Tech and life

Is the Windows key a forgotten key on your keyboard? Is your hand glued to your mouse or do you try and use any keyboard shortcuts? I must admit, I’ve never been one to use the Windows key much and I’ve been missing out on some cool shortcuts.

Apart from the obvious function of opening the Start menu, the Windows key can be used in combination with others for some great shortcuts. I’ve tried them out and this is how they work in Windows 7. Many of these shortcuts will also work in Vista and some work in Windows XP.

Win + Tab: displays the apps open on your superbar (really cool 3D effect in Windows 7); keep pressing Tab to cycle through them and release keys to open that window  (Alt + Tab is nice too; keep your finger on Alt and move your mouse over the windows; click to select one)

Win + E: opens My Computer

Win + D: shows the desktop; pressing the same key combination again takes you back where you were

Win + F: opens Windows search; or if you have Coperic Desktop Search installed, that opens instead

Win + R: displays the Run command box

Win + Pause/Break: displays system information in Windows 7

Win + U: displays the Ease of Access Center (try the Magnifier tool)

Win + G: shows your gadgets if you have any installed

Win + L: locks your desktop

Win + S: select and save a screenshot to Microsoft OneNote (if it’s installed)

Win + N: opens Microsoft OneNote

Win + P: opens the display control dialogue box

Win + F1: displays Windows help

Win + 1: Maximises or opens the leftmost application on your superbar in Windows 7. If Word is the first application on your superbar, and say you have three documents open in Word, you can cycle through them by repeatedly pressing Win + 1.

Win + 2 maximizes or opens the second application and so on. Works right through to Win + 0 for the 10th app along your superbar.

Hope all this helps you to be more productive.

Image credit: Jeremy Brooks

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If you regularly find yourself copying and pasting text from websites or desktop applications then you should really have a look at PureText. When activated, this free utility quickly removes text formatting such as bold, italics, colour, underline, bullets and hyperlinks allowing you to just paste the text. For example, I commonly find myself having to paste portions of information I’ve found online into Word documents but I don’t want all the web formatting to be carried over. Similarly, I sometimes copy sections out of Word files into other applications and I often don’t need all the Word formatting. With PureText installed, once the information has been copied to the Windows clipboard in the usual fashion, I just click the PureText icon in the system tray and paste the text into the new document (or there’s an alternative hotkey combination to paste without the formatting – by default, it’s Windows key + V). Pure Text only removes rich formatting from text and won’t remove carriage returns or tabs.

There are free utilities for just about everything you need to do on your PC. In fact, you could end up downloading way more than you need – and forget they’re there on your PC. But if copying and pasting is something you do regularly then this is one utility you’ll end up using on a regular basis. It only takes up about 3MB of memory.

PureText

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If you’ve ever used a browser on a netbook, you’ll know that pretty much half of your screen can be taken up by menus, address bars, bookmark bars and tabs. Here’s a screenshot of the full netbook screen showing Firefox on my Acer Aspire One netbook running Ubuntu Netbook Remix – just 12 lines of posts in Google Reader – not too good.

Okay, I know all you keyboard ninjas know about this one, but for those out there who do everything by mouse, try pressing F11 when your browser is open. This is the same screenshot of the full netbook screen after pressing F11.

Great isn’t it. As you can see, the Firefox menus are gone from the top and the status bar from the bottom, and we now have 16 lines of posts. And the F11 full screen trick works in Google Chrome and Internet Explorer as well, and on a desktop PC of course. Hitting F11 again will toggle the menus on again, but here’s a nice feature. If you’ve maximized your screen real estate with F11 and then move your mouse up to the very top of the screen in Firefox and Internet Explorer, the address bar and tabs will auto-show allowing you to open new tabs or key a new URL in the address bar! Move the mouse back down and the menus auto-hide again.

Now if you want even more control over which menu bars and address bars show in Firefox, you could add the Hide GUI Bars extension as described on How to Geek.

Okay, so you knew about F11. Well did you know that in Firefox, hitting Ctrl-F brings up a search bar at the bottom for searching that browser window? Not only that but you can highlight the search results too and click through them. Also works for the other browsers I’ve mentioned. Here’s an example of a search for ‘Facebook’ in my Google Reader feeds.

Okay, so you knew that too and you’ve been short-changed by these simple tips. Well how about the ultimate list of Firefox keyboard shortcuts – head over to ShortcutWorld. There are pages for Chrome and Internet Explorer there too. More keyboard shortcuts than you’ll probably ever need!

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I upgraded my son’s Dell laptop from Vista to Windows 7 recently. Did a custom install without reformatting the hard drive. Everything went fine but after installing some essential programs and putting his 20GB of music back from an external drive, I couldn’t reinstall his 20GB of photos as I was out of disk space. This Dell 1545 came with a 160GB hard drive which should have been way more than enough. What was hogging all the disk space?

I’m not a great lover of Windows Explorer so I downloaded the free Xinorbis to analyse the folder sizes on the hard drive. Straight away I could see that a folder called Windows.old was taking up 63GB of space! I googled windows.old and discovered that the Windows 7 installation had backed up the entire Vista set up here. I didn’t need anything from Windows.old as everything important was backed up to an external drive so I deleted the folder using great instructions I found here.

So if you’ve moved up from Vista to Windows 7 by doing a custom install and without reformatting the hard drive and were wondering what had happened to all your disk space, watch out for Windows.old.

Many people treat an operating system upgrade with great trepidation. Is my data safe? What if I have problems, can I go back? I’m just going through an upgrade from Windows XP to Windows 7 but I’ve chosen a no-risk route which completely preserves my old OS and all my data so I can transition to Windows 7 at my own pace, getting it set up just the way I want and getting used to it before completely moving over from XP.

I’ve already blogged about installing a new 1TB SATA drive in my PC and I’m going to do a clean install of Windows 7 Home Premium (Full Version) on this new drive. I’m going to be replacing my 4-year-old 80GB Maxtor drive running Windows XP (which still works fine). I should say that I also have an identical 80GB removable Maxtor hard drive to which I cloned my primary drive soon after its installation and where I back up new data on a regular basis with a simple batch file. I blogged about it soon after I started this blog. So I effectively have an XP install with a mirror in case the first drive dies. But I felt that both these drives were too small (and probably too old) to move forward with Windows 7 so I chose to buy a new 1TB drive and keep the old drives for backups of music, photos, etc.

Anyway, on to the Windows 7 install on the new drive. I must say that, as someone who doesn’t regularly reinstall my OS, I found the Windows 7 custom install a breeze and no-one should be worried about a clean install on a new hard drive. I booted up with the Windows 7 disk in the DVD drive and followed the prompts, picking Windows Setup on the first screen and then Custom Install (not Upgrade). A custom install is a clean install.

The install took about 20 minutes on my system, followed by a reboot to bring up the Windows 7 desktop. But the new OS couldn’t detect my ZOOM ADSL X6 wireless router and get online. A little strange considering that installs of Ubuntu 8.10 and later Ubuntu 9.04 on another desktop PC and Easy Peasy Linux on my Acer Aspire netbook had no problems at all seeing the wireless router and just needed the WPA password. So I tried installing the ZOOM router driver. Still no luck. Then I tried installing the driver for my Edimax Wireless LAN PCI card, selected the ZOOM profile and activated it and finally entered my WPA password and that got me online. That was really the only hitch in the install.

First stop online was Ninite, an excellent site where you can pick multiple applications from an ever-growing list and install them together. The screenshot below shows only part of the list of applications currently available

I picked Firefox, Skype, VLC, Audacity, Irfanview, Foxit Reader, Microsoft Security Essentials, Flash (for browsers other than IE), Java, .NET, Evernote, ImgBurn, CCleaner, Revo, CDBurnerXP, Recuva, 7-Zip and Notepad++. The complete install of all these applications took only about 10 minutes – obviously a lot quicker than visiting each site and downloading the applications individually. Then Evernote just had to sync with the web client.

I’ve already listed my essential software and web applications on the About page, so I went through that and installed what I would initially need. I’ve always used AVG Free in the past for antivirus but I’m going to give Microsoft Security Essentials a try this time round – you’d figure that Microsoft should be the best candidate to keep their own system clean and it’s had pretty good reviews so far.

So that’s where I’m at right now. Installing my data won’t be a problem later – just a case of booting up with my removable backup hard drive in place and copying across everything I need. At this point, if you’ve followed this route, you may very well be plugging in your external hard drive to copy across your data.

But before I copy the data over, what I propose to do next is, when I have all the applications installed that I want and everything set up as I like it, I’m going to image the ‘untainted’ system so in future I can restore a clean system with my essential applications if I have to. So I loaded my copy of Acronis True Image 8 to make an image but found it wasn’t compatible with Windows 7. No problem, I’ve found an excellent tutorial from Gina Trapani on using the free DriveImage XML to make the image instead.

I’ll blog later about finishing this install, and any new applications I’ve come across to replace utilities I’ve used with XP.

If you’ve had a PC for any length of time, you’ll have probably experienced the trial and error approach to getting things done. Whether it’s achieving a particular effect in Photoshop, converting files to different formats, exporting or importing data into different applications, setting up preferences for applications or plugins the way you want them, reinstalling applications, or setting up hardware, often you have to methodically change different parameters until you get things to work or get the right result. You may have had to search the web to track down the answer. You may even have to resort to a workaround which achieves the right result – but it’s quite rewarding when you finally crack it and master a procedure.

Problem is, when you go back a few months later to do the same thing, you’ve probably forgotten how you did it first time round so you have to reinvent the wheel. Enter Evernote your ’second brain’. Start a new notebook in Evernote called say ‘How-to’ and immediately you crack a difficult procedure, save the steps you used to achieve your result as a new note. Tag it with the app name or whatever best describes the action you’ve mastered. So when you need to recall that same procedure later, it’s safely tucked away in Evernote ready to be recalled when you search that tag in the How-to notebook. And if you think it’s a really good how-to, you could even share the notebook with everyone or with individuals.

If you haven’t tried Evernote, make a point of checking it out.

Really quick one today but it may help someone out. A friend recently sent me a jpeg she couldn’t open on her PC. I went to my free graphics editor IrfanView and tried to open it. It prompted Warning! The file xxx.jpg is a TIF file with incorrect extension! Rename? Once it had renamed it with the tif extension, there was no problem opening it and then saving as a jpeg. I learned today on Twitter (@WollemiPine) that this also works if a jpeg is really a bmp file with the wrong extension.

So if you’re having problems opening a jpeg or indeed another graphics file format, and you haven’t tried IrfanView, download it and see if in fact it’s been saved with the wrong extension. It won’t always work – you may not be able to open your jpeg because of a corrupt header for example.

Ever been sent a file you can’t open? Or a friend has emailed a file to you that they are unable to open and hope you might be able to help? It happened to me yesterday. A friend had been sent a file which she couldn’t open and asked me to have a go. First impressions weren’t good – I didn’t recognise the extension – it was a pzf file – no, not a pdf! Double-clicking wouldn’t open it. However, I was eventually able to open it and save it as a pdf or a jpeg. The process I went through on a Windows system might be instructive so I’ve set it out here.

What kind of file is it?

Well, I could have googled ‘pzf’ but I already knew about the website FILExt, a site which lists file extensions and what possible programs can open them, so I went straight there. Turns out that pzf is most likely a GraphPad Prism file, a scientific graphing program, although FILExt did indicate another less likely possibility as well. Ominously, the site said that pzf files could only be opened by Prism, which I didn’t have.

Can I convert it?

I googled ‘pzf file conversion‘. Apart from professional data recovery services, there didn’t appear to be a freeware app which might convert this file type. I had a look at my Delicious bookmarks. For online file conversion, I found File2.ws which claimed to be able to convert virtually any file into a public online web page, but alas, it didn’t work for pzf files (but it might work for your file). Convert.Files and Zamzar also didn’t support this format. I had a quick look at the free file conversion applications on my PC – SUPER and FormatFactory but both were for media files and again didn’t support pzf format.

Look for a free file viewer

I then had a look at free file viewers. Universal Viewer and its plug-ins can open many different file types but not pzf (again, it might work for your file). I also tried Irfanview but again even with its plug-ins, still no luck. However, proprietary software occasionally have free or trial viewers and in this case, the FILExt website indicated that the free Prism Viewer was available to open GraphPad Prism files. It’s possible to view or print the file with this utility but not make any changes. Another file viewer you could try is Explorer View which has a 30-day free trial.

Save the opened file in a different format

Now that we can open our file to view it or print it, it would be nice to be able to save it in a more useful format which can be opened by everyday free apps so we can refer to it again without any trouble. Well, once opened, you can easily save a file in pdf format using any one of a number of virtual PDF printer drivers. I use doPDF – I’ve mentioned it before in my Miscellany of Tech Tips. After installation, this appears in your Print menu so, in any app you can print from, you now have the option to print to a pdf format file. To convert to pdf format, you just have to print the document to doPDF rather than to your printer.

Now that your document is in a familiar format, you can convert it to another format if necessary, e.g. JPEG, PNG or GIF. However, I found it hard to track down a freeware pdf-to-jpeg converter. Some applications are trial only and leave a watermark on your output jpeg file, others require Adobe Acrobat to be installed first. However, there are online file conversion sites like Zamzar that will do the pdf-to-jpeg conversion for you. What I also discovered was that, if I opened the file on my PC in my preferred free pdf viewer, Foxit Reader, I could choose the Snapshot tool (Tools, Snapshot), and outline an area to save to the clipboard. Now open an image viewing program like Irfanview, paste in your snapshot (Ctrl-V) and click File, Save as to save the snapshot as a jpeg file.

So, given a file you can’t open, it should be possible to convert it to a more familiar format using the process I’ve outlined. How do you open an unusual file format?  Any formats that have completely stumped you? Any tips to pass on? Drop a comment below.

Image credit: Lazurite

A search for slow firefox on Twitter shows that there is a virtually constant stream of tweets complaining about Firefox being slow. I don’t find the current Firefox (Windows) release any quicker or slower than previous versions yet many people are under the impression that it is. I do find it’s still a memory hog – for me, currently around 230MB with 5 tabs open, about 20 plug-ins installed and 3 Greasemonkey scripts enabled – so probably about a typical set-up. Before you start, it may be worth checking that you’re not blaming Firefox for what’s just a slow internet connection. Check your connection is up to speed by visiting SpeedTest.net and testing the speed of your connection. So is there anything that the typical user can try which might help speed things up before throwing up their arms in disgust and moving to Chrome or Safari? Well I hope this list of tips might help:

Some tips to speed up Firefox

1. Uninstall the latest buggy Skype plug-in: If you are experiencing that Facebook, GMail or Google Reader are really crawling and you’ve recently updated Skype to version 4.1 and installed the Skype plug-in for Firefox, try uninstalling the Skype plug-in, but leave the main Skype program installed. That should help. Hopefully, Skype will update this plug-in soon because, reading the tweets on slow firefox, it’s certainly responsible for driving a number of people away to other browsers, particularly Chrome.

2. Check how much memory Firefox is using: Bring up Windows Task Manager with Ctrl-Alt-Del in Windows XP or Crtl-Alt-Esc in Vista and go to the Processes tab. Look for the process called firefox.exe and check the memory usage: for example, 230,000K is 230MB. Try cutting back on the number of tabs you have open and uninstall any plug-ins you really don’t need and see if this brings down memory usage. If you’re anything like me, you’ll have installed plug-ins which seemed a good idea at the time but which you now rarely, if ever use. Uninstall them.

3. Do some maintenance: Use a program like CCleaner (for Windows) or BleachBit (for Windows or Linux) to clear your browser temporary files, internet cache and browser history regularly.

4. Modify the Firefox config file: Here’s some tweaks which involve modifying the config file for Firefox. I’d heard some of these a while ago on the Mike Tech Show podcast, also at Life Rocks 2.0. It’s not difficult to edit the config file. Just type about:config in the Firefox address bar and press enter. Then type network.http in the filter field. This will filter the list down to only those with network.http in the name. Now make the following changes:

• Double click on ‘network.http.pipelining’ and set the value to true (double clicking toggles the value between true and false).
• Double click on network.http.pipelining.maxrequests’ and in the dialog box enter a value higher than the default value 4. According to Mozillazine, the maximum you can use is 8.
• Double click on ‘network.http.proxy.pipelining’ and set the value to true.
• Again in the filter field enter ‘browser.sessionstore.interval‘ (without the quotes), double click on the entry and change the value from 10000 (10 secs) to 120000 (2 minutes). This adjusts how frequently Firefox creates session restore save points. Firefox will now take a snapshot of your browsing session every 2 minutes instead of every 10 seconds.
• Right click on the page and select New->Integer. Enter the name nglayout.initialpaint.delay and then click ok. Set the integer value of this to 0 and click ok.

You can find additional great config file tweaks at Technically Personal.

5. Disable Firebug: If you’re using Firebug, it can slow Firefox to a crawl.

6. Optimize Firefox’s SQL database: Firefox uses SQLite databases to store lots of its settings. With time, the databases grow and Firefox slows down. Use either Vacuum Places Improved, a Firefox add-on, or SpeedyFox, a stand-alone app to compact these databases without losing any data. I prefer SpeedyFox as I like to keep the number of Firefox add-ons to a minimum.  Only works in Windows at the moment though. Thanks again to Life Rocks 2.0 for this tip. I also use the portable version which doesn’t modify the Windows registry.

7. Try Memory Fox, a memory optimizer for Firefox 3. It constantly flushes Firefox’s memory usage. At the moment it’s only for the Windows OS. There’s a full write up on ghacks.net.

8. If you’re still not happy with Firefox, there’s a terrific Firefox Troubleshooting Guide over on MakeUseOf.com. And have a look at this post at Dedoimedo for more suggestions.

9. And if you’re still not happy, try Google Chrome – it’s a worthy alternative to Firefox.

Do you have any tips for speeding up Firefox? Drop a comment below with your tweaks.

I posted recently on trying the Google Chrome browser after Google Reader and Google Mail suddenly slowed to a crawl in Firefox. It turned out that the latest Skype extension for Firefox was causing the problem. I had upgraded Skype to version 4.1.0.141 and elected to install the Skype extension for Firefox during the Skype upgrade. Others have also reported this problem recently.

So if you’re experiencing problems with Firefox suddenly being a lot slower than usual, particularly when viewing Google Reader, Google Mail and Facebook and you’ve recently upgraded Skype and installed the Skype extension for Firefox, uninstall it and things should improve. Doubtless Skype will fix this buggy extension in a later release. Thanks to Scotian who posted in the comments of the Chrome post and resolved this problem.