Dinosaur Sighting: Microsoft Windows 3.1 Resource Kit Utilities

The Resource Kit came with a single floppy disk that included 5 great utilities, which over the years became part of the Windows operating system, and enhancements for File Manager. There were also a bunch of Windows Write documents that contained supplemental information that was not included in the Windows Resource Kit manual.   

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Once you launched setup you were prompted to install the Windows Resource Kit in the root directory.

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You could choose which components of the Windows Resource Kit that you wanted to install as well as whether you wanted to install them in separate Program Manager Groups.

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As soon as you clicked the Continue button, the installation began and you could track the progress.

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Once the installation was complete, you saw the new Windows Resource Kit group in Program Manager.

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The Graphics Viewer utility allowed you to view graphics files that were in Bitmap, MetaFile, and Icon formats. You can think of the Graphics Viewer utility as the first iteration of the Windows Picture/Photo Viewer that are found in Windows XP and Windows 7

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Once you selected an image file, the image displayed in the main Graphics Viewer window, which as you can see included Previous and Next buttons to allow you to cycle through all of the available images.

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If you pulled down the Options menu, Graphics Viewer allowed you to set any files that were in Bitmap format as the desktop wallpaper—either centered or tiled.

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Windows 3.1 didn’t come with any real networking tools and the Network Assistant provided several tools for managing the network connections for both disk drives and printers. You could think of this tool as an early version of Network Neighborhood.  As you can see, this utility consisted of three parts:  Network Connections, Previous Connection List, and Network Utilities.

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You can think of the Network Connections tool as an early version of the Map Network drive command that we now have in Windows Explorer.

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The Previous Connection List allowed you to see and maintain a list of frequently used connections.

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The Network Utilities provided you with options for viewing and configuring network specific information, such as the computer and workgroup names. At the bottom of the dialog box were the Options: Startup, Password, and Event Log.

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On the Startup Settings dialog box you could configure certain network features to be enabled at startup, configure options for Enterprise networking, as well as set performance priority.

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When you accessed the Event Log Settings, you could pick which networking events that you wanted to log in the Event Log.

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The SmartDrive Monitor provided an interface to the Windows 3.1’s SmartDrive 4.0 disk cache and displayed a graph showing Cache Hit Rate. Each column in this graph represented the percentage of “hits” on the cache during the specified sampling frequency (the default is 500 msec). A hit occurs each time Windows looks to SmartDrive for information and finds it in the cache.

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Using the options you could alter the Cache Hit Rate sampling frequency settings, enable a log file, as well as change the SmartDrive configuration in the Autoexec.bat file.

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The SMARTDrive Monitor also displayed the Hit Rate when minimized.

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The SysMeter (System Meter) displayed the current use of the User heap, the GDI heap, and system memory. The application displayed three bars that represented the percent-free of each of the three monitored areas.

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The SysMeter also provided information while minimized.

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You could say that TopDesk was the very first iteration of Microsoft's Virtual Desktop Manager PowerToy. TopDesk displayed a window that contained all available desktops. All running applications appeared in the center block/desktop and you would then drag an application’s window to another desktop.

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Once you had distributed applications to different desktops, you could then switch desktops by right clicking on desktop that you wanted.

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Since TopDesk provided a completely new way to use Windows, Microsoft provided a very nice animated, interactive demo that taught you how to use the utility. Keep in mind that the concept of and term Virtual Desktops was not very common back in 1992.

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File Size Information was an extension to File Manager. Once installed, this extension added a menu to File Manager called Info.

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Selecting the File Size Information command revealed information about the selected item such as Number of Files, Number of Directories, and Total Disk Space. This add-on was especially useful for viewing the disk space occupied from the root directory and all its subdirectories.

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Did you install and use the Microsoft Windows 3.1 Resource Kit tools back in 1992?

Please take a moment to drop by the TechRepublic Community Forums and let us hear from you. 

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