Well, I’m encouraged. I’ve received some feedback from last month's article. I want to reply to one question I received and then continue where I left off last month. You may want to read last month's article as a refresher because I’ll be assuming you did as I continue.

I received some e-mail from a club member with a very good question. "… why did you mention in the beginners’ article, not to 'double click' on a file in explorer? I do this now and then, … I thought the worst thing that could happen when you double clicked on a file is that it would launch the host application." I twice cautioned against double-clicking an application; that is a file with a .exe extension. This is very good advice. Most often, unless you’re very familiar with the application, you are not going to know what the results of double clicking an app is going to be; and that can be dangerous to your PC at worst, or annoying to you at best. Here’s why.

Executables (in the form of applications or programs with .exe, .com or .bat extensions) are delivered to you from external sources like purchased installation packages or Internet downloads. Most often they come to you by CD or by diskette with installation programs. The installation process copies programs and all associated files to the correct locations on your hard drive and then, most importantly, supplies you with a shortcut or start menu item to run the program. It may register an associated file extension as I described last month. Like say .ask for an AskSam file. So the correct way to run the AskSam application is to click on the start menu item OR double-click on a file with an extension of .ask. Double clicking on the asksam.exe (if there is one - it could be named something else) is not necessary or recommended. Clicking on the shortcut item will launch AskSam without a data file, and double clicking on an asksam file will launch AskSam and momentarily will load the asksam file into AskSam. Clear? Let’s reflect on the bad things that can happen.

Let’s say you read about a neat utility called neatstuff and get it from a download site on the internet. The download process - after asking if you want to open it or save it to disk - lets you specify where it goes, and for some reason defaults to Desktop, and you accept it (ever done this? I have !). So it downloads neatstuff.exe to your desktop and shows a neat icon on the desktop. Do I want to double-click it and run it??? NO ! oops, too late. What happened? Well as it turned out neatstuff.exe was a "self extracting zip file", and it contained 1,533 files that it extracted to your desktop! And they’re ALL OVER THE PLACE! How am I going to clean this up? They’re all mixed up with my good, well organized desktop icons. I can’t remember all this stuff! What are the good files, and what are the bad? Wished I hadn’t done that.

Let’s say I had thought ahead and created a directory called "d:\downloads" and am in the habit of placing all downloads to that directory, but I then inadvertently double-click on it, and neatstuff.exe does a quick installation and without warning makes all my graphics files its own. Darn! So instead of ACDSee opening when I double-click on a .GIF, it opens this terrible neatstuff application that looks like it was written by an old geezer that’s real proud of his newly-learned Visual Basic skills. What do I do now? Re-install ACDSee, I guess, and hope it all gets straightened out. (I can joke about geezers with impunity, since I’m one.) So to summarize: Use the icon supplied with a program to run it, after installation, or double-click on a file that is registered to an application.

How do we know what files are registered to what application? The best way is to use Windows Explorer features. Unless you’ve been experimenting, you may not know what Explorer can do for you. Here are some things to try. Follow this through and you’ll have the information you’ll need to determine what file types are registered.

Open Windows Explorer from the Start Menu. Go to the menu under View, Options. On the panel with the View tab, click "Show all files", then check "Display the full MS-DOS path in the title bar", un-check "Hide MS-DOS file extensions for file types that are registered", and check "Include description bar for right and left panes", click OK. Go back to the menu, click View, then Details. Look at the right pane as you click on directories in the left pane. The right pane should have file headers called Name, Size, Type, Modified. Under Type there’s now a description of the type for every file. An exe is "Application", an ico is an "icon", a BMP file (maybe) is a "paint" file.

Some programs will come to you as a single executable that must be double-clicked on. This has become very rare, and is mostly restricted to DOS programs. It’s nearly impossible (and probably inefficient) to deliver a Win95/NT application as a single file. If you do have a program like this, drag a shortcut out from the exe and place it in an appropriate place in your Start Menu.

So, let’s continue with running applications. As an experiment, do this: Go to Start, Run and type in Wordpad /p c:\autoexec.bat, and click Ok. If you’re still running Windows 3.1, instead of Wordpad, use Write. So, see what happens. Wordpad launches, loads your autoexec.bat file, then prints it and then closes out. Gone. We’ll continue with this next month. u