| Please remember to use your thinker, before you tinker! | |
A Periodic Newsletter for the Members of the PC User Group Community !!!
To subscribe to Dave "Bytes" click here
Here's A Vista Tip
Straight out of the box, Vista ships with exactly one icon: the Recycle Bin. Microsoft found that most people appreciate a clean desktop, devoid of icons — but it also found that hiding the Recycle Bin confused people. So Microsoft compromised by making the desktop squeaky-clean, except for the Recycle Bin: Aero Glass and a Recycle Bin.
| If you bought a PC with Vista preloaded, you probably have so many icons on the desktop that you can't see straight. That desktop real estate is expensive, and the manufacturers get a pretty penny for dangling the right icons in your face. Know what? You can delete all of them without feeling the least bit guilty. The worst you'll do is delete some shortcut to a manufacturer's tech support software, and if you really need to get to the program, the tech support rep can tell you how to find it from the Start menu. |
Vista gives you several simple tools for arranging icons on your desktop. If you right-click an empty part of the desktop, you see that you can do the following:
- Choose Sort By and sort icons by name, size, type (folders, documents, shortcuts, and so on), or the date that the icon was last modified.
- Choose View and auto-arrange icons — that is, have Vista keep them arranged in an orderly fashion, with the first icon in the upper-left corner, the second one directly below the first one, the third below it, and so on.
- Choose View, and if you don't want to have icons arranged automatically, at least you can have Windows Align to Grid so that you can see all the icons without one appearing directly on top of the other.
- You can even choose View and then deselect the Show Desktop Icons check box. Your icons disappear — but that defeats the purpose of icons, doesn't it?
| In general, you can remove an icon from the Windows desktop by right-clicking it and choosing Delete or by clicking it once and pressing Delete. |
Some icons are hard-wired: If you put a Word document on your desktop, for example, the document inherits the icon — the picture — of its associated application, Word. The same goes for Excel worksheets, text documents, and recorded audio files.
Icons for shortcuts, however, can be changed at will. Follow these steps to change an icon on a shortcut:
1. Right-click the shortcut.
2. Choose Properties.
3. In the Properties dialog box, click the Change Icon button.
4. Pick an icon from the offered list, or click the Browse button and go looking for icons.
Windows abounds with icons. See Table 1 for some likely hunting grounds.
5. Click the OK button twice, and the icon is changed.
Table 1: Places to Look for Icons
| Contents | File |
| Everything | C:\Windows\System32\shell32.dll |
| Computers | C:\Windows\explorer.exe |
| Communication | C:\Windows\System32\hticons.dll |
| Household | C:\Windows\System32\pifmgr.dll |
| Folders | C:\Windows\System32\syncui.dll |
| Old programs | C:\Windows\System32\moricons.dll |
| Lots of icons are available on the Internet. Use your favorite search engine and search for "free Windows icons." |
Microsoft Office Has Banner Year
According to a study issued by the NPD Group, sales of Microsoft Office dominated the software market in 2007, which in turn showed a sharp increase in sales growth over 2006.
In fact, Microsoft Office accounted for 17 percent of the $3.3 billion in software sold within the U.S., which in turn represented a 15 percent increase from the $29 billion sold in 2006.
NPD also called out Microsoft's Vista OS as another solid performer, but it was nowhere close to Office, whose near ubiquity was matched against a price that can range from several hundred dollars to just $59.99 with academic discounts. Office 2007 unit sales experienced year-over-year growth of 50 percent, the analyst firm found.
USB 3.0
USB has become the de facto standard for attaching peripherals to PCs and transferring files. But since the advent of FireWire 800 (which is still available only in a limited number of devices), USB has lagged behind in the speed race. That could change with USB 3.0. Intel recently announced a SuperSpeed USB Promotions Group, which will spend the next year finalizing a USB 3.0 spec that will take care of our wired peripheral and syncing needs for another five years or more.
Backward-compatible with the USB 2.0 High-Speed spec (as well as the older USB 1.1), SuperSpeed USB should provide a tenfold boost in transfer rate (from 480 Mbps to 4.8 Gbps) while dramatically lowering power consumption. That means you'll be able to transfer a 27GB HD movie to a portable device in 70 seconds instead of the 15 minutes it takes with USB 2.0.
In addition, computers compatible with USB 3.0 will ask a device only once if it has new data to send, instead of polling continuously the way 2.0 does. If the device has no data to transmit, it is never asked again; the device informs the host when it has new data. This alone should dramatically lower the energy use of USB 3.0 devices, especially when they are idle. Other features, like per-link power management, will further reduce power consumption.
Device virtualization will be an important part of the new USB spec as well. The Promotions Group wants to make sure that virtual machines can access USB 3.0 devices without software intervention. A final concern is over mass-storage device drivers. Currently, USB 2.0 drivers limit performance to around 32 MBps, so a new, more efficient driver model is needed. This is outside the purview of the USB spec itself, but the teams involved want to work with driver specifications groups to make sure USB 3.0 devices can live up to their potential. Finalization is expected by the middle of 2008, and devices should arrive in 2009.
Here's A Word Tip
Drawing your readers’ attention to different parts of your document is easy in Word because of all the different formatting features that are available. For example, you can underline, bold, or italicize a word to draw attention to it.
What if you want to draw attention to an entire paragraph? One option in Word 2007 is to shade the entire paragraph in a different color, making it stand out from the rest.
To add shading to a paragraph in Word 2007:
In the Paragraph group, click the Shading button (the button that looks like a paint can).
Click the color you want to use for shading and Word will apply the shading to the paragraph.
While Wandering The Web
MushyGushy is all about self expression and connection… for everyone. And they really mean everyone! They’re the only site that gives its community the tools to easily upload photos and cut and place their heads into all of thier amazing animations. Then, you can adjust skin tones to match your facial complexions. You can even switch genders. See what they mean by everyone?
When you make one of thier e-greetings (which they call GushyGrams), you and your friends become the stars. Your recipients will love that you sent them one. You’ll love the reactions you get!
GushyGrams are FREE when you send them through standard e-mail. So, if you have a head (any shape or color will do) and no money, you can start starring in your GushyGrams today.
Take a peek at the full line of GushyGrams for all occasions. You’ll see that thier animations are “heads above” the competition in detail, design, story-line and overall appeal. By adding your own photo heads and personalization, they’ll be a hit with anyone and everyone.
BECOME A MEMBER. They’re already working on the next generation of GushyGrams. If you register to become a member, you’ll be the first to preview them as they come out. Members also get to save their prepared “photo heads” for future use (along with your attributed skin tone, name, gender and e-mail address). What a time-saver! You’ll simply click and drag already-finished heads right into the cards you want to send.
To learn even more, take a few minutes to view the entertaining tutorial starring “MushyMan.” He’ll take you through everything you need to know.
Enjoy!
Dave's Cool Downloads
LogMeIn Free
Computer remote access comes in very handy when you need to control your home PC from work and vice versa. It's also a fast, efficient way to help a friend –or even your customers- with software installation and configuration. But remote control apps are usually difficult to use and hog system resources.
Well, not anymore: now LogMeIn makes remote control easier than ever by providing you a simple, fast and free tool to access your PC from anywhere. Just download the client and create an account on their website, and you're ready to go.
The client should be installed and launched in the computers you want to access remotely. Then all you need to do is start your session in the LogMeIn webpage and you'll have immediate access to your computer. You'll be able to manage files, transfer data from the local machine to the remote machine and vice versa (only during the first 30 days, though) and even control the desktop and mouse in the remote PC, with a surprisingly quick response to mouse movements. You can create various users with different privileges or open your remote session temporarily to a guest user, so that he or she can see what you're doing on the PC.
On the downside, image resolution is obviously not very high when remote controlling (forget about viewing photos in the remote PC). Also, the Java-based file manager looks a bit sloppy but that's probably due to Java itself. In all, I think LogMeIn is one of the best free remote control apps I've tried.
Pros
Very easy to use: works in a web browser
Support for several users
Allows to transfer data between computers
Quick response from remote PC
Cons
Low resolution on remote controlling
Java file manager looks clunky.
Google Health Will Be Ad-Free
The newest member of the Google family, Google Health, will not have advertising, CEO Eric Schmidt said this week, but will earn its keep from the traffic it draws to the company’s search engine. The new service stores health records, allowing users to share test results, prescriptions and other information with multiple medical providers; it's currently being tested at the Cleveland Clinic, and isn't open to the public yet . • It will be name and password protected, just like Google e-mail accounts, but some worry that users will risk breaches of their medical privacy. Schmidt waves off such concerns. “Our model is that the owner of the data has control over who can see it,” he says. “Trust, for Google, is the most important currency on the Internet.”
Here's A Digital Image Tip
Have your friends ever emailed you photos that exceed the boundaries of your computer monitor? Or worse, have your friends complained about the size of photos that you've sent? Either way, the problem is caused by an overabundance of pixels. In addition to producing pictures that don't fit on-screen, having too many pixels creates another problem for Internet photo-sharing. Every pixel adds to the picture file size, which increases the time that it takes for your photos to make their way through the Internet pipeline.
Your camera's resolution setting determines how many pixels a photo contains. Even if you shoot a picture using your camera's lowest resolution setting, you probably will need to dump some pixels from your photo to shrink it to an appropriate size.
How many pixels are enough?
To figure out how many pixels your email or Web picture needs, you first need to understand how a computer monitor displays what you see on-screen.
Like your digital camera, a monitor displays text and images using pixels. And just as you can select from different resolution settings on your camera, you can choose from a variety of monitor resolution settings, each of which results in a specific number of screen pixels. For example, you can choose from screen resolution settings such as 640 x 480 pixels, 800 x 600 pixels, 1024 x 768 pixels, and 1280 x 1024 pixels.
When you display a digital photo, the monitor uses one screen pixel to reproduce one photo pixel. This one-to-one relationship between screen and picture pixels means that if the pixel dimensions of your picture — pixels wide by pixels tall — match the screen resolution, your photo fills the screen. |
To set the screen display size, you simply decide how much screen-pixel territory you want your photo to consume and then change the image pixel count to match. Keep in mind, though, that people who view your pictures have control over the screen resolution setting on their monitors, and so ultimately have control over the display size of your images.
Given that you can't predict the monitor resolution that will be in use when your pictures are viewed, follow this advice:
Size your pictures with the lowest common denominator in mind. Keep the image small enough that someone viewing the photo at a screen resolution of 640 x 480 can see the whole picture without scrolling the display.
Remember that the Web browser and email window themselves eat up some of the available screen space.
For pictures that you plan to attach to an email message, limit the picture height to 300 pixels and the picture width to 400 pixels. This allows enough room for the picture to display in the message window even on a monitor set to a resolution of 640 x 480.
For Web pages, the same pixel dimensions work fine as long as your page has only one image. If you have multiple photos on a page, you should keep your pictures even smaller. Each photo you put on the page adds to the page download time, and you don't want visitors to your site to have to wait several minutes to display the page.
These guidelines assume that you're preparing your picture for on-screen viewing only. If you want people to be able to print a good copy of a picture, you need to provide them with a much higher pixel count. |
Trimming the pixel count
Your photo-editing software should offer a command that enables you to check the pixel count of your photo and eliminate any excess pixels. The following steps show you how to get the job done in Photoshop Elements, but the basic concepts apply no matter what software you're using:
1. With your picture open, choose Image --> Resize --> Image Size.
The Image Size dialog box appears.
2. Select the Resample Image check box.
When the box is selected, the Width and Height options in the Pixel Dimensions area at the top of the dialog box become available.
3. Select Bicubic from the drop-down list next to the Resample Image check box.
4. Select the Constrain Proportions check box.
5. Enter the desired horizontal pixel count in the Width box at the top of the dialog box.
Or enter the vertical pixel count in the Height box, again using the box in the Pixel Dimensions area at the top of the dialog box. When you change one value, the program automatically adjusts the other value to keep the original image proportions intact.
6. Click OK to close the dialog box.
7. Choose View --> Actual Pixels to see the image displayed at its new size.
Remember that the picture will display at a different size when viewed on a monitor that doesn't use the same screen resolution that you're currently using.
If you don't like the new size, choose Edit --> Undo and try again.
8. Save your resized picture file.
If you want to make additional changes to the picture, choose File --> Save As and save the photo in a non-destructive file format, such as PSD or TIFF.
Bumper Sticker
Pause For Thought
| "The internet is a great way to get on the net." ------ Bob Dole |
To be notified when a new issue of "Bytes" is posted just enter your email address in the box below
|
Click here for the Dave "Bytes" Archives
P.S. Don't forget to say "Hi" at the meeting!!
© 2008 All Rights Reserved
Last Updated
03/12/2008