Tips & Tricks-November 2001

Don't go out at midnight on Halloween without a lot of garlic hanging around your neck. (I know Halloween was in October, but it fell on a date after the newsletter was published.)

A Flood of Fonts

If you have loaded any version of Office, many of the Corel products, Adobe products and some others, you probably added a number of fonts to those that came with Windows. My computer has 805 fonts on it right now.

When the number of fonts begins to balloon, your computer's performance may begin to suffer a bit, particularly when you boot up. You can clean out some of the fonts that you don't use. Go to the Control Panel. Select the Fonts icon. You will see a list of the fonts that are available on your computer. You can delete the fonts that you are not likely to use, but it is probably better to copy them to another folder. That way, they won't be loaded when you start Windows, but if you need the font, you can copy it back to the Fonts folder.

Also notice that the fonts folder allows you to print a sample sheet of each font. Just double-click on the font name to see the sheet. This is an easy way to catalog the fonts that you move so you can find them later. Don't move any fonts that show a red "A" as the icon for the font. Those are fonts used by the Windows system

Suppose you don't have enough fonts. When you installed Windows 98 or ME, a number of fonts were installed for you, but there are more on the installation CD. You can get those fonts from the Windows CD. Open an MSDOS window by going to the program menu and finding MS-DOS Prompt. Assuming that your CD ROM drive is drive D:, go to the root directory by typing d:\. Then you have to extract the fonts.

For Windows ME type: Extract /A /L C:\Coolfont d:\Win9X\Base2.Cab *.ttf

For Windows 98: Extract /A /L C:\Coolfont d:\Win98\Base4.Cab *.ttf

Thanks to Emazing for the tip about the additional fonts.