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What is X-mouse? Is it any use? Make your mouse move faster by increasing its Refresh Rate Ok, if you feel the need to cut open and melt your motherboard, don't use a power saw like I did... Make your mouse easier to use by altering its sensitivity, pointer speed, and yaddy-yaddy-ya Okay, so you want to figure out what all the Tweaking nonsense is all about? Well, if you don't have TweakUI already, go check out the powertoys on the Windows98 CD. I personally have never even touched my Windows98SE CD so I have no idea what directory TweakUI is stored in. If the CD seems like a foreign jungle to you and you just end up getting lost, go get TweakUI at www.tucows.com or at: http://www.tweak3d.net/files/tweakui.zip. And who knows? Maybe good ol'Microsoft will have it somewhere on their Linux servers too... Okay, a few years back when Windows95 was still new, I had no real idea what an inf file was for except to store hardware data. So you can guess that when I decompressed the powertoys archive, I was pretty surprised to not find a single executable. Sooner or later, I figured out how the install the darn program: right click on the tweakui.inf file and click on install.... Go ahead and laugh at me, but we were all dumb at computers once... Back in1991, I had to send my double-space compressed computer to the shop after tinkering and deleting both the msdos.sys and the dblspace.bin file, and that was just the first time I screwed the computer up that year... |
What the Heck is X-Mouse anyways?:
You know, I've been asking myself that same question for 6 bloody years now. I've never tried that stupid X-mouse inf file (or is it an executable? I remember a weird icon thingy...), but it just looks so tempting... According to Tweak3d (my source for everything - I owe the last 2 months of my life to them - God save the Queen!), X-Mouse is a program for computer beginnings. It modifies the Windows GUI to highlight whatever icon the mouse pointer floats over - you won't have to click to highlight. It's sort of like what happens when you use the mouse wheel button over an icon - it just magically gets highlighted. WOW!!! No wonder I don't use this program - I've got just 2 icons on my desktop and with my computer as my witness, I vow to never add a single one more... but maybe I'll add 2...
Increase your PS\2 Mouse's Speed and Refresh Rate:
Okay, I can't really try this tweak since I've got a 2-button mouse from this company called Phoenix or something, but anyone who has a PS\2 Logitech mouse with Mouseware 8.3 or greater installed can. This won't work with serial ports like mine because they just go too doggone slow! Anyways, according to Tweak3d, if you open up regedit and open up this key: [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Logitech\MouseWare\CurrentVersion\Technical\], and "change the "PS2ReportRate" DWORD to equal either 40, 80, or 200", you will increase your mouse's refresh rate. This makes mouse motion so much smoother and accurate for games and everyday, plain computer usage. If you don't have a Logitech mouse, go get PS\2 Rate from http://www.tweakfiles.com/misc/ps2rateplus.html. I haven't tried it (I don't try much, do I?), but it does the same mouse refresh tweaking with the benefit of a friendly GUI.
Make sure you watch out for sparks when cutting through your TowerCase:
Okay, I just learned this lesson the hard way. You see, I have an i430VX in a 486 mid-towercase. The brilliant cheep-os at Swift Technologies covered my PS\2 port with metal - plating. I didn't even know I had a PS\2 port until I checked the manual half a year later, and by that time, Swift was bankrupt and voided all warranty crap (not like I'd ever send my compute back to those idiots). So at the beginning of the year 2000, I took some kind of power saw and drilled a hole in the back of my computer. And SUCCESS!!! I made a hole large enough for any mouse tail to crawl through. Heck, with my cutting precision, the entire mouse can now squeeze and hide inside my computer. However, I ended up with two problems: a), I cut off a piece of my AT Keyboard connector and b), sparks from the cutting rained into my computer and all landed on my exposed CLSavage4! Ack! Alack!!! And I had just paid $140 Canadian to get that piece of space-age junk! Well, the end result turned out to be an unused PS\2 port (until I get a new mouse) and a Savage4 that's covered in ashes and black, burned spots. The funny thing is, the CL Savage actually runs more stable now! Who would've thunk?
TweakUI is a mouse's heaven when it comes to tweaking... then again, maybe that's a bit of an exaggeration... In the Mouse tab of TweakUI, you can increase your computer's sensitivity to double clicks. I haven't tried it yet, but I think the higher the sensitivity, the easier it is to double-click on an icon. This is great for people who have computer novices in the family yet hate Windows98's one-click feature. Now the next features that I will mention aren't in TweakUI; they're in the Mouse section of the Control Panel. Increasing the pointer speed seems to reduce some lag and increase aim in 3d shooters. Well, that happens on my computer because since game just goes so slow, the mouse pointer usually chugs along with it. Make sure you disable that annoying pointer trail and don't bother using a custom mouse pointer. Maybe it's just a psychological thing, but the mouse just seems slower when I switch to a different cursor. The Mouse control panel also has a double-click sensitivity scale and I'm not sure how this one differs from the one if TweakUI. Low settings on the control panel one allow double-clicks that take 3 or 4 seconds long to happen while on the fastest setting, even my double-clicks aren't quick enough to load an icon.
Make sure the menu speed in TweakUI is set to fastest. This modifies the registry to make the folders in the start menu to appear immediately rather than with slow scrolling. Turn off windows animation, smooth scrolling, and beep on errors. The animations must be useless because I notice no difference in Windows after turning that option off. Smooth scrolling occurs when you drag a window around. Turning this option off disables the redrawing of the menu everywhere that you drag it; it only is redrawn when you're done dragging. For 32MB guys like me, smooth scrolling takes up quite a bit of power with 2 or 3 programs open at once. Beep on errors obviously beeps when you get a message. Just turn off those annoying sounds; they spook the hell out of me and into me at the same time. The sound card takes up quite a lot of CPU power to run and its really not worth it to hear a bleep when a huge error message gets centered on your screen anyways. Choose "none" for the shortcut overlay to get rid of that annoying arrow on all of your icons. This saves your computer from having to add it to every shortcut which probably doesn't make your computer faster, but it looks a hell of a lot better. Then get rid of the "Click here to begin" feature; everytime my computer freezes while shutting down, I end up getting this annoying message everytime that I reboot. I can't take it any longer! And now that I've turned it off, I think my computer actually shuts down faster... or is it just me? It's hard to tell... Uncheck that "tip of the day" option because it adds booting time if your windows gets that stupid welcome screen all the time. Try to limit your desktop icons to as few as possible. On my desktop, the only icons I have are the recycle bin and IvanF's Computer; from a psychological point of view, anymore than 2 or 3 icons feels like it adds to boot time. Windows defrag isn't the most efficient at putting the desktop directory near the very head of the hard drive so the more icons, the more hard drive searching for IDE 16MB transfer rate guys like me. Try to disable the play audio and data CD options, although they always come back for me. It's better to not have auto-run at all then to have it add boot time (if you leave your CDs in your CD-ROM overnight) or for no apparent reason pop up at you when you're innocently typing away at a book report... Make sure Windows isn't logging errors in the faultlog.txt. Any logging requires a tiny bit of hard drive bandwith. For computers like mine with 1.5GB of bad clusters, if I ever set this option on, faultlog.txt would end up being 1 GB large. Get rid of as many document types in the create "new" section as you can. I, for one, never use those create new template thingys. I prefer to just use the start menu and open up the program. The more of those create new stuff you have, the more milliseconds it adds to boot time. To shorten your booting time, turn off the function keys. If you have to go to dos (which I do all the time), just use a boot disk with REAL Dos (or Win98 Dos if you've got FAT32). Completely disabling the function keys is a few milliseconds faster than just setting the keys to 0 second delay... Then again, you may need that Safe mode sometime... but then you can always just edit that write-protected msdos.sys file... Always make sure you disable that Splash screen/logo option. The boot difference may seem non-existant, but doesn't it just make your happier to know you ran away from at least one Microsoft advertisement on your computer?... but then you enter Windows... Oh, and disable that F4 button too. Who actually uses it anyways?... Well, I've tried... but now I'm just stuck with my boot disks... And finally, delete as many program uninstall entries as you can from the Add/Remove section. The registry is what makes Windows take so long to boot up. Deleting a registry file in this section may make your mind feel more at ease - booting time won't be any shorter than normal, but at least you'll think it is... Well, maybe that won't work, but at least that stupid uninstall list will look shorter...