M.A. Hochberg’s Technology for Teaching

Nothing is so frustrating as having trouble installing a program that you have used for many years. It took four tries to get Kid Pix installed recently. The reason? The hard drive had a blank space and a / in its name. The program was looking for a subdirectory called “blank space.”

Some programs warn you about naming conventions. For example, the current version of Apple’s Print Center warns you that some printers have problems with spaces in print queue names. Most, however, do not.

When naming things on a computer:

• Use a name that will help you to find it again
• Keep the name as short as is comfortable for you. While your computer may allow very long file names, you will run into problems with communicating with another computer or sending a file in email. 36 numbers, letters, and spaces is about as long as you want to use.
• Use numbers, letters, and underscores to name a file. Most modern computers do not have a problem with spaces in a name but that is not true of everything, including printers, scanners, external hard drives, etc.
• Don’t use special characters such as ?, /.|,\, “, -, *. Yes, some computers do well with them. The problem occurs when communicating with another person, computer, or machine.

Follow these naming rules and you will have much less trouble with your computer.

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 21st, 2008 at 10:23 am and is filed under User Support. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.