There are a number of tricks and shortcuts that are fairly well known among people that have been using Windows a lot over the last 14 years of it’s existence. However, we tend to take it for granted that everyone knows these things, when in fact they don’t.

Some of these functions are documented in the Windows help files, but I’ve noticed (with our secretary and my colleagues, for example) that most people never read the help files. I suppose they are kinda boring…

So with out further ado, here are some turbo tips for Windows:

(If a key name is in bold, it means you HOLD IT DOWN while pressing the other keys)

1. Windows key (the one with the flying window on it) and E will open Windows explorer, instead of right clicking the My Computer Icon on the desktop and then clicking Explore. Very useful if your desktop is full of open windows and you wnat to get another explorer window open.

2. Ctrl B for making marked text bold

3. Ctrl C to copy marked text to the clipboard

4. Ctrl V to paste that text into a new document.

5. Ctrl A selects All; either all text in a document, or all files in Explorer.

6. Alt Prt Sc to copy the presently open window to the clipboard. You can then use Ctrl V to paste it, as a jpeg image, into a document, or a photo editing program.

7. Crtl Shift Esc will open Task manager, where you can see what processes are running, and stop them if they are misbehaving and won’t close. Task manager also gives you a graph which shows how hard your CPU and memory are working.

8. In Windows Explorer and in Outlook Express (and other programs) if you click on the column headings, it will sort the whole thing according to the alphabetic/numeric order of that column. Clicking it again will reverse sort it.

9. Clicking a word of text twice will highlight (ie mark) that word. Clicking the word three times in quick succession will select the whole sentence, line or paragraph. (Depending on your text editor)

10. In Windows Explorer, if you hold your Ctrl key down, you can click on numerous, random files and select them, even if they are not contiguous (For foreign readers, this means: one after the other)

3 Ways to Diagnose & Fix Registry Errors

If your computer is like 90% of the rest you will more than likely have registry problems. These problems can often appear as annoying error messages or in more serious cases, they may appear as random shut downs, restarts, or even worse preventing Windows from loading. Registry problems will get far worse over time which can usually explain why Windows machines always appear to slow down over time.

Here are some common errors associated with Registry issues:
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