W98SE:

Helping a friend get started in digital photography.

He has some photos stored on his computer *.jpg - but they don't have any preview panel in windows explorer and when I click on the files - I have to select an application to use to open the file.

Did W98 come with a native photo viewer for use in windows explorer, or do I need to link to an external 3rd party program to view photos?

I'm wonderng if W98 is corrupt or needs a tweak in order for it to open these photos...

Hope someone can point me in the right direction!

Noup all is ok, use IE, or paint: open wit...always and stuff

For imagine I think ur friend should upgrade his OS, 98 is a great OS but it can crash a lot while working on GFX, or anything for that matter. So I would consider XP Pro, or 2000. Also, you can get an inexpensive program like JASC Pain Shop Pro that can do the job, not as good as Photoshop, but it's good. Just a suggestion.

And to answer ur question, 98 does not come with a native Imaging program, so u will have to end up using IE to open up jpgs hence my suggestions.

I guess I'm still confused...

It's been a few years since I regularly used W98 - but I thought I use to have the feature I'm seeking on my machine.

In any event, it did exist last week on my friends computer - until I rebuilt his system. I doubt he had installed any specific software to generate the feature I'm about to describe (unless it came bundled in MS Picture-It or HP's photosmart software).

I use to be able to single left click on a photo file (jpg) to select the file.

With windows explorer in "web style" mode, there would then be a preview panel on the left side of the screen that would show a small image of the photo, along with file info (size, ext, date, etc).

Once I saw the preview and determined it was the one I wanted, I could then double click to open the file or right click for the context menu (such as email photo)

There has to be an easy way to get this feature back - is it a matter of configuring windows or downloading a plug-in?

Try... View>> as Web Page

Should now give the left hand side preview pane. Hope this helps

I have tried the vew as a web page option -

It shows the file details and clears the space where the preview box would normally be - but no picture (or picture frame) appears.

I'm thinking that something got screwed up in the registry during installtion of W98-SE.

Althought I'd hate to do it, I wonder if I do a reinstall overlay - it would help correct the problem.