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ESSENTIAL UTILITIES
Getting the most out of DialupMaster options
By Dan Huber
Last month, we introduced you to DialupMaster, a program by Peter Koch that substantially improves the Remote Networking component of Windows CE. DialupMaster is chock full of options and, as promised, this month we're going to describe those options in detail.
A program like this is bound to have plenty of options to let the you customize the program to your needs and tastes, and DialupMaster is no exception. When you select the icon in the system tray representative of DialupMaster and choose Options, a pop-up menu appears, which you can see in Figure A.
FIGURE A
 
DialupMaster can be tailored to your tastes through plenty of options. Roll over picture for a larger image.
That pop-up menu gives you the options shown in Table A, which you can toggle on and off.
| Option |
What it does |
| Sound On |
Enables sound effects that act as confirmations to menu selections, pop-ups, etc. |
| Tray Timer On |
Enables the small numerical timer that resides in the system tray to time your connections. |
| Login Scripts On |
Enables the use of scripts which are used with dial-up connections. |
| Keep-Alive On |
Enables the ping utility that attempts to keep your ISP from disconnecting you. |
| Skip Connect Window |
When using DialupMaster to dial, this skips the need to press Connect when the dialog box is launched. |
| Properties |
See below. |
When you choose "Properties" from the DialupMaster tray menu, you're presented with a tabbed window that a number of tabs. I'll explain each in order.
The Pop-up Menu tab
The Pop-up Menu tab, which can be viewed in Figure B, is a tabbed window with two boxes that dictate how the connection entries are displayed.
FIGURE B
 
This is one of the most versatile dialog boxes in DialupMaster. Roll over picture for a larger image.
The first box, labeled Show, has three entries:
- System entries (prefixed with `): connections listed in DialupMaster's connection list that are part of the system, such as serial ports and infrared ports, will have a ` character in front of them to add distinction from dial-up connections;
- DIRECT device entries: include the actual serial port and infrared connections in the connection list;
- MODEM device entries: include dial-up connections that are created in Remote Networking.
All of these options can be toggled on and off.
The second box, labeled Sub-Menus, contains several more options. Your device's serial and infrared ports can operate at more than one speed and Windows CE already designates the names of the connections as "Serial@ 115K," etc. An option available in DialupMaster, called "Split entries into sub-menus", lets you group connections of similar nature by the use of a user-defined character that's present in all connections.
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