Conceal What You're Working On So You Can Step Away from Your Computer

If you have any sensitive information open and you want to walk away from your computer you can conceal the open windows on the bottom toolbar by placing your mouse pointer at the top of the toolbar and then dragging it down. It will "hide" the entire toolbar!

You may need to unlock your toolbar first to do this, simply right click on the bottom toolbar and uncheck: Lock the Taskbar. Now it should work.

To reveal the open programs again simply put the cursor over the bottom toolbar and drag up.

This saves a lot of time closing and re-opening programs!

Oh and you can do this all even faster if you minimize all your open windows simultaneously with the shortcut keys:

WINDOW KEY + D (it's to the left of your spacebar and it looks like Microsoft's Windows Flag Logo)

Also another tip: Switch between open windows with this great shortcut:

Alt + Tab

If you only want to switch between two windows at a time first click on each window, THEN click ALT + TAB to toggle back and forth between them!

If you want to scan through all open windows hold down the ALT button then tap the TAB button and a list of open files will appear that you can scroll through by tapping the TAB button until it lands on the program/document you want to view.

Unfortunately concealing the bottom toolbar does not work on Vista, but it does work on previous OS.

But all the shortcut keys mentioned above do work on Vista.

Create Shortcuts to your favorite Programs

Open the directory/folder where the program exists.

Right click on the program.

Select: Send to

Select: Desktop (create shortcut)

The shortcut to the program will now appear on your desktop.

If you want the shortcut to appear on the bottom toolbar simply drag and drop it there. You may need to unlock the bottom toolbar first by right clicking on it and unchecking: Lock the taskbar.

Yippee that's it!

Quick click to your favorite webpages!

Here's a really great tip that you may not know about. The internet browser you're using (i.e. Internet Explorer or Mozilla Firefox) has a toolbar at the top which you can customize with bookmarks to your most visited sites! It's really great! I use mine every day! Just go to any page you visit frequently, then click on Favorites or Bookmarks, select "Add to Favorites" or "Bookmark this Page" then click on the folder labeled "Links" or "Bookmarks Toolbar." Click "Ok" or "Done." Now look at the top of your browser under the URL you'll see the bookmark you created. If you're using Internet Explorer it may be on the right of "GO" you can single right click on the toolbar area and uncheck "lock the toolbars" Then you can drag the link bar down to display the full bookmark names. YEAH! That's it! Now when you open up your browser the links you bookmarked on the toolbar will automatically appear! Great deal, huh? You can customize this even more by editing the name of the bookmark so you can fit more links up there! Just right click on the link in the toolbar and click "rename." Some of the bookmarks may even have a little logo - for those I just leave the title blank and then I just click on the logo to go to the site. If you have about over 15 bookmarks on the toolbar the remaining bookmarks will be to the right under an arrow. You can arrange these bookmarks in any order you like from left to right on your tool bar (and the drop down list if you have that many) just by dragging and dropping them where you want them to appear. Cool, huh?

2 Tips to Speed up your Computer

My friend taught me a couple ways to speed up my comp that actually work!

Try this one: Right click on the bottom tool bar, select: Properties, select: Start Menu, select: Classic Start Menu.

Another tip: Click on Start, Run, type in: msconfig, select startup, then uncheck the boxes of programs you don't want to start automatically when you boot your computer (these are the icons on the bottom right of your screen that will disappear when you take it off this list). Only uncheck boxes of programs you know for a fact you don't need to be running all the time in the background - such as chat messengers, audio programs, etc. Just make sure not to uncheck boxes that you aren't certain about (as it may seriously effect your computer). Since there's no reason for your audio player to always be running in the background, unchecking it here only means you'll have to manually click on the icon to open the program - which you're probably doing already anyhow! The less useless crap you have running in the background the faster your computer will perform! Cool, huh?

Do you have any good tips for speeding up computers?