Announcements

Follow-up to Last Week's Tips

4/21/03 What Programs are open in the Toolbar: Several readers wrote to let me know that if you mouse over items in the taskbar a description will come up. You must have pop-up descriptions enabled for this to work in XP (usually the default mode). My favorite thing about holding down Alt and hitting Tab is that I can toggle between programs and files that I have open.

4/22/03 Filter email w/ Netscape: "In Netscape 7.0, you can create a message filter by right clicking on any part of the message heading. A box will appear with different options. The bottom option will be create message filter. After that, follow the same procedure." Thanks for the short-cut Floyd.

Here's an additional suggestion for email filtering: "Whenever you create a new rule, create a new folder and send the mail there. That way, you can check that folder every so often and make sure that there is nothing that you want to keep. If you find something to keep, then revise the filter. After a while you can update the filter to send to the deleted folder." John

4/23/03 Surge Protection: "You didn't say anything about battery backup protection on a surge protector. I live in a rural area and MUST HAVE this on mine because of brownouts. It has already saved my computer quite a few times. My backup beeps at me to let me know my battery is making up the difference in power my computer needs." ~ Laura A.

4/23/03 Thunderstorm Protection: "A thunderstorm came through with a strike that felt like it lifted the house." wrote Berry W., "It blew out three telephones, an answering machine, literally blew the wire out of the connectors at each end of one phone cord, blew the DSL filter and swapper apart, and went so far as to trace back out of one phone and blow the cover off the power transformer! The lesson is, PROTECT YOUR PHONELINES! An amazing amount of electricity can come racing through them and has no respect for the amount of money you've spent on the equipment they're connected to."

Lori L. had a similar story: "I just had to replace my modem because of a storm. The storm wasn't bad so i did not unplug my computer. All it took was one lighting strike and it was gone. I paid for that mistake. I also bought a good surge protector with telephone hook-up the day I bought my new modem."

4/24/03 Transfer Old Files: Many readers mentioned other methods for data transfer between computers such as external hard drives, Zip Drives, flash memory cards. Key, "thumb", or pen drives that plug into USB ports are another option. Of course, these cost money and we like to find inexpensive ways to do stuff ;-)

Richard T. recommended, "Use WinZip (or similar program) to compress files before emailing." Good idea—I hadn't thought of that.

Computers 101

Q:
You are always telling us to "drag & drop" files and stuff. This probably sounds stupid, but what does that mean?

A:
Dragging and dropping is easy. It's a procedure where you grab something (selected text, a file, a picture, or whatever) and drop it into a new location.

To drag and drop, click the item you want to drag to the new location with your left mouse button. Now, keeping that mouse button pressed down, move the item to where you want it to be. Once you're hovering over its new home release the left mouse button and it'll be "dropped" into place.

~ Steve

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Tip of the Day

Drag & Drop Madness!

I used to hate dragging and dropping files. I was never sure what Windows was going to do with it. Was it going to be copied? Was it going to be moved? Was I just creating a shortcut to the file? Urrgg! It was enough to drive a geek nuts.

Well, then I started paying attention and realized that Windows actually tells you what it's doing as you move the file. If you see a "+" sign in a little white box, the file is being copied. If you see an arrow, Windows is creating a shortcut. Finally, if you see nothing at all, the file is being moved.

OK here's a new problem. What happens if you're trying to move say, a program file (a file ending in ".exe"), and Windows wants to do a shortcut instead of a move? Or maybe you want to make a copy of a file and Windows wants to move it?

Well, there's an easy solution for that as well. Just drag and drop with your RIGHT mouse button. When you release the button, you'll be given a little menu that allows you to pick Move, Copy, Create Shortcut, or Cancel.

In case you're wondering, I'm a right-click drag and dropper now :-)

~ Steve

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Amanda's Cool Site of the Day

Last Words

Sporting the Shakespeare quote, "The tongues of dying men enforce attention like deep harmony." (Richard II, II.1.5-6), this site is about famous last words.

You’ll find a collection of Famous Last Words from real people and fictional characters, as well as, Famous Epitaphs, Famous Wills and Obituaries, Famous Last Stands, and Famous Farewells.

From the profound to the just plain dumb, you can find it here.

http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Acropolis/6537/

Do you have a cool, non-commercial site that you want to share?
Send it to Amanda at amanda@worldstart.com