@COMPUTER reliability ?

[Stan099]

Hi,

First many thanks to all the people who made Autoit and/or developped a lot of useful user functions ... :)

Now my question ...

My wife has work on many computers and spends a lot of time finding out where to launch Word or Excel (for instance), so I thought about making a launcher who would reside on her USB Key and alleviate her workload by presenting buttons or icons to launch the programs she needs to use with the same layout whatever the computer she inserts her key in.

As finding out where all the programs she needs are on a given computer, can be time consuming I tought of remembering all the computers she already "logged in" by their name to speed up the process (assuming the programs were not moved elsewhere since the last time she used a given computer), in order to do it I was thinking about using @COMPUTER to get the computer's name, but the doc states that @COMPUTER give the network name of the computer which leads to my question : is @COMPUTER reliable when non networked computers are concerned ?

Many thanks in advance.

Sorry about that silly question but I don't have any non networked computer to test it.

Sorry about my bad English : I live on the wrong side of the pond ...

[BrewManNH]

Most of the time, launching any of the MS Office applications just requires typing its name. For example, starting word you'd use ShellExecute("Winword.exe"), for excel you'd just use Excel.exe.

As to @Computername, a computer's network name is its name networked or not. I don't know if AutoIt has a macro for giving the full computer name of a domain connected computer, which would give you the name plus the domain it's connected to, ex. Somecomputer.microsoft.com.

[Varian]

If I remember correctly, only Win9x machines could run without having a computer name. That being said, unless she is working on Win9x machines without a NIC, @COMPUTERNAME will return the name of the machine (not sure if FQN or Netbios though)

[Stan099]

Many thanks for your fast answers

I thought about the shellexecute command but some programs doesn't work with it : Word and Excel where only examples my wife uses other programs as well (and fortunately she works on XP or more recent Windows versions).

Edited October 13, 2010 by Stan099

[GEOSoft]

If a certain file type has a file association on that system then ShellExecute will work very well. As an example, you want to open a file named "myfile.doc" the use

ShellExecute("myfile.doc)

You don't have to specify winword.exe with the filename as a parameter except in the cases where there is no file association. I generally use that method when I have a link in a GUI.

ShellExecute("http://www.autoitscript.com")