A Trio of Questions I Wish You Had Asked Me

Automate tasks, get organized, improve your PC's performance, and alter your desktop's appearance.

I get a big kick out of answering your PC questions every month, and I often marvel at how talented PC World readers are at finding glitches in their "thoroughly tested" hardware and software. But for this special tips issue, I'm doing something a little different. Here are answers to three questions I've been waiting for.

Simple Windows Automation

Can I select an item on the Start menu and launch not one program, but two or three or four? Better yet, can I double-click one icon and have one program scan my hard drive, another defragment the drive when the scan is done, and a third start a backup after the defrag?

You can accomplish all of this and more with DOS batch files--even in DOS-free Windows XP. As DOS fades from memory, however, fewer and fewer people are comfortable writing batch files.

>>TIP If you're batch-averse, I recommend Outer Technologies' free Batchrun program, which makes automating multiprogram tasks easy. This nifty utility lets you create batches by dragging, dropping, and clicking. You can add commands for such common file manipulations as copying and deleting, and you can instruct the program to wait a preset number of milliseconds (I know, whole seconds would have made more sense) or until the last program is finished (see FIGURE 1).

Organize My Documents

I have all kinds of files in my My Documents folder--from last week's budget report to three-year-old letters to my mom. How do I find a specific file?

Rather than treating My Documents as your catchall folder, think of it as the root of a system of folders. >>TIP Create other folders inside it, and possibly other folders inside those; then save files to the appropriate My Documents subfolders.

You may want to separate personal files and work files, for example. Or you might create separate folders for each work project. Perhaps you prefer to organize your work files by month or quarter. A time-based system makes archiving or deleting old files simpler.

Want a concrete example? Inside my PC's My Documents folder is a subfolder called Answer Line, and inside that are subfolders for the column in each recent issue of PC World (I've archived older issues to a CD-R disc). Other articles I've written get their own subfolders in My Documents; I keep separate subfolders for personal files and for financial documents as well.

Keep a Stable Swap File

The swap file Windows places on my hard drive to run programs that can't fit in RAM grows and shrinks as needed. Can I improve my PC's performance by keeping the swap file one size?

Yes. If you set the minimum and maximum sizes the same, your system won't slow down to resize this file. >>TIP Set both to 384MB, because--with the size of today's hard drives--you're unlikely to run out of storage at that setting.

In Windows 9 x and Me, right-click My Computer and select Properties. Click the Performance tab and then the Virtual Memory button. Select Let me specify my own virtual memory settings, and enter 384 for both the minimum size and the maximum size. Click OK, then Yes, and finally Close. Reboot now or later.

In Windows XP, click Start, right-click My Computer, and select Properties. Click the Advanced tab. In the Performance box, click Settings. Choose the Performance Options box's Advanced tab, and in the 'Virtual memory' box, click Change. Select Custom size and enter 384 for both the initial size and the maximum size. Choose Set, and then click OK three times.

A Wallpaper a Day

Tired of seeing the same boring wallpaper every day? >>TIP Several free programs automatically and randomly change your desktop's background. I use an ancient one called Randomizer created by Greg Heier. It's small and simple, and since it's a DOS program, it won't conflict with any other programs. It just changes the wallpaper and disappears.

Unfortunately, Randomizer can be a bit complicated to set up, so you may prefer to use ClipperSoft's Clip On Boots. This application not only changes wallpaper, but it can also play a random MP3 at boot-up.

Send questions to answer@pcworld.com. We pay $50 for published items. You'll find Contributing Editor Lincoln Spector's humorous writing at www.thelinkinspector.com.