15th June 1998

Ain't gotta lotta money? Who does? If you're a poor, starving, ex-college student like myself, I'm sure you could use these not-so-fancy tweaks to help speed up your daily Windows operations!

SEND IT FIRST CLASS: Place a shortcut to Notepad.exe in your 'Send To' folder. That way, you can right click on a file not associated with Notepad and view it easily. Just click on "Run" in the Start Menu and enter "sendto" and it should launch your 'Send To' folder. From there, just make a new shortcut to Notepad.exe.

RUNNING A MARATHON: The "Run" command in the Start Menu is largely ignored. Try pasting a website in there sometime! Or, if you want to send an e-mail, just type in: mailto:someone@somewhere.com and it should launch your default e-mail program. Heck, you can even type in folder names found within the Windows subdirectory and they should launch in Explorer. Run with it!

ICON CONFUSION: How many icons do you have on your Desktop? If you have more icons than the population of New York City, perhaps it's time to get rid of 99% of them. Keep things clean and you'll find what you're looking for quicker. I'd keep it to just the icons you use on a daily (or regular) basis. Nothing more!

START ORGANIZING: Let's get rid of some more icons. Do you really need half the shortcuts that are in your Start Menu? I bet my second liver that you don't. Right click on the Start button and choose 'Explore' from the menu. From there, you can open the Programs folder and delete & reorganize links/folders in succession. Remember, less *can* be better!

BETRAY THE TRAY: Many crashes occur because you have 92,831 programs loaded at once. If you have more items in the system tray than you have fingers, it's time to rethink your needs. Do you really need to have those proggies running ALL the time?

EAT SOME PASTE: You're probably used to cutting, copying, and pasting in your Word Processing application. But you can do it just about everywhere in Windows. Anywhere you can type, you can cut, copy, & paste. Heck, you can even do it in Explorer! The easiest (and quickest) way is to use the keyboard shortcuts: CTRL+X for cut, CTRL+C for copy, & CTRL+V for paste. Memorize and utilize!