STELLARIUM IS A PLANETARIUM FOR YOUR COMPUTER

Stellarium is a free open source planetarium for your computer. It shows a realistic sky in 3D, just like what you see with the naked eye, binoculars or a telescope. It is being used in planetarium projectors. Just set your coordinates and go.

YAHOO EMAIL DRAG MESSAGE STRAIGHT TO FOLDER

Highlight a message in your inbox, hold the left mouse button down and just drag the message to one of your folders.

YAHOO EMAIL QUICK COMPOSE

Type the letter N to start a new message, R to reply to a selected message or F to forward a selected message.

WINDOWS WORD SHORTCUT

Quickly move the cursor to the location it was at when the document was last saved by pressing  SHIFT + F5.

MAKE THE OFFICE ASSISTANT GO AWAY

1. Click on the Office Assistant, then click on Options.
2. Clear the Use Office Assistant check box.

You can also customize the behavior of the Office Assistant by checking or clearing the checkboxes on the Options tab. If you want to learn how to customize the Office Assistant, but it's not currently visible, choose Show the Office Assistant from the Help menu.

CHANGING INTERNET EXPLORER HOME PAGE

To change your home page:
1. Go to a web page that you want to have as your  initial page when you start IE
2. Select Tools / Internet Options
3. In the Home page section, simply click on the Use Current button

INCREASE VIEWING AREA INTERNET EXPLORER

Make the web page viewing area bigger by pressing the F11 key. This switches Internet Explorer (or any other browser) into full-screen mode, removing all trace of the browser and letting the web page occupy the entire screen. If you move your mouse near the top of the screen, the missing parts of the screen reappear temporarily. Get back to normal by pressing F11 again.

ASUS 23.6" WIDESCREEN LCD MONITOR FOR $165

Newegg has the ASUS VH242H Black 23.6" 5ms HDMI Widescreen LCD Monitor for $175 - $10 rebate [Exp 8/31] = $165 with free shipping. Resolution at 1920 x 1080 pixels, 300 cd/m2 brightness, 1000:1 contrast ratio, 5ms response time. This monitor is highly rated by those who have purchased it.

SPEEDING UP WINDOWS OUTLOOK

Keeping a nice, clean mailbox is probably one way of speeding up your Outlook experience. You can do this by using the Auto-Archive feature. Archiving simply moves the emails to a backup file.

You can turn on the built-in Auto Archive feature by heading into: Tools -> Options -> Other--- and setting up your preferences for when to archive—you may need to tweak them to fit your own emailing behavior, but the key is to keep your daily mailbox nice and small.

RESTORING WINDOWS OUTLOOK ARCHIVED FILES

The process for restoring the archived file is:

1. On the File menu, click Import and Export.
2. Click Import from another program or file. Click Next.
3. Click Personal Folder File (.pst). Click Next.
4. In the File to import box, change the default file name in the path from backup.pst to the name of the archive file you're importing from. Click Next.
5. Click the folder to import from. If you want, click Include subfolders.
6. Specify how you want Outlook to handle duplicate items.
7. Click Import items into the same folder in, and then click the folders with the same name as the folders you're importing from.
8. Click Finiish

HIDING SYSTEM TRAY ICONS: You can manually select how you want individual icons in the System Tray to be displayed.
1.Right click on the Taskbar
2.Select Properties
3.Check Hide inactive icons
4.Click on the Customize button
5.This will bring up a dialog box that will allow you to select one of three options for your applications: Hide when inactive, Always hide, or always show
6.Highlight current or past applications and make any changes you like.
7.A small arrow will now appear in the System Tray that will allow you to show or hide these icons.

GROUPING SIMILAR TASKBAR BUTTONS: When you open more than one document in the same program and then minimize each document, rather that  showing separate icons on the taskbar for each document, WindowsXP groups them under a single icon for that application. If you want to group, or ungroup, similar taskbar buttons,
1.    Right click on the Taskbar
2.    Select Properties
3.    Check or Uncheck Group similar taskbar buttons

CLOSING MULTIPLE TASKBAR ITEMS: You can highlight and close multiple taskbar windows at once by using the same syntax you use for selecting multiple files in Windows Explorer. To do this: 1.)Hold down the CTRL key and click on each taskbar item you want closed. 2.)When you are done selecting them, release CTRL and the mouse button. 3.)They will all become selected, and you can right click on any one of them and choose ‘close group’ to close all selected windows.

SPEEDING UP THE DISPLAY OF START MENUS: An easy way to speed up the display of the Start Menu Items is to turn off the menu shadow. 1.Right click on an open area of the Desktop 2.Select Properties 3.Click on the Appearance tab 4.Click on the Effects button 5.Uncheck Show shadows under menus.

WESTINGHOUSE 26in LCD HDTV - REFURBISHED: Hop on over to www.ebay.com for a deal on this huge HDTV for $238 and free shipping.

HOW ABOUT A SAMSUNG WIDESCREEN LCD MONITOR FOR $100: Staples.com is offering the Samsung SyncMaster 18.5" Widescreen LCD Monitor for $100 and free shipping. OK not the biggest monitor out there but its a SAMSUNG.

HOW ABOUT A 1.5TB HARD DRIVE FOR $100: Dell is offering the Seagate Barracuda® 7200.11 SATA Internal Hard Drive with a capacity of 1.5TB for $100 with free shipping. Supports up to 32-MB Cache Buffer. Offers 3 year warranty.

TIPS AND TRICKS: Want to delete files permanently without moving them to the Recycle Bin. Pressing the "Shift+Delete" buttons at the same time when deleting will stop files from going to the recycle bin.

DEFINITION OF COMPUTER VIRUS, WORM, TROJAN HORSE: A VIRUS is a computer program that is capable of attaching to disks or other files and replicating itself repeatedly, typically without user knowledge or permission. A VIRUS is designed to spread from file to file on a single pc, it does not intentionally try to move to another pc, and it must replicate, and execute itself.

Unlike viruses WORMS do not infect other computer program files. These are parasitic computer programs and replicate by creating copies on the same computer, or they send the copies to other computers via a network.

A TROJAN HORSE is a malicious program that pretends to be a benign application. It purposefully does something the user does not expect. Trojans are not viruses since they do not replicate

IF YOU JUST WANT SMALL LAPTOP FOR INTERNET ACCESS: Buy.com has the Asus Eee PC 900A Notebook, Intel Atom N270 1.60 GHz processor, 1GB DDR2, 4GB SSD, 8.9-inch Wide LCD display,802.11b/g Wireless LAN, Linux OS. Sale price is $180 with free shipping. Three USB ports. No optical drive. No floppy drive. 2.18 lbs weight with battery. Nice computer for students on a low budget.

GOOD DEAL ON 1TB EXTERNAL HARD DRIVE: Buy.com is offering a 1TB USB 2.0 & eSATA External Hard Drive for $100 - $20 rebate + $0 shipping = $80 shipped. Expires 8/9/09.

PLANNING TO WRITE A NOVEL: Use OpenOffice.org. You can use this tutorial to print publications and e-books. Open Office is open-source software and therefore it's free.

TIPS AND TRICKS: There are many ways to print a document, but you can print a document quickly if you put a shortcut to the printer on your desktop and drag a document icon to it, no need to open file for printing just drag a file to printer icon and get your print. To do this, first click Start button, Settings, then Printers ( first make sure you installed your printer driver). When the Printers window opens, hold down Ctrl and drag the printer icon to your system desktop.

TIPS AND TRICKS: You can tap the Space bar to scroll down on a Web page one screenful. Add the Shift key to scroll back up.

NEXT TIME YOUR PC LOCKS UP: SuperF4 kills the foreground program when you press Ctrl+Alt+F4.

NEED A SIMPLE AND FAST PDF READER: Sumatra PDF is a slim, free, open-source PDF viewer for Windows. Portable out of the box. Sumatra has a minimalistic design. Simplicity has a higher priority than a lot of features. It's small and starts up very fast. It's designed for portable use: it's just one file with no external dependencies so you can run it from external USB drive.

GOOGLE TO OFFER NEW OPERATING SYSTEM TO COMPETE WITH MICROSOFT WINDOWS: Projected to be available by the end of this year. About the same time Windows 7 is due to launch. It's open-source software and therefore it will be FREE!

THINKING ABOUT UPGRADING FROM WINDOWS XP TO WINDOWS 7: Good luck! This Wall Street Journal article lays out the trials and tribulations.

Super Ear Sound Enhancer: What binoculars do to improve your vision, Super Ear™ Sound Enhancer does to increase your ability to hear all sounds all around you.

TIPS AND TRCKS: You can enlarge the entire Web page or document by pressing the Control key as you turn the wheel on top of your mouse.

NEED TO HAVE A PROGRAM ALWAYS ON TOP: DeskPins can be used to make any application topmost, that is, to keep it above all other windows. Just grab a pin from the DeskPins icon in the system notification area (a.k.a. taskbar tray) and click on any window. This functionality is identical to the "Always on Top" setting found in some programs. With DeskPins you can add this feature to any program! This software is free.

NEED AN ALTERNATIVE TO WINDOWS EXPLORER: FreeCommander is an easy-to-use alternative to the standard windows file manager. The program helps you with daily work in Windows. Here you can find all the necessary functions to manage your data stock. You can take FreeCommander anywhere - just copy the installation directory on a CD or USB-Stick - and you can even work with this program on a foreign computer. This software is free.

ARE YOU USING A BIG SCREEN MONITOR: GridMove makes moving windows, resizing windows, displaying them on cascade or on mosaic, making them on top or anything you can think of as easy as drag and drop.

WANT TO SHUTDOWN YOUR PC AUTOMATICALLY:WinMend Auto Shutdown is a freeware utility that can turn off your computer automatically. With simple settings, it can shut down, hibernate, stand by or log off the computer unattended at a scheduled time.

SEND A FAX FOR FREE: FaxZero.com lets you send a fax to any fax machine in the United States (including Puerto Rico) or Canada for free. You don't need a fax machine yourself, but you do need a valid e-mail address. Simple to use. No gimmicks. No registration required.