Raymond.CC Blog

These days, you can barely browse a page on the internet without websites and businesses offering you newsletters advertising there products. Either that or offering the classic ‘We may give your details to a third party who will also bombard you with advertising emails’ tick box. You have to be so careful because some are opt-in and others are opt-out. Quite often they are rather conveniently difficult to spot and cleverly worded. If you have to, or accidentally sign up for something, then you get a constant stream of mails to your inbox. It might not be spam in the strictest sense, but sure feels like it sometimes.

Sometimes it may simply be websites you have signed up to for a promo and to receive a serial key. The common ones are the foreign language promo’s when you have to register on a website which isn’t in your native language. I still get the odd one in German or Chinese from things I registered for years ago. Also, a friend has made the ultimate mistake and let the kids use his email address a few times to register on websites and buy some things online. It’s no surprise the amount of unknown newsletters his account has been signed up for is now quite alarming!

Whenever you use your computer, there are probably times when you are doing things on it that really aren’t very productive. Whether it’s surfing the web, wiling away the time playing Windows card games or sitting there chatting online with friends, it could possibly shock you how many hours a week or even a day are perhaps wasted and could be put to better use.

You could probably find it rather interesting to actually have a look after a period of time and see which applications or games you have been using the most and how long you have been using them. A free open source utility called Personal Activity Monitor can assist in helping you find out where all your time goes and is designed to give users help in identifying which applications are possibly eating up too much of their time.

Although most of the features and functions included in Windows 7 are at least some sort of improvement of previous Windows versions, one of the areas where this is sadly not the case is the Windows Explorer toolbar. Sure, you get a small text based toolbar with a few different functions, which is not so bad in itself, but it’s not what you would call particularly useful most of the time. For instance, ‘Include in Library’, ‘Share with’ and ‘Burn’ are not really buttons many people will use often or perhaps even at all. That’s why a lot of experienced users really miss the toolbar that is available in XP because it is useful AND can be customized to a reasonable degree, something which is sadly completely lacking in Windows 7.

It’s a bit of an oddity then, that simple but functional buttons like Cut, Copy, Paste, Undo, Delete etc. are nowhere to be found in Windows 7 by default, the commands you are likely to use the most often. There are a few tools around to give you back some sort of toolbar, but for the most part they don’t look quite right to me. The great Start menu and Explorer enhancer utility Classic Shell can give you a toolbar, but I think it looks a bit odd and out of place. This is actually one of the very few things I quite like about the upcoming Windows 8 with the inclusion of the Explorer Ribbon toolbar.

It’s not uncommon for someone who knows of or visits a website to want to find out a little bit more about it. This could be out of simple curiosity or might possibly be something more serious like checking the validity of a website and its location and who the owner is. Finding out the background information for a site you’re not sure about could help the decision of whether to visit it or find out more beforehand. Looking to see where a site is coming from or who hosts it could also help if you are having issues accessing sites in certain countries or particular hosting services.

A domain name is a simple identifier label that makes a website unique on the internet and it is easily possible to gather other details about it such as who it is registered with, when it was registered or the date it is due to expire. There are a number of different websites online that can provide you with domain Whois database information as well its related DNS records.

Windows 7 has a number of great and useful features that make it the best Windows operating system to date in the eyes of many people. One of the areas of improvement over Vista and XP is the way Windows 7 handles the icons and programs in the system tray notification area. As you know, this part of the task bar is a special area for programs that have started with Windows, currently running programs and system functions to display small icons giving you quick access to those programs or features and supplying various snippets of useful information.

Like previous Windows versions, Windows 7 has an option to hide icons that are not currently in use or ones you don’t necessarily want displayed by means of an arrow that hides them and clicking on it can show those that are hidden. Clicking ‘Customize’ inside the hidden icons box brings up another window that will present you with the ‘Notfication Area Icons’ window. This window will show all icons currently in the system tray and allows you to choose whether to show them all the time which puts them in the main tray area, only show notifications which hides them in the hidden icons box, or completely hide them altogether.

There are literally hundreds of different types of files that have the possibility of being opened in Windows. With that in mind, the chances are pretty good that at some point in time, you will receive a file that can’t be opened in Windows by default because there is no associated program installed to handle it. If you happen to know that you have a program already installed to be able to open the file, there is the feature to right click on it and select the ‘Open With’ option where you can either choose to use a program from the list or manually pick a suitable program on your PC to take care of it. You can then decide to make it the default in future.

The problem with the standard open with feature is it’s not particularly helpful if it doesn’t know what the type of file you’re trying to open is. Sure, the search the web to find a program window might be able to point you in the general direction, but the whole process could be a lot more user friendly.

It’s always a little frustrating when there are features built into other operating systems that sound like a good idea, but they’re not available as standard in Windows, no matter how big or small. One of these is a small but useful feature Mac users and also users of some Linux distro’s have, is the simple but useful ability to have a shortcut icon automatically appear on the desktop when a removable drive or CD/DVD is inserted into the machine. It’s pretty logical to assume that at some point you are going to want open the drive up and having an icon there for you to quickly and conveniently do so is a simple thing but can be quite useful.

Like most useful functions, if it’s not built in to Windows, there is third party software around that can do it for you. The situation is no different in this case, and a freeware utility by the people at Tweaknow can help. Driveshortcut is a simple to use but effective tool that performs the task of putting the shortcuts for a number devices on the desktop when they are inserted. And when the said devices are removed or ejected, the shortcut icons disappear again.