Email Photos

When sending photos via email, be kind to those receiving the email. Windows XP makes it easy to send photos that are smaller and easily visible on the screen. Follow these instructions from Microsoft to share your digital photos instantly.

This is basically the same information I posted last year, except this links to Microsoft's instructions.

Microsoft Office - 10 quick tips

I've seen these things several places, and they usually go into extra detail, but I just wanted a quick reminder of these tips. If you want the details, visit the link.

10 Word Tricks

• Alt-Shift up/down arrow - Current paragraph/table row shifted
• Shift-F5 - Return to last edit location after opening a document
• Shift File - Changes the Save to Save All to save all of your open documents
• Alt Drag - Selects text vertically
• Tools Calculate - Add the Tools Calculate command to a toolbar then you can select numbers and calculate them
• Quick Formating Access
  • To open the Page Setup dialog box, double-click on the horizontal or vertical ruler.
  • To open the Paragraph dialog box, double-click on an indent marker on the horizontal ruler.
  • To access bullet or number options, double-click on a bullet character or number in a numbered list.
  • To access AutoShape options, double-click on an AutoShape.
  • To open the Table Properties dialog box, double-click the Move Table Column marker (those little dotted squares you see on the horizontal ruler when you’re in a table) or the Table Move Handle (the four-headed arrow that appears at the top-left corner of a table in Print Layout view).
• Use Replace All to globally reformat text
• Ctrl-Shift-C & Ctrl-Shift-V - Copies and pastes formatting
• Ctrl Drag - Duplicate selected text or objects using the mouse
• Start Word with /t - Create a shortcut to launch Word using a particular template

Google Calendar: last day of the month

One thing I found frustrating with Google Calendar is when adding a repeating event, there is no "last day of the month" option. For instance, if and event is scheduled to occur on the last Monday of the month, that often is the 4th Monday, but some months have 5 Mondays. So the question is, how do you create an event so it occurs on the last Monday of the month?

In doing a lot of searching, I finally came upon a post by LeotaNews that shows a way to do this. Here are the steps I followed to get the tip to work for me.

1. In Google Calendar, press Q to bring up quick entry.
2. Type in "EventTitle EventTime last dayname of the month". For example, "MonthlyMeeting 7p-8:30p last Monday of the month". It appears in order for this to work, the description must be a single word. And it will be placed in your default calendar. Once you hit enter, it should appear on the current day plus on the last day of the month.
3. Click on the event for the current day, and click "Edit event". You will notice the repeating instuction shows something like "Monthly on the last Monday".
4. Change the When date and the Starts dates to the date of the last day of the month. Make any other changes necessary, including a more descriptive What and Calendar if desired.
5. Click Save.
6. Verify it worked by checking several months into the future, making sure it has shown up as expected every month.

Speeding up Explorer in Windows Vista

Source: robichaux.net

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Speed up Vista Explorer

A great tip from my friend Liam Colvin:

I don’t know if you’re like me but I was experiencing slowness (like a 20-30 second delay) when opening an Explorer window to view files. You might have found this before me, but it took me some time fiddling with settings to figure it out. I was trying all the usual ways to determine what was causing the delay in opening the explorer window: anti-virus, explorer extensions, etc – and nothing worked, very frustrating. I looked extensively internally and searched the Internet, and the best I could find were issues with copying files down from servers causing delays due to SMB issues (there is a hotfix out there for that, by the way - http://support.microsoft.com/kb/931770/en-us). I finally found it after carefully reviewing the behavior of Explorer when it opened by monitoring the Explorer process with Filemon. I noticed that when Explorer went to open a folder (from a shortcut, for example), it parsed all the files in the root of the directory. Urk! This clearly took a long time. I looked at the Folder Options under Control Panel and noticed the very first setting under the View tab: Always show Icons, never Thumbnails. It was not checked. I realized that Vista must read each file when opening the folder for a thumbnail and/or creates one. When I checked the Always show Icons, never Thumbnails, it reduced the time required to open each folder to 3 or 4 seconds.

Posted by Paul at May 04, 2007 04:50 PM

Firefox - reduce memory usage

Source: help2go.com

Note: I've found this several places, but I like the brief explanation from this site.

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Firefox Memory Leak Workaround

Written by Oscar Sodani
Monday, 10 April 2006

I saw a great tip today: by adding a simple preference in your Firefox configuration, you can tell Firefox to reduce its memory usage to 10 megabytes every time you minimize the application! This has worked very well for me - here's how you do it:

1. In the Firefox address bar, type about:config and press Enter.
2. Right-click in the page and select New -> Boolean.
3. A pop-up box will appear. Type config.trim_on_minimize and click OK.
4. Select True and click OK.

It will take effect the next time you startup Firefox. You can check it out by opening your task manager (right-click on the Windows taskbar and choose Task Manager) and watching Firefox's memory usage as you minimize and maximize the application.

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Related Links:

• Cybernetnews
• Cyberhackz.net
• digg.com
• helpero.com
• Yahoo Search

Emailing photos using Windows XP

Every year, digital cameras get better and take higher resolution photos. With the higher resolution, comes larger picture files. These higher resolution pictures can make printed pictures look nicer. But you don't need large pictures if you want to simply email them to friends.

Not everyone has high speed internet. In fact, I tell people with dial up internet to configure their system to not download large emails. And those large photos are often not easily viewed even for those with high speed internet.

There are several options that you can use to share your photos. There are many photo sharing sites (Picasa Web, Shutterfly, snapfish, flickr, myphotoalbum, webshots, fotki just to name a few) that allow you to upload your files, then you can simply email the link to your pictures. That is the method I recommend most people use.

But if you don't want to do that, you can use a feature built into Windows XP to share your photos, and make sure everyone you send them to, can enjoy them. Here are the steps to follow.

1. Click Start | All Programs | Accessories | Windows Explorer
   
   


2. Navigate to the folder or CD that has the photos your want to email
   
   


3. On the menu, select View, Thumbnails
   
   


4. Click on the picture you want to email. To send more than one picture, after you click on the first one, hold the Ctrl key down and click on the additional pictures you want to send.


5. Then right-click on one of the selected picture(s), then click Send To | Mail Recipient
   
   


6. A "Send Pictures via E-Mail" dialog box will appear. Make sure the "Make all pictures smaller" option is selected then click OK.
   
   


7. This will open a new email message similar to this.
   
   


8. Enter the email address of the person you want to send this to.


9. You can leave the subject line as is, but I would recommend you change it to something more meaningful.


10. You can leave the text of the message as is, but I would recommend you change it to something more meaningful.


11. Click the Send button.

Now your friend will receive an email that is small, downloadable, and viewable on most computer screens.

Viewing Images in Windows XP

From Windows Client Update Newsletter August 18, 2006

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Tip--Viewing Images in Windows XP

If you've been unable to view images with Windows XP's Windows Picture and Fax Viewer and you can't see thumbnails when you're browsing folders that contain images, it's because the OS has lost the proper registration of the Shimgvw.dll file. To fix this problem, do the following:

1. Close all Microsoft Internet Explorer (IE) windows.
2. Click Start, Run.
3. In the Run dialog box, type
   

   regsvr32 /s %systemroot%\system32\shimgvw.dll

4. Click OK.

At this point, you should be able to view thumbnails properly. To check that the viewer works correctly, do the following:

1. Open a folder that contains images.
2. Right-click an image.
3. Select Preview from the context menu.

--contributed by David Chernicoff

Opt out of Yahoo Web beacons

Source: WinXPnews February 27, 2006 Newsletter

Note: Below is copied directly from the newsletter. Yahoo certainly doesn't make it easy to escape their "Web Beacons".

We've had a few questions lately about Yahoo's use of Web beacons, which track Yahoo Groups' users website visits. This is stated on their Privacy Policy page, in the "Cookies" section. Web beacons are small electronic files that are used to count and recognize users for purposes such as personalizing your pages and conducting research.

You can opt out of other companies' cookies by going to the Privacy Policy page at Yahoo! Privacy Center Web Beacons and clicking Cookies in the left column. Scroll down to "Other Companies' Cookies on Yahoo!" and click "Other companies" under that. Then scroll to the third paragraph and click "web beacon."

Scroll down to "Outside the Yahoo! Network" and in the final paragraph, click "click here." Note that this opt-out action is not user specific but machine specific, so you'll need to do this on every computer you use.

Clean out Windows XP's Prefetch folder to speed up boot times

Source: TechRepublic

by Greg Shultz

Takeaway:

Windows XP's Prefetch folder stores information about each program you launch; then, on subsequent restarts, XP uses the information in the folder to preload parts of those programs at boot time. Find out why you need to clean out the Prefetch folder periodically to keep boot times from dragging.

One of Microsoft's big selling points for Windows XP was that it loads applications much faster than its predecessors. To accomplish this feat, Windows XP uses what is called the "Prefetch technique," in which the operating system gathers information about each program that you launch and stores that information in the \Windows\Prefetch folder. Then on subsequent restarts, Windows XP uses the information in the Prefetch folder to essentially preload parts of those programs at boot time. Thus, when you launch your application, it appears to load really fast.

However, the Prefetch folder can accumulate too much information over time. This makes the operating system so busy loading bits and pieces of lots of applications into memory that it ends up slowing down the boot process. Fortunately, you can clean out the Prefetch folder at any time. Follow these four steps:

1. Access the Run dialog box by pressing [Windows]R.
2. Type Prefetch in the Open text box and click OK.
3. Press [Ctrl]A to select all the files.
4. Press [Delete].

As you use your system, Windows XP will rebuild the contents of the Prefetch folder.