New British payphones to offer Internet access
Posted by me101 on 12 December 2001 - 19:16 · no comments & 135 views
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The companies said they were to introduce the new phones, which would offer full online access and traditional voice services, from next April and roll them out over five years.
BT already has about 500 multimedia payphones in use, but these are a different design and do not offer as many services.
Some 3,000 new terminals will be put in place in the first year in busy, well-protected locations such as train stations and airports. But BT said the terminals were "robust enough" to allow them to be installed in high street phone boxes as well.
Internet access will cost 50 pence (70 cents) for the first five minutes and 10 pence per minute thereafter.
BT said the phones "could realize 56 million hits a week." That is equivalent to each of the 28,000 phones being used 2,000 times per week, or once every five minutes day and night.
Using Notepad, open %systemroot%infsysoc.inf (normally C:winntinfsysoc.inf for Windows 2000, or C:windowsinfsysoc.inf for XP). This file determines which of the Windows optional components are displayed in the Control Panel "add/remove Windows components" applet. You'll see several lines like this:
Games=ocgen.dll,OcEntry,games.inf,HIDE,7
The first part, to the left of the "=", is an identifier for that component. Some are more cryptic than others; in the above example it's obvious that the optional Windows Games (ie, Freecell, Solitaire, Minesweeper) are being referred to. Another line refers to "AccessUtil", which is the Accessibility Utilities component. Most can be figured out relatively easily. For Microsoft Messenger, the line is "MSMSGS".
The second part determines the behaviour of that component within the add/remove programs applet. The bit we're particularly interested in is the word "HIDE" towards the end of the line. If this flag is present, then the component in question will NOT be exposed to the end user for removal via the Control Panel. If you want to have the option to remove the component, simply remove the word HIDE. So the example line above becomes:
Games=ocgen.dll,OcEntry,games.inf,,7
Be sure not to remove the delimiting commas from the line.
Save the file when you've finished editing it. Take a backup copy just in case. Now re-load the Control Panel->"Add/remove Programs"->"Windows Components" applet. The SYSOC.INF file is parsed anew each time this applet is run, so your changes should be reflected immediately. All being well, you should now see the additional components listed and available for removal.
This method is known to work with Windows 2000 and Windows XP. It may also work on the toy operating systems (aka Windows for Playgroups). Usual disclaimers and caveats apply - do this at your own risk. One assumes that Microsoft had a good reason for hiding the ability to remove these components - some of them should be removable with no adverse effects (the games and Microsoft Messenger) but there may be interdependencies that result in unforeseen Bad Things Happening if you remove some of the more obscure components (COM, DTC, Frontpage Extensions).