Tips and Tricks-September 2005

Here are a bunch of random tips this month.

Did you know that having a large number of icons on your desktop can slow your system down? Windows links each of the shortcuts to its source program. An easy way to minimize the number is to create folders for groups of the icons or one big folder for all the desktop icons. Even though you might have to click an extra time to open the folder, it does make you get better organized. Last time I counted, I had 55 icons on my desktop, excluding the basic ones like “My Computer” and some folders I created previously. Time to clean them up!

Running short of disk space? Emails are one source of drive clutter that you can deal with, especially if you tend to keep emails for a long, long time. (I have emails dated in 2000.) You can compact your stored emails. Almost every email client has a utility somewhere for doing this. In Outlook 2003, you have to go to the file menu, then “Data Management.” Select the account you want to compact and go to “Settings.” There is a button for compacting the folders for the account, you select. Click on it and sit back. Mine worked in the background and allowed me to do other things while it did its job.

If you plan to switch to Firefox or want to have it on your system as an alternate browser, but don’t want to have create all your bookmarks, passwords, etc. again, try the “Import” function on the File menu. You are also prompted to do this when you install Firefox, but if you skipped it, you can still import from Internet Explorer, Netscape or Opera. You can choose which items to import.

I don’t know about you, but I am not interested in starting all over with creating bookmarks.

Another tip for Firefox users—it doesn’t update itself automatically, but it does include a fairly easy way to know if updates are available. It’s a little tough to see and know what it is, but once you know what it is, keep an eye on it.

Notice the little gray circle in the upper right hand corner—no—the other right corner—under the red X. That takes you to the Firefox home page, but it also is supposed to turn into a white arrow on top of a red circle if there are any critical updates. You can also just use the button to go to Firefox to manually check on the updates.

Web Developers or people interested in learning more about accessibility on web sites will be interested in two toolbars available for IE and Firefox. The first is the web accessibility toolbar for IE from http://www.nils.org.au/ais/. The second one, for Firefox, is a download from http://chrispederick.com/work/firefox/webdeveloper/download/#download. Both provide tools for analyzing pages, viewing them with cascading style sheets, resizing the browser, turning off javascript and more. Both include ways to view table structures and source code. One caveat about each: Sometimes IE generates an error when exiting after using the toolbar. It is not fatal and only slightly annoying. It seems to occur whenever IE or the Web Accessibility toolbar is updated. The Web Developer toolbar for Firefox installation gave me fits. It’s an xpi file. It took me a read of the documentation (after fooling with it unsuccessfully for several minutes) before I figured out how to install it. It is an extension for Firefox. The easiest way to install is to download it to your desktop and drag it to an open Firefox window. Follow the prompts and you’re in business.

Here’s what it looks like. I had to cut off a little on the right to save it in a size large enough to read. Notice that it outlined the tables used on the PCC web site. I clicked on outline to find that option.

Have fun!

PC Community, P.O. Box 3127, Hayward, CA 94540-3127
Copyright 2005

Banner Photo by Charles Scamahorn