Tricks and Tips for Windows...

Jstn · **Posted:** Tue Feb 19, 2008 7:58 pm

I thought we'd start a thread where people could share the little things they have learned to do with Windows that aren't always obvious.

I'll start with a favorite of mine. Most Windows OS's from 98SE on up will do this little trick. Try it out, it'll save you a lot of typing...

Type "savesurface" into your address bar. (No quotation marks)

Hold down the Ctrl key while you hit Enter.

It should automatically add the "http" "www" and ".com" stuff for you and go to that site. In this case...

savesurface

becomes

http://www.savesurface.com

and goes to this sites homepage.

I am always amazed how many people don't know about this.

Keith Beyer · **Posted:** Tue Feb 19, 2008 9:25 pm

Here's a ton of stuff from Bleeping Computer. A lot of really cool tricks.

Keith

http://www.bleepingcomputer.com/forums/forum27.html

Zelda · **Posted:** Thu Mar 27, 2008 10:51 am

thanx for the tip Jstn--i never knew about that at all--also, Keith, i really like the site you sent the link for--got any other neat tricks up your sleeves?

Jstn · **Posted:** Thu Mar 27, 2008 11:55 am

Zelda wrote:

thanx for the tip Jstn--i never knew about that at all--also, Keith, i really like the site you sent the link for--got any other neat tricks up your sleeves?

You're welcome, Zelda. Like I said, it's amazing how many people don't know that. Glad you mentioned it as I realized I had made a bad typo (I meant to say quotation marks) in my post. D'oh.

Btw, if you are going to a .net or other type of site, you can do the same thing, then as the page starts to load, hit the "Stop" button and edit in the .net or whatever instead of the .com, then hit "Go"

Still saves a lot of time.

Here's one more. Hold down the Ctrl key and use the scroll wheel on your mouse. You can instantly resize many webpages (not this one, sorry) to make them more readable.

I'll think of some other stuff, as well.

Jstn · **Posted:** Thu Feb 11, 2010 9:27 pm

Here's a handy thing that comes with WIndows (not sure about Vista on up, though)

Under Start Button/ All Programs/ Accessories/ System Tools

You will find the Character Map. Select a character not available on your keyboard, then hit the Copy button and you can paste that character into posts here or word proccesor documents to your's heart's content.

Here are some examples...

¢ ¼ ½ ¾ ¿ Ø ° ¥ ¦ © ® « ±

Thanks to Graze for reminding me about this tool a while back.

Jstn · **Posted:** Tue Mar 02, 2010 10:12 pm

This may be one of those things that everybody figured out but me, so if I'm late to the party, forgive me, but here we go...

This works for I.E., but I haven't tried it with other browsers.

After you type text into a text box (like Google), you probably get "suggestions" the next time you start a word with the same letters, which you click on and it enters the text for you.

For instance, if you type "slimeball" one time and "Surface" the next, the next time you enter an "S" the suggestions pop-up with the list...

slimeball
Surface

Whereas if you type in "Su" the suggestion list will only have...

Surface

This can be quite handy such as in my case where we have three long library card numbers all of which start with a "1"

I simply type in the number "1" and I get a listing for the three numbers, my kids, my wife's, and then mine. I just click on the suggested number for the account I wish to sign into, and add the password.

Saves a lot of looking up and typing long numbers each time.

Well, in theory anyway. However, when I first entered the numbers I accidently added an extra "1" to one of the numbers, which means instead of a list of three suggestions, I got four.

I never found a way to eliminate the "extra number suggestion" until the other day, when I deleted a different suggestion accidently. I can't believe it was so easy and there all along.

Simply put the highlight on the suggestion you wish to get rid of, and instead of clicking it, go to your keyboard and hit your delete key. The suggestion highlighted will vanish.

This can be really handy for cleaning up those typos you accidently typed in, or those private searches you'd rather not have pop up in the suggestion list when someone else types in the first letters.

So, no one needs to see that you've been searching for hemoroid ointment deals on the web or wonder about you, when they see you were searching for details about a terrorist bombing, so you can post the story.

I hope you find that helpful.

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Tricks and Tips for Windows...

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