Active Desktop Tutorial
Alt+Tab
Animated Logo Screens - Creating Win95/98
Application Removal
Auto Change Sounds, logos, wallpaper
AutoPlay CD-ROMs - Avoid
AutoUpdate (Windows Millenium)

Active Desktop Tutorial

If you choose your own desktop colour scheme (right-click, choose Properties, change background), you lose the "Tell me about Active Desktop" tutorial.
If you decide you need it again, right-click on the desktop, choose Properties, and click on the Background tab.
From the list, choose Wallpaper, and then click on OK.
This puts your desktop back to the default, and you will once again have "Tell me about Active Desktop" available for use.

Alt+Tab

To flip from one application to another using only the keyboard keep your thumb on the Alt key while tabbing. To select an application, release the Alt key.
You will see all open applications along with an outline box highlighting the one you are about to select.

Creating Win95/98 Animated Logo Screens

As many people are no doubt aware, anyone can replace the start-up logo screen shown by Windows 95 / 98® with one of their own, the only problem has been that it isn't widely known how to create an animated start-up screen (Those pretty moving blue bars at the bottom of the standard screen.)
While some people may not feel this is important, and many simply disable the logo screen completely, with my extremely unstable system (Strange Hardware), it is important to me to know the that the system is still doing something rather than just sitting there during start-up.
Until now this has left me STUCK with the default start-up logo which has bothered me because I KNOW I'm running Window 95®, and don't need to be reminded every time I boot (Happens quite often). As it turns out, creating an animated start-up screen is a rather simple though time consuming task.
 
What's required:

A picture to animate, this should be a 256 Colour 320 x 400 Windows BMP, this seems a strange size because the start-up screen uses a mode that puts that resolution on the screen. I tend to do my designing on a 640 x 400 image then scale it using a graphics utility, this makes it easier to get the proportions correct.

A graphics Utility that can directly edit the Palette of an image. (I have yet to decide what is the best for this, I've been trying out a few different ones, and think the final choice will be Paint Shop Pro

A hex editor. or the XrX Animated Logo Utility (822KB) which allows you to view animations without rebooting, and does all the hex editing automatically, check out the XrX Animated Logo Tools Page for more info.

Patience, getting all the right colours in all the right places can be time consuming.

Steps to create Animated Logo:
First a word about the 'animation' this is not true animation, this is palette animation, this means that only the colours of areas on the screen change, not the shape of the areas. This is accomplished by the manipulation of the pictures palette, so far I have got 2 scenarios figured out, the first simply rotates the palette from a selected starting point through to the end continuously, this is the method used by the default start-up logo. The second seems to step through the palette to the end and back again. Designing an animation using this technique can be a bit of a challenge.

Create, borrow or whatever, just get yourself a picture to animate. A good place to get some ideas is Steve Kremer's Windows 95 & Mac Joke Wallpaper etc. Page One of my first attempts was a bitmap of flowers, simple but appealing. I found a JPG that's 640 x 480 TrueColor.

Correct the size of your picture. Resize the image to 320 x 400 using your choice of tools.
You will need a few unused colours in the palette to use for your animation. So at this point you want to reduce the colour depth of your image to something under 256. I'm going to use the same kind of animation that the default logo uses at the bottom of my image so I'm going to need 20 colours. (If you count you'll find that there are 20 boxes across the screen) So I need to reduce the number of colours in my image to 236. I find that doing this step after resizing generally results in a better image.

At this point I generally go in and set the unused colours I'm going to be animating (Must be at the END of the palette) to unique colours that are not used anywhere else in the picture. This makes it easier to do the editing because some editors will use the first matching colour in the palette rather than the one selected. This can get quite frustrating, you think you've set that last box to a specific colour to be animated, and it never changes because it actually got set to a non animated colour earlier in the palette.

Now add the elements to be animated to your picture, in this case I am putting 20 boxes across the bottom of the picture, and setting them to each successive colour I set in the previous step.
Now go back and set those colours to what you actually want them to be. In my case I started with black, faded to green and back to black in those last 20 palette entries.

Save your picture as a 256 colour Windows Bitmap (.BMP), it will have to be renamed later.
Load the file you just saved into your Hex Editor. Changing the following Bytes:
Offset: Hex 32, Decimal 50 - Change this byte to the number of the FIRST palette entry that you wish to animate.
In my case because I am animating 20 entries, this would be Hex EC, Decimal 236.
Offset: Hex 33, Decimal 51 - For standard palette rotation this should be zero (00), for back and forth action this should be one (01).
Setting this to other values does strange things, I am not even sure of the back and forth action of the 1 setting. When I have these other values figured out I'll post the results, or if anyone else has these figured out, let me know. Save your original LOGO.SYS if any.
Rename your file to LOGO.SYS (This is in the Root Directory of your boot drive (If your boot drive is compressed LOGO.SYS can be found on the HOST drive) by the way.)
Reboot.
If your lucky everything should work just the way you want.

This is a 'simple' example, and most of the grudge work can be done automatically using a small utility I've created, XrX Addbar, which adds the animated bar to the bottom of an appropriately sized bitmap, to download this and other XrX Tools, check out the XrX Animated Logo Tools page.

Good luck creating your own logo's, I wouldn't mind seeing other peoples work, or if you have any comments you can send me E-Mail. Karl McMurdo (XrX) - kmcmurdo@nucleus.com>
Check out Sample Logos (Over 400 and counting)

One final note here, I got serious about figuring out the animated logo screen after seeing some interesting themes available on the net for MS Plus, and deciding that a theme in my mind couldn't be complete without a tied in start-up screen. One of the better sources I've found for themes is Dale's Window 95® Theme Page with new themes being added all the time...
Karl McMurdo's (XrX) Homepage
Check out the Nucleus Hompage
Comments to: Karl McMurdo (XrX)

Application Removal

Do NOT delete the files associated with an application before removing it using the Control Panel - Add/Remove Programs. Failure to do this will leave the registry entries in place and can cause all sorts of nasties. You'll then have to re-install the app to enable Win95 to remove it properly.

Auto Change Sounds, logos, wallpaper

To make the cycle you will need to create .BAT files
Create Subfolders in C:\Windows\Media and name them as follows;

Wallpaper.
Sounds.
Start-up.
Shutdown.

Example for wallpaper;
Place the your chosen files into the Wallpaper folder and rename all the files in a sequential number, (wallpaper001.bmp, wallpaper002.bmp etc).
Copy the first file in your selection to C:\Windows and rename it simply as wallpaper.bmp.
Select Display Properties, on the ‘Background’ tab select ‘wallpaper.bmp’from the list , or browse to it, hit ok.
Open Notepad and type in the following;

ren \windows\media\wallpaper\wallpaper002.bmp wallpaper001.bmp
ren \windows\media\wallpaper\wallpaper003.bmp wallpaper002.bmp
copy \windows\wallpaper.bmp \windows\media\wallpaper\wallpaper003.bmp
move \windows\media\wallpaper\wallpaper001.bmp \windows\wallpaper.bmp

Now save the file into your C:\Windows\Media folder with the name ‘swap wallpaper.bat’.
Now edit your autoexec.bat file in your C: Root directory, At the bottom of the file on a line by itself type:

"C:\Windows\Media\swap wallpaper.bat" include the quotes, save and close Autoexec.bat

When you restart your computer your wallpaper will be changed cycling through the images each time you boot up.
Add or remove files at anytime by editing the swap wallpaper.bat file.
Use the example above for the other folders

Avoid AutoPlay CD-ROMs

You can hold down the shift key when you insert a CD-ROM to disable AutoPlay or you can make the following changes: Open any folder and select view, options, file types. Select AudioCD and click Edit. Select Play from the Action listbox, choose Set Default (this actually toggles the default). If Play is bolded, the CD will play when inserted. If it is not bolded, it will not.

AutoUpdate

The goal of the Auto Update feature is to bring the functionality of the current Windows Update Web site to the client machine. From an end-user experience standpoint, the goal of this product is to be as nonintrusive as possible while retaining full functionality.

Ultimately, the intent is for Auto Update to become silent and automatic, much like the Critical Update Notification self-update feature. Replacement of the Critical Update Notification occurs during the Millennium setup; if Critical Update Notification is installed on the client in an upgrade scenario, setup will uninstall Critical Update Notification, because Auto Update provides a superset of redundant Critical Update Notification functionality. And Auto Update is on by default.

There will be no user action required or notification of this change. It updates every 24 hours — that’s not configurable. Auto Update will periodically wake up on schedule to determine what operations to perform. If there are no pending actions to be taken by Auto Update, and the user has not explicitly set the schedule by using the Remind Me Later option, Auto Update will run once every 24 hours.

If the 24-hour time period has passed and Auto Update was not able to check for updates, it will register with SENS, the System Event Notification Service, to be notified when a connection is available. After a connection is available, Auto Update will check for updates and reschedule for 24 hours.

Once Auto Update has been awakened, it will need to check the last state of Auto Update. In other words, what action was Auto Update performing on the last execution. And how should Auto Update resume?

It uses a throttled download technology. The downloader will only retrieve information from your Windows Update server in the background, while the bandwidth is not being used by another service, user, or anything else. Auto Update will detect when a connection is not in use, or not saturated, and request information from the server. As other requests enter the pipe, Auto Update will throttle down its use of the bandwidth until a sufficient amount of bandwidth becomes available.

The goal for background download is to have no noticeable impact on a user’s use of the connection. The noticeable impact varies, depending on the use of the pipe: e-mail, surfing, streaming media, whatever you have. So Auto Update will detect, in real time, the saturation level of the pipe to determine how much bandwidth is available for its own use.

Background downloading applies to all CAB content downloaded, as in self-update CABs, new content, etc., but will not apply to version 3 (of SFP and Auto Update) catalog information. The reason for this is the catalog information must always be the latest information when detecting or resuming a download, to ensure that the user receives proper updates. For this reason, if the catalog retrieval is ever interrupted, then a restart will occur from the beginning, rather than the point of interruption.

Windows Update uses the Wuv3is.dll control that the Windows Update site uses. It only deals with critical updates. Auto Update is a subset of the content located on the Windows Update site.

The Auto Update content is contained on a separate server. We won’t pull down anything from recommended updates or other Windows Update areas. Auto Update will not automatically dial a connection. It will sense if a connection to the Internet is present and proceed accordingly.

When Millennium is about to enter a hibernated or suspended or standby state, Auto Update must exit gracefully to allow this state to occur. Because Auto Update runs in the background, it will not be obvious to the user why the transition cannot be made. Auto update should not prevent this transaction.

If connectivity is lost due to the state transition, Auto Update should terminate and not be in memory when the system hibernates. But the SENS and shell hook should be able to resume from hibernation as appropriate.

It’s configured in Control Panel or Auto Update properties.
There are three options in Control Panel / Automatic Updates.

  1. Automatically download updates and notify me when they are ready to be installed.
  2. Notify me before downloading any updates and notify me again when they are ready to be installed
  3. Turn off automatic updating. I will manually update my computer.