If you’re using an older computer, especially a laptop with a track pad, you probably have “lost” your cursor once or twice. Don’t you hate that? When you go to move the mouse and you can’t for the life of you find where the cursor is. You end up swinging your finger wildly across the trackpad hoping that at some point the mouse will show up again? I’ve even had this happen once or twice with my desktop.

Well, here’s a quick tip that will make finding your cursor 100x easier the next time it “dissapears.”

If you’re using the standard XP setup click: “My Computer > Control Panel > Printers and Other Hardware > Mouse.” For those of you with the “Classic View” enabled it would just be “My Computer > Control Panel > Mouse.”

Once in the Mouse settings window look for the Pointer Options tab. Under Visibility select “Show location of pointer when I press the CTRL key” and then click “Apply.”

Now whenever that pesky cursur is missing just hit the CTRL key to have windows graphically zero you in on its location.

This post was originally a Technoobogy post of mine on another site. I’ve since closed down that blog and wanted to share some of it’s highlights here.

Visual Task Tips is a shell extension for Windows XP that works a lot like the Alt-Tab Replacement powertoy. The difference basically rests in the Windows taskbar.

While Alt-Tab Replacement only works while your "Alt-Tabbing" through your current processes, Visual Task Tips pops up when you mouse over any item in your taskbar. Both programs show you thumbnails of the program that's running which is nice. This is fantastic if you’re used to keeping several programs running at once (especially if its multiple browsers, spreadsheets, images or documents.)

This post was originally a Technoobogy post of mine on another site. I've since closed down that blog and wanted to share some of it's highlights here.

For those not yet switching to Windows Vista I thought I'd share a program I found awhile back called Alt-Tab Replacement from, of all places, Microsoft. Awhile back Microsoft started posting "powertoys" which could be used in Windows XP (and in some cases previous Windows versions) and that are free to download.

What's nice about a lot of these programs is that they have a mostly offer features that you really wish were included in Windows. Alt-Tab Replacement is a perfect example of this.

When you press Alt+Tab in a Windows environment it gives you the chance to quickly swap between running programs with just the keyboard. If you’re a multi-tasker (like me) then you might have several things running at the same time. In standard Windows XP you only get to see a small icon for that program - with Alt-Tab Replacement you get to see a thumbnail of the program’s current state.

As you can see, the right portion of the window offers up the standard small icons while the left portion gives you a look at what's currently going on in the selected program.

This post was originally a Technoobogy post of mine on another site. I've since closed down that blog and wanted to share some of it's highlights here.

Quicktime, iTunes, Skype, Windows Messenger, these are all programs that are hard to keep off your start menu. Sometimes they just don't want to go away and next thing you know it takes 20minutes for your computer to boot. Occasionally you may even run into issues where two or three programs are running that you may not be able to identify.

I've found the best way to handle programs on my computer is WinPatrol. Basically WinPatrol has two uses.

The most basic functionality of WinPatrol is a system monitor. Whenever you install a program (or even if a program attempts to install itself) WinPatrol pops up a warning window to see if it's something you want. As you can imagine, this is great for stopping AdWare before it gets a foothold. It's also great for stopping commercial software from loading at boot.

Digging around through WinPatrol also unveils some extra functionality. Using the StartUp Programs and Services tabs you can check out what's running and even track down information about it. WinPatrol offers a robust and deep library of information on just about any program you find running on your PC.

I've been using WinPatrol for ages now, if you're looking to secure your PC it's a great place to start.

As I said a couple times last week my notebook computer started suffering from some hardware issues which resulted in a trip back to the manufacturer. This is the second time in two years I've had to ship my PC back to Gateway and I'm 100% happy that I got the extended warranty when I first purchased it.

While I waited for the shipping materials to arrive I started going through the process of backing up all the items that I didn't want to loose if Gateway saw the need to format my PC. One thing I found that was very helpful was the manner in which I had previously organized all of my personal files.

On previous computers I really didn't have a plan for dealing with my files. From Word documents to image files everything was everywhere. At the end of any computers lifespan I'd have to say close to 70% of the files on it died with it - needless to say there's a ton of old stuff I wish I had kept better track of.

My new laptop is a different story though. Somewhere shortly after purchasing the computer I decided to take advantage of the "My Documents" approach that Microsoft started pushing with newer versions of Windows. The result of this was a backup process that took only a few minutes and definitely has every file I've ever saved on that machine.

Here's how I did it:

• First I broke "My Documents" into several sub-folders (including a new "My Documents" folder.)
• My Documents: This is probably the only sub-folder in this system that I didn't add sub-folders too. Any documents (including spreadsheets, documents, and saved pdf files) are spread throughout this folder. In each case I'm careful to name documents descriptively so as to guarantee a cursory browse of the name or date can help me find the right file quickly.
• My Pictures: Broken into several sub-folders again, "My Pictures" houses "My Digital Folders," "My Downloaded Images," "My Original Graphics." These folders hold ALL my saved images in a pretty obvious format and are divided into appropriate sub-folders as needed to make finding things easier.
• My Music: I setup Napster (my current music service) to save all music files to this directory and break them up by artist and album title. When I rip my own CDs I follow the same rules - this is a great way to track my music and also made backing things up very easy.
• My Backups: On a monthly, weekly and in some cases daily basis I back certain things up. My feed list gets backed up just about every month, my bookmarks every week, and things like My Quicken files get backed up every day. Keeping all these files in one place makes it easy to find them when you need them and also easy to back them up when you're trying to hit everything important.
• My Briefcase: Does anyone else use this Windows feature? I've been using "My Briefcase" ever since I started using two computers. It's a simple way to keep files up to date across multiple PCs and a it's really portable. After downloading the SyncToy powertoy from Microsoft I also found it a great way to sync up "My Briefcase" quickly when first sitting down at a PC.
• Outside of these folders / directories I also keep a few files including my GTDTiddlyWiki install, and any document that I'm currently working on.

While I'm sure it wasn't necessary to name everything under the "My BlahBlah" scheme I did feel it fit the overall plan best.

Besides cutting the number of directories I needed to find down to one (just the main "My Documents" folder) I was also able to accomplish a few other things. By right clicking on the folder I was able to see exactly how much space I needed to backup everything (It turns out I had close to 650 folders loaded with over 7k files.) While I didn't need to split everything across multiple backup locations I could have easily split everything up onto SD cards or USB drives. If you did it the right way you could easily put your Music files on one SD card and your Documents on another.

This system worked out great for me but ultimately you'd need to find your own setup. The trick, which is the heart of this, is to create a setup whereby you can easily find everything in the fewest number of clicks.