Since this is my last column for this school year, it makes perfect sense to me that I share some of the tips and tricks I’ve learned over the last year that have made the hours per day I spent on computers much easier, and I hope they do the same for you.

Sadly, no user manual comes with computers, only useless little booklets and pamphlets that bore you with warranty details and support information. We must learn for ourselves how to make our time spent on computers more efficient, and more user-friendly.

First, when you’re surfing the internet, sometimes you may want to zoom into a YouTube video, or maybe some text that you’re finding a little hard to read. In recent versions of Firefox and Internet Explorer. To do this, press the left “CTRL” and the “+” next the backspace key to zoom into the area where your mouse is hovering. Use “CTRL and “-“ to zoom back out.

We all hate the tedious task of sifting through the start menu to find a program. In Windows Vista, simply type the Windows logo key on your keyboard, and start typing the first few letters of the name of the program. It should show up in a list. You can use your mouse to click it, or use your arrow keys and press the “enter” key.

If you use a program on a daily basis, you can assign a key on your keyboard to open it quickly. Use the last tip to find the program in the Start Menu, then right-click the program and choose “properties”, then in the field next to “shortcut key”, press a key you won’t use for anything else. In my case, I chose F9 to open Editpad Lite, and F4 for Paint.

In Windows Vista, you can avoid the painstaking task of renaming a group of files individually. Click on the first item, then hold down the left “shift” key and left-click only once on the last file in the group. Then press F2 to name the first file, and Vista will rename the rest in numerical order.

Also in Windows Vista, you can get a real-time preview of each of your open windows or programs by pressing the “Windows Key” and tapping the “tab” key. This is useful for quickly switching between a few open programs and saves the extra mouse clicks.
In the early years of the internet, in Internet Explorer, we had to type the http:// and “www” before the actual website address. Now, you can avoid that altogether, and just type the address, such as “CNN.com” (without the quotes).

A great deal of students and residents have laptops these days, and most people use Google to search the internet. There is an add-on for the Firefox web browser that will highlight the Google search results and let you scroll through the results with your keyboard’s arrow keys. Once you’ve found the result you want, press enter to go to that site.

I hope you’ve enjoyed reading my columns and stories this year as much as I’ve truly enjoyed writing them. You can continue to find my work on my website at http://kevins-stories.ca, and I hope you’ll even leave a comment or two.

Originally posted 2009-03-17 01:43:35. Republished by Blog Post Promoter

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