Organizing Your PC Part 2

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As you know from Organizing Your PC Part 1, I like to have all the screen space possible available. To further do this I utilize the Quick Launch Toolbar, the Taskbar and the Desktop Toolbar. Using these makes everything I need readily available but, does not use up my screen real estate. These areas are shown in the image below:

I will just give you a brief description of these areas at this time, and will go more in depth about how I got them the way they are in subsequent posts in this series.

The Quick Launch Toolbar contains all the items I regularly use and need accessible. Not all the icons shown on the Quick Launch Toolbar are standard from Windows, some I have changed to reflect something of significance to me.

The Taskbar shows me the Windows I currently have open, both minimized and maximized. I don’t need that much space and will explain why later on.

The Desktop Toolbar contains all the items on that are on my desktop , which are hidden from view, as explained in Part 1 of the series. I have it shrunk down as far as it can go but, I can still access everything by clicking on the double right facing chevrons (>>).

More on each of these in the next installment of the series.

As an update on my hurricane shutters, they are now telling me that they should be installed June 9th. That should work out well.

C:BPCA News and Recovering Missing Toolbars

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First of all the May 2006 edition of C:BPCA News has been sent out.

It is also available in PDF format at http://snipurl.com/BPCA_News (Note: link no longer valid)

Hurricane Wilma

Secondly, as I was writing this entry, the man from the shutter company arrived to make the final measurements for the hurricane shutters I have ordered.

The day of Hurricane Wilma is when they were first supposed to come out and give me an estimate. Of course, that did not happen. It was November before they could take the initial measurements and then it took until late December to get the architectural approval from the condo association.

Luckily, the price has stayed the same, but with the shortage of materials and labor, the last time I talked to the company they thought we were looking at sometime in the late fall for installation.

Hopefully, with the final measurements now taken so that they can be manufactured, my shutters can be installed prior or right at the beginning of this year’s hurricane season. Hurray!!!!

Tip

Lastly, my wife called me all in a panic yesterday because she could not see the toolbar in Outlook that has the icons for creating a new message, printing a message, etc.

She thought she had totally messed up the company computer.

I calmed her down and told her it is not a big deal, she must have just slipped with the mouse and turned off the toolbar.

Sure enough, I told her to look at the menu bar, find where it says View, left click on it, then left click on Toolbars, and then make sure that the Standard toolbar has a check next to it. Mission accomplished.

In most cases, if a toolbar is missing, visiting the View menu and experimenting with turning various toolbars on and off should recover it for you. You might even run across a useful toolbar you didn’t even know existed because it wasn’t turned on by default.

Most of the newer software has a lot of optional toolbars, that can be helpful, once you know about them.

Organizing Your PC Part 1

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An attendee at the Boca Raton Computer Society (BRCS) April 2006 meeting Q&A session asked how they could organize things on their PC so that they can be found later.

Just yesterday a coworker was asking me how I knew where to find what I am looking for when I have 7 or 8 programs going at the same time, this is just the way I work.

The above gave me the idea to start this multi-part series on how I organize my PC from top to bottom. I am sure anyone reading this has their opinion also, I just know that how I do it works for me.

The first thing for me is to organize my workspace.

I like to have a clean desktop to begin with. The picture above is from my home XP desktop PC, but is very similar to my both my 9x and XP laptops, as well as my Suse Linux playground.

As you can see I have hidden by desktop icons. You can do this in XP by right clicking a blank area of the screen, left click on Arrange Icons By and then uncheck Show Desktop Icons. To make your desktop icons visible once again follow the same process, except now you want to check Show Desktop Icons.

I use an 1152×864 pixel resolution, because I want to have the most room available, that is still readable, for me to work in. I know that this will not work with most people, but the same principle applies no matter what the resolution. Why ruin a nice background with a lot of icons, when you can just as easily access your icons via the Desktop toolbar or the Quick Launch toolbar, which will be the topic of my next installment in the Organizing your PC series.