Screen Shot

"Screen shot" is the phrase used to describe the action of capturing your computer desktop or anything shown on your computer screen to a static image file. In other words, it is a way of taking a snapshot, or picture, of your computer screen. Some people also call it a screen grab.

Screen shots can be very helpful when you need to demonstrate something that would be difficult to explain in words. Here are just a few examples of situations where a screen shot can be useful and why:

• In software reviews, to show what the software looks like.
• In software tutorials, to demonstrate how to perform a function.
• In technical support troubleshooting, to show error message or software issues.

Screen shots are also useful to save snippets of anything you have on your screen, particularly when it can not be easily printed. You do not need special software to take a picture of your screen because screen shot functionality is built into all current operating systems.

Capturing screen shot of the desktop in Windows

1. Press the Print Screen key on your keyboard. It may be labeled [PrtScn].
2. Open an image editing program, such as Microsoft Paint.
3. Go to the Edit menu and choose Paste.
4. If prompted to enlarge the image, choose Yes.
5. Optional: Use your image editor's crop tool to crop out unnecessary portions of the screen shot.
6. Go to the File Menu and choose Save As.
7. Navigate to the folder where you want to save the image.
8. Type a file name for the image.
9. Select a file type.
10. Click the Save button.

Tips:

1. Hold the Alt key down while pressing Print Screen to capture only the active window.
2. Generally the GIF format works best when saving screen shots of application windows. The JPEG format usually makes screen shots (especially those with text) blurry, blotchy and discolored.
3. See related resources below for more screen shot tips and listings of screen capture software that offers many more options for capturing screens and portions of screens on Windows and Macintosh computers.
4. The Windows " clipboard" is a term used to describe the temporary storage space in memory where an item is placed when you copy or cut. When you paste, the item is transferred to the program you're working in. If you copy something else, the old item is replaced with the new. You can't navigate to or manipulate the clipboard directly; it's only used for copy and paste operations.
5. If you have windows Vista, you can capture screen shots much more easily using the Snipping Tool included with Vista.

Mastering Gmail

Tips and tricks to make Google's Gmail work harder for you.

So you've jumped on the Gmail bandwagon? Good for you! Abandoning POP mail for Google's mail service and app gains you many interesting perks, such as never having to download your mail again, using a powerful mail search that doesn't seem like an afterthought, and having a nearly infinite amount of online storage space.

That said, after the initial excitement of webmail wears off, you may start missing a few old-school features of Microsoft Outlook, such as personal folders and the ability to organize your mail any way you want. We say "old-school" because there really are better ways to handle your mail—they just require a little change in perspective.

Use labels, not folders

First off, creating a personal folder in Outlook for every project or topic under the sun is more like a chain around your neck than a legitimate productivity enhancer. Instead, Gmail provides a way to label your messages so they are automatically organized into groups, without using folders.

When a message arrives, just click the More Options drop-down and click New Label. Name the label and you're done. Now, that entire message thread will be categorized for you with the new label, which you can access along the left side of the screen. When you don't need that label anymore (if for example, the project has ended), you can remove it. Or just edit it and leave it active. Click the Edit Labels link on the left and put a "z" or a number in front of the label. You can use any letter or number scheme to organize unused labels, although you can't create "sublabels" that mimic Outlook's handy subfolder hierarchy.

Put a filter on it

You can label messages automatically, however. And you can use filters for all kinds of handy tasks, including auto-forwarding messages and deleting them without reading them. To create a filter, click the Create a Filter link—it's located near the search box. Enter the data you want, such as the message sender or text, in the fields. For example, you can filter all messages related to neurology by entering neurology in the "has the words" filter. Click Next. To set up a label filter, click the checkbox next to Apply the label and select one of your labels from the menu. The prospect of automatically organizing all messages from your boss or that relate to a project you're working on seems almost too good to be true, but the system works quite well.

Gmail helpfully suggests applying the filter to existing messages; check that option if you want. Otherwise, just click Create Filter to use the new filter. You can also auto-archive messages, mark them as read, star them, and forward the message automatically using the new filter rules. Delete all messages from your ex-girlfriend without even reading them? Yes, you can do that, too.

Get the syntax

Gmail emphasizes power over a stellar user interface. (In fact, Sundar Pichai, the director of Google Labs, says the company actually debates how every small interface element, especially icons, may slow down the app.) Tapping into that power is not always intuitive. And there are some things you still can't do, such as grouping all e-mails from the same person regardless of thread. However, what Gmail does provide is an easy, effective way to search for e-mails based on labels, who sent the message, the subject, and other factors.

In fact, for those with a vast e-mail archive, searching is really the way to go—we all have too many messages to keep them organized. Think of it this way: In Outlook, you can click on the Deleted folder and group by sender to see all messages from Uncle Hal. In Gmail, you can just type his e-mail address in the search field, and all the messages he sent you will appear in the results box. With all due respect to Uncle Hal, he is easier to find by searching than by categorizing.

Editor's tip If you get an e-mail that seems ripe for filtering, select the drop-down next to Reply and choose Filter messages like this to create an automatic filter that is, say, from your sister or to your coworkers.

Searching goes far beyond just typing an e-mail or a portion of a message, although one of the most powerful searches you can perform is when you remember a particular phrase, such as "get grandma for christmas." The key is learning the Gmail "operators" that you can type in the search box. Use "subject:" to search only e-mail headers. Use "from:bob" to find messages that your pal Bob sent you, and not the ones you sent to him. Instead of clicking on a label, you can type "label:" and the name to find messages with that label.

Advanced syntax

If you grok the basic syntax like "from:" or "label:" you are ready for more advanced search modifiers. For example, you can search for messages that were sent between a period of time. Just type "after:x before: x," where you replace the x with a date, in the format year/month/day or month/day/year.

Another great trick is to use parentheses to control your mail search. Let's say you'd been working on a project related to golf. You were making diagrams of several golf courses, including Pebble Beach and Stonebridge. If you wanted to find only the messages related to those two courses, you could use the syntax "golf (pebble beach and stonebridge)." This search weeds out a lot of superfluous messages. For those who receive hundreds or thousands of messages per month, it means a lot less hunting around for a few particular messages and homing in on just a few.

by John Brandon

20 Great Google Secrets

Google is clearly the best general-purpose search engine on the Web but most people don't use it to its best advantage. Do you just plug in a keyword or two and hope for the best? That may be the quickest way to search, but with more than 3 billion pages in Google's index, it's still a struggle to pare results to a manageable number. But Google is a remarkably powerful tool that can ease and enhance your Internet exploration. Google's search options go beyond simple keywords, the Web, and even its own programmers. Let's look at some of Google's lesser-known options.

Syntax Search Tricks

Using a special syntax is a way to tell Google that you want to restrict your searches to certain elements or characteristics of Web pages. Google has a fairly complete list of its syntax elements at

www.google.com/help/operators.html

Here are some advanced operators that can help narrow down your search results.

Intitle: at the beginning of a query word or phrase (intitle:"Three Blind Mice") restricts your search results to just the titles of Web pages.

Intext: does the opposite of intitle:, searching only the body text, ignoring titles, links, and so forth. Intext: is perfect when what you're searching for might commonly appear in URLs. If you're looking for the term HTML, for example, and you don't want to get results such as

www.mysite.com/index.html

you can enter intext:html.

Link: lets you see which pages are linking to your Web page or to another page you're interested in.

Try using site: (which restricts results to top-level domains) with intitle: to find certain types of pages. For example, get scholarly pages about Mark Twain by searching for intitle:"Mark Twain"site:edu. Experiment with mixing various elements; you'll develop several strategies for finding the stuff you want more effectively. The site: command is very helpful as an alternative to the mediocre search engines built into many sites.

Swiss Army Google

Google has a number of services that can help you accomplish tasks you may never have thought to use Google for. For example, the new calculator feature

(www.google.com/help/features.html#calculator)

lets you do both math and a variety of conversions from the search box. For extra fun, try the query "Answer to life the universe and everything."

Let Google help you figure out whether you've got the right spelling—and the right word—for your search. Enter a misspelled word or phrase into the query box (try "thre blund mise") and Google may suggest a proper spelling. This doesn't always succeed; it works best when the word you're searching for can be found in a dictionary. Once you search for a properly spelled word, look at the results page, which repeats your query. (If you're searching for "three blind mice," underneath the search window will appear a statement such as Searched the web for "three blind mice.") You'll discover that you can click on each word in your search phrase and get a definition from a dictionary.

Suppose you want to contact someone and don't have his phone number handy. Google can help you with that, too. Just enter a name, city, and state. (The city is optional, but you must enter a state.) If a phone number matches the listing, you'll see it at the top of the search results along with a map link to the address. If you'd rather restrict your results, use rphonebook: for residential listings or bphonebook: for business listings. If you'd rather use a search form for business phone listings, try Yellow Search

(www.buzztoolbox.com/google/yellowsearch.shtml)

Extended Googling

Google offers several services that give you a head start in focusing your search. Google Groups

(http://groups.google.com)

indexes literally millions of messages from decades of discussion on Usenet.

Google even helps you with your shopping via two tools: Froogle

(http://froogle.google.com),

which indexes products from online stores, and Google Catalogs

(http://catalogs.google.com),

which features products from more 6,000 paper catalogs in a searchable index. And this only scratches the surface.

You can get a complete list of Google's tools and services at

www.google.com/options/index.html

You're probably used to using Google in your browser. But have you ever thought of using Google outside your browser?

Google Alert

(www.googlealert.com)

monitors your search terms and e-mails you information about new additions to Google's Web index. (Google Alert is not affiliated with Google; it uses Google's Web services API to perform its searches.) If you're more interested in news stories than general Web content, check out the beta version of Google News Alerts

(www.google.com/newsalerts).

This service (which is affiliated with Google) will monitor up to 50 news queries per e-mail address and send you information about news stories that match your query. (Hint: Use the intitle: and source: syntax elements with Google News to limit the number of alerts you get.)

Daterange: (start date–end date). You can restrict your searches to pages that were indexed within a certain time period. Daterange: searches by when Google indexed a page, not when the page itself was created. This operator can help you ensure that results will have fresh content (by using recent dates), or you can use it to avoid a topic's current-news blizzard and concentrate only on older results. Daterange: is actually more useful if you go elsewhere to take advantage of it, because daterange: requires Julian dates, not standard Gregorian dates.

Thanks to its many different search properties, Google goes far beyond a regular search engine. Give the tricks in this article a try. You'll be amazed at how many different ways Google can improve your Internet searching.

10 Security Enhancements

Before you spend a dime on security, there are many precautions you can take that will protect you against the most common threats.

1. Check Windows Update and Office Update regularly (_http://office.microsoft.com/productupdates); have your Office CD ready. Windows Me, 2000, and XP users can configure automatic updates. Click on the Automatic Updates tab in the System control panel and choose the appropriate options.

2. Install a personal firewall. Both SyGate (_www.sygate.com) and ZoneAlarm (_www.zonelabs.com) offer free versions.


3. Install a free spyware blocker. Our Editors' Choice ("Spyware," April 22) was SpyBot Search & Destroy (_http://security.kolla.de). SpyBot is also paranoid and ruthless in hunting out tracking cookies.

4. Block pop-up spam messages in Windows NT, 2000, or XP by disabling the Windows Messenger service (this is unrelated to the instant messaging program). Open Control Panel | Administrative Tools | Services and you'll see Messenger. Right-click and go to Properties. Set Start-up Type to Disabled and press the Stop button. Bye-bye, spam pop-ups! Any good firewall will also stop them.

5. Use strong passwords and change them periodically. Passwords should have at least seven characters; use letters and numbers and have at least one symbol. A decent example would be f8izKro@l. This will make it much harder for anyone to gain access to your accounts.

6. If you're using Outlook or Outlook Express, use the current version or one with the Outlook Security Update installed. The update and current versions patch numerous vulnerabilities.

7. Buy antivirus software and keep it up to date. If you're not willing to pay, try Grisoft AVG Free Edition (Grisoft Inc., www.grisoft.com). And doublecheck your AV with the free, online-only scanners available at www.pandasoftware.com/activescan and _http://housecall.trendmicro.com.

8. If you have a wireless network, turn on the security features: Use MAC filtering, turn off SSID broadcast, and even use WEP with the biggest key you can get. For more, check out our wireless section or see the expanded coverage in Your Unwired World in our next issue.

9. Join a respectable e-mail security list, so that you learn about emerging threats quickly and can take proper precautions.

10. Be skeptical of things on the Internet. Don't assume that e-mail "From:" a particular person is actually from that person until you have further reason to believe it's that person. Don't assume that an attachment is what it says it is. Don't give out your password to anyone, even if that person claims to be from "support."

Exiting Windows the Cool and Quick Way

Normally it takes a hell lot of time just Shutting down Windows, you have to move your mouse to the Start Button, click on it, move it again over Shut Down, click, then move it over the necessary option and click, then move the cursor over the OK button and once again (you guessed it) click.This whole process can be shortened by creating shortcuts on the Desktop which will shut down Windows at the click of a button. Start by creating a new shortcut( right click and select New> Shortcut). Then in the command line box, type (without the quotes.)

'C:\windows\rundll.exe user.exe,exitwindowsexec'

This Shortcut on clicking will restart Windows immediately without any Warning. To create a Shortcut to Restarting Windows, type the following in the Command Line box:

'c:\windows\rundll.exe user.exe,exitwindows'

This Shortcut on clicking will shut down Windows immediately without any Warning.