Windows 98 For Dummies, First Edition Corrections

These corrections have all been made for the current, second edition of Windows 98 For Dummies.

Turning on the CD’s AutoPlay feature

When you insert a CD into your computer, Windows usually plays it automatically. Although Chapter 2 refers readers to Chapter 18 for a fix if that feature isn’t working, the information isn’t there.So, when your CDs aren’t playing or loading automatically when you insert them into your computer, try this for a fix:

1. Click the My Computer icon with your right mouse button and choose Properties from the menu.
2. Click the Device Manager tab and find the CDROM drive entry.
3. Double-click on the CDROM drive entry to open it up and click on the CD-ROM driver that appears directly below it.
4. Click the Properties button at the bottom of the page and, when the new Properties page appears, click the Settings tab.
5. Click in the Auto insert notification box to add a check mark.

The FreeCell game that can’t be beat!

When describing FreeCell on Page 239, the book says this about FreeCell’s 32,000 possible games: So far, none of them has been proven unbeatable.

This isn’t true, as pointed out by Mr. John McCarter of Pennsylvania: “A couple of years ago, my son, a software engineer for Agilent Technologies (Hewlett-Packard) indeed wrote a program that proved FreeCell game number 11982 could never be solved.”

The sneaky creator of Microsoft’s FreeCell also made sure that games “-1” and “-2” can’t be solved. (Choose Select Game from the Game menu, and type in those negative numbers to try playing those games.)

The Solitaire Laboratory Web site shares an incredible wealth of information about FreeCell.

Menu Bar not labeled in Figure 5-1

Although Figure 5-1 identifies all parts of a typical window, it neglects to point out the menu bar — the strip of words that create a menu near the top of a window. The menu bar is identified a few pages later in Figure 5-3, where it receives its own section.

Chapter 5’s “Don’t bother with this Control-menu button stuff” Technical Stuff section

For the extra-curious reader, this section explains the purpose of a window’s rather redundant “Control-menu.” The original sentence reads, “Choose the Move option, and you can move around the window with the keyboard’s arrow keys.”

A reader suggested that the wording be changed to this, instead: “Choose the Move option, and you can move the window around with the keyboard’s arrow keys.”