Windows Tips: Safer Backups--The Long and Short of It

Windows Me Slide Shows

Maybe you want your office computer to display a continuous series of promotional screens, or your home PC to run a slide show of the family vacation pictures you took with your digital camera; or maybe you simply want to browse the images in a folder in Explorer's thumbnail preview mode--but you don't want to buy and learn presentation or graphics-management software. Use Windows Me's slide-show feature instead.

If you're planning a presentation, first assemble your slides. (Skip this step if you plan only to browse images currently on your hard disk.) The images must be in a bitmap-based file format--such as .gif, .jpg, .bmp, or .tif--that Windows Explorer's Image Preview supports. If you use a digital camera to create your slides, they are probably already in one of those formats. (Unlike the miniature preview that Web View provides, Image Preview will not display .xls, .htm, and other files that are not bitmap based.)

Open a new folder for all the images in your slide show (and only for those images). To control the order in which they'll appear, rename the images from first to last in alphabetical or numeric order: Select a file in the folder window, press F2, and add a letter or number (such as 00, 01, 02, and so on) to the beginning of each file name.

To customize your slide folder with the proper template, right-click an empty area of the folder and choose Customize This Folder (or highlight the folder and select View, Customize This Folder). Click Next in the Customize This Folder Wizard, select Customize, check 'Choose or edit an HTML template for this folder,' click Next again, and select Image Preview. Click Next once more and then Finish.

To launch a slide show, open this folder and click the underlined slideshow text in the upper-left corner of Explorer's left pane. If you don't see the slide-show option, drag an edge of the window to widen your view.

If you do nothing, the slides will advance on their own (one every 10 or 15 seconds). To advance the slides manually, click anywhere on your screen. To go backward, move the mouse or press any key except Alt or Esc to display a set of VCR-like controls in the upper-right corner of the screen.

To run the slide show from your keyboard, press any key to make the VCR controls appear, use the arrow keys to highlight a button, then press Space or Enter to activate it. Press Esc to end the slide show.

Bonus tip: If you have a scroll-wheel mouse, you can use it to zoom in (magnify) or out (return to the normal view) as slides appear on screen.