Linux applications: Part 1 - Productivity

As I mentioned in a recent post, I have recently switched to a Linux distribution as my operating system of choice. Many other users may be put off from making a similar switch because they are concerned that they may not be able to use the applications that they know from the Windows environment. While...

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By Your Command: File and Folder paths the easy way

When using the Command Prompt you can avoid typing the whole path for files and folders by dragging and dropping them onto the Command Prompt window. This video shows this time-saving feature in action.Please note that this function does not work with all icons such as the My Documents icon on the desktop.More Command Prompt tips so...

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Goodbye Windows. Hello Xubuntu

For years I have had a love/hate relationship with Windows in its various incarnations, which has led me to flirt with a number of Linux distributions in the past. Nevertheless, games and other Windows only applications have meant that I have always returned to Microsoft OS's. That was until last week...

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The 22nd Carnival of Computer Help and Advice

Welcome to the twenty-second monthly Carnival of Computer Help and Advice - a digest of recent blog articles that spread the wealth of PC knowledge."Firefox is the second most popular web browser in the world and it continues to gain popularity and market share. With this rapid growth many users, especially...

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How to sort the Programs Menu

If, like me, you have a lot of applications installed on Windows XP, it can be time consuming to find the folder or icon for the program that you are looking for on the Start menu. You can sort the contents of the Programs menu into alphabetical order, with the folders listed first and then the applications....

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The 21st Carnival of Computer Help and Advice

Welcome to the twenty-first monthly Carnival of Computer Help and Advice - a digest of recent blog articles providing top tips for PC users. Because so many blog authors submitted high quality posts for inclusion this month, this carnival is a little longer than usual. Nevertheless, there is not enough...

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By Your Command: A Rough Guide to the Command Prompt, Part 2

In a previous post I explained how to navigate to different drives and folders using Command Prompt. I also showed how to list the contents of the current folder using the dir command. We will now look a little closer at this command.In the tutorial, I suggested typing the following command dir /a-d...

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By Your Command: A Rough Guide to the Command Prompt, Part 1

Before the rise of graphical user interfaces (GUIs) the main method of controlling computers was through text based operating systems such as MS-DOS. You can still use these old DOS commands using a facility called Command Prompt that is available in all forms of Windows. In this first part of this...

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Spam comments

I have noticed a marked increase in comments left on this site that are little more than spam. I do not mind that people want to share links here, but I object to comments that contain little more than a list of links to commercial sites.From now on such comments are subject to removal with no explanation. Please do not let this dissuade you from leaving short comments with a link to your blog or...

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The 20th Carnival of Computer Help and Advice

Seasonal greetings and welcome to the twentieth monthly Carnival of Computer Help and Advice. Another digest of blog articles that help you to avoid problems with and to get the most out of your PCs.I will let the first contributor introduce their own article. Josh Allison of Modern Geeks presents a...

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The 19th Carnival of Computer Help and Advice

Welcome to the eighteenth monthly Carnival of Computer Help and Advice - a digest of recent blog articles offering advice on safer and easier computing.We start this month with a couple of articles about Microsoft Office applications. Excel Matic author Mohit Khurana presents a tutorial explaining How...

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Customising the Quick Access Toolbar

In a recent post about adding buttons to the toolbars in Microsoft Office applications I pointed out that there is no way to add buttons to the new 'ribbon' that has replaced the old toolbars. Nevertheless, it has come to my attention that there is still one customisable toolbar in the latest versions of Word, Excel and Powerpoint. This is called the 'Quick Access Toolbar'. If you wish to add extra...

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The 18th Carnival of Computer Help and Advice

Welcome to the eighteenth monthly Carnival of Computer Help and Advice. Another digest of the best blog articles published recently that help you get the most out of your PCs.We start this month with regular contributor, Andrew Edgington, who submitted his article Adobe Photoshop Elements Tools - Restoring...

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Printing from Excel - Part 2

In the last post I showed how to format an Excel sheet so that it fitted to the page and added page numbers. The end result as displayed in Print Preview is as shown here.As we can see there are no gridlines on the print. We can either remedy this by selecting border types on the table or, more easily,...

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Printing from Excel - Part 1

Printing from Microsoft Excel is markedly different to printing from Word. Whereas in Word we can usually just tell it to print without worrying that much about formatting the page, in Excel we will usually have to specifically tell it how we want to print our speadsheets, and this can sometimes be...

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Finding lost documents

We have all done it, saved a document and then immediately forgotten where we saved it and what we called it. Fear not, help is at hand. Some applications will keep a short list of recently opened documents, which can usually be found in the 'File' menu. This should at least identify the name of the...

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The 17th Carnival of Computer Help and Advice

Welcome to the seventeenth monthly Carnival of Computer Help and Advice. Another collection of blog articles to help you avoid problems and get the most out of your PC.He start this month with some relief for Vista users. Krissb explains how to get rid of the annoying dialog box that opens everytime...

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Putting new buttons on toolbars in MS Office (before the 2007 version)

A while ago I published an article that suggested that rather than printing directly from web browsers, such as Internet Explorer, it is better to copy the information that you want into a word processor and print it from there. In that article I mentioned the use of the 'Paste Special' in Word, which...

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How to password protect any file in Windows XP

Certain applications, such as Microsoft Word, enable you to password protect your files. Nevertheless, the zip functionality that is built into Windows XP enables the user to password protect any file by compressing it using a password. If you have an alternate compression application, such as WinRar...

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The 16th Carnival of Computer Help and Advice

Welcome to the sixteenth monthly Carnival of Computer Help and Advice. Another collection of blog articles to help you avoid problems and get the most out of your PCs.I would like to thank everyone who contributed yet another bumper haul of excellent posts. As ever, limitations of space mean that not...

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Print the web and save the world (again)

Web browsers such as Internet Explorer and Firefox are notoriously bad at printing. You can end up with many disparate pages with sidebars and parts of images on, you have no idea how many pages are going to come out, and you use more paper than you need; which, can't be good for the environment - let...

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Weekend Website: PortableApps.com

I have not run this feature in ages, but I decided to bring it out of retirement to feature an excellent site: PortableApps.com. With the increasing popularity of USB flash drives and memory cards many software producers are creating versions of their software tailored to run from these devices. This...

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The 15th Carnival of Computer Help and Advice

Welcome to the fifteenth monthly Carnival of Computer Help and Advice - a digest of recent blog articles providing top tips for PC users. Because so many blog authors submitted high quality posts for inclusion this month, this carnival is a little longer than usual. Nevertheless, there is not enough...

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What to do when Windows hangs (revisited)

So, your PC isn't doing anything, the screen is a mess, the hard-drive is whirring away. Is there anything you can do, rather than just reach for the reset button?Here are my top tips for dealing with those times when Windows hangs.Don't keep clicking thingsWindows buffers (meaning that it remembers)...

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