How-To Geek

I’m not a toolbar fan, especially if the bar takes up my viewing space, so I always try and find the most minimal setup possible.

With all of the problems of identity theft, advertisers tracking your every move through cookies and problems with privacy these days, finding a way to keep your web browsing more private has become important for everybody.

If you’ve found that your Hibernate option is missing from Windows Vista, it might be from running the disk cleanup wizard and removing the hibernate files. This is due to a known bug in Vista that might not have been hotfixed already.

If you’ve found that your Sleep mode menu is dimmed out in Windows Vista, it’s most likely because Media Center disabled the option when it feels that media is being shared. This is an easy setting to fix, but it’s a little tough to locate without some assistance.

I love the term “crapware” There is so much of it out there. All the crapware bundled into Best Buy and Dell computers. Here is a list of crapware that I can think of off the top of my head.

I am an Information Technology Specialist working at an electric cooperative in Minnesota. I enjoy all aspects of computers and technology.

If you are a new Ubuntu user coming from a Mac background, you might be disoriented by the placement of the minimize/maximize/close box on Ubuntu, which mimics Windows by default.

If you are the type of person that dislikes those little site specific icons, then this tip is for you. Favicons can be disabled completely in Firefox with a simple config change.

The new Safari for Windows is a very slick browser that beats the pants off everything else in the speed department, but it crashes so much on Windows Vista that it’s virtually unusable.

One of the immediate complaints people have had about the new Safari for Windows beta is how “fuzzy” the fonts seem to look in comparison to Internet Explorer or Firefox. There’s a quick solution to this issue, although only partially, since Safari doesn’t use ClearType on Windows for some odd reason.

Keeping your bookmarks organized is a critical task for any web browser, so let’s see how the new Safari for Windows handles bookmarks.

You can customize the toolbar in Apple’s Safari for Windows like you can with FireFox and Internet Explorer.  Here is how.

It’s a pity that the people who write browsers don’t set the default home page to something useful. This is how you change the default homepage from Apple to one of your choosing in Safari for Windows.

I’ve been having a very frustrating issue with Windows Vista on my HP notebook: I put the computer into sleep mode, close the lid, and then unplug the network cable… and the computer wakes back up, typically when it’s already safely in my laptop bag, so I don’t notice until I get to my destination and the battery is nearly dead.

A very common task for a web developer is uploading a single file from a subdirectory on your development box to the same subdirectory on a remote server. Unfortunately, this always ends up being an annoying manual process involving switching directories on both servers, and wastes a large amount of time.

Since moving to Windows Vista, a lot of the keyboard shortcuts that I was used to just don’t work quite the same anymore. As a keyboard junkie, I find it imperative to learn the shortcut keys, so it’s good that there is a quick way to enable underlining of all shortcut keys.

When you are all finished with a Word document that has been passed around your company for reviews, you can mark the document as final so that your colleagues know that it’s the final version and does not require additional editing. It also prevents people from accidentally making changes to the document before forwarding it on to a client, for instance.

This isn’t for everyone, but you can enable a mouse mode in Windows 7 or Vista where just hovering over a window with the mouse will switch to that window. In the old days, this used to be called the XWindows mode, and was enabled through TweakUI, but now it’s built right into Control Panel for everybody to use.

As this site has gained popularity, the time required to keep the site running has also grown. For instance, even though Akismet blocks virtually all of the spam comments, I still have to manually filter through hundreds of spam comments per day to see if any valid comments were blocked.

Firefox has a spooky feature called “Prefetching” that downloads pages that it thinks you are going to click on. (note: this is a good excuse for how those pages ended up in your history). It’s also a waste of CPU and bandwidth that slows Firefox down.

The Instant Search box in Outlook 2007 is a huge improvement over previous versions of Outlook, but remembering all the search operators can be a little difficult, so here’s a quick one that I use all the time.

If you are worried about sensitive data in your Microsoft Word document you can both encrypt and password protect the document to keep it secure. This feature is very useful if you have to store your documents in a shared location, such as a network folder or home computer.

Windows Vista includes an extremely useful utility called Mobility Center, designed for laptop users to give you lightning quick access to all functions that a mobile user would need.

All geeks love line numbers… you can even add line numbers in your Word 2007 documents with just a few steps.

Taking ownership of system files or folders in Windows 7 or Vista is not a simple task. Whether you use the GUI or the command line, it takes far too many steps.