on the extract icon.
This will uncompress everything in the compressed file, and place each component into the same folder that the file is in. Then close winzip, and double click on the set up file from Windows Explorer or My Computer. This should start the installation.
Alternatively, you can start up winzip, select the file to uncompress, then follow the rest of the process described above. This will work whether or not winzip is set up as the default. By the way, most zipped files will come down with the file extension, .zip. However some will come down with a .exe extension.
Those with .exe extensions are set up to decompress even if you don't have a zip application on your system. Although the process is similar for other popular zip utilities, it may differ a bit.
David Radin is host of the nationally syndicated radio show "Internet Insider," a local version of which is aired on KDKA AM 1020 at noon Saturdays.
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