Found this video on YouTube today, which mentions some tips on how you can customize the Windows XP taskbar to become more productive. I actually used 2 of those techniques when I was still dependent on the taskbar, namely the use of Taskbar Shuffle and toolbars. However, since then I’ve moved on to a different way of organizing my desktop, taskbar-free. But if you can’t live without the taskbar, this video is worth a look.

It’s Friday and you don’t know what that means – it’s Pimping Bookmarks day!  It’s that special day of the week where I compile some great links to articles, tools, and other digital trinkets that will definitely pimp your work. Of course, readers are encouraged to contribute links that I’ll probably miss.  You can submit these links throughout the span of the week and send them to my email (celineroque AT b5media DOT com).
So here’s this week’s list:

I don’t know how many times I’ve seen computers at people’s offices and homes where several people are using a computer, but all under the same account.  I’m not even get into if it’s an admin level account or not, just looking at the overlap, confusion and organization of this drives me batty.
From a practical standpoint you have several people’s logins to manage (like Gmail, Hotmail, etc), documents to keep straight, bookmarks, even just colour preferences of windows.  All of this can be handled with each user having their own login.
What about shared documents?  Simple, I know Windows has cross-account …read more

Did you know you could save all open documents by just holding down the shift key when selecting the File menu?  Yeah, Save turns into Save All (okay not in Word 2007 it appears)!  Web Worker Daily has six more tips in their article:
Many of us writerly types spend a lot of time in Microsoft Word, and I even know a few Web designers who like to use it and Microsoft Excel for doing simple site prototyping work. Whether you’re sentenced to use Word all day by a dictatorial IT department, or it’s simply your word processor of choice, you …read more

Got that spiffy new (Windows) machine? Cool. Vista? Nice. Wait, what about your old one? Got stuff on there? Well as GHacks reminds us, Windows has some great migration tools on both XP and Vista:

It is possible to transfer the following information:

User Accounts
Folders and Files
System Settings
E-Mails and other personal information

The process is pretty simple. You select which files, folder and settings you want to transfer and how you want to transfer them. Options are to burn them on a DVD or CD, store them on a removable drive, transfer them over a network or …read more

There has been a bit of discussion about Vista and laptops lately.  The big gripe is that battery life takes a major hit.
I believe that the myth of Vista using more battery life came from the first people that installed it in their machine and did not configure properly the Power profiles. And a proof of that is that Samsung released it own power profile which is different than the Maximum Battery Life Profile of Vista.There are people that installed Vista in a Q1 before me. But probably I’m the only one that installed and never went back to XP, …read more

Man I’ve been dying to blog about this for over a month.  I’ve been in the private beta test of the new MindManager 7 Pro.  If you’re a MM fan, this is a good upgrade.  Must upgrade?  If you use Office 2007, I’d say yeah.
The new MM 7 Pro is officially coming out May 30.  I had the chance to listen to a MindJet overview of the new product yesterday (and for disclosure as an invited guest and attendee I get a free license for the new version).   What impressed me about this new version are the nice UI improvements.  …read more

 Diana Huggins who contributes to Lockgnome’s Windows Fanatics blog always seems to have those tips and how tos that people need.  Whether it’s watermarks in Word or new lines in Excel cells, Diana has posted them.
Sure, you might think they are simple, if you’ve already spent time trying to figure out how to do it through trial and error and Office help, but lots of people haven’t.
Instead of just posting every day her latest tip, just save us both some time and subscribe to the blog and get them via RSS.
 
Technorati tags: Windows tips, Vista tips, MS Office, MS Word, …read more

I’ve been testing EverNote 2 beta for some time now, just a little while ago (last week I think), I got a ping that EverNote 2 was final and I should download the new version (actually throughout the beta period I received notices to update, which I very much appreciated).  Here a portion of the press release:
EverNote Plus now includes unique AIR-Search® (Advanced Image Recognition) technology, available to the public for the first time, which allows users to search within photos, scanned images and graphics in their EverNote collections for printed and handwritten text. With EverNote Portable, users who need …read more

We’ve been complaining, we’ve been trying to do what we can to improve things (including disabling most fun plugins), but Outlook 2007 has been dogged with performance problems since it debuted (actually in complaints started in beta).  Microsoft has finally released a patch for Outlook 2007 that is supposed improve the performance issues:
Microsoft indicated that the problem stemmed from RSS feeds, email, and calendar files all being stored in the same .PSD file which as one might imagine could grow in size rather quickly depending on the user. The problem lies not with the software, but how users are using …read more