This is a 2 second fix which will save you time and annoyance if you, like 90% of the users of Windows XP I know, store your documents somewhere else. You can take it two steps further and create a fully redundant and multi-computer environment if your so inclined as well. More on that later.
Every time I open a document, I noticed myself navigating through folders. I’m repeating this action every time I open a new document. Wasted time!
Many reasons exist to relocate the My Documents folder. I like to set up windows machines with a relatively small partition on the main drive, say 50 GB, and the rest goes as files for User Space. I never know what user I might be in, or if another user on my system wants access to My Documents. Finally, if I’m coding, I hate digging through the user folder layers if I have to write some code on the command line. All Tiny Annoyances, all fixable.
I’m being a little tedious here, but I see no excuse for lack of clarity.
- I create a new folder or find the existing folder I wanna make into the default location for My Documents.
- Copy the location into your clipboard.. Keyboard: (CTRL-C)
- If your “My Documents” is on your desktop, right click on it. It may also be lurking in the start menu. Find one of the 10 places it lurks, and right click on it. Go to Properties
- Click on the textbox called Target, and paste. Keyboard (CTRL-V)
- Click OK.
Boom. Your done. You saved a few seconds every time you open a document.
Creating PDF Documents in Windows Using PDFCreator
One essential action that Windows users need is the ability to print PDF documents. Over on the Mac platform is easy to create a PDF document, this feature ships with every copy of OS X. Windows users, are not so lucky but do not fret. A free open-source program called “PDFCreator” is available for download from SourceForge.net. This program creates a new printer on your local system, which will emulate a real printer to all your Windows applications. Although I haven’t played with it in this mode, it has the ability to become a network printer and listen on a local area network for incoming print jobs.
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I frequently see other peoples computers when asked to resolve a problem or conflict. One tool I see rarely-but-wish-I-saw-more-often on these computers is a free file compression tool called 7zip. I think it is one of the best tools nobody has heard of.
You can go get it from here: http://www.7-zip.org/
For those of you whom just left on that link, I’ll wait until you return…
.
..
Your back! Good!
Here are some quick reasons why you want it
- It can compress multi-gig files / directories without slowing down (as the file size increases).
- It can handle UNIX/Linux style .gz or tar.gz or bzip files
- It can unpack RAR files
- It has a nice right-click extract feature
- Its GNU Free Software
- Its lightweight and not bloaty
- It is fast enough for me.
- With respect to free software, its stable and well rooted (good community mass, “mature” project)
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