Problems, problems, problems...
This week's article looks at resolving some more problems that people have been having. I hope that if you are experiencing problems - that yours is listed here!
16 Versus 32 Bit - What's the Difference?
A number of people have emailed me asking about this and why Windows 3.x users can't use some Windows 9x programs. Here's the reason.
The computer is constantly moving data around from disk to memory, to CPU to screen - all over the place in fact. Rather than sending it one bit at a time - the computer uses chunks of data. These in (some) programming languages are known as "words" and memory is divided up in such a way as to have "word boundaries". These boundaries tell the computer where one word of data ends and the next begins.
In the old 8 bit machines of yesterday, these boundaries were in 1 byte amounts. That is - 8 bits of data (8 binary 1's) would be sent around the machine. When 16 bit machines arrived, 16 binary 1's (or 2 bytes) were sent instead. This doubled the carrying capacity of the machine as twice as much data could be sent at any one time. When 32 bit came along, 4 bytes of data (32 bits of binary 1's) could be sent at any one time which doubled the capacity of 16 bit processors.
All this increase in bits also meant that the computer had to be able to address larger sizes of memory. Binary 11111111 is 255. 16 binary 1's is 65535 whilst 32 binary 1's is a massive 4294967295. You need a bit of a different layout to address 32 bit addresses than you do 16 or 8 bit addresses. This is the reason why 16 bit systems can't run 32 bit applications. Or can they?
A program WIN32S.EXE tricks the 32 bit program into thinking it is running in a 32 bit environment when in fact it is running on a 16 bit system. Although not foolproof, well behaved 32 bit programs should and can run when WIN32S.EXE is in place. This program is readily available from most places (try ZDNet - http://www.zdnet.com/downloads/ )
Completing Forms in Word
An email I received had an attached form (used for their company) that they wanted to complete in Word (indeed - this could be almost any word processor). They had a template with all the boxes and stand text and they had to complete the "data" areas of the form when it was completed.
Latest Articles