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Clone Your Printer

If you routinely print two or more kinds of documents (i.e. draft printing for email, normal for word processing, and high quality with photo paper for photos), each requiring its own printer settings, you’ve probably found it cumbersome to have to re-enter all the printer properties every time you change documents. 

You might find it easier to actually install the same printer twice, but with different names and settings. This way, you can simply select the "printer" (actually the group of print settings) that you like the next time you execute your print job.

Resize an emailed photo for printing

Have you ever been frustrated when trying to view or print a picture that you received via email?

Today’s tip will solve this annoying problem for you quickly and almost effortlessly.

1. When you receive one of these large pictures, save it to your hard drive (and remember where it is).
2. Start Microsoft Word (Word Perfect and newer versions of Works will work as well).
3. Click on Insert –> Picture –> from file from the menus
4. Click in the “Look in” box and navigate to where you saved the photo
5. Double-click on your photo
6. Word automatically resizes the photo to fit in the document.

The efficient way to email your digital photos

I often get emails from family or friends who have recently been on vacation or been involved in some other event and they want to share a handful of photos with everyone in their address book. Some of the email works out great, but other email doesn’t quite make it through the way sender intended.

Emailing photos can be one of the most troublesome things you can do with your email for several reasons.

1. Non-resized photos can take a long time to upload to send through email on a dialup line.
2. Non-resized photos can take a long time to download for everyone you send the email to. Nothing is more aggravating than waiting 20 minutes for a photo to download so you can read your email, only to find out that the photo is of a funny position that the cat fell asleep in.

The efficient way to email your digital photos

by Adam Cochran

I often get emails from family or friends who have recently been on vacation or been involved in some other event and they want to share a handful of photos with everyone in their address book. Some of the email works out great, but other email doesn’t quite make it through the way sender intended.

Emailing photos can be one of the most troublesome things you can do with your email for several reasons.

  1. Non-resized photos can take a long time to upload to send through email on a dialup line.

  2. Non-resized photos can take a long time to download for everyone you send the email to. Nothing is more aggravating than waiting 20 minutes for a photo to download so you can read your email, only to find out that the photo is of a funny position that the cat fell asleep in.

Stop the Windows password screen

Follow either of these techniques to get rid of the Windows logon password (it doesn’t provide any type of security any way).

I’m going to give a couple of ways to go about it, because it can be quirky and not work the same way on every machine (imagine that).

Technique 1:

1. Click on Start–>Settings –> Control Panel
2. Double-click on the Passwords icon.
3. Click the Change Passwords tab and click the Change Windows Password button.
4. Make sure all three fields are completely blank and click the OK button to save changes.

Technique 2:

1. Click on Start –> Find –> Files and Folders

Remove Password at Startup

Are you annoyed by a ‘password’ screen that starts up every time you start your computer? Did you know that this password affords you NO extra security what-so-ever?

Well, if you are itching to get rid of it, here’s how:

1. Click on Start –> Find –> Files or Folders
2. Type: *.pwl in the named box
3. Click in the Look In box and choose My Computer
4. Make sure the Include subfolders box is checked and then click on Find Now
5. Delete any files that are found and close the Find window
6. Click on Start –> Settings –> Control Panel
7. Double-click on Network

Make Windows XP Thumbnails Larger

Windows XP brought many new and useful features to computer users. Digital photographers benefited greatly with the roll out of Windows XP nearly three years ago. One of my favorite features is the ‘thumbnail’ view in my photo folders.

Thumbnails allow you to see mini pictures instead of just file names. Windows Me had this feature albeit not as elegantly implemented as in XP. To view your photos in thumbnail view, do the following:

  1. Open a folder containing your photos

  2. Click View from the menus

Drag and Drop

Over the past few weeks, we discussed the usefulness of cut, copy and paste. Another great skill to have at your disposal is “drag and drop”. With very few exceptions, drag and drop requires your mouse.

To drag and drop an object, click and hold the left mouse button on the file, object, or text and then move (drag) the mouse to its destination. It is the same exact maneuver computer users use every day to play solitaire and move the cards from stack to stack.

Here are some other examples:

* Want to delete an unused icon from your desktop? Click on the icon and hold the mouse button down while dragging it to the Recycle Bin. Once over the Recycle Bin, release the mouse button and the icon disappears.

Beware of Fraudulent Email

This week I had the unfortunate job of helping a client of mine change email addresses and passwords. Not that the change itself was unfortunate, it was the reason for the change. Earlier in the week, she fell prey to an Internet scam known as ‘phishing’.

Phishing starts in our email box. The email looks and almost sounds completely official and usually claims to represent a large company like AOL, Earthlink, Citibank, eBay, etc. Even the company’s logo and maybe an address or telephone number will appear in the email as well. The email states that either the company has had a catastrophic computer melt down and needs to rebuild their customer information database OR it says that for your security you need to react.

Adding a Mail notification sound to your email

OK, I?m going to pick on AOL a little this week. Who believes that ?You?ve got mail!? is not only horrible grammar, but also pretty corny!

If you are an AOL user and want to change that sound or are an independent Internet user who uses Netscape, or Outlook Express, Eudora, etc for their mail, this tip will help you add your own customized sound to your email.

The first thing you need is a sound file. You can get this one of three ways:

1. Use the stock sounds that come with Windows
2. Download a sound from the Internet (see Links of Interest below)
3. Or my favorite, record your own sound (or record your children, grandchildren, friend, dog, etc )