Keeping your computer well-maintained

It is always important to keep your computer well maintained. One thing the inexperienced computer users forget to do is keep their antivirus program up to date. Antivirus programs are not install and forget programs. They need to be kept up to date! Check the instructions on how to have the program automatically update itself. If it doesn’t have this feature make sure you do a manual update regularly (i.e. at least once a week, more often when there are rumours of viruses going around). Even if the program is set to update automatically it wouldn’t hurt to do a manual update every day or more often when the word is out that a virus is going around.

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Copying Online Messages

C.

If the Send doesn’t take, you can just paste your clipboard contents back again in a new post window.

If it appears to have been sent, but it’s important, you can paste it into a Notepad .txt file (Ctrl

Using the invisible character

Do you have something that requires a name but you don’t want anything in it? You could just throw nonsense in there, but a blank space would be best. In actuality, there is an invisible character! This special character is the equivalent of a space:

Hold down ALT then type 0160 (Alt

Disabling Windows Vista and 7 Login at Startup

When you start your Windows Vista or Windows 7 computer, by default the system makes you enter your password to log in. Here’s a way to get around it.

When you first install Vista or 7 and start using it, you are required to enter in a password for your account. But after that, you’re not really given a choice to remove the password if you don’t want it. You’re just sort of stuck typing it in every time and that can get old rather quickly!

If you’re not the only one who uses your computer, consider leaving it this way. It is a good security feature and it helps to keep all of the different accounts, files and preferences separate from each other. But if you’re the only one who ever uses your computer, you should be able to get rid of the password prompt if you want.

If you’d like to bypass the Windows Vista and 7 log on process and remove your password, just follow these steps:

Go to Start, Control Panel.Click on the User Accounts and Family Safety link.Next, click on the User Accounts link.Under the “Make changes to your user account” section, click on the Remove Your Password link for your account.On the next screen that comes up, enter in your current password.Click on the Remove Password button to confirm everything.Close out of all the open windows and restart your computer. That will allow you to test the system to make sure your password really was removed.

From now on, when you start up your Vista computer, you will be taken to your desktop automatically and you will no longer have to worry about a password.

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Three Options for Finding Clip Art That is Not Junk

I often need buttons, generic images, or just plain ideas for graphics for a variety of reasons: icon for an article, as part of a larger image or mockup of a web page, etc.

Stock images – Buying your source material, if it is copyrighted, is the only moral thing to do. Designers worked hard to save you the time. And a stock website like iStockPhoto makes it very affordable, so there’s no reason to rip off the creator. Searching a website stock image website can lead you to high-quality images and reduce the clutter of poorly made graphics. iStockPhoto in particular has an amazing advanced search function, by size, shape, color, even area where you want to put text.Search engines – Google’s image search has gotten better too. If you search by exact size you can often find what you need so that you don’t even need to resize it yourself. Again, make sure you pay for copyrighted works. But it can also be a source of ideas and can show you many images, quickly.Open Source – That’s generally where I stop, but I recently found a great website called Open Clip Art Library. It is well organized, and many of the graphics are good quality and usable without needing editing. It’s worth considering as one of the first places to search, and in fact, I’m going to start here from now on, since stock sites and search engines can be overwhelming.--

Assign Shortcut Keys in Windows Vista

Windows Vista has a screen capture/screenshot tool that is actually pretty decent. You can take region captures or full screenshots and easily save them using this tool.

Note: The snipping tool doesn’t exist on every version of Vista. To turn it on, you’ll have to go to “Turn Windows features on or off” in Control Panel, and check the box for the Tablet PC utilities.

The only problem with this tool is that there’s no hotkey to bring up the window. But here’s how to change that.

Visit the Start Menu, and then click on All Programs. Click the Accessories folder, and you’ll see the Snipping Tool.

Right click it and go to the Properties screen. You’ll see a Shortcut key text box.

The only annoying thing with this trick is that you can’t use the PrintScreen key… but no big deal. Let’s assigned Ctrl

How To Remove Page Info From Printed Pages

By default browsers will add the date, page number and URL to any page printed from the Internet. For most (if not all) of the printables on this site, you probably don’t want text at the top and bottom of the page. Luckily it’s pretty easy to fix, just pick your browser and follow the instructions below.

Internet Explorer 7 Printing Tips

By default there’s a small image of a printer, click that and go to “Page Setup…”. Below is a screenshot showing the button you’re looking for.

Go to “File”, “Page Setup…”, then erase the text in the “Headers and Footers text boxes.
(The default for header is &w&bPage &p of &P and for footer &u&b&d if you need to put it back later. IE’s default margins are 0.75 inches.)

Click the “OK” button and you’re done.

Firefox Printing Tips

From the menu in the top left corner of your browser, choose “File”, then “Page setup..”. Go to the second tab called “Margins & Header / Footer”, in the drop down lists choose “Blank” for all the items you don’t want printed. The screenshot below gives a better view of what I mean.

If you want, you can also adjust the print margins here as well, Firefox’s default margins are set at 0.5 inches. Once you have your setting chosen, click “OK”, and you’re done!

If you’d like a faster way to get to the print preview feature from within Firefox, the Print / Print Preview extensions is very handy. It adds a submenu to your context menu (the menu that pops up when you right click on a webpage) with “Print”, “Print Preview” and “Page Setup”. Much faster if you change margins, headers etc. often.

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