More and more programs these days are using tabs in one form or another, web browsers and Firefox and IE have had tabs for a long time. Most of these programs now also allow you to drag and drop the tabs to re-order them. The drag and drop feature lets you organize better and helps to increase your proficiency.

So if you’re anything like me, you’re wondering why hasn’t Microsoft added this feature to the taskbar of the Windows operating system. If you could re-order your open applications and windows you could group them together in order by the tasks your are working on.

There’s no reason to keep waiting for Microsoft, meet Taskbar Shuffle!

This little program is easy to install and works as advertised. Taskbar Shuffle runs in your system tray without slowing things down. Once installed you can begin dragging your taskbar items around and reordering them any way you like. Go ahead, give it a shot!

Technorati Tags: taskbar, shuffle, windows, drag-and-drop,

If you have to give a technical presentation check out Scott Hanselman’s “11 Top Tips for a Successful Technical Presentation“. He offers some excellent things to think about prior to your presentation. Some of the tips are general enough that they apply to any presentation, not jut a technical presentation.

One of the tips he seems to put the most emphasis on, and for good reason, is “font size“. I’ve seen too many presentations where the presenter choose a font that looks good on his monitor but is way to small form the back of the presentation room. If your audience can’t read anything on the screen it’s pointless! You loose their attention as they struggle to read the screen and they soon give up and fall asleep. You need to go to the presentation room ahead of time and prepare!

Another excellent tip he gives is “Care“. You must care about what you are presenting. If you care about what you are presenting you’re more likely to do the research needed and you’ll have the enthusiasm needed to pull in your audience.

Read more of his excellent tips.

Technorati Tags: tips, presentation, presentations

This months PC Magazine features “72 Tips for Safer Computing“. 72 tips sounds like a lot but they’re short and make for a relatively quick read. The information is great and easy to understand for non-techies so I suggest taking a quick look to see if there is anything you may have left out of your security arsenal.

The article is full of great information but not knowing how to act on some of the tips could be an issue for some people. Most of them will at least point you in the right direction, try taking a look at some of the articles on ComputersConfuseMe.com or using the advanced search along the right side of this site to find more details on a particular area that may be of interest. A web search through Google will probably also be quite helpful, however maybe not as targeted as the advanced search, which is also powered by Google.

If you have any questions feel free to leave a post here or contact me via email.

Technorati Tags: tips, security, PCMag, afer-computing

Here’s a windows tip for you:

Everyone has run into the situation where part of a window is hidden off the screen and you can’t access the title bar to move the window back into view. This can be quite frustrating but it’s actually quite easy to fix.

All you have to do is right click on the task bar button for the hidden window and you’ll see a context menu show up with a “move” option. Click on “move” and then using the arrow keys move the window back into the view of your screen.

Ask The Admin points out a keyboard shortcut that can be used as an alternate way to display the context menu.

Technorati Tags: tip

Here’s a quick maintenance tip for you:

Use CCleaner once a week to keep your computer running fast and smooth.

CCleaner is an optimization and privacy tool that will free up temporary files, erase your Internet tracks and clean up excess registry keys. They tool is easy to run and most people can get by with the default settings after installation. The initial program scan can take a few minutes but the cleaning process is very quick!

You can find a link to CCleaner under “Utilities” of the “Favorite Free Software” section of my website. After installing I recommend taking a look at the short CCleaner Tour to learn about the features of the program so you have a good understanding of how it works and what’s available.

Technorati Tags: CCLeaner, PC+Maintenance, tip

Here’s a little search tip for you:

Imagine your doing some research for your boss and you remember reading this perfect reference article that would allow you to complete the research in no time an meet your deadline. You could remember the address to the home page of the website (websiteExample.com) where you read this article but can’t can’t for the life of you seem to remember the articles title. You spend hours and hours browsing through the confusing navigational links and even tried using the sites search feature only to come out empty handed and very frustrated, it seems there article has just disappeared! Now what do you do?

Most likely go to your favorite search engine (possibly google.com) and begin searching for new articles that may not have all of the information you need. If only you could use the power of Google.com with a few keywords you remember from the article to search the entire websiteExample.com website, and only websiteExample.com site, to quickly and easily find the article you’re looking for. You could quickly print it out and make it to your daughters ballet show on time!

You can do exactly that by simply using the “site:” keyword! Using your search query with the “site:” keyword followed by the address of a website tells Google to only return results that match your search query from the website address you entered. i.e. “MySearchWords site:exampleWebsite.com”. Here’s an example of how this feature recently saved me hours or research.

My coworkers and I knew there was an article on appDeploy.com that told how to get around being forced to start an MSI installation using the setup.exe. Searching for this article on appdeploy.com proved to be rather difficult. But by simply searching appDeploy.com using the Google search engine we were able to find the exact article in a matter of seconds. To do this we used the query “setup.exe” followed by the “site:” keyword and then the appDeploy.com address: “Setup.exe site:appdeploy.com“. Google returned results only from the appDeploy.com website and the first result on this page was actually the exact article we were looking for: “Getting Around MSI Packages That Require Setup.exe“.

Other sample searches:

• antispyware site:www.ComputersConfuseMe.com
• Map Services site:http://techcrunch.com
• Canon DSLR site:dpreview.com

Give this tip a try the next time you’re having trouble re-locating an article on a website, I sure you’ll find it a huge time saver.

Technorati Tags: google, search, tip, site