Instead of bookmarking a website, you can drag the URL directly to your desktop. Bookmarks are great, don’t get us wrong, but sometimes you might want to keep a link handy in order to get to it quickly, without even having your browser open. Or, you might only want to keep that site around for a day or two and a bookmark seems too permanent. Either way, here’s how you do it:
Whatever browser you use, there is an address line across the top, the one that contains the URL of the website, basically the http://www.suchandsuch.com letters. In the far left corner of that line is some type of icon. All you have to do is drag that icon to your desktop. Once you do that, all you have to do is double click the icon to get to that site again. This is a picture of what you have to drag to your desktop:
This will put a link to the page onto your desktop.
This is the same as a shortcut, just double click and the page will open in your default browser. This is a quick and easy way to get to a page almost instantly.
Here’s a short post on how to make the typeface (some people say font) bigger in your browser.
Click anywhere on the page that is open in your browser. Hold down the Ctrl key (lower left corner of your keyboard) and roll your mouse center wheel away from you.
To make the type smaller, roll the wheel towards you.
This works any computer with a mouse and a center wheel.
If you are on a laptop and or you don’t have a mouse with a center wheel, simply hold the Ctrl button and press the + key (shift and the = key) a few times. The type will get larger. Alternatively, press the Ctrl key and then the – (or hyphen) key and the type will get smaller. Cool huh?
Windows 8 is available on a demo basis right now. (Spring 2012) Installing the demo version as your main operating system isn’t a great idea, obviously. However you want to do it, make sure you install Windows 8 in a dual boot scenario, either on its own separate drive or on another partition of your main hard drive. If you can spring for an SSD, even better. You don’t have to worry about creating the dual boot option yourself, Windows does that for you.
The problem arises when you want to get rid of Windows 8. The dual boot menu still pops up every time you start up your computer. For me, this meant waiting around for the choice to come up then scrolling down to Windows 7. I couldn’t just push the start button on my computer and head off to make a coffee. Disaster!
After some searching, I came across a cool little program named EasyBCD by NeoSmart Technologies. (NeoSmart sounds like they weren’t smart before but are now, doesn’t it?) Their website is here: http://neosmart.net/ and you can check out some of their other software while you’re at it. EasyBCD is free as long as you are just a home user. If you’re using this commercially, cough up some bucks to buy it.
The software comes with ample online documentation but the main thrust of the whole thing is to show you which boot options you have (in my case there were two: Windows 7 and Windows 8). Using a small, efficient menu, EasyBCD displays your current options and allows you to remove the one(s) that you don’t want. The various options are on the left, as you see here:
I've already deleted the Windows 8 option, leaving only Windows 7.
I wasn’t planning to write a post on EasyBCD so I had already deleted the Windows 8 option. Basically, you do this:
1. Choose View Settings to see what your choices are.
2. Click Edit Boot Menu then highlight Windows 8 and choose Delete.
3. Highlight Windows 7 (or your normal operating system) and make it the default choice. Do that by clicking the box to the left of the word ‘Yes’.
4. Click the Save Settings box on the bottom right.
That’s it! EasyBCD has other uses as well and you can investigate what they are using the Advanced Settings or the BCD Backup/Repair and Useful Utilities. I just used it to delete the dual boot option, however.
TIP: If you screw up your boot menu, you won’t be able to start your computer. That’s kind of obvious, right? If you are at all squeamish about doing stuff like this, ask a techie friend to help you out. I’m just here to tell you about EasyBCD and give you details on what worked for me.
This weekend, a friend came over with a DVD that wouldn’t work on her DVD player. Turns out that the DVD was from England and was in the PAL format. Not that this matters too much to you but a good portion of the world has a different broadcast system for their TVs. Our native North American system is known as NTSC while their system is known as PAL. We’re not talking about regions here, as in DVDs that only play in one region even if that region is PAL or NTSC. The regions have to do with DRM (digital rights management), not transmission systems. Regardless of the reason, her PAL DVD wouldn’t work on any North American NTSC system. How would we fix that?
After hours of trying to re-author the DVD using some very arcane and complicated software, I decided to take the simple route. Since the DVD is essentially a group of video files, I decided to convert those files to AVI files using Format Factory. We’ve written about Format Factory before and it’s one of our go-to programs for converting video or audio files from one format to another. Read our posts here: Format Factory and here: Format Factory
Almost every DVD player out there will play AVI files. You can also pop those files onto a flash drive and connect it directly to some TVs and play the files from there. Here’s how we converted the PAL DVD to a group of AVI files :
1. Download Format Factory here: http://www.formatoz.com/ and install it. Watch out for some of these downloads since they will want to change your search options or home pages. Don’t just assume things when you are clicking your way through the screens. Read them one by one before you click OK and make sure you uncheck anything that seems fishy.
TIP: A PAL DVD can be read by your computer but not played on your TV. The TV screen is different from your computer monitor screen, to put it simply.
2. Make sure the PAL DVD you want to convert is in your DVD drive on your computer. Start Format Factory. This is the opening screen:
You're looking for the DVD to Video file button.
3. Click the DVD to Video File button and the following screen will pop up:
If the PAL DVD is in your optical drive, your screen will be much like this.
This menu looks complicated but it isn’t. On the top you’ve got your DVD drive with the title of the DVD shown. Below that are the various VOB files that make up the DVD with two files already checked. I wanted to convert all of the files so I had to check Title 2, 3 and 5. On the right side, I have changed the output to AVI and I want the files to be converted to XVID 640×360 Wide Screen HD. The default setting is MP4 but that resulted in pretty crappy, but watchable, video files. This particular setting works perfectly. There are no subtitles offered on the DVD but you can choose your own setting here. Leave the Audio Stream at default and it should be fine. Change the file titles if you want.
4. Once you’ve set all the parameters, click Convert and go and have lunch. Depending on the speed of your computer, conversion could take hours. We used a reasonably fast computer with 8 gigs of RAM and the conversion of this short DVD took about half an hour.
5. Format Factory will beep when the files are all converted. Look for the files in My Documents in the folder named ‘Format Factory Output’, unless you have created your own directory already.
6. Once you have checked that the files work on your computer, burn them to a fresh DVD or pop them onto a flash drive and try them on your DVD/TV setup. They should work perfectly.
TIP: A DVD is made up of many VOB files, some small, some large. The main movie, obviously, is simply the largest VOB file but you might want to convert all the VOBs anyway. You can then sort them out later on and delete them if they aren’t worth saving.
This method of converting PAL DVDs to watchable AVI files is much simpler than any PAL to NTSC method that I’ve discovered. It’s also completely free. We don’t buy software at Computers Made Simple and, while there are several pay solutions for this problem, we decided to look for a free solution. Thanks for Format Factory, we were able to solve the PAL DVD problem quite easily. We hope it works for you.
When it comes to backing up your computer, what exactly are you backing up? Well, pretty much everything that you have added to it. This includes, but is not limited to, documents you’re written, photos you’ve taken as well as anything that you’ve downloaded from the Internet such as videos, photos, audio files, Etc. What you aren’t able to back up are all of the Windows files, the program files nor any of the browsers or apps that you use. There isn’t a way to back these last things up anyway, unless you want to copy your whole drive. Even then, none of the programs would work. You’re backing up your stuff, not Windows or related stuff.
If you have purchased a new computer or laptop/netbook, it most likely didn’t come with any CDs or DVDs. These days, new computers don’t come with these system disks. You have to make them. Windows will prompt you to make new recovery disks and this is something you should do as soon as you can after purchase. If your computer fails, you can restore it to its original condition by using these disks. But, and this is a big but, creating the recovery disks has nothing to do with backing up your computer. When you create recovery disks, you are only backing up the original software that came with your computer, nothing that you have saved or created since you started using it. Remember that.
Where is all of your stuff? Nine times out of ten, everything you want to back up is in the My Documents folder. Windows automatically saves files to different folders in My Documents. Even the downloads from the Internet are saved there. This, however, doesn’t mean that everything is saved there. Some programs save your creations in completely different folders, ones that the program creates on its own. If you have things that are important to you on your computer, make sure you know where they are.
Windows Explorer, that folder on the bottom of your taskbar in Windows 7 or the ‘Explore’ program that comes up when you right click the start button and choose ‘explore’, is your friend. Get used to using it. All of the cool things on your computer can be found using Windows Explorer. Explorer is worth a blog entry on its own, it’s that important. Play around with it and see what you can find. I use it all the time and it’s one of the reasons I stick to Windows. The Mac OS has nothing like Explorer, that I have found anyway, and I get claustrophobia using OS X simply because I can’t find anything!
While we are discussing back ups, go back and read my post on WinDirStat . If you’re wondering where things are on your computer or if you simply want to know what’s taking up the room, read the post and you’ll be educated. WinDirStat is free and perfect for exploring your computer. Once you have the graphic up on your screen, run your cursor over it to see where everything is. As the cursor moves, the location of the file it’s resting on is shown. Some files, the Windows ones for instance, are huge but can’t be touched. Others, usually the blue ones, are your files and can be backed up.
That’s it for today. Tomorrow I’ll write more about actually performing the back up. It’s a step by step job that takes time but, ultimately, will save your bacon should your hard drive fail. Even if you only save precious family photos, it’s worth it, right? Some things that are lost are lost forever. That’s not a good feeling.
Thanks for reading!
a little bit of hi-tech, a little bit of common sense and a lot of fun
