Tips

I read the following tips in "Spider" in June 2007 edition, in the column "Tips and Tricks". It has been very helpful for me.

Nifty folder shortcuts

This tip is for setting up your folders for some really easy access without having to clutter your desktop with folder shortcuts. First step, make a folder in your C drive called “shortcuts”. Now you can place as many shortcuts as you want in there. To test it out, create a shortcut for internet explorer and place it in the “shortcuts” folder. Now rename it to “ie”.

Now for step two, right click the “My computer” icon on your desktop and select properties and click on the “advanced” tab. Now select “Environment variables”. In the new window you will have two sections, “system variables” and “user variables”. In the user variables section look for an item (also called a variable) called “PATH”, it it’s there, select it and hit edit. In the edit box type in “;C:\shortcuts” and hit enter. Do not change the value that the PATH variable already has, just add that to the end of it. If there is no variable called “PATH”, then hit the “new” button instead of the edit button and create it with the same value but without the semicolon at the beginning that is, just, “C:\shortcuts”.

Now hit OK on all the windows. To test this out, go back to your desktop and press “Winkey + R”, this will bring up the Run dialogue box. Now type in “ie” and hit enter. Internet explorer should open up now.


Winkey is the key with Windows icon on it.

Using notepad as a log file

Here is a way to use the Notepad as a log file that tracks the date and time of whenever you add something to it.

Open up notepad and type in “.LOG” (without the inverted commas) and then press enter. Now close your file and save it somewhere.

The next time you open that file it will have a date and time appended to it. Now type whatever you want to under the date and time and hit enter when you are done typing. Close the file and save. The next time you open the file it will again append the date and time and you can enter more data after it. This will happened every time you open that particular text file.