Aiding your Windows Computer with winaid.zip 
16sep10, correction in a url made 26sep15.


\begin{document}


\section{Introduction}
The package \textt{ winaid } consists in three useful tools for Windows. 
It's a collection of files that do not affect your Windows Registry. 
They may be removed by simply 
deleting the files. The overall purpose of Winaid 
is to let you to use the Windows command shell. When you open a command shell,
for instance with the keypress (Flag)+(R) followed by entering "cmd", and 
then enter "startall", you will have the following.

\begin{itemize}
\item This shell will obey many of the common Unix commands, like ls, cd, cp, rm,
cat, and find. It will still obey its native commands, such as dir, C: etc. 
\item A version of VIM is available on the command line, as in "vim foo.txt".
\item The command shell Doskey utility is still function (as of Windows 7). 
\item  Winaid contains a compact, if obsolete, still functional native 
Windows compiler.  With it you can compile simple C programs, and some 
programs written in C++
(up to circa 1998). 
\end{itemize}

\section{Preparing your PC with Winaid}
If you download winaid.zip from 
http://www.math.uiuc.edu/~gfrancis/illimath/windows/  
for example, also download unzip.exe from the same location. 
If your browser shows a space instead of a tilde between the / 
and the g in the urls (an unfortunate change made to browsers since
2011) then you must use the tilde key in your browser.
Then  do this.



\begin{itemize} 
\item If you have administrator permission, download unzip.exe and 
winaid.zip into the root directory of your C: drive. 
\item Enter "unzip winaid.zip" 
\item Enter "cd winaid" and enter "dir" to make sure where you are. 
\item Copy the batch file startall.bat into your home directory.
\item The easiest way to do this is to 
\begin{itemize} 
\item open a new command shell. They always open in your home directory. 
\item enter "  "
\item Note the period is part of the command; it means "this folder".
\item test it by entering "startall". The doskey commands will scroll by.
\item and then enter "ls" to test that the paths to this shell are OK.
\item if you know how, you should now use vim to edit and extend your 
doskey arsenal. See below, if you want to learn.  
\end{itemize}
\end{itemize}

\section{Using VIM, the universal command line editor.}

A good way to use your newly enabled command-line editor is to 
\begin{itemize} 
\item  Save a copy "cp startall.bat o-startall.bat" \\
\item Do "vim startall.bat" and you should see what's in the picture, except
that instead of the word "temp" you should see "winaid". \\
\item If you don't know VIM yet, then use Wordpad, but don't save anything
but .txt files, and don't use any punctuation in your file names, expecially
not spaces! EVER! You may use underscores and dashes. \\
\item Write some new doskey commands just line the ones you see. \\
\end{itemize}

\section{Using mvc98, your tamed Windows compiler.}



Above you learned that the command shell needs to know the paths to various
places to work properly. Thus executing the batch file startall.bat prepares
that command shell to understand certain commands. 

Similarly, to compile and run programs written in C, execute the batch 
file \texttt{vcvars98.bat}, located in \texttt{ mvc98 }. If mvc98 and 
winaid are not in their standard locations, you need to edit this batch
file, but do so only by replacing the phrase "temp" with the appropriate
phrase for the new path.  

To be continued


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