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Rick

Computer Add-ons and

Adding a few computer components or peripherals to your computer can breathe new life into your system and make you more productive at the same time. In this week’s tip, you will find some easy ‘do-it-yourself’ ideas for your computer.

Cordless Mouse and/or Keyboard

Lose the wires! Cordless mice make a great gift for a computing friend, and certainly for yourself. When shopping for one, make sure to get an optical mouse…unlike their predecessors with the little ball in the body, optical mice never get dirty or ‘sticky’ when moving them on your desk. Cordless keyboards help you optimally position your keyboard without having to stretch or strain the cords.

Selecting or Highlight Text Tips

Selecting Text on the web or with your word processor:

* Double click on a word to select it
* Click and drag in the margin of your word processor to select entire lines of text

If you have text that you need to select that spans multiple pages, then click once where you want to start selecting, then hold the shift key down and click your mouse after the last word you want to select.

Print your Word document on one page

If you have a letter or some other document you typed in Microsoft Word 97 or 2000, and you want to print it on a single page then this tip will save you some time and frustration.

Before I discovered this feature, I would adjust the margins, shrink the font and make other formatting changes to make my letters fit on one page. Thankfully, one of the more useful additions to Word 97 and Word 2000 is the ability to shrink a document to one page automatically. Here’s how.

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1. Type and edit your document as normal
2. Click on File, then Print Preview
3. Click on the “shrink to fit” icon

Disable or Change Clippy

Who is ‘Clippy’? He’s the little paper clip guy that pops up in Microsoft Word, Excel or any other Microsoft Office program in their 97 and 2000 versions. In the computer world, he appears to be like the Dallas Cowboys…people either love him or hate him.

If you are on the dislike side of the fence, follow this procedure to disable him once and for all:

1. RIGHT Click on Clippy
2. Click on Options (not Hide)
3. Uncheck the box that says “Use the Office Assistant”
4. Click OK

If you start to miss him, just click on Help from the menus and then click on Show Office Assistant

Customize Office Toolbars

Starting with Microsoft Office 2000 and the XP version afterward, software engineers in Redmond decided that showing an entire menu in Word, Excel or any of the Office programs would confuse software users.

Instead of showing the entire menu when clicking on File, Edit, Format, etc, from the menus, we are presented with an abbreviated menu showing only two or three options. In order to view the entire menu, we can either wait a few seconds (who has that kind of time) or click on the double arrows at bottom of the menu.

Thankfully, you can reverse this process, if you wish. You can restore order to the Office menu system and view all the menus with a single click. Follow these steps for either Office 2000 or Office XP products (including Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Front Page, Access, Outlook (not Express), and Publisher):

Create a Watermark in Microsoft Word

Believe it or not, the post office is capable of mailing a real letter! Letter writing in this era of email is slowly becoming a lost art. However, if you had some nice stationery to write on, you might be more willing to write letters. Even if you want to ‘write’ your letter on your computer, learning how to do so with some nice self-designed stationery would be nice.

Watermarks are the very lightly printed backgrounds on a piece of paper or stationery. You can create your own custom stationery with a watermark to print out independently or with a typed document using word quite simply. Here’s how:

Maximum length of a USB cable?

A standalone USB connection should not go further than 16.5 feet (5 meters).

If you need it to be longer, try inserting a powered USB hub in the chain between the device and the computer. This would effectively double the length.

If it is for a printer, you can also get a wireless print server which would allow you to go a maximum of 300 feet.

Split your video signal onto two monitors

There are two ways to hook two monitors up to your computer.

1. A dual monitor video card. These are very inexpensive – around $60. This is the best way to go since it will allow you to post the same image on both monitors or split the signal into two sections allowing your computer to work as a wide panorama.

2. A VGA splitter. This is simply a cable that will split your monitor signal onto two screens. This will only allow you to see the same image on both screens and it will likely present a lower quality image on both screens.

CTRL+ALT+DEL in Windows XP

With all previous versions of Windows, save Windows 2000, pushing Ctrl+Alt+Del on a keyboard would bring up the Close Program dialog box.

 

In Windows XP, pushing this combination of keys brings up the multi-tabbed Windows Task Manager. A much more ominous looking version of the former Close Program box. The only tab where you will want to occasionally end a program is the "Applications" tab. The programs listed here can be safely terminated using the End Task button.

The processes tab can be a little more touchy. The cryptic descriptions there are hard to decipher. My advice is leave it alone unless there is something obvious to you that you would like to delete.

Control Your Recycle Bin

Just to get all of us on the same page, remember that when you delete a file from your computer (like a photo or Word document for example), the file does not leave the computer, it gets moved to the Recycle Bin. If you want to free up the space used by the file, you must delete it from the recycle bin.

However, did you know that you can control how much space can be used by the recycle bin, stop the “are you sure” prompt, or completely bypass the recycle bin? Read on and learn…

To gain control of these functions, simply right click on the recycle bin and click properties.