If you've ever turned on the CAPS LOCK when you're composing an email message or writing a document -- but you don't intend to SHOUT -- you might want to set up a sound cue. Here's how to do it:
When you get an error message and need tech support to fix a computer problem, troubleshooting the issue is much easier if you can share with your tech support person what it is you're seeing.In Windows, pressing the Print Screen / PrtScn key copies the whole screen image onto your the Windows Clipboard, so you can paste it into a Word document or an (HTML-format) e-mail message. If you press both the Alt key and the Print Screen key at the same time, you'll get a screenshot of just the active window.
You can customize how your mouse pointer looks — its shape, speed, and visibility. You can choose an extra-large pointer, or even an animated cursor to improve visibility.
Recently my laptop caught a virus and needed to be re-formatted. When I got it back after it was fixed, I wondered why text — not just web pages, but Word documents and spreadsheets — was hard to read. Text looked faint & pixelated. I tried tweaking all kinds of settings, and finally found the solution that worked for me.
If you've opened a Windows folder and found all the columns squished together & hard to read, here's a quick way to resize all the columns with a simple keyboard shortcut.
(Note: this works when your computer has a full keyboard with a numeric keypad like the one pictured at right, but not from most laptop keypads.)
Windows XP lets you display the contents of folders in a variety of ways — a detailed list of the files, thumbnail images, etc. Each folder in the My Computer or My Documents folder can have its own view. That's useful for folders like My Pictures, because you can look at your digital photos in Thumbnails or Filmstrip view.
Finding programs on your Windows XP All Programs menu is tough if you've got a lot of programs installed.
Each time you install new programs, Windows XP adds each new item to the end of the All Programs menu. To make it easier to find what you're looking for, you can sort them so they display in alphabetical order instead.
Here's how to sort items on your All Programs menu alphabetically:
For most documents I print, I only need a black & white copy for myself, so choose not to use the color ink cartridge or high-quality mode.
Since that's my choice for 95% of what I print, I've set that as the default mode for my printer, so I only need to tweak the settings when I want a color or best quality printout.
If you've ever turned on the CAPS LOCK when you're composing an email message or writing a document -- but you don't intend to SHOUT -- you might want to set up a sound cue. Here's how to do it:
You can customize how your mouse pointer looks — its shape, speed, and visibility. You can choose an extra-large pointer, or even an animated cursor to improve visibility.
For most documents I print, I only need a black & white copy for myself, so choose not to use the color ink cartridge or high-quality mode.