And now for something completely different..

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Indeedily-doodily, I promised useful information to be found somewhere on this site. This might be the place. Or, this might just be a jumbled mass of letters and numbers and goofy symbols. That's your call. As time passes and this grows, I will stumble around looking for a better way to organize all this. I intend to dump everything even remotely useful into one place. (you guessed it, here) If you have anything you wish to contribute, there's always the Email link on the front page.

As some of you may know, I attempt to make my pathetic living primarily as a PC repair tech. I've been tinkering around inside these wee beasties for almost nine years now.. and won't be stopping anytime soon. I don't claim to be anywhere near the best tech on the planet, but hopefully I've learned some things along the way that might help others.

I have a rather interesting disadvantage when it comes to working with PCs.. I'm mostly left-handed. (I say mostly because there are exceptions, but now isn't the time to explain further) Now, you probably don't see the disadvantage to that *cough* right *cough* away.. but I shall explain. PC input devices are by and large shamelessly biased towards the majority of the population.. that being, the brazen right-handed hussies of the world. (I am, of course, being humorous about this) It's much easier to get around if you only use your own computer. You can buy left-handed keyboards, you can configure your mouse to switch button functions around, etc. But what if you work on many computers? Well, I have two options.. first option is to do what's most comfortable for me, and on each PC I work on, go in and switch around the buttons and what not, and switch them back when I am finished. Sure, that may be comfortable for me in the short term, but what happens if I repeatedly forget to change those settings back when I am done? Then I have to waste time with another repair visit or with phone support telling the customer how to change it all back, and it makes me look bad. The other option, which I chose, was to learn how to use hardware that was configured right-handed, and deal with a bit of extra awkwardness.

"That's all very interesting," you might say, (or you might say, "shut the hell up and get me a pizza!" Who am I to tell?) "but what does this all have to do with the price of tea in China?" Well well well, my testy reader, it goes like this. Being that I have an inherent disadvantage that needs to be compensated for, I have extra incentive to try and find ways to speed things up. So, without much further babble, here goes: (I will try and make command summaries at the end)

1) The keyboard can do just about anything the mouse can, with the exception of drawing silly pictures using cursor trails..

Do you work with a lot of text? Do you get sick of having to pull a hand away from the keyboard to use the mouse to highlight something for copy and paste? You don't have to do that. The [Shift] key, combined with many of the keys you find between the main keyboard and the keypad, can do wonders for copying and pasting. For instance.. you've just typed a line that you want repeated.. you've just typed a line that you want repeated.. *grin* you can hold down [Shift] while your typing cursor is at the end of a line, and press [Home], and it will highlight the entire line you are currently working on. The left- and right-arrow keys, when used with [Shift], will highlight characters individually. But wait, there's more!

Alright, so I've given you the crude basics of highlighting, but how to copy and paste without the mouse? [Shift], of course, plus [Delete] for cut or [Insert] for paste. Yeah yeah yeah, I know I said CUT and not COPY. But in the grand scheme of things, doing a cut only adds one keystroke to this entire operation. Remember, you're doing all this without having to stop and move to the mouse. So it goes something like this. You just typed a line of text, and you want to copy (oh be quiet) and paste it. I shall demonstrate.

"Hey, you sass that hoopy Would71? There's a frood who really knows where his towel is."

[Shift] + [Home] highlights the line, from the end.

[Shift] + [Delete] cuts the line into the clipboard.

[Shift] + [Insert] pastes the original line back.

[Shift] + [Insert] pastes the second copy after the first.

"Hey, you sass that hoopy Would71? There's a frood who really knows where his towel is.""Hey, you sass that hoopy Would71? There's a frood who really knows where his towel is."

Alright, if this just made your head spin in confusion, or if you thought that all my details made it look extremely complex, look at it this way. You can hold down [Shift] the entire time. So essentially, you're holding down one key with one hand, and pressing four keys in sequence with the other. So it would be [Shift] + [Home][Delete][Insert][Insert]. Stop for a second and look at your keyboard, please. Those three keys are all right next to each other. Once you get the hang of it, it goes much faster than it looks on paper. (or in this case, HTML) For small cuts and pastes, use the left- or right-arrow keys in place of the [Home] key. Sometimes you will find that this method is much faster for you than using the mouse. Sometimes you will want to stop and use the mouse. Your call.

By the way, there are also key combos using the [Ctrl], or [Control] keys, which will perform the same functions as what I've described, and then some. (like actual copy and paste, not cut-paste-paste) I'll leave those for another time. For those of you who knew the [Ctrl] stuff but not the [Shift] stuff, I didn't want you to think that I forgot the former.

2) Start where YOU want to, not where someone else wants you to!

There always seems to be some new web gimmick that tries to get you to spend more of your time on a given site than anywhere else. First there were the "Make us your start page!" buttons or links.. now there's the whole Web portal thing. Blah. Some of you may need your Web spoon-fed to you, but hopefully that is a very small percentage of the people who would take the time to read what I'm writing.

I'm not going to get into the basics of web design right here and now, although I probably should. I was planning on doing something on making simple pages (like mine) somewhere along the line, but for some reason I felt compelled to do this tip first. So for the sake of keeping me marginally sane, let's assume you have some very basic HTML skills. (hint: I suck at HTML, but I was making these Start pages a couple years ago, so they're not all that hard)

What you might wanna do first is sit back for a moment and think of all the places you use most. Maybe write them down, or open a text file and type them in for safe keeping. Whatever you need to do to remember your content for when it's time to enter it. Any-hoo, make a directory you can store your page in locally. There are a few ways to go about this, but for this tip we'll go the My Computer route.

Double-click (or single-click on it if it has a line under it when you highlight it) on the My Computer icon on your desktop.. it should open a window to your drives and a few essential folders. Double-click (or, see above) on the icon for your C: drive. You should now see several folders of different names, including My Documents, Program Files, and Windows. Look for some empty space between these icons, and right-click on that space. You should get a menu that has a "New" option, with an arrow next to it. Move your mouse to New, then another menu pops up. One of the options is Folder.. slide your cursor over to that and left-click on it. A new folder will appear and give you a chance to name it. Put in a simple name you can remember easily, like Start or Page or whatever you wish. Hit Enter when done with naming it, and you now have a folder which to save your page in.

Now here's where we gloss things over for the time being, and assume you know how to make a Web page. Kinda silly, not assuming you know how to make a folder but assuming you know how to make a Web page. Fear not, intrepid Web warrior.. soon I will fill in this blank and this tip shall be complete. For now, however, let's get on with our assuming. Make your web page.. make it pleasing to your eye and easy for you to navigate. Cater to no one else, this is your baby. My personal suggestion is to use a rather simple background, make a multi-panel table and categorize your links a bit, etc. Once you have it done the way you want, (take your time) save it to the directory we assumed you didn't know how to make. (I'm such a rodent, aren't I?)

Now, it's time to go live with your creation. Open up your browser, which we will assume for now is Internet Explorer. (there's that assuming crap again!) It's been awhile since I used the older stuff, but this should pretty much hold true for anything 4.0 and up. Move your mouse up to the File menu and left-click on it. Several options should appear. You want the "Open... Ctrl+O" line.. click on that. A dialog box will appear, asking you for the address you want to use. Click on Browse... another dialog box will appear. There's a pop-up menu near the top that you can use to locate the C: drive quicker, then select your freshly-made folder from there. Whatever you named your Start page, it should show up in that directory. You want to open it with the dialog box.

OK, if I haven't given you a complete migraine by this point, your browser should be showing you your shiny new Start page. You're not done just yet, however. Go back to the browser menu that has Tools listed, and click on it. A menu will appear with Internet Options listed. (in some other versions, you may have to click on the other menus to find this 'Options, errr, option) Click on Internet Options, and a rather large dialog box will open, containing multiple tabs and entries. You are looking for something under General, (the default tab) under the Home Page box. Since your browser is currently open to your Start Page, click the Use Current button. The box above it should now change to your Start Page's location. Apply and OK to get out of the dialog box, and you're in business!

What are the advantages to this? Well obviously, first and foremost, you have COMPLETE control over the content. Secondly, any page that loads from your hard drive will be MUCH faster than anything that loads from a remote site. What I used to do with mine is click my dial-up networking icon to start the connection, and while it was dialing out, I'd load my web browser. It would generally be done loading before the connection was completed, or just at the same time, so it saved me a bit of waiting many times over. You may think saving waiting time is trivial.. but think about just how many times you might use something like this, and if it saves you 5-10 seconds every time, with you using it several dozen times a day, how much time did you save when you add it all up? Well, probably enough time to sit back and add up how much time you're saving, right? :D Anyway, this section will be fleshed out with everything I can think of to save time, so hopefully when you add this all up, you'll have saved a lot more time than you might think you'd save.

Thanks for having the patience to read through all my babble, and I'll do my best to get the basic HTML thing up soon if some of you are itching to do this, but I assumed incorrectly and you don't know how. (I sowwy) I'll also try to make, in the future, two different versions of each tip. One where I type them out at length like this, if that makes you more comfortable for me to be conversational with you in my writing.. and another version where it's "just the facts, ma'am".. for those of you who can't stand this style of info presentation. I also foresee this getting broken up into multiple sections to be much easier to find what you want in a hurry. Ciao!

3) Working on your monitor tan..

I'm gonna try really hard not to get too technical with this one.. I don't want to ramble on forever like I seem to do with every other topic.

You may have heard someone tell you at one point that you should change your monitor's refresh rate from the default 60 Hz. to something higher.. but did they ever tell you WHY you should do that? This was explained to me by a friend who did design work for Boca Research. (a PC hardware company, for those who aren't familiar with the name) The power coming into your house is transmitted at a frequency of 60 Hz.. you may not be able to easily tell that there's a flicker to it, but it's there.

Now I can't give you all the scientific details as to why it's a problem to have your lights and your monitor flickering at the same frequency. What I can say is this.. both that friend and I have put it to the test, running our monitors at default refresh rate and other refresh rates with different lights nearby, and the difference is noticeable. Fluorescent light seems to be the worst offender of them all. You'll be doing your eyes a favor in the long run by changing it to a better refresh rate, even if it's not too much higher than 60 Hz.

So how do you go about changing this? Well, I'm getting a little rusty as of late with other OSes, so I'll just mention how to do it in Win98 (original and SE). *DISCLAIMER* I'm not responsible for any damage done by accidental or improper use of this information. Proceed cautiously, as you should with any system setting. Now, for the details:

Right-click on an open (unused, no icons) portion of your desktop. A menu will appear, with Properties listed at the bottom. Please left-click on Properties. The Display Properties window will appear. It should have several tabs at the top, one of them being labelled Settings. Please left-click on Settings. It will tell you what display type you are running, as long as what color depth and resolution. There should be an Advanced... button near the bottom right corner of the window. Please left-click on that button. Now you should see a new window with even more tabs to click on. One of those tabs should be labelled Adapter. Please left-click on that tab. Near the bottom should be a box labelled Refresh rate, and it will probably say something like Adapter default (or 60 Hz) in the text box. Left-click on the arrow at the end of the box, and a menu will appear. Click on the word Optimal. Then left-click on Apply. You should get a warning box at this time. Read what it says and follow any directions it may give you. A fail-safe system should be in place so that if your system picks an incompatible refresh rate, the old one will be restored shortly. If the new refresh rate works for you, click OK on the boxes present to finalize the settings and exit the Display properties.

Hopefully, you should notice a difference right away. If you have any further questions, there are Help files on such things, and you can also Email me from the main page. Good luck, and I hope this helps your eyesight in the long run.

That's all for the moment. More later, when my brain starts working again.