And here we are again with yet another installment in our ongoing series of Windows 7 goodness. In our past articles we touched on a couple neet tricks that you can accomplish with some simple text and a couple easy clicks here and there. All useful. Today we will continue that trend and give you some Windows 7 goodies that are easy to setup and another that will require a bit more complexity. You can consider it a more "advanced" trick, but if you follow the steps I will give you, anyone can make it work. So without any further delay, here we go.
Tip # 4: With this tip we will be entering the wonderful world of Internet Explorer. Although many people (myself included) use Firefox, Internet Explorer is still a very capable browser. And if you take advantage of some of it's more advanced settings, it can rival some of the best around. And maybe even reclaim it's spot on the "Best Internet Browser" list. Today we will discuss Internet Explorer "Add-Ons" and the features they can add to your browsing experience.
There are many different ways to utilize today's add-ons. I could literally type pages and pages of descriptions if I was to try and explain all the different add-ons. But that is not the point of this series. I am here to point out the advantages of doing this the right way. First of all adding this to your Internet Explorer is as easy as downloading anything else you would download. Today's Windows is not like the previous versions, because when you download an add-on for Explorer it will get installed automatically for you. So what you need to know how to do is manage your add-ons. And that is very simple. Just find the Tools drop down menu on the far right side of Internet Explorer and click it. In that menu you will see an option that reads: Manage Add Ons. Clicking on that will load a separate window that will show you all your add ons broken up into separate categories. From here you can Enable or Disable the add-ons and even Remove them as well. Do yourself a favor and get familiar with this menu and all its functions. Because if you do, you will be one step closer to customizing Internet Explorer to do exactly what you want and need it to do. As I mentioned a minute ago, there are different categories of add-ons that you should know. They are: Accelerators, Search Providers, Toolbars and Extensions, and InPrivate Filtering. There are actually a couple more. But you need not worry about those at this point because they are a bit more advanced and really not important for what we are discussing here. Let us instead go into the categories mentioned above.
Accelerators are not really anything that speeds up your browsing as you may think by its name. It does make things faster, but in a different sense of the word. Accelerators basically take text that gets highlighted while your are on a web site and by selecting the text you can find maps, define a word, or use a particular accelerator to open another web site or program to handle other functions. So basically an accelerator is something that opens another function depending on what the accelerator you have installed is meant to do, like open a map to an address by simply clicking on the highlighted text on the page.
Search Providers are precisely what you would expect them to be. Everyone is familiar with Google and Bing and some of the others. But by having them installed as an add-on will give you those search providers in a little text bar at the top right side of the Internet Explorer window. Of course different providers have different features and things that people either like or dislike. And by using them as an add-on gives you the option of searching for things on the net directly with your browser instead of having to actually go to the website of that provider, like google.com for example.
ToolBars and Extensions extra toolbars, animated mouse pointers, stock tickers, and pop-up ad blockers are all things that this add-on does for your browsing. By installing these types of add-ons you can really change the way your Internet Explorer functions. Personally I do not use any of these things because to my they tend to clutter up my experience. But lots of people really like these and enjoy for example a mouse pointer that functions in a way that is well... funky.
InPrivate Filtering is a good one. This basically hides what you are doing when you are on the Internet. Internet Explorer really does a good job of saving information and pages in an effort to make things faster the next time you happen to visit that site. Utilizing its page cache and cookies, Internet Explorer saves tons of information about your browsing experience. However, this can be a bad thing as well. Lets say your searching the Internet for something that you consider private. Well you find what you were looking for, get on a web page or two, read what you wanted to read and then get off the net. You think that your safe right? Not really. A person like me can come along and I can (with a few simple clicks) review everything you just read on the net. So what you were hoping to keep private, I now know about and can spread to all your friends and loved ones! Pretty scary eh? Well there are alot of things like that on a computer that people don't know about but that is a story for another day. InPrivate Filtering is a series of add-ons that you can install that will prevent that from happening. These add-ons can insure that what you do on the net is safe from prying eyes. Because lets face it. Today there are more than one person in almost every household that use a certain computer.
That is it for add-ons. At least for now. I will probably at some point write an article about specific add-ons. Add-ons that are "special" so to speak. But for now I just wanted to point out what add-ons are and what they can do for your browsing experience. Become familiar with them and with managing them. Open the Manage Add-ons windows a couple times and play around with the add-ons already installed on your computer. Once you become familiar with that, you can go to Microsoft's Add-On Central where you can find many, many more add-ons in all different shapes and sizes. Try a few on for size and see how you like or don't like them. You can always remove the ones that don't work for you. Microsoft's Add-On site can be found here.
Trick #2 Taskbar and Jumplists. With the advent of Windows Vista and then Windows 7 Microsoft put an emphasis on the Taskbar. For those who are not aware, the Taskbar is the bar at the very bottom of your screen. In Windows 7 it can be made into a very useful tool. Depending on who the manufacturer of your computer is and where you bought it, your taskbar may have a few different icons on it. My suggestion would be to wipe it clean. To do so right-click on each icon and "unpin" it from the taskbar. Once the Taskbar is empty you can now add only the programs you want to it. And why would you do this? Because the Taskbar is a very useful tool if used properly. It allows you to quickly load any program on your computer without having to search for its shortcut or find it in the Start Menu. And for certain software, having it on the Taskbar provides you with what is called a Jumplist. A Jumplist is a list of documents or such that you have recently loaded into that particular program. For example the Notepad. If you have that pinned to your taskbar and you hover over it with your mouse pointer and then right-click, you will be provided with a list of recently loaded documents. Pretty useful. The Taskbar is useful in a similar way with any program. With any program you have pinned to the Taskbar, hovering over that programs icon with your mouse pointer will provide you with a preview of what that program has loaded or is running currently. For example I have Microsoft Outlook 2010 pinned to my taskbar. When I have Outlook open but minimized it stays on the Taskbar as an icon. Now if I take my mouse pointer and hover over its icon a preview thumbnail will pop up showing me what I am working on. If I have a couple emails open but minimized, the Taskbar will show a preview window for all of the open emails. It is a useful tool especially when you have multiple windows open and your working on all of them.
Anything can be pinned to the Taskbar. And that is what makes it so wonderful. All you have to do is find the program you want on the Taskbar and right-click on it. In the context menu that comes up you will see the option to "Pin This To The Taskbar". So like I said, if you want to utilize it to it fullest potential wipe your Taskbar clean and pin whatever you use the most to it. Once you do you will see how it has helped save you time when all you have to do is load the application from the Taskbar as opposed to finding it in the Start Menu's bloated list.
Thanks for reading. But that is all we have for this installment of Tips and Tricks for Windows 7. There is much more to come as I have a big list of things to write about for this and more come in every day. So if you have a Tip or Trick for Windows 7 that you want to be added shoot me an email. If you send me one that I don't already know about or already have on my Master List you can win a free Blackberry app! That's right, our first Aggregate Universe dedicated contest! Send me a Windows 7 Trick that is not on my master list of tricks and you can win a Blackberry app from Crackberry's Appstore! I will name the app later as this idea just came to me as I was concluding this article.. way to be organized Tony! Look for the article detailing the contest to be posted soon. That's it for now.
