Vista and Windows 7 Keyboard Shortcuts

Windows 7 and Vista both come with a plethora of keyboard shortcuts for those of us who want to be super efficient or who are just mouse weary.

Here is a small, arbitrary and incomplete selection of some keyboard shortcuts that I find useful, at least sometimes.

Alt + P (in explorer)	Activates preview of the currently selected file
Win + Up	Maximizes the active window
Win + Down	Minimizes the active window
Win + Shift + Up	Stretches the active window to max. screen height but leaves the width unchanged
Win + Shift + Down	Active window: -    reduce maximized window to normal -    minimize normal window
Win + +	Turns the magnifier on
Win + Esc	Turns the magnifier off
Win + Left/Right	Repeated use on active window will -    fill exactly left/right half of screen -    flips window to other side of screen -    reduce window to original size and location
Win + Home	Minimizes all open windows except active window; repeating restores all previously minimized windows
Win + T	Cycles through preview thumbnails of all open programs (almost identical to Alt + Tab)
Win + E	Opens Explorer on “Computer”
Win + (number)	Launches programs pinned to taskbar (first, second a.s.o.)
Win + Space	Aero mode only: Make all windows transparent (toggle switch)

I hope you too will find some of these useful.

There are many, many more. Click on Start, Help and Support, search for Keyboard Shortcuts and click the Keyboard Shortcuts entry in the list of results.

Lots to read, bring some spare time to the party ;-)

As usual I welcome comments and suggestions right here in the blog. Thank you in advance.

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Facebook and Twitter - Beware

This is a serious warming, guaranteed no jokes in here!

If you or any family member use any of Bebo, Facebook, Friendster, hi5, MySpace or Twitter your computer is at acute risk.

The Koobface virus is on the loose!

In the meantime there are several variants of this nasty critter around and some of these are outright difficult to remove. If you want to do your part to keep your computer clean then please be extremely wary of or avoid altogether:

• Links sent from friends you don’t communicate often with
• Broken/bad English in the messages
• Outright grammar and/or spelling errors
• Exciting messages (see this hilarious video!)
• Email hackers and password thieves  (change your Facebook password to be different from your email password)
• Short web link instead of a fully spelled out link
• Wall posts from others that don’t seem normal or appear strange in any way
• New Friends requests from people you don’t know in person
• “Gifts” of Farmville money or the like
  If you ask “What is Farmville” I say “Good for you that you don’t know; don’t even think about going there!”
• And new, developing tricks and lies to come. . .

This list is by no means complete, it is solely meant to give you ideas on what to be wary of.

If you want to read more about risks and dangers on Facebook please take the time to read this article from Cnet (opens a new window or tab, depending on your browser settings).

Naturally the best precaution is as always to stay completely away from social networking sites. Did you know that pickpockets operate in crowds, but hardly ever where there are only a few people?

As usual I welcome comments and suggestions right here in the blog. Thank you in advance.

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Microsoft and Privacy – Urgent!

If you either have and use an email account with Hotmail. MSN or Windows Live or if you use Microsoft Messenger to chat with coworkers, friends or relatives you should read this article on the Windows Secrets blog. The author is a reputable man and a very experienced computer journalist; I trust his words!

All I can say:

Big brother is watching you!

I will de-activate my Hotmail account, you can bet on that.

As usual I welcome comments and suggestions right here in the blog. Thank you in advance.

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Firefox Add-Ons

Firefox as a web browser tries to stay close to the web standards. Many of us like to have added functionality in the browser. This is achieved by adding little programs to the browser that supply these functions integrated into the browser. Such a little program is called an Add-On (or Extension).

Usually I install on all my customer’s machines three extensions:

1. Forecastfox shows the current weather conditions in the menu bar of the browser window.
   I instal this to discourage my customers from playing with WeatherBug and similar stuff because the latter are ad-ware or worse.
   Even a PC World article that was trying to absolve WB said literally "I'm not oblivious to WeatherBug's shortcomings. Previous versions have been resource hogs, and the freeware edition has a nasty habit of introducing unexpected pop-ups".
2. Adblock Plus suppresses all advertisements from known commercial advertisement servers.
   Ad blocking has become very important because way too many advertisements are carriers of malicious software.
3. WOT Web Of Trust marks Google and Yahoo search results with green, yellow and red circles to warn from visiting known dubious (yellow) or malicious (red) web sites.

You can easily check what Add-On is installed by clicking Tools, Add-ons, Extensions.

The Add-ons manager has a drop-down menu by the gear symbol; here you could manually check for updates. I usually just keep the check mark by "Update Add-ons Automatically". 

These Add-ons need to be kept up-to-date just as the browser itself.

After you install an update to Firefox or just because Firefox thinks “it’s about time to check again” you may see (when you start Firefox) a square window that is listing some add-ons and asking you whether to "Check now for updates" or "Cancel" the process. Please allow the checking for updates.

In this context a warning is required: Although generally extensions supply added useful functionality they can interfere with Firefox, sometimes even seriously interfere! If you want to experiment with extensions please at least refer to Mozilla's page about blocked add-ons and the page about slow performing add-ons.

Here is another article with much more detail about what else to update.

As usual I welcome comments and suggestions right here in the blog. Thank you in advance.

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Out Of My Support

As of this writing it has been almost eight months that I don't use or recommend

• Avast 
• AVG (since a looong time already!)
• Ad-Aware
• Spybot Search & Destroy and
• Spywareblaster

any more.

This is not because they are any "bad" but because there is something better or at least as good out there, Microsoft Security Essentials (MSE). IMHO it is for my customers the better solution and it is MUCH easier to use.

I have talked about this fact since at least October 2009 every time I was on WTKM radio (first Monday of every month at 10:00AM on 104.9 FM).

Since January 15th 2010 I have a long and detailed article about the change on my blog. This article describes detailed step by step instructions for switching to MSE.

In the blog's table of contents you can easily find all my other articles about MSE.

The short of all this is that I can not answer questions about the five programs mentioned above any longer. I simply don't use these programs any more and thus don't know the answers to questions concerning the most current versions.

As usual I welcome comments and suggestions right here in the blog. Thank you in advance.

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Printing On The Wrong Printer

It happens sometimes that Print commands go to the “wrong” printer. This can be changed easily.

The following examples show Windows 7 and cover Vista as well, a short description for Windows XP follows further down.

Click on Start, Devices and Printers
 

and you will see all printers.

Find the printer that you want to be your default printer, right click on it and click “Set as default printer”. It will look like this (your printer’s name will naturally be different):
 

Windows XP: Go to Control Panel, Printers and set the correct printer to be your default printer.

As usual I welcome comments and suggestions right here in the blog. Thank you in advance.

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