Hands on: Commanding Windows

Pretty directories, jiggling mice and the dark screen of fright ­ it’s all here!

Older readers may remember the Dos Tree command, which is still around. If you open a command prompt and type tree, then you’ll see a representation of folders and subfolders from the current directory downwards, with lines linking subfolders to parent folders.

As with most commands that output to the console, you can divert this to a file by typing, for example, tree > mytree.txt If you then open mytree.txt in Notepad, you’ll probably be in for a disappointment.

All the connecting lines will be changed to strange symbols, such as Ã. One way to change this is to use the /a switch with the tree command. You won’t get the nice neat lines, but you will get an approximation using symbols such as bar, plus, minus and backslash.

A better way to get the proper lines is to leave off the /a switch and change the Notepad font to Terminal. This is fine for viewing, but Terminal is not a printer font. If you try to print the file it will revert to a printable font complete with strange symbols.

If you’ve got any version of Microsoft Word, then there is another way. Open the file in Word ­ you’ll need to have ‘All files’ selected in the ‘Files of type’ box. You’ll get a File Conversion dialogue asking which encoding to use ­ select MS-Dos. Now your text file should appear, lines and all. You need to use a monospace font such as Courier or Lucida Console, otherwise the vertical lines will be disjointed, but this should happen automatically.

Jiggling with software
Further to our previous mention of the Mouse Jiggler, a USB device that simulates random mouse movements to prevent the screensaver starting or the PC going into standby, reader James Clarke wrote that some years ago he wrote a program that did much the same thing. Burnout can be configured to start when another program, such as a CD burner, is run. And although it was written in 1999, it seems to work fine on XP. You’ll find it at www.jhc-software.com/burnout.htm.

Yet more metadata
In September’s column, we also mentioned finding metadata ­ such as the camera model and date taken for digital photos ­ using Windows Desktop Search. In last month’s Question Time we saw how to edit metadata to add the title and comments to the pop-up info tip for an image file. This month we continue on this theme with a free tool from Microsoft. Although you can edit the metadata of, say, a JPG or TIFF file in XP by right-clicking on it and choosing Properties, the capabilities are limited. Vista offers rather more, including a star rating system for photos, videos and music.

The good news is that both XP and Vista users can download Microsoft Photo Info, released earlier this year, and edit metadata that the normal file properties can’t reach.

You can add all sorts of data, such as the location, city, and country where the photo was taken, a star rating and add a copyright notice. You can do this individually or with a bunch of images, so you could add your copyright details to a folder full of pictures. In XP it needs .Net Framework 2.0 or later. In Vista .Net 3.0 is already present, and some of the extra metadata, such as the star rating, is already accessible.

Beware, however, of working with Raw files or the software that came with your camera, as Microsoft warns that ‘the third-party software included with the digital camera may no longer recognise some proprietary metadata’.

The dark arts
The first time it happened it was something of a shock. I went to open a command prompt and the Vista screen went completely dark. Just as I was thinking ‘Powercut? Crash? Data loss?’, the screen came back, albeit dimly, with a message saying that Windows needed my permission to continue.

We’ll come back to the philosophical implications of that later, but the second time it happened there was still that blank panic moment. Activating Windows produced another brief blackout and it’s still catching me out. Microsoft has obviously devoted considerable psychological research into how to give users a momentary panic attack without causing any permanent (and litigable) harm.

This is just one aspect of the much-vaunted User Account Control. Unfortunately, first impressions count, and in this case the first impression is of an idiotic underling who needs your permission to do something you’ve just told it to do, after having done something rather irritating that you hadn’t told it to do.

Overall, UAC is a good thing ­ such a good thing, in fact, that we can’t deal with it all in one month’s column. But we will consider some emergency treatment on getting rid of the dark screen of fright.

For Vista Business and Ultimate editions, make sure you are logged on with administrator rights and run secpol.msc, or just type Security in the find box ­ the first item found should be Local Security Policy. You will, of course, get the DSOF and a request for permission to continue.

Having granted yourself permission, in the left pane of the Local Security Policy editor, burrow down to Security Settings, Local Policies, Security Options. In the right pane, find ‘User Account Control: Switch to the secure desktop when prompting for elevation’. Double-click this and set it to disabled.

Vista Home users won’t have the Local Security Policy editor and will have to hit the Registry directly. Make a Restore Point, run regedit and go to: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE \SOFTWARE \Microsoft \Windows \CurrentVersion \Policies \System. In the right pane you should see a DWORD named PromptOnSecureDesktop. Double-click it and change the value to 0.

This will make your system less secure ­ but not as insecure as turning off UAC completely ­ and you’ll still get the confirmation dialogue, but without the DSOF. The idea of the Secure Desktop is that the dialogue thereon is isolated from the rest of the system. Without the Secure Desktop it is possible that malware could hijack the dialogue. But if you take precautions to ensure malware isn’t present on your system this shouldn’t be an issue.

If you are setting up a system, installing programs and making a lot of Control Panel changes, consider disabling the Secure Desktop temporarily and re-arming it when you’re done.

Shutdown ­ an annoyance
When Windows 95 came out, it seemed rather bizarre that in order to shut down Windows you clicked the Start button. We’ve all got used to this foible by now, but if you’ve tried to shut down Vista you will notice that there are further levels of lunacy.

Click on the ‘Off’ button and the computer will go to sleep; that is, it will continue to hold the current session in memory and go into a low power state. This will leave it vulnerable to accidental disconnection but still making a contribution, ­ albeit reduced, ­ to global warming.

If there are updates waiting, clicking the button will install these, close down Windows and switch off the PC. The second button locks the PC ­ it takes you back to the Welcome screen without logging you off, but you’ll have to supply your password to get back in. The third produces a seven-item menu, including Sleep and Lock, as well as the elusive Shutdown.

How this design disaster came to pass is documented by a former member of the team. It involved a total of 43 people and took a year, and you’ll find the blog at http://tinyurl.com/y2g6ye.

There is something you can do to improve the situation. Go to Control Panel, Power Options. On the left you’ll see ‘Choose what the power buttons do’. Ignore this ­ it refers to real buttons that you press with real fingers. Instead, choose any of the three options on the right and click its ‘Change Plan Settings’.

In the next screen click on ‘Change Advanced Power Settings’. You’ll get a long list of options ­ expand ‘Power buttons and lid’ ­ and that’s where you can change the behaviour of the ‘Off’ button, with a choice of Sleep, Hibernate or Shutdown. Finally, if you have the mouse focus on the Taskbar or Desktop and press Alt & F4, you’ll get a box popping up offering a list of all the shutdown options as per previous versions of Windows.