Windows Media Player has an interesting option that will let you open files in the Mini Player mode instead of the full player window. This is especially useful for opening music files where you really don’t need the full-size window.
If you would like better communication with your co-workers here is a quick tip on sharing your calendar in Outlook. This will only work if you are using an Exchange Server e-mail account, typically something you’d be using in a corporate environment.
If you get hundreds of emails every day your inbox can fill up quickly. Outlook 2003 has an easy way to clean up your inbox quickly without having to go through each email individually to decide what needs to be kept.
Windows Vista has a neat new feature for laptops called “hybrid sleep”. Actually, Windows Vista has a neat new feature for laptops called sleep too, so I’m getting ahead of myself a bit.
If you’ve been having problems copying large files over mapped drives, network disconnects, or having to reboot your router a lot more often than normal, then you can try out this fix to solve the problem.
Everybody sends out emails to the same group of people on a regular basis, but most people don’t realize that you can create your own private list of email addresses in Outlook by using the Distribution List feature.
The default action for searching with the Firefox toolbar is to open the search in the current tab. This drives me crazy, but thankfully it’s easy to fix.
As many people already know, the most supportive application for playing media ( Video ) files on your computer in VLC Player. The problem is that it doesn’t always work correctly on Windows Vista.
Here is a quick and easy way to add all holidays to your Outlook 2003 Calendar. This tip also works for countries other than the United States.
This method can be applied to any special circumstance for bringing in a CSV file into Excel including other delimited files. With the ability of specifying the data type for each column during the data importing process you are in much better control on your final result.
In the first part, I ran through the basics on how to connect and configure your Mac Mini as the heart of your entertainment center. In this next article in the series, I had been planning on going into detail on how to store your media files on a remote NFS share. However, one of the comments on the first article got my attention and it occurred to me that I didn’t really cover alternate video codecs at all. So, rather than launch into some fascinating list of iptables rules and Apple alias quirks, let’s look at third-party codecs.
If your hard drive is short on space you might want to consider reducing the size of your Recycle Bin. By default Windows XP reserves 10% of your hard drive for the bin. You can save up to 3GB of space if you resize a bin to 1% on a 40GB hard drive. You can resize individual drive or all of them globally.
Have you ever plugged in a USB drive or any external device with a hard drive and wondered why you cannot see it in My Computer?
If you have an email you send out every day that contains the same information, or a form that requires users to dictate answers to the same questions – you can create a template in Outlook to help save you time.
Don’t you hate it when you are typing an email, a report, or chatting on IM and halfway through… you (or the person you are shouting at) realizes you have caps lock on?
The close tab buttons on each tab in Firefox 2 are really annoying. When you have a lot of tabs open, it becomes very difficult to click on the tab without accidentally clicking the close button instead.
If you have a lot of tabs open at a time, it’s sometimes quicker to have Ctrl+Tab switch to the most recent tab instead of the next one to the right. This is the default setting in the Tab Mix Plus extension for Firefox, so a lot of you are probably used to it.
My friend made the huge mistake of downloading PartyPoker onto a laptop from work - even after he uninstalled it, the menu item still showed up. He was worried about getting caught by the IT people, so he asked me how to get rid of it.
I prefer files being download directly to the desktop, but a lot of other people would prefer to download into a downloads folder, or a directory inside their Documents directory.
If the main reason you install the Google Toolbar is for the PageRank, now you can easily display the PageRank of any site with a tiny extension for Firefox instead of the full Google Toolbar.
The next important thing is to get your Mini actually connected to the television. For this you’ll need two cables and (at least one adapter). The adaptor can be purchased from Apple here ($20 USD). Basically what it does is convert DVI (Digital Video Interface) to either S-Video or RCA video out (I recommend using S-Video). (note, you may be lucky enough to have a DVI-in on your television. Check for this first) At this point, you should be able to turn the mini on and use the television as a monitor.
The headers and footers that always print along with the page when printing a page can be irritating. I know very well what page it was I printed, so it’s not useful to me to show the URL at the bottom of the page.
The quickest way to lock your computer screen is to just use the Win+L keyboard shortcut. Some people prefer to use the mouse to lock the workstation, however, or would just like to have both options.
We’ve all seen it at some point or another – Some company full of pointy haired bosses feels the need to insert their company name into our Internet Explorer title bar.
