September 2010

There are lots of tricks that can help a lot with the operation of your computer. They’re all documented – somewhere. The trick is finding them.

 

So, rather than just listing 50 useful shortcuts, here is a reminder of some of the ones that might be really useful:

 

●     Ctrl+C copies the highlighted area into the Paste Buffer.

●     Ctrl+V pastes the contents of the Paste Buffer, beginning at the location of the cursor.

●     Ctrl+X deletes the highlighted area including the contents of the Paste Buffer.

 

[Editor’s Note: A while back, I wondered about the difference between “Cut” and “Delete”. The simplest answer I found is that “Cut” copies highlighted material to the clipboard, and removes it from its current location. “Delete” removes the highlighted material from its current location without copying it. More at http://tinyurl.com/2c2f4y2.

While still in the cut (or copy)-and-paste area, I (jb) recommend installing and using a clipboard buffer program, to ease the task when multiple items are involved.. You can find some via http://tinyurl.com/27aa2sb. ]

 

1.      Simply type the “main” part of the address; examples: “ford, google, hp, usps.

2.      Press Ctrl+Enter. Your browser will add “http://www.” before your string, and “.com/” after it, giving a complete URL. It’s like getting 16 characters by pressing two keys.

 

[Editor’s Note: This is effective only if you want to go to a site’s home page, not if you want to go directly to some other page at the site.]

 

Two uses for the Ctrl++ combination

●     Automatically resizing all columns in a list—When you have a listing going (suppose directory listing) and the columns are either running into each other or so far apart that the listing dribbles off the right side of the screen, just click anywhere on the listing and then hold Ctrl and press the + key in the numeric keypad, the columns will all line up with a single horizontal space between each pair. Cleans up a mess in a hurry and makes the information readable, and beats lining up the columns by hand. 

Note: This does not work on laptops that do not have a numeric keypad, as they do not have a numeric +. The one along side the numbers will not work.

 

●     Changing the size of displayed text—When looking at a web page and either the font is too small or the information is in a narrow vertical column with junk beside it, that using the combination will make the font grow in size to the point where you can read the font with ease. I tend to give the Ctrl + + combination four applications in rapid succession and find that this number is just about right.

 

There are lots more shortcuts, but these seem to be particularly useful.

 

The class that covered how to maintain your computer is generally over, but computers still seem to come to the Clinic with junk that is slowing down the whole process.

 

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Computing in “The Cloud” is currently the big rage. Turns out there are a few things that are truisms that you have to be aware of:

 

·     Computing in the cloud is what Google and Yahoo and AOL do with their email. As long as they don’t lose your email, all is well. All you need to do is to sign into their site and you have total control again. No need to remember or write down the network addresses, the TCP/IP information, or the debugging of the whole lot.

 

·     Some companies will try to save money and effort by entrusting their data to offsite cloud companies. This will go on until a company goes out of business because their data was either lost or unavailable for some reason.

 

The Cloud is a tremendous resource for those that won’t or can’t do their backups for some reason in that, while incredibly slow, will get the job accomplished once set up properly. Yes, some of these will be lost when the backup company goes out of business, but most of the users will have their backups available when they need it. I have been told personally that the personnel have been very effective restoring the computer after a severe crash. The personnel are doing the same thing time after time so they have the drill memorized.

 

I consider The Cloud acceptable for the backup function if it encourages backups to be created that would not be created otherwise.

 

On the other end of the spectrum, if I have a fire and the computer is history, I have a DVD-DL about a mile from the house that has an image of my entire operating system. The replacement computer might not be able to operate XP at the CPU level, but the data will all be there. Incidentally, I have totally ignored the Microsoft allocation of data areas and have used a single directory called DATA in the base directory. EVERYTHING is in that directory except for my email which is kept under the Eudora directory.

 

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Crossloop remains the best bargain in town! For free to one computer at a time, help can be at your side by a remote person who can pay attention to some problem you are having. 

 

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You should have a “junk” email account for use when you want or need interaction with some entity, but don’t want them cluttering up your primary mailbox. Airline ticket vendors could be considered for this account. 

 

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Mailwasher is an email preview program that filters the output of your ISP’s spam blockers against what other Mailwasher users have declared to be spam. 

 

Users get to declare that something is spam. If at least 6 users declare an item to be spam, then a worldwide database marks any similar message as spam. Thus, you don’t have to deal with the spam messages yourself—you have the whole world helping you. 

 

You can review safely the first 400 characters of the supposed spam—and, if you decide it’s not of interest to you, call it spam yourself. It is really nice to see what has already been marked as “possibly acceptable”, which is a result of “training” by you for the first few weeks of Mailwasher use. 

 

Actual mail processing must be resident on your own computer. Mailwasher can’t work with AOL, etc.

 

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Obtaining an XP license just got harder.

 

 

That’s all I have for this month — Jim