Expand Your Workspace

It’s not easy working on just one monitor and sometimes you need a way to expand your workspace. Once you have a second monitor to use how do you best make use of it? You might want to just extend your workspace with and extended desktop. Especially if you only have one computer that you work on. What if you have multiple computers?

Solution for Multiple Computers

- KVM Switch Keyboard / Video / Mouse switch This is a hardware cord that you can buy which allows you to use one monitor to switch between two computers. This is useful if you are running two separate operating systems or servers that you need to access quickly and easily. You don’t have to move your hands from the work area you are used to, instead you just hit the scroll button twice and your monitor will switch displays between one computer to the next.

- Input Director

This application allows you to use two monitors and two computers almost seamlessly as if they were the same computer. You can drag and drop files across two separate computers from one screen to the next, as if they were the same computer. You can copy / paste text in the same manner.

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Freeze Your Hard Drive to Recover Data

Who would have thought that the dreaded click of death could be fixed by freezing your hard drive? I was quite skeptical to start, but when I did a quick google search and found an article about freezing a hard drive to recover data and reading the comments from people who tried it, it seemed to be a credible option to try out.

My Experience

I had an old 80 gig hard drive that when I booted it up, it would continuously click. This syndrome I was quite familiar with as Iomega Zip Drive’s in the early 1990′s would stop working with the dreaded click of death syndrome. The recommended minimum freezing time was 4 hours,  popped the drive into the freezer for 3 hours and with a $15.00 hard drive to USB connector (SATA/IDE to USB connector), connected the hard drive in Windows XP. Low and behold as the drive booted up, NO CLICKING! none whatsoever. It took a second for the drive to thaw and slowly spin right, but finally a drive letter appeared and there were my files! Files I had given up retrieving about 6 years ago.

How to do it!

1) Buy an IDE/SATA to USB connector  ($15.00)

2) Freeze your drive for a minimum of 4 Hours

3) Have a plan on where you will copy the files
(you can only copy files while the drive is still frozen)

4) Connect hard drive to USB connector, connect power to USB connector. Hard drive will spin.

5) Copy your files and enjoy!

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USB Flash Drives

USB Flash Drives

$14.00 /w shipping – 4 GB Patriot Drive 200x
$18.00 /w shipping – 8 GB Patriot Drive 200x
$30.00 /w shipping – 16 GB Mushkin Read : Up to 32MB/s Write : Up to 17MB/s
$55.00 /w shipping – 32 GB Mushkin Read : Up to 32MB/s Write : Up to 17MB/s

http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.aspx?Submit=ENE&N=40000522&IsNodeId=1&bop=And&Order=RATING&PageSize=100

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Handy Tips on Screen Shots

Screenshots come in handy often in helping to troubleshoot a client’s computer, or in compiling a technical document, and of course blogging!

Being able to use and have full control of screenshots is great for:

- Designing technical documents with images from a program or website
- Blogging about a program or image that you wish to discuss
- Selectively displaying what may need correction in a colleagues document or project
- Creating instructional websites or How To’s

When you want to capture the screen, you can use the “Print Screen” button on your keyboard. To capture just the window, activate the window and hold down the ALT key and press “Print Screen”.  What if you just want to select a portion of the screen?

I use a program called ScreenCapture.exe It’s a small program that can sit as an icon in the tasktray and you double click when you are ready to capture a portion of the screen.

Well now that you have the screenshot, how do you access it? You could open up the Paint program via Start Menu and then Accessories. You could also just paste it into a word document. What if you want to access the screen shot as file?

If you take screenshots and have trouble getting them off of your clipboard, there is a program called PasteOff which will allow you to quickly retrieve the images from the clipboard and save them to a JPEG file in a designated folder.

How does Paste Off work?

First you use the Print Screen button or the ScreenShot.exe program to capture the screen. Once captured, you run the PasteOff program and you will see an icon display in the task tray that looks like this:  

Right click the icon in the task tray (by the clock) and you will be able to select configuration.

You can now set up configuration to save to a particular folder. It can even be configured to open with your favorite free image editor such as Gimp or .Net Paint

It now will only take you a matter of minutes to capture the screen and get the file you need from it to upload to your blog, facebook or whatever online site you desire.

Screen Capture for Windows XP/2000/Vista/7
ScreenCapture.exe

Paste Off for Windows XP/2000/Vista/7

PasteOff.exe by Tristan Kington
http://blogs.technet.com/b/tristank/archive/2004/12/17/pasteoff-utility.aspx

.Net Image Editor for Windows/XP/2000/Vista/7
http://www.getpaint.net/download.html#download

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Clear All Jobs from Print Queue

Clear Printer Queue for Windows XP/2000/Vista/7

Do you find yourself saying: “I have to restart every time I try to print”? I can’t tell you exactly why it happens, the printer queue becomes backed up with a job that can’t complete. You still have a ton of work open and all you want to do is just print! BUT NO, DENIED, windows will not print. There is a nifty little script online that you can use to “Clear All Print Jobs” this in effect will save you the trouble of having to reboot every time you try to print.

Save this file to your desktop and double click it any time your printer queue is hung up and you feel the urge to reboot to get the printer to work.

RENAME the following text file as ClearPrinterQueue.bat and save to your desktop.

ClearPrinterQueue.txt

If you have problems, right click on the batch file and select run as administrator.

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WinDirStat

This application allows you to view the space taken up by files and folders on your computer. It’s a fantastic way to clean up your computer when you have low disk space. It will show a graphical representation of which file type is taking up what space on your hard drive. Quickly discover all mp3′s, jpegs, docs, movies or any file type which is taking up your precious hard disk space.

http://windirstat.info/

Direct Download Link:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/windirstat/

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Jeff’s Computer Essentials

This blog will highlight the many tools, tips and tricks I’ve learned along the way. What’s ridiculous about computing is the amount of time we waste trying to do our every day tasks. Is the printer hung up and you find you have to reboot every time this happens? Why? That’s ridiculous. Have you used windows search and find it to be a complete piece of crap for lack of any kind of meaningful results? There are other solutions out there, and I have taken the precious time to find them. I offer to you this blog as a gift and remedy for all those people who suffer from technology overload, technology headaches, the very thing that is supposed to make our lives simpler and ends up making us feel completely helpless and useless during our days. I hope it will help even just one person save some suffering and technology woes from their day. :)

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