Fumbling through the Start Menu or mountains of icons on your desktop is never ideal when trying to locate the shortcut for your favorite apps. This frustration is only compounded when trying to do so when attempting to bring something up for the student that is hovering over your shoulder. Times like this have made me wish for the sleek dock functionality found on a Mac.

Rocketdock solves this. This free application places a very aesthetically pleasing doc to your Windows OS that not only boasts the ability to quickly house icons for your favorite applications, but also can be extremely customizable, placed where you want it, and even autohide itself so it stays out of the way until you need it. Sound nice? Here is a more complete list of functions from their website.

Features:

• Minimize windows to the dock
• Real-time window previews in Vista
• Running application indicators
• Simple drag-n-drop interface
• Multi-monitor support
• Supports alpha-blended PNG and ICO icons
• Icons zoom and transition smoothly
• Auto-hide and Popup on mouse over
• Positioning and layering options
• Fully customizable
• Completely Portable
• ObjectDock Docklet support
• Compatible with MobyDock, ObjectDock, RK Launcher, and Y’z Dock skins
• Runs great on slower computers
• Unicode compliant
• Supports many languages and can easily be translated
• A friendly user base
• And best of all… its FREE!!!

Rocketdock can be downloaded here. They also have a nice video that demonstrates it’s abilities.

The first stop in this topic should then be shortcuts. They are buttons or combinations of buttons that enable useful features that normally require you to use your mouse.(What? Why wouldn’t you just use your mouse?) Because time is wasted between switching back and forth between the mouse and keyboard.

F11
Beautiful shortcut for putting your browser into full page mode. This little used feature will optimize your browser’s screen real estate. This is very useful when trying to show off a webpage to a class or group. Enabling this feature removes a lot of the navigation buttons at the top, and the status bar at the bottom. It allows you to show more of what you want to your audience and less of what you don’t.

Alt+D
Quickly highlights everything in the address bar. This allows you to immediately type a new address. This is great for using ctr+enter which adds www. and .com to whatever you type in the address bar.

CTR+Tab
Quickly tab through each of the tabs that you have open.

Webpage Shortcut on your Desktop
Several schools are taking away the ability to change your home page. This may or may not be your case, but in the event that it is, here is a tip. Place a shortcut for any page right on your desktop. Clicking on it will not only open your browser, but will also take you directly to the page that you want to go. To do this you only need to navigate to the page that you want to have a shortcut, then drag the little icon that appears directly to the left of the address bar to your desktop. Bam! Granted, it has a lot of text in the name on the shortcut, but that can be changed as well by right clicking on the new shortcut and editing it’s title.

CTRL+T / CTRL+N
CTRL+T will immediately open a new tab in the current window, if your browser currently has tabbed browsing. CTRL+N will open a new browser window.

Backspace
Entered the wrong page and want to go back quickly? Hit the backspace button to go directly back to the last page you left.

Mouse Clicking
A lot of time is lost trying to highlight words or phrases to be copied, especially if you are on a laptop and dealing with a trackpad. Typically you have to precisely place the cursor just before or after the word or phrase you want and then drag it. To shorten this considerably, use your mouse. Double clicking on a word will hightlight the entire word. Triple clicking will highlight the entire line. Shift plus your arrows will also fine tune what you are highlighting. Shift+left/right will increase/decrease the amount you have highlighted by one character. Shift+up\down will increase/decrease by a line. CTRL+A will highlight everything on a page. These typically work in most applications on your computer where text is consearned.

Sure these take a bit of time to master/remember, but once you do, it will save a lot of the time you waste switching between mouse and keyboard.

Finally, notice that I have been saying browser instead of “Internet Explorer” even though this is a Windows-only post. That is because IE isn’t the only player in the game. As a matter of fact, I hardly use it at all. There are several browsers that you can use, but if you want to use the browswer that IE is always playing catch-up with, you could try FIreFox. It is a free software, and other than being what IE strives to catch-up with, it also boasts the ability to add extensions to it. Some of these extensions add more functionality to Firefox itself with great utilities for downloading, browsing, bookmarking, and so on. Here is a great article from ComputerWorld that highlights 20 of the top plugins. The article is about a year old already, but the plugins that it highlights are still in use and have, in most cases, been updated to be even better. Go here to try Firefox, and here to see a directory of many of their current plugins.

Other browser tweaks? Let us know in the comments.

1. More demanding software using your system’s resources.
2. Programs performing uneccessary tasks.
3. Spyware, Malware, Viruses
4. Too many programs
5. Too little space to store files.

Unfortunately, some of these would require an upgrade of equipment. However, keeping updated with the appropriate files, and removing the ones that are hogging all of the space can do a lot. We’ll talk about these later. For now, let’s look at #4.

Having too many programs isn’t always a problem unless you have too little storage on your hard drive. The problem is when these programs are demanding attention at the same time. To cut down on this, we will take a look in a few places that show these running programs.

Task Bar

The first indication of too many programs rests in what is known as the Task Bar which resides next to your clock at the bottom of your screen. It isn’t a bad thing to see a few programs running alongside your speaker settings and battery meter, but too many can be chaos on slower machines. Programs create this option for running their program in the background without demanding the viewing space of your desktop, but it was never intended to keep every program you own running. And since most programs install with just that option, a lot of programs end up there.

If you need a program a lot, and it has to be running… keep it. Things like virus protection and commonly used application are good to have there. Most other things don’t need to be. And removing them from there doesn’t delete them. It just stops them from continually running. To stop one, try right clicking on it and finding the exit button. Most will have this feature. Again, things like virus protection, volume, battery, and your most commonly used and running apps need apply to be kept there.

Exiting out of a few of these programs will give you a bit of your system back, but you will notice that most will come back after you restart. We can fix that. Most programs will give you an option in the preferences section to startup when Windows does. You can deselect that. If that doesn’t work you will need to be a little more stern.

1. Start by hitting the Windows Start button and clicking on the Run button. If you can’t find the run button try hitting your Windows Key+ R.

2. In the prompt type msconfig.

3. You will notice a new box popped up with several tabs. Navigate to the startup tab and you will see all of the programs that run when you start your machine. See if you can locate the applications that refer to the ones starting in your taskbar and deselect them. Again, you aren’t deleting anything, just keeping it from starting. This doesn’t mean you should uncheck all of them… Just the ones that you don’t need.

4. Uncheck the ones that you don’t want to have automatically started, hit apply and you are ready to go.

The next time you restart, you will get a message referring to what you just did. It is just a reminder that you removed some items from the startup action. Just check the “do not tell me again” box and hit OK.

You should now have a bit more of your resources back, and hopefully get a little more performance.