windows tips

Shortcut Tip: Quickly Navigate to a commonly used folder

I recently found a useful tip for those of you that always have tons of windows open, like me, and minimizing them all to get to an item on your desktop is just a pain. Create a shortcut with a hot key combination to open an item on your desktop! It works with all your windows open in their current location and is a HUGE time saver. here are the instructions

1. Select the folder in Windows Explorer.
2. Create a shortcut, and place it on the desktop. (You create a shortcut by opening the folder, pointing to New on the File menu, then clicking Shortcut. Drag the shortcut to your desktop.)
3. Right–click the new shortcut, and then click Properties.
4. In the Properties dialog box, click the Shortcut tab, and in the Shortcut key box, enter a key combination (for example, CTRL+ALT+D or CTRL+SHIFT+D when D is for Documentation), and then click OK.

The trick here is that the item MUST be on your desktop in order for the hot key to work… but then again, what’s one more thing on your desktop.

Enjoy!

OneNote Tip: Take better notes during meetings the easy way!

Microsoft has a product called one note that i really didn’t know a lot about. They really haven’t pushed it a lot and it just comes bundled with Office so I’d never really tried to use it, however, I found an article over at Microsoft’s site that gives an excellent set of tips for how to use it to take better notes in meetings.

If you’re like me, you scribble notes (and doodle) on a notepad, open up word on your PDA, or if in a conference call full blown word on your laptop. You take notes as the meeting progresses and then later look back at your notes and wonder… “what was that I wrote about? That note doesn’t make any sense.”

Well Microsoft has a couple good tips at the one note site to make your life easier taking notes.

Check them out!

Windows Tip: Clearing Internet Explorer cached data from the command line

As a Network Administrator sometimes you need to clear the browsing history, cookies, or the like for a entire community of users. Sure, you could tell them how to do it thinking that you were being super smart by providing instructions for them. However, as you well know there will be some who will be unable to follow the directions and you will spend 3 times the amount of time it took you to write the directions and refine them to a point where any one could do it— or so you thought. All the while, thinking about the amount of time you will save by having the users do it.

Why not be really lazy!!!??!? And do it with a batch script? You could then put it in their login script and it would happen at their next logon, or every logon for that matter. Well, there’s an easy way to do this with windows’ built in functions– it’s just obscure enough to not be found anywhere you would normally look!

Yo can preform many of the things I mentioned (and more) with Microsoft’s RUNDLL.EXE file, plus you don’t have to write a line of VBScript to accomplish the task!

Here is a short list of some tasks you can preform on IE, along with the command to do it… give them a shot!

Temporary Internet Files
RunDll32.exe InetCpl.cpl,ClearMyTracksByProcess 8

Cookies
RunDll32.exe InetCpl.cpl,ClearMyTracksByProcess 2

History
RunDll32.exe InetCpl.cpl,ClearMyTracksByProcess 1

Form Data
RunDll32.exe InetCpl.cpl,ClearMyTracksByProcess 16

Passwords
RunDll32.exe InetCpl.cpl,ClearMyTracksByProcess 32

Delete All
RunDll32.exe InetCpl.cpl,ClearMyTracksByProcess 255

Delete All - “Also delete files and settings stored by add-ons”
RunDll32.exe InetCpl.cpl,ClearMyTracksByProcess 4351

 These commands should work in Internet Explorer 7

Windows Tip: Moving a window from off screen back into view

If you’ve ever hooked up your laptop to a secondary monitor and then disconnected without remembering to move the windows back to the primary desktop, you’ve probably encounted this problem: 

The application is running. You can see it in the taskbar, but you can’t see it on the screen, because it still thinks it’s running on the secondary monitor. You try and use right-click, Move, but that doesn’t do anything, and the window doesn’t move anywhere. Maybe you try doing a minimize and then a restore… but still the window doesn’t come into a area of the screen you can actually use. Likely, you simply end up rebooting.

There’s a simple trick to get around this. First make sure you’ve clicked on the windows to bring it into focus. Then right-click on the taskbar and choose Move, then hit any one of the arrow keys and simply move your mouse.

TAAADAHHH!!! Enjoy!