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Click on the links below:
ACDSee
Firefox
Internet Explorer
Nero
Notepad
Keeping a Log using Notepad
Browser Keyboard Shortcuts
DoubleKiller
StartupRun
My Movies don’t play in QuickTime
Create PDF documents for free!
The Open CD
The GIMP
Booklet Printing
An alternative PDF Reader
Safari
Free Software
Some AVI movies won’t play
Free Video Conversion
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Notepad
I use Notepad to write lists - jobs to do, things to buy, general reminders, etc. I have them on the desktop and change them during the day.
But when I open the lists they always look small and difficult to read.
It never ever occurred to me that you can make the font size bigger. But you can - and lists are so much easier to work with when the writing is big!
You can’t change the font on a per document basis, it’s set within the program so that if you make a change whilst using one text document then all the others will look the same until you change it again.
Notepad is usually in Start, All Programs, Accessories.
You set the font by left clicking Format, then Font.
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Keeping a Log using Notepad
If you start a new text document with “.LOG” (without the quotes and in CAPITALS) then when you reopen it Notepad will automatically insert the current time and date ready for you to make the next entry.
You can also insert the time and date whilst using Notepad by hitting the F5 key
Keep on logging!
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Browser Keyboard Shortcuts
Sometimes, especially when using a laptop, it’s easier to use the keyboard.......
These shortcuts work in Internet Explorer, Firefox and Opera.
Space - Scroll down a screensworth at a time.
Shifted Space - Scroll up a screensworth at a time.
Full Screen mode - F11.
Back to normal screen - F11 again.
Alt Left Arrow - Back to the previous web page.
Alt Forward Arrow - Forward to the next web page.
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DoubleKiller
DoubleKiller is a free application for finding and removing duplicate files - even when they don’t have the same names.
It is a stand-alone executable that does not need to be installed, just extracted and run, and does not change or delete anything until you tell it to.
DoubleKiller searches single or multiple directories for duplicate files by comparing any combination of:
file name
size
modification date
checksum
If you compare by checksum, the complete file's content is read and results in a number which can be compared against other checksums.
You can think of this checksum as a fingerprint. Every file has a fingerprint, and these fingerprints can be easily compared to each other.
Using user-defined masks like *.mp3 or *.dll you can limit the scan or protect important files from being scanned. You can exclude files in a particular file size range or files with certain attributes, like hidden or system files.
When the scan is finished a list containing all duplicates found is displayed and you can manually or automatically select the files to be removed. The result list can be sorted and exported to a text file.
You can download it from:
www.bigbangenterprises.de/en/doublekiller/download.htm
Warning - Windows or some applications may deliberately put duplicate system files in different locations. If you delete all but one the program might not be able to find the copy it is looking for and may fail - or Windows might fail!
So just use it to delete things that you know about - like photos or music files
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StartupRun
Some people admit that they switch on their PC and then make a cup of tea while it is starting up. They have so many programs that launch at boot-up that it seems to take forever and they end up with an array of icons in the notification area at the right of the taskbar. Most of these programs have been put there by the installation CDs of hardware manufacturers (especially printers). Most of them are rarely or never used and they slow down the PC and hog the memory.
Why have everything start every time? When you want to use something, start it then.
Windows has a built in program that shows you what programs are run at startup. But msconfig has to be started by left clicking Start, Run and typing msconfig into the Open box. And this puts off a lot of users - they are frightened of typing commands - they want to just click an icon. And the interface is rather scary for tentative PC users.
Anyway, there is a much more user-friendly little utility called StartupRun (strun) available free from www.nirsoft.net/utils/strun.html
The program is a stand alone executable that does not need installing, just unzip it from the downloaded zip file and put it on your desktop.
StartupRun displays a list of all the applications that are automatically loaded when Windows boots up. It also displays additional information (Product Name, File Version, Description, and Company Name), to allow you to judge whether you want those programs to continue to start.
You can disable, delete and re-enable any item by right clicking it.
I suggest that you select all the items (hold down Control whilst left clicking each item) other than your anti-virus and anti-spyware programs and disable them by right clicking one of them and left clicking Disable. Exit StartupRun and then see how fast your next startup is. Then keep strun on your desktop and only enable those items that you genuinely want to load at the start.
Eventually you may decide to delete those items that have remained disabled for months.
(As a bonus, if StartupRun identifies known spyware that runs at startup, it flags it in pink.)
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My Movies don’t play in QuickTime
“I have some video clips taken on my stills camera. These work fine when I play them using Picasa. But I cannot play them any more using QuickTime. Please can you tell me where I have gone wrong?”
I think you may have unwittingly changed the default program that opens your video files.
I am guessing that when you open Picasa and then select a file it plays it. But if you come out of Picasa and just double left click on a file to play it then nothing happens (although previously it would have played in QuickTime).
Open My Documents and find one of the video files that you are having problems with.
RIGHT click on the file and then left click on “Open With...”
In the list of programs that comes up left click on QuickTime
Left click to select the box beside “Always use the selected program to open this kind of file”
Left click OK and you video should play in QuickTime.
And next time you double left click on a video file it should also open in QuickTime.
If that doesn’t work, you may have a faulty installation of QuickTime. Uninstall it through Add/Remove programs and then reinstall it from www.apple.com.
Watch out - if you don’t want iTunes as well as QuickTime you need to click the appropriate button, and if you don’t want emails from Apple you need to unclick some other buttons.
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Create PDF documents for free!
Adobe Acrobat Reader is on almost everyone’s PC and it enables them to read PDF documents. The good thing about PDF documents is that they can be read on any kind of PC running any operating system and always display exactly as the author intended.
But creating a PDF document used to require the purchase of Adobe Acrobat - and the price for that is £288 at December 2006.
But you can create PDF documents for nothing from any program that can print.
Go to www.primopdf.com and download PrimoPDF. Install the program and it creates a virtual Printer called (obviously) PrimoPDF.
In the document-authoring program, left click File then Print.
Select the PrimoPDF printer from the list of available printers and click OK .
The PrimoPDF window opens. Enter a name and a location for the PDF file that you want to create.
Select whether the PDF will be used for Screen, Print, EBook or Prepress. (If in doubt choose the Print option)
Left click OK. The PDF file will be created and Adobe Reader will open to show it to you.
Before you click OK you can change security settings to stop people opening, printing, copying or changing your document without a password.
And you can use Document Properties to record information about your document to help organize your PDFs so that you can find them easily later.
This is a bargain almost as good as OpenOffice! (also free!) and AbiWord (also free again!).
Dare I mention that the Linux versions of both the above programs can create PDF files directly!
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The Open CD
“The OpenCD project aims to introduce users of MS-Windows to the benefits of Free and Open Source Software.”
Someone has very thoughtfully collected together all the best free software for Windows and stuck it on a CD. You can either download and burn it yourself for nothing or purchase it online (if that doesn’t defeat the object).
Programs included are:
Productivity
MoinMoin 1.5.4
OpenOffice.org 2.0.4
PDFCreator 0.9.3
Notepad2 1.0.12
Design
Blender 2.42a
GNU Image Manipulation Program 2.2.13
Inkscape 0.44-1
NVU 1.0
Scribus 1.3.3.5
Tux Paint 0.9.16
Internet
Azureus 2.5.0.0
FileZilla 2.2.29
Firefox 2.0
Gaim 1.5.0
HTTrack 3.40.2
RSSOwl 1.2.2
Thunderbird 1.5.0.8
TightVNC 1.2.9
WinSCP 3.8.2
Multimedia
Audacity 1.2.6
Celestia 1.4.1
Really Slick Screensavers 0.1
Stellarium 0.8.2
Games
Battle for Wesnoth 1.0.1
Enigma 0.9.2
Neverball 1.4.0
Sokoban YASC 1.330
Utilities
7-zip 4.23
Abakt 0.9.4
Clamwin 0.88.5
GTK+ 2.8.18
HealthMonitor 3.1
Workrave 1.8.3
I can vouch for several of these - Firefox, OpenOffice.org, NVU, Azureus, Audacity, GIMP and Thunderbird because I have tried them. But most of the others I have never heard of let alone tried.
But given that they are all free I believe that it is well worth the time downloading this CD, providing that you have a fast broadband connection.
You have nothing to lose!
More information from http://www.theopencd.org/Welcome
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The GIMP
The GNU Image Manipulation Program is a free image editor. Although originally developed for UNIX-like operating systems like Linux, it has now been converted to also run on Windows.
If, like me, you only have need of an image editor on an occasional basis to do the odd “tweak”, then you may not want to spend £60 - £70 on Photoshop Elements or Paint Shop Pro. The GIMP is a perfectly acceptable alternative and certainly does all the things that I want an image editor for.
Once you get used to its unusual interface (different elements of the program have their own separate windows) then the program is fairly intuitive. But the basic program download does not come with a help file. I find help files essential, but this one has to be downloaded separately.
To get it all you need to download these 3 items and install them in the following order:
GTK+ 2 Runtime Environment
The GIMP for Windows
GIMP Help 2
You can get them all from: SourceForge
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Booklet Printing
Nobody seems to provide printed manuals any more - they just put the manual on a CD as a PDF file.
But sometimes you really do want a printed manual and it can take a lot of time, ink and paper to print off one of those 100+ page manuals.
But the latest version of Adobe Reader (version 8) has Booklet Printing! That means that you can print off a 100 page manual on both sides of only 25 sheets of paper with two pages per side. And the program works out which pages to print side by side so that the whole thing can be folded and stapled (or cut and bound) to form a booklet with the pages in the right order.
Get Adobe Reader 8 from: www.adobe.com - remember to deselect the option to “Also download: Adobe Photoshop® Album Starter Edition” if you don’t want it.
When you have downloaded and installed Adobe Reader 8, open the PDF that you want to print and left click the print button. In the Print box, just over halfway down, in Page Handling you will see a Page Scaling selection box. Select Booklet Printing and then in Booklet subset choose to print Both sides, Back sides or Front sides. (It depends on whether your printer does duplex (automatic double side printing) or not).
You could use the booklet printing facility to print booklets from your own documents.
Create the document in Office or OpenOffice
Save it as a PDF file. OpenOffice has a built in “Export as PDF” option. Office users could use PrimoPDF (see: Create PDF documents for free!)
Then open the PDF file with Adobe Reader 8 and use Booklet printing as above.
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An alternative PDF Reader
One of my clients was running Windows ME and was using Adobe Acrobat Reader 4.
He decided that he needed to update Adobe Reader and went to the Adobe website. The site correctly identified his operating system and presented him with the correct version (6.0.0) of Adobe Reader to download.
But when he installed it there were all sorts of problems and it wouldn’t work at all. So I uninstalled it and then installed it again directly from my own disk - but the same thing happened.
So, if you are having problems with Adobe Reader, or don’t want to download over 16MB to get it (version 8 is over 21MB) then try Foxit Reader 2.0 for Windows.
Foxit Reader 2.0 is a free PDF document viewer and printer, with incredible small size (only 1.5 M download size), fast launch speed and rich feature set. Foxit Reader 2.0 supports Windows 98/Me/2000/XP/2003. Its core function is compatible with PDF Standard 1.6.
Read more about it here.
I have tried it and cannot fault it - it does what it says on the site.
Safari
Apple have released the beta version of their Safari 3 web browser. And for the first time it is available for Windows as well as for Mac.
They claim that it is faster than Opera, Internet Explorer and Firefox. By faster they mean faster at rendering pages. We need to wait for independent testing to confirm that.
I would have thought that with most modern PCs the bottleneck is the speed at which pages can be delivered from the internet. Which makes the speed of rendering the page pretty irrelevant.
You can download the beta version of Safari 3 from here.
I’m not sure if it has any significant advantages over other browsers. The key thing will be how secure it is and that will only be discovered over time.
Some initial observations are:
You can drag a tab to the desktop, where it becomes a new window, but I’m not sure I would find that very useful.
When you install it, Safari automatically imports all your existing Firefox & IE bookmarks, without asking for your agreement. And it puts them into a discrete folder instead of into the main bookmark folder.
Bookmarks cannot be displayed in a left-hand panel without it expanding to fill the whole screen.
You can't keep the tab bar on display, nor can you open a new tab by double left clicking in its blank area as you can with Firefox.
Maybe there will be some changes before the proper release.
I don’t see much of a demand for Safari for Windows. Most Internet Explorer users don’t even know that they are using a Browser and wouldn’t know what the point of an alternative was. And those of us that do know about browsers are already using Firefox because of its greater security and great add-ons.
Any new browser needs a compelling selling point, and I’m not sure that Safari has one.
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Free Software
There may be no such thing as a free lunch, but there is plenty of free software available.
I’ve mentioned some of the free programs that I am using (or have at least tried) on this page and in various other sections of this site.
But there is a site called “nedwolf” that lists “The Best Free Software for Windows”.
Now I haven’t tried most of the programs listed on that site, but those that I have tried are good, so I expect that the rest are too.
But if you don’t like them they haven’t cost you anything!
Just be aware that although “updated regularly” the nedwolf site has some out of date info (Microsoft AntiSpyware) and some broken links (Gimpshop).
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Some AVI movies won’t play
You have some AVI movies that play quite happily in Windows Media Player (or whatever player you prefer) but others that won’t play at all.
The probability is that those AVI movies are really DivX movies and the reason that you can’t play them is that you don’t have a DivX codec installed.
Go to www.divx.com and download DivX for Windows. You have to download the complete package, which includes items that you may not want, but when you get to the installation stage you can de-select everything other than the codec.
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Free Video Conversion
There are many different formats for digital video.
If you need a simple, efficient tool to convert virtually any video file then SUPER © seems to do the job.
I haven’t tested all the possible permutations of file conversion that it offers, but what I have tested works just fine.
And it’s free!
Get it from: http://www.erightsoft.com/SUPER.html
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