Keyboard basic shortcuts you should know

Using Keyboard shortcuts save time by allowing you to never take your hands off the keyboard to use the mouse. So here is the list:-

Win                                Press windows key to open start menu

Win+R                           Opens Run dialog box

Win+M                          Minimize all opened windows

Win+S                            maximize all opened windows

Win+L                            locks keyboard in windows XP

Win+E                            opens My Computer

Win+F                            opens search options

Win+U                            opens Utility Manager

Win+D                            view desktop/minimize all windows

Win+F1                           view the detail windows help page

Win+P                              Pause view the System Properties dialog box

Win+Tab                          Move through open windows

Win+F+Ctrl                     open search Window

Alt+Tab                           Move through opened windows programs

Alt+F4                             close active window

Alt+Enter                         open properties of selected item

Alt+SPACEBAR             Open the system menu of active window

Alt+SPACEBAR+N       minimize the active program

Alt+SPACEBAR+R        keys to restore the active program

Alt+SPACEBAR+C        keys to close the active program

Alt+SPACEBAR+X        keys to maximize the active program

Alt+SPACEBAR+M       keys to move the active program

Ctrl+Alt+Delete               options to shutdown or open task manager

Ctrl+Shift+Esc                open windows task manager

Ctrl+Esc                           keys to open start menu

Shift+Delete                     delete items permanently

Ctrl+A                             Selects all items in Folder

Ctrl+C                              Copy function

Ctrl+v                              Paste Option

Ctrl+home                        Move to the top of the page

Ctrl+End                          Move to the bottom of the page

Extract (Rip) Audio Files from an Audio CD

Quite often, we end up wanting to copy our favorite songs from a CD to a computer, probably as MP3 files so that we can play them on a computer or an MP3 player. The process is very simple, but we just need some basic knowledge of the audio tracks and MP3 files. For more information on the differences between an Audio CD and Mp3 CD, see this article.
Some people call this process as simply "extracting" the audio files, while others call it "ripping". The same idea is to copy those music tracks from an audio CD to a computer. Most often, the MP3 format becomes the best option for those music files. The instructions below will help you create either MP3 files or WAV files.

The following sample instructions are based on a CD-copy software called Free Easy CD/DVD Burner v1.2. This is a free burning tool with advertising supported, but no spyware or adware. You can download this program from SnapFiles, or v4.2 here

There are many different programs can do audio ripping. Some of them are freeware. You can lookup the internet for different software with the keywords "Audio Ripping". This instruction is only a guideline.

You don't need to have a CD/DVD burner to rip audio files from an Audio CD. A CD-ROM (read-only) will do it.

1. If you have not installed a burning program, download the tool above and install it. Make sure you reboot after the installation.
2. Insert the Audio CD that you wish to rip.
3. If Windows automatically starts a player software and is playing the CD, stop and exit the player.
4. Open the Free Easy CD DVD Burner program.
5. Click on the "Audio CD Grabber" button on the top (1). The available tracks from the CD will show up under Audio Tracks box (2).
   
   
   
6. By default, all the tracks are selected for ripping. If you wish to rip only some certain tracks from the disc, click to remove the checkbox on the tracks that you want to skip.
   
   
   
7. Click "Ripper configuration" to determine the destination folder you want to save the files to.
   
   
   
8. The "Ripper configuration" window displays, the default destination folder is shown under "Output Path". If you wish to change this path, click on the browse button and change it. Once you're done, click "OK" to return.
   
   
   
9. If you wish to change the MP3 format settings (i.e. Bitrate, channel, etc...), you can click on the link "MP3 format configuration".
   
   
10. Once you're ready to rip, click "Rip now in MP3" if you want the files created as MP3, or click "Rip now in WAV" if you want the files created as WAV. Make sure you have enough hard drive space with the WAV option since the WAV files are big.
    
    
    
11. The program starts to rip the tracks one-by-one. When it's done, it will display a complete message.

Audio CD versus MP3 CD

Audio CD
While some people are very knowledge about the different types of CD and DVD, some others are still very confused on the different formats. Although more and more people want to enjoy the MP3 technology by making their own MP3 discs for their cars, portable mp3 players, etc... many of them are not sure how to create a MP3 CD and how it is different comparing to a regular audio CD.
To make it simple, an audio CD (Compact Disc Digital Audio) is one that you buy from stores and contains only audio tracks. Audio CDs are compatible with most of current CD-drives, including your CD/DVD drive on your computer, and your car CD player. For little more details, this standard of Audio CDs is called the "Red Book", which was first released in 1980 by Philips and Sony.
The audio tracks are uncompressed digital data (essentially WAV). This explains why you can't fit 100 songs in an audio CD like an MP3 CD because the size of each track is big. Try to plug an audio CD into your computer CD/DVD drive, what you'd see are some files with the names similar to "track01.cda". These are audio tracks, and you can't just open them with your computer like any other computer file. A CDA file simply points to the location of the audio track on the CD. Also, you cannot copy these CDA files to another location with your computer. Why? because they contain no audio data, they are just the "pointer" files. The actual audio data is stored on the CD sectors and cannot be viewable on your computers.
An audio CD normally can hold up to 74 or 80 minutes of audio. So when you create an audio CD from some MP3 files, no matter how big or small your mp3 files are, the CD can only fit in up to 80 minutes of audio.
- Pro: Compatibility. Audio CDs can be played on most CD players/drives.
- Con: Size limit. You can't fit many songs into an audio CD.
Audio Spec

• The frequency response: from 20 Hz to 20 kHz.
  
• Bit rate = 44100 samples/s × 16 bit/sample × 2 channels = 1411.2 kbit/s (more than 10 MB per minute)
• Sample values: range from -32768 to +32767.
• On the disc, the data are stored in sectors of 2352 bytes each, read at 75 sectors/s.

MP3 CD
MP3 (or "MPEG-1 Audio Layer 3") is an encoding format for audio data. Not to be confused with "MPEG-3", which is a video standard. MP3 is an audio-specific standard that was introduced in 1991.
Late 1990s, the internet users started to encode more and more audio files using the MP3 format and spread them over the internet. This lead to the creations of many MP3 player software such as WinAmp, Nullsoft, etc... The MP3 format became the most popular audio format for computer because of the advantages of it.
An MP3 file is a compressed audio file. This brings the biggest advantage of the MP3 format: the small size. Although the size of each MP3 file is vary, depending on many factors, an average size of an MP3 file for a music track doesn't go more than 7 MB.
MP3 files are just like any other computer files. You can move them from place to place on your computer, or you can open them using different application software. Once it comes to the idea of making a CD out of these files, it can be a little confusing. Why? apparently, many people think that they're creating an audio CD instead, just because they are expecting a "CD with audio" at the end. In fact, an MP3 CD is not like an audio CD but like an any other computer discs: it contains data files, not audio tracks.
So what makes it a big deal? Many CD-copy software have different selections for "Audio" and "Data". The "Audio" option is for creating a standard CD with audio tracks, while the "Data" option can be used to copy either computer data or MP3 files. Remember MP3 files are just like computer data files!
Now the term "bitrate" might come up while you're playing with MP3, so what is it? Bitrate is the number of bits that are processed per unit of time. Simpler, it defines the compress ratio on the MP3 files. A lower bit-rate would give you a smaller MP3 file, but also.. less quality.

- Pro: Size! A CD with MP3 files can hold up to 700 MB of data/mp3 files. So with an average of 4-5 MB each MP3, you can store up to 160 songs on a CD, that's about 10 times of an Audio CD.
- Con: Compatibility. Although more and more players are compatible with MP3 standard, there are still some that only play audio CDs.

Any Folder as a Photo Folder

This tricks shows you how to setup any folder to display its contents as a photo folder. In many cases, you save your images/photos in a folder different than "My Pictures" (under "My Documents"). Since this folder you choose is just like any other normal folders, its contents displayed as a listing of files. You can temporary change it by just right-click and select "View" >> "Thumbnails". But if you want to change the folder so that everytime you come back, the folder itself, as well as all its subfolders, display the contents as photo thumbnails.
Here's How

Right-click on the folder you choose and select "Properties"

Select "Customize" Tab. Then under "Use this folder type as a template", select "Pictures (best for many files)"

Check on "Also apply this template to all subfolders" to apply the setting to subfoders as well

Click OK to exit 

Browser Shaking

This is a fun little trick that can create a shaking screen on your web browser (i.e. Internet Explorer, etc..)
The trick is simply a small Java Script that causes your browser window to move to different positions, causing a shake of your entire screen. It's kind of cool to watch and see what Java Script can do! Try it out..

Use this trick at your own risk.

Here's how:

Copy this entire line and paste it onto your address box, then press Enter:

javascript:function Shw(n) {if (self.moveBy) {for (i = 35; i > 0; i--) {for (j = n; j > 0; j--) {self.moveBy(1,i);self.moveBy(i,0);self.moveBy(0,-i);self.moveBy(-i,0); } } }} Shw(6)

Draft Background in Word

This trick shows you how to add a grey background text on your document. For example, when you have a draft document, and you want to make sure other people know it is a draft version. It is a good idea to have a background printed text, i.e. "DRAFT" on every page of your document. This feature is called "Watermark" in MS Word.
You can follow the same steps to create different watermarks. For example "SAMPLE", "DRAFT", "PERSONAL", or your own text.

Here's a sample



Here's how

1. Select "Format" on the top menu of Microsoft Word, then select "Background".
   
2. Select "Printed Watermark".
   
3. On the "Printed Watermark" dialog box, select "Text Watermark". Then select your desire text or enter your own text into the "Text" field
   
   
   
4. Click "OK" to finish.

Shortcut to Change Case in Word

This trick shows you how to create a Right-click Menu to change case on the selected text. When you select a text and want to change the selection to either all upper case, lower case, or sentence case, all you need to do is a right-click and pick!
The change case format option is actually one of the font options; howerver, you would have to open the font format dialog and select this option everytime you want to change case. Why don't we create a link on the Right-click menu.

Here's how

1. Open your Word document.
2. Select "Tools" on the top menu, then select "Customize".
   
   
   
3. Select the "Toolbars" tab.
   
   

Convert Any Document or Web Page to PDF

Somebody just told you that you need to have Adobe Acrobat (Writer) to create a PDF file? Guess what, you can get away from that pricey piece of software if you just need to convert some documents to pdf, without a need of fancy editing the pdf document.
Here's how. Thanks to the BullZip, who provides a Free Pdf printer. With this free tool, you can simply "print out" your document or webpage to a pdf file, just about the same way as you print it out to a printer.

You can visit BullZip.com for more information about the software.
Here the direct link to BullZip downloads page: Downloads

1. To get started, first follow the link above and download Free Pdf Printer from BullZip, then install it to your computer.
2. Once you're done, you might need to close the program (or the web browser) which you're currently viewing the document. This helps refreshing the list of available printers on your computer.
3. Once you get back to the document you want to convert, perform the same steps are you print out the document, i.e. File > Print ...
4. When you see the Print window pop-up, select "Bullzip PDF Printer" under "Printers", then click "OK".
5. BullZip PDF Printer will then start to analyze your document and display a new pop-up window, where you can direct it to the location you want to save the pdf file.
6. Follow the pop-up windows and.. hola! The PDF document is created!

Find Product Key for Windows and Office

If you are looking for a way to retrieve the product keys of your MS Windows or MS Office, you are on the right page!
The following is a tool to detect the product keys of Microsoft Windows and Microsoft Office installed on your machine. This tool is free to download at Magical Jelly Bean.
Here's a screenshot


The tool also provides some nice features let you change your Windows product key, or detect the key remotely to another computer.

To download a copy of this tool. Click Here.

Add Watermark to a Word Document

You can insert a watermark into a Microsoft Word document as either text or image.
Here is a sample Word Document with text watermark:


And here is an example of picture watermark:

Add Author Information into Word Document

This trick shows you how to add some additional information to a Microsoft Word document. The information can be the name of the author, company, title, revision number, etc... When you open the folder which contains your document, and point the mouse to the document, the information will be displayed.

Here's a sample

Here's how

1. Open the folder that contains the document.
   
2. Right-click on the document and select "Properties".
   
3. On the "Properties" dialog, select the "Summary" tab.
   
4. Under the "Summary" tab, the fields are listed by two columns "Property" on the left and "Value" on the right.
   
   
   
   
5. Click on a field (i.e. "title") you want to edit, then edit its value. Then click "OK"