07/08/94 Become a Power-User part 3 We conclude this look at some of the features of RISC OS which make life easier by examining new features introduced in RISC OS 3. Some of these require the support of the application concerned to work. * Dragging one or more objects between two directory viewers copies them to the directory. If you hold down the SHIFT key the objects will be moved rather than copied. On RISC OS 3 objects will be renamed rather than copied if possible. * Help (ie from !Help) is now available on menu entries. * Clicking on the Toggle Size icon with SHIFT held down will open a window to its largest possible size without obscuring the icon bar. * If you drag a scroll bar with the Adjust button and the window has both vertical and horizontal scroll bars the pointer will temporarily disappear, and the mouse can be used to scroll the window in both directions while you hold ADJUST down. * If you click Select within a directory viewer in a position which is between objects, you can then drag a rectangle around all the objects which you wish to perform an operation on. Individual objects can be added or removed from the group by clicking Adjust on them. * Clicking on the close icon of a window with SHIFT held down does not close the window, but instead iconises it on to the Pinboard (the Backdrop program). Double-clicking on the iconised window restores it to full size. * While a window is iconised, you can get at the relevant menu for that window by using SHIFT-Menu with the pointer over the iconised window. * SHIFT F12 brings the icon bar to the front of the desktop (beware applications which also use it!). It can also put it back at the back. * CTRL F12 starts a Task Window. Some questions and myths about viruses Now that viruses are becoming more common on RISC OS machines, there are a number of common questions which crop up. * Should I inoculate my files ? Do not use any inoculation program. It is not possible to simultaneously inoculate against all the known viruses. * I've got the version n.nn of !xxxxxxx, and that doesn't find anything. So I'm protected, right ? Wrong. The virus scene changes very rapidly. If the program you are using is more than 3-6 months old, it will not detect the newect viruses and newly discovered strains of existing ones (at the time of writing 23 families of virus exist). Futhermore, using an out-of-date program has the possibility of spreading a virus through your system as it scans, and of corrupting data when attempting to disinfect a file (because the infection is of a different strain, discovered more recently). * Can a virus reside in the CMOS RAM ? No. The CMOS RAM is only used for data storage. Program code is never executed within the CMOS RAM. In addition, it is only 240 bytes long. However, some viruses do use CMOS RAM locations for data storage. * Can a virus survive a CTRL-Reset ? No. However, it will probably not take long to reload it - see below! * How can I be infected with a virus ? Opening a directory viewer on a directory containing an infected application is enough - you don't have to actually use an application which is infected.