Widescreen monitors are great for watching movies and organizing windows side by side, but much of the time all that screen space goes to waste. Even if you don’t have a huge monitor, you can still get a great benefit by adjusting the Taskbar.

Why not move the Windows taskbar to the side of the screen? This may sound crazy at first and you’ll need a few days to get used to the results, but since web pages, Word documents, and the like run top-to-bottom, the more vertical space you can give them, the easier it will be for you to read them and the better it will look.

By relocating the taskbar to the left side (or the right, if you prefer), you’re freeing up vertical space for the stuff you use every day while making smarter use of wasted horizontal space, and you may even speed up your work by doing so.

To try this, right-click an empty area of the taskbar and clear the check mark next to Lock the taskbar.

Next, left-click and hold on an empty area of the taskbar, and then drag it to the left or right side of the screen. Once you get close, you’ll see it lock in, at which point you can release the mouse button.

You can also extend the width of the taskbar by clicking and dragging the right edge to make it wider and to better see the labels for the programs which are currently running.

Install Microsoft Security Essentials.

Windows 7 comes equipped with some solid security tools, including a robust firewall and the spyware-blocking Windows Defender. On top of that, you will need a good antivirus program, one that works quietly in the background and won’t bog down your system.

Microsoft Security Essentials provides real-time protection against viruses and other kinds of malware, and it’s impact on your performance pc is negligible.

It could be a great alternative to paying an annual fee for virus protection, and whether you use XP, VIsta or 7 you should think about giving it a go and may even find it speeds up your pc.

Install Web Of Trust.

The seemingly innocent act of clicking a link – even one that’s at the top of a Google search-results page – can result in ‘drive-by downloads’ infecting your PC. Scary, right? But how do you know whether a link is safe to click?

Try Web of Trust, a browser add-on that will warn you of unsafe sites.

Specifically, the plug-in adds colour-coded icons to each link that your search engine produces: green for safe, yellow for risky and red for dangerous.

You can also right-click any link, such as one that appears in an online forum, and choose View WOT scorecard to perform a manual safety check.

WOT is free, and available for both Firefox and Internet Explorer. Although its rating icons add a little clutter to some web pages, we recommend it very highly for anyone concerned about security and looking for a quick and easy way to check for ‘dodgy’ pages.
 

If you remember the annoying User Account Control notifications which kept coming up in Vista, then you may be pleased to know that it is still there in Windows 7. Why pleased?

Because now you can actually change the settings of UAC so that it only notifies you when you want – i.e. when programs really try to make changes and not when you make changes yourself to Windows.

Although this feature was something that everyone bitched about with Vista, it is there to do a job and that’s to keep your machine safe from running dangerous software programs or making unwanted changes to your performance pc.

Here’s how to change the settings:

- Click ‘Start’ & type in ‘account’

- Select Change User Account Control settings

- Adjust the slider to your desired setting

If you really want to remove all the messages, then set it to ‘Never Notify’ and it will be as if it’s turned off.

One word or warning though, making changes to any security levels can be dangerous so be sure you know what you are doing beforehand, and get professional advice if you are not sure.

Better Safe Than Sorry!

With Windows 7 you can make a recovery CD or DVD with these simple steps:

• Insert a blank CD or DVD into your CD/DVD burner drive

• Click ‘Start’ & type in ‘Repair’

• Select the ‘Create a System Repair Disc’ option

• Follow the instructions given to you  on screen

• When it’s been completed, write a label on it (with time & date helps)

If you one day find you have a problem starting your pc, insert the repair disc and start your system. You will be presented with a recovery menu which offers you several recovery and diagnostic tools and will also allow you to select a System Restore point to go back to a point where your pc worked correctly.

As it’s only a 10 minute job, go do it now before you regret not doing it.

Windows has it’s own power management functionality which can help you save energy and that’s a good thing. But, you shouldn’t do it at the expense of speed and productivity unless you absolutely have to.

You can also do this with any version of Windows.

Also, I added this video as it is gives you a guide around Control Panel and is one of my favourites – you will see why when you watch it. Please do let me know what you think of it.  

If you’re a Mac user, there is a software called Boot Camp from Apple which is now compatible with Windows 7.

Due to several issues with Nvidia graphics cards causing Blue Screens of Death and some totally black screens where nothing can be seen, Apple have setup a special help page for users having these issues with  .

For more information and to update your drivers to the latest versions, visit Apple’s support page.

Amazing! Even though there is a new serious security hole in IE8, we are still being advised to upgrade asap.

No wonder really. If you sold someone a kettle 10 years ago (Windows times) and they kept coming back asking you to fix it again and again, wouldn’t you also try and persuade them to get the latest model?

Microsoft issued a warning telling people to upgrade their internet browser, after the zero-day exploit that was used to attack companies such as Google.

According to Microsoft’s security advisory: "the vulnerability exists as an invalid pointer reference within Internet Explorer. It is possible under certain conditions for the invalid pointer to be accessed after an object is deleted. In a specially-crafted attack, in attempting to access a freed object, Internet Explorer can be caused to allow remote code execution."

In other words, a nasty net person could get remote control of your computer. If you’re anything like me, you wonder how the hell that can happen in reality – But, believe me. I’ve seen it done and it’s scary stuff

The same issue exists also in IE7, so regardless of what version you have you should make sure you have the latest updates and patches. Simply go to Microsoft’s homepage and get them as soon as you can.

Further advice from Microsoft is to run the browser in Protected Mode and ensure users aren’t running with administrator privileges.

My advice would be to ditch IE (if you haven’t already, where have you been these last 5 years??) and switch to Firefox. It’s FREE, much more user friendly and you can get hundreds of different official (safe) add-ons to make it do almost anything you want.  As soon as I get it to make me a cup of tea three times a day as well, I’ll let you all know.

Cheers

I’ve just checked out this new (for me anyway)  Twitter tool . If you’re into Twitter and Social Media stuff and would like to have a quick and easy way to setup targeted tweets, then you should check this out.

It allows you to automatically follow and get followers based on your selected keywords, so can give you a good idea of who is tweeting within your chosen area. Another cool feature is you can set it to ‘unfollow’ people who don’t follow you back, and this is also done automatically based on your own settings.

Here’s a quick sample from their site – "Choose a keyword or phrase, select how many people to follow each day, choose when to drop lame friends, and you’re done. A week from now you will have hundreds if not thousands of new followers – and it never has to stop."

Imagine if you have a site on a particular subject and you want to get visitors to your site. You can use the normal methods of trying to get the Google’s of this world to push people to your site, but that is a serious amount of work. I reckon it would be great if you could setup connections with people based on your common themes (from the keywords) and you would surely get a good percentage of those visiting your site.

I’ve just joined up to give it a  good trial  so will let you know in a week or so how it’s going, but so far it looks pretty good here. http://www.evertweet.com/

Cheers

Paul