Basic Things You Should Know When You’re Using Your Computer

I know, I know. You prob­a­bly have this smug look on your face, and you’re prob­a­bly think­ing, “Why am I read­ing this arti­cle anyway?!”

But there are actu­ally a lot of basic and common-sensical ( is there such a word?) stuff about com­puter use that I found out is not so basic and not so com­mon after all. This arti­cle is from David Pogue’s Pogue’s Posts, a series in the New York Times on technology.

Pogue’s Posts
David Pogue

* You can double-click a word to high­light it in any doc­u­ment, e-mail or Web page.

* When you get an e-mail mes­sage from eBay or your bank, claim­ing that you have an account prob­lem or a ques­tion from a buyer, it’s prob­a­bly a “phish­ing scam” intended to trick you into typ­ing your pass­word. Don’t click the link in the mes­sage. If in doubt, go into your browser and type “www​.ebay​.com” (or what­ever) manually.

* Nobody, but nobody, is going to give you half of $80 mil­lion to help them lib­er­ate the funds of a deceased millionaire…from Nige­ria or any­where else.

* You can hide all win­dows, reveal­ing only what’s on the com­puter desk­top, with one key­stroke: hit the Win­dows key and “D” simul­ta­ne­ously in Win­dows, or press F11 on Macs (on recent Mac lap­tops, Command+F3; Com­mand is the key with the clover­leaf logo). That’s great when you want exam­ine or delete some­thing you’ve just down­loaded to the desk­top, for exam­ple. Press the key­stroke again to return to what you were doing.

* You can enlarge the text on any Web page. In Win­dows, press Ctrl and the plus or minus keys (for big­ger or smaller fonts); on the Mac, it’s the Com­mand key and plus or minus.

* You can also enlarge the entire Web page or doc­u­ment by press­ing the Con­trol key as you turn the wheel on top of your mouse. On the Mac, this enlarges the entire screen image.

* The num­ber of megapix­els does not deter­mine a camera’s pic­ture qual­ity; that’s a mar­ket­ing myth. The sen­sor size is far more impor­tant. (Use Google to find it. For exam­ple, search for “sen­sor size Nikon D90.”)

* On most cell­phones, press the Send key to open up a list of recent calls. Instead of man­u­ally dial­ing, you can return a call by high­light­ing one of these calls and press­ing Send again.

* When some­one sends you some shock­ing e-mail and sug­gests that you pass it on, don’t. At least not until you’ve first con­firmed its truth at snopes​.com, the Internet’s author­ity on e-mailed myths. This includes get-rich schemes, Microsoft/AOL cash give­aways, and–especially lately–nutty scare-tactic mes­sages about our Pres­i­den­tial candidates.

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

* When you’re fill­ing in the boxes on a Web page (like City, State, Zip), you can press the Tab key to jump from box to box, rather than click­ing. Add the Shift key to jump through the boxes backwards.

* You can adjust the size and posi­tion of any win­dow on your com­puter. Drag the top strip to move it; drag the lower-right cor­ner (Mac) or any edge (Win­dows) to resize it.

* Forc­ing the camera’s flash to go off pre­vents sil­hou­et­ted, too-dark faces when you’re outdoors.

* When you’re search­ing for some­thing on the Web using, say, Google, put quotes around phrases that must be searched together. For exam­ple, if you put quotes around “elec­tric cur­tains,” Google won’t waste your time find­ing one set of Web pages con­tain­ing the word “elec­tric” and another set con­tain­ing the word “curtains.”

* You can use Google to do math for you. Just type the equa­tion, like 23*7+15/3=, and hit Enter.

* Oh, yeah: on the com­puter, * means “times” and / means “divided by.”

* If you can’t find some obvi­ous com­mand, like Delete in a photo pro­gram, try click­ing using the right-side mouse but­ton. (On the Mac, you can Control-click instead.)

* Google is also a units-of-measurement and cur­rency con­verter. Type “tea­spoons in 1.3 gal­lons,” for exam­ple, or “euros in 17 dol­lars.” Click Search to see the answer.

* You can open the Start menu by tap­ping the key with the Win­dows logo on it.

* You can switch from one open pro­gram to the next by press­ing Alt+Tab (Win­dows) or Command-Tab (Mac).

* You gen­er­ally can’t send some­one more than a cou­ple of full-size dig­i­tal pho­tos as an e-mail attach­ment; those files are too big, and they’ll bounce back to you. (Instead, use iPhoto or Picasa–photo-organizing pro­grams that can auto­mat­i­cally scale down pho­tos in the process of e-mailing them.)

* What­ever tech­nol­ogy you buy today will be obso­lete soon, but you can avoid heartache by learn­ing the cycles. New iPods come out every Sep­tem­ber. New dig­i­tal cam­eras come out in Feb­ru­ary and October.

* Just putting some­thing into the Trash or the Recy­cle Bin doesn’t actu­ally delete it. You then have to *empty* the Trash or Recy­cle Bin. (Once a year, I hear about some­body whose hard drive is full, despite hav­ing prac­ti­cally no files. It’s because over the years, they’ve put 79 giga­bytes’ worth of stuff in the Recy­cle Bin and never emp­tied it.)

* You don’t have to type “http://www” into your Web browser. Just type the remain­der: “nytimes​.com” or “dil​bert​.com,” for exam­ple. (In the Safari browser, you can even leave off the “.com” part.)

* On the iPhone, hit the Space bar twice at the end of a sen­tence. You get a period, a space, and a cap­i­tal­ized let­ter at the begin­ning of the next word.

* Come up with an auto­mated backup sys­tem for your com­puter. There’s no mis­ery quite like the sick feel­ing of hav­ing lost chunks of your life because you didn’t have a safety copy.