Tips and Tricks-June 2006

More Power Toys from Windows

Clear Type Tuner – This little utility helps optimize your display. By using the wizard you can fine tune Clear Type on your LCD display. In about 30 seconds you will improve the look of type on your monitor.

Taskbar Magnifier—Have a little trouble reading the text or menus on some of those modern websites. This one’s for you. It’s a magnifier that sits on the Windows Taskbar (you can turn it off when you don’t need it). The magnifier bar magnifies the text (or other objects) nearest to your mouse cursor. You can pick from 1, 2, 4, or 8 zoom. You can widen the bar by widening your taskbar—put your cursor on the edge of the taskbar and when it becomes the two headed arrow, you can widen the toolbar.

Image Resizer—Add a selection to your Context menu (right-click) to allow you to re-size images. You right-click on the picture, select “Resize image” and you are presented with the following choices:

The changed image is saved with the same file name as the original with the size added. The process is very quick and painless. The is a great utility for anyone needed to put photos on a web site.

Alt-Tab Task Switcher – Everyone knows that you can switch between applications open on your desktop by pressing the alt and tab keys simultaneously. You see a small Windows that displays an icon for each application. Now you will see an image of the Window for each application and a set of icons for each application. As you move from one icon to another, the image of that Window appears.

One last one—Microsoft SyncToy. This utility allows you to set up “folder pairs” and to perform a number of different actions on the pairs.

This is how they are described in the Help folder for SyncToys:

Synchronize: New and updated files are copied both ways. Renames and deletes on either side are repeated on the other.

Echo: New and updated files are copied left to right. Renames and deletes on the left are repeated on the right.

Subscribe: Updated files on the right are copied to the left if the file name already exists on the left.

Contribute: New and updated files are copied left to right. Renames on the left are repeated on the right. No deletions.

Combine: New and updated files are copied both ways. Nothing happens to renamed and deleted files. You can create shortcuts to perform the action with the click of the mouse or schedule the action for a specific time. You could use this tool to perform backups from your main computer to an external drive or to another computer on the network.

That’s it for this month.

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