How-To Geek

Every Geek uses Gmail… it’s pretty much required. And now you can set Gmail as the default client in Ubuntu without any extra software. (Windows requires the Gmail notifier be installed)

When you know you are going to be out of the office for a few days, you can set up the Out of Office Assistant to reply automatically, letting people know that you are enjoying your vacation while they are stuck at work. You can also add rules to forward messages based on different criteria.

Automatic Updates is a great feature. Your computer stays protected from threats without worrying about it… but if it’s 3am and I’m trying to play a video game, the last thing I want is for the automatic updates to pop up and remind me every 5 minutes that I need to reboot, interrupting my game… Drives me crazy!

If you’ve tried to use the built-in “Extract Here” functionality in Ubuntu’s File Roller to extract either a single or a multi-part zip or rar file and ended up with a “Password required” error, then you might just assume the files are password protected when in fact they are not.

If you encounter this error message as often as I do, you will thank your various gods for this extension, which allows you to hide the warning message on a per site basis, for both Firefox as well as Thunderbird.

Did you know that you can run more than one Firefox profile at once? This can be extremely useful if you want to test out extensions more easily, create a web development profile, run a slimmed down profile just for Gmail, or if you just want to have a clean profile.

If you are concerned with video game performance, or you are trying to fix some problems with any 3D application, you can ensure DirectX 9 on XP is running at peak efficiency by running a diagnostic. 

Changing this in XP was extremely simple, but in Windows 7 or Vista it’s buried behind a few more menus. Here are three routes you can take to open up System Properties:

The System Restore feature in Windows Vista is very important to keep enabled, what with all the problems Vista users are having with compatibility. Even so, the disk usage can get out of hand if you install a large amount of software.

For those times when Windows completely freezes and you can’t even open the start menu, you can also restart your computer from Task Manager instead of just powering the machine off.

Ubuntu has an option for adding a Trash Can icon to the desktop, which might be a comfort for those of you migrating from Windows.

How many times have you migrated to a new computer and lost all the little settings in Word or Excel that you had finally tweaked perfectly?

Many utilities need to be run as administrator in order to function properly, especially older utilities that haven’t been updated to support Windows 7 or Vista yet.

I prefer a clean desktop with no icons cluttering it up, but by default Ubuntu adds icons to the desktop for every single removable drive that you attach to your system.

If you’ve been wondering why your XP desktop icons have a background color, you’ll be glad to know you can flip a checkbox and have them go back to a normal transparent background.

Ubuntu includes a very limited shortcut key configuration utility which doesn’t allow you to assign hotkeys to your own applications or scripts. To get around this limitation, we can use the built-in gconf-editor utility to assign them ourselves.

Restarting Firefox is always difficult for those of us with dozens of tabs open, because you don’t want to lose all the open tabs, but you might not want to bookmark them all either.

It drives me crazy when applications install themselves into the system tray without giving me a choice during setup. QuickTime has no good reason to be in the system tray, but it’s there anyway after you install iTunes.

I’ve previously written about mounting an ISO image in Windows Vista using Virtual CloneDrive, but I thought I’d go a step further and explain how you can mount more than one ISO at a time.

If Outlook 2007′s new Instant Search just isn’t… instant… there’s a patch from Microsoft that might fix this problem for you.

The How-To Geek doesn’t allow just anybody to leave any comment they feel like. Because this site is dedicated towards helping people, only helpful, constructive, on-topic or interesting comments will be approved.

If you have an external hard drive that is always plugged into your computer, you can enable write caching to speed up performance significantly when writing to the disk.

To show hidden files, just click on the Organize button in any folder, and then select “Folder and Search Options” from the menu. 

To show hidden files, open Control Panel and double-click on Folder Options.

Using the Disk Cleanup utility in Windows XP is a great way to clean up files and get more hard drive space. One of the options is to “Compress Old Files”, but the default setting is files older than 50 days. This setting can be modified if you only want to compress really old files.