My Favorite Geek

My favorite Geek is the How to Geek (www.howtogeek.com). Every day he sends me e-mails containing extraordinary XP and Vista How To tweaks and often useful little benign utilities to accomplish those tweak.

Although not all are appropriate for novices, many are novice friendly "why didn't someone tell me sooner that could be done" tweaks and configurations.

For example:

I'll wager many of you, particularly those who try to expeditiously sort, organize and relocate their digital photo into appropriate sub folders, have experienced the frustration of selecting a bunch of photos in Windows Explorer by holding down your Ctrl key only to discover Window arbitrarily creates copies of the selected photos. Annoying to say the least as you must now find, select and delete the copies. And even more annoying if you use the Ctrl key to select the copies to delete only to discover Windows has created a second batch of copies.

This usually happens and it can happen selecting any group of file using the Ctrl key because if you moved your mouse pointer more than 4 pixels while "clicking down" on a file, Windows assumes you've dragged the files and want to copy them.

If you happen to be an Xpers who all too often experiences this annoyance go to Microsoft's Web site and downloading Microsoft's free Tweak UI utility.

One of Tweak UI's features allows you to configure XP's drag setting. Just click on it's "Mouse"
feature and change the value under "Drag" to something more than 4 pixels.

Don't set the value too high as it'll make it difficult to drag files the normal way. Somewhere between 10-20 pixels should stop accidental copying. You can test the effect of your changes by dragging around the "test icon".

Unfortunately there's no Vista Tweak UI a novice can use to prevent accidental copying, but Windows Vista does have a super "why doesn't XP have it?" Windows Explorer feature that's extraordinarily useful - check boxes.

Instead of holding down the Ctrl key and clicking on individual files and folders to select them, you can conveniently select them by clicking on their individual check boxes or the "Name" check box to select them all.

To enable this feature click Start > Documents > Organize > "Folder and Search Options". Click the View tab and scroll down to and click on the "Use check boxes to select items" checkbox.

I personally recommend you consider a How to Geek e-mail subscription.

Here's wishing you a Good Boot.