Cheap Tweaks

Build a better virus trap: For a leaner system, consider shutting off your antivirus program's heuristics feature (it probably doesn't work very well anyway). Or better yet, give one of the new, superspeedy antivirus tools a try; your options include Grisoft's free AVG and Hauri's $40 ViRobot Expert. Both are faster than and as effective as Norton AntiVirus and other antivirus packages. Download AVG or a trial version of ViRobot Expert. Bonus tip: Save money and disk space by going to Hauri's site or to Housecall.antivirus.com to scan your system for free over the Web.

Take Excel to a new level: Excel has more options than a 1999 dot-com CEO. As Excel maven and former PC World Contributing Editor John Walkenbach says on his site, "the Options dialog box is essentially Excel's junk drawer...a prime candidate for the cover of the Journal of Bad User Interface Design."

Tame the beast with his $40 PUP program. PUP is no whelp--it clearly organizes Excel's options, and its 60+ utilities enhance menus, add dozens of range tools,and permit batch printing. Download a fully working 30-day demo with no nag screens.

Try a free Office alternative: Are you so cheap the condiments shelf in your fridge consists entirely of little packets swiped from fast-food outlets? You'll be happy to learn that you can read and print files and perform other basic Office functions without any disk overhead--and without taking a big bite out of your wallet. Simply download the various free Office app viewers that let you view, print, and/or play files created by Access (97 and 2000 report snapshots), Excel (97 to 2000), PowerPoint (95 to 2002), and Word (97 to 2000). You'll see all the file's fonts, colors, charts, and animations. And it won't cost you a nickel. Go to Downloads for May's "Cheap Tweaks" to download the viewers.

Don't take Office menus personally: Microsoft may have liquidated the deplorable Clippy animated assistant in Office, but other enhancements still irk, such as "personalized" menus, which hide some options you haven't used recently. If you sometimes like this and sometimes hate it, you can have it both ways. Double-click any of the menu titles (such as File or Tools) to display all of your options on the spot.

Speed up your files by quashing links: Are your Excel worksheets sluggish and your Word docs dilatory? OLE may be to blame. Object Linking and Embedding lets you add dynamic data to a file, such as placing live Excel spreadsheet cells into a Word document. If the data you plugged into your document no longer requires active updating, make it static: Right-click the object and select Hyperlink, Remove Hyperlink. Now your PC won't waste CPU cycles updating these fallow links.

Avoid your local print shop: Why trudge to the print shop or hire a desktop publishing pro to print your brochures, newsletters, leaflets, and catalogs? Blue Squirrel's $50 ClickBook 6 application makes it easy to design and print booklets, Day Planner pages, business cards, brochures, and other material. And you can do it all from within just about any Office app. We're talking more than 40 booklet styles, multipage/double-sided printing, automatic sizing, watermarks, and custom layouts. ClickBook's learning curve is a little daunting, but once you set up the program, printing custom documents is a snap. Go to ClickBook v 6.0 to download a trial version.

Faster than a speeding mouse: Inveterate mousers may sneer at keyboard shortcuts, but these feats of prestidigitation save PC users oodles of time. For example, pressing Ctrl-D creates a bookmark in Internet Explorer. Unfortunately, shortcuts can be tough to remember, and that's where Office 2000 and XP can help: In any Office app (except Excel and Publisher), select Tools, Customize, Options, and check the Show ScreenTips on Toolbars and Show shortcut keys in ScreenTips boxes.

Thereafter, when you pass the pointer over any toolbar button, up pops its keyboard shortcut. Note that when you change this option in one Office application, you change it in all of them that support it. See this month's Answer Line for more on keyboard shortcuts. Bonus tip: To see all of the keyboard shortcuts in Word, select Tools, Macro, Macros. From the 'Macros in' dialog box, select Word Commands; then scroll down to and double-click ListCommands. Select Current menu and keyboard settings, and click OK. Word will instantly create a document listing all the keyboard commands.

Put Windows XP's PowerToys to work: Some people love Windows XP's marzipan look and tail-wagging search mascot. Others (like me) just want to scream when exposed to all that cuteness. But instead of howling, I fire up Microsoft's free PowerToys. One of my favorite PowerToys tools is Tweak UI, which lets me change my mouse-click speed, turn off IE's annoying AutoPlay feature, and perform other interface modifications. Two other winners are the Image Resizer, for zooming in on or out of an image with one click, and the Taskbar Magnifier. (I like the Alt-Tab Replacement tool's view of my active apps, too, but it makes switching between your open windows slower, so you may want to skip this toy.) Download a copy of PowerToys for Windows XP.

Start XP faster, Microsoft style: Ah, the instant boot--the dream of Windows users everywhere. This may be centuries away, but at least Windows XP users can try to shorten their current boot-up time by installing Microsoft's free BootVis tool.

First the program identifies everything that Windows loads at start-up; then it relocates the files and rearranges their start order to maximize load speeds. You may be able to shave between 15 and 45 seconds off your start-ups with BootVis. Then again, you may not notice any change at all. Is it worth the time and effort? Steve Bass gave the program a try and answered "yes." Read his take on BootVis from the March issue's Home Office (with a link to the download).

Add foreign punctuation in an instant: If you need foreign-language characters in Word, drop-kick the character map and add them from your keyboard. For acute accents, press Ctrl-' (apostrophe) and then the letter you want accented, such as the á in "no más." For grave or left-leaning accents, press Ctrl-` (the left single-quotation mark on the key located above the Tab key on most keyboards). You can generate letters with a tilde by pressing Ctrl-Shift-~, letters with a circumflex accent by entering Ctrl-Shift-^ (the ^ mark shares the 6 key), and letters with an umlaut by typing Ctrl-Shift-:. Bonus tip: If you go to Word help and type foreign punctuation, the program will give you the option of seeing all such keyboard shortcuts.

Sort everything out in Outlook: By default, Outlook sorts mail by date and time, but you have other choices. If you're looking for e-mail messages with mondo attachments, for example, click the Size button at the top of the window to make those messages move to the top of the list. To sort by sender's name, click the From button and type the first letter or two of the name you want; you'll jump to that person's most recent correspondence.

Fire your CPU: And hire a better one. If you have a Celeron- or Athlon-based system, a CPU upgrade falls below our $50 price ceiling. (Check your system's documentation or its vendor's Web site to learn whether your motherboard and BIOS support the faster CPU.) For example, Googlegear.com lists a 1.3-GHz Celeron CPU for $47, and you'll find Athlon XP CPU upgrades for a similar price. Make sure that your new CPU has a heat sink and a fan. Go to Stan Miastkowski's step-by-step CPU installation instructions.

Back up faster, simpler, cheaper: Yeah, we always nag you to back up your data--and we'll do it again. If you've ever groused that backup software is too slow, complicated, and pricey, carp no more. Maximum Output Software sells three versions of its FileBack PC software: $25 gets you backups to any fixed or removable media, the ability to synchronize directories, and automatic backups at Windows start-up and shutdown, among other features. The $35 network version lets you back up to another computer on your network and adds e-mail notification of completed backups. And for IT types, the $45 enterprise version lets you create custom configurations for groups. All three feature step-by-step wizards that make getting your backups started a breeze. Visit FileBack PC 3.2x to download the limited-function trial version.

Boot faster, BIOS style: Give your PC a boot in the BIOS. Open your PC's Setup program by pressing the key you're prompted to hit when your system starts (before Windows loads). In the Boot section, turn on the Rapid BIOS Boot or "quick boot" feature and quash poky diagnostic routines. Turn on the Silent Boot feature to eliminate start-up messages. Disable options like Scan User Flash Area unless you have a SCSI hard drive or a network card that uses boot-from-LAN features. Turn off 'Automatic detection of hard drives' so the BIOS won't look for nonexistent drives; then run the BIOS IDE drive identification routine to find and store only your drive's parameters. This will shave 5 to 10 seconds off your boot time. If you use Windows XP, see also " Start XP faster, Microsoft style."

Extend your laptop battery's life: Sure, downloading your favorite Menudo MP3s would strain any laptop's battery; but the real watt hogs are a notebook's screen, external drives, LAN and wireless cards, pointing devices, and flash/USB cards. If you don't need it, unplug it or turn it off. You can also save juice by cranking down the screen's brightness via its Fn key combination. To force your browser to use system memory instead of the watt-soaking hard drive, set the browser's disk cache to zero. Open Windows' Power control panel (Power Options in Windows XP), and pick aggressive settings--for example, 'After 3 minutes' for your screen blanker, and 'After 10 minutes' for your standby setting.

Squeegee your drive: When your hard drive starts looking like a college dorm room during finals--cluttered with the digital equivalent of junk-food wrappers, old term papers, and dirty socks--give it a good wall-to-wall scouring. Windows' Disk Cleanup tool lets you rinse away cached Web pages, accumulated cookies, temporary files, and other dead weight that slows your system's performance (click More Options for other ways to clear space).

However, it misses some detritus in the corners--downloaded e-mail attachments, Netscape's disk cache, and Office scrap, for example. Let Webroot's $30 Window Washer utility pull on the elbow-length gloves and get to work. Go to Webroot's Window Washer to download the fully functional demo.

Gain graphics speed gratis: Want better video performance? Open up your PC's pipes--namely, the AGP aperture setting (AAS) in the graphics portion of your PC's Setup program (enter it by striking the key you're prompted to hit before Windows loads). The AAS specifies the amount of system RAM that your AGP card can use if it runs out of room to store texture data (for game backgrounds, for example). Today's graphics cards are loaded with their own RAM, so they'll probably never need to borrow system RAM. But older graphics cards with just a few megabytes of on-board memory might get a boost from an AAS reset. Make the aperture setting twice the size of your graphics RAM, plus 12MB. If you have 16MB of graphics RAM, for example, your AGP aperture should be 32MB plus 12MB, or 44MB. Note that if you go lower than 16MB, your graphics card will starve for data; go above 256MB, and your PC won't get to enough RAM, triggering Windows to crank up its slo-o-o-w virtual memory scheme. Also, not all Setup programs let you change this setting.

Sync in a blink: Does it take longer than usual to hot-sync your PDA? The likeliest reason is that extra programs on the syncing list are slowing the process down. Right-click the HotSync icon in your system tray, and choose Custom. Select a program that you don't want to sync, and click Change. Choose Do nothing, and then click Set as default to prevent the change from affecting only the current session's sync. With fewer apps to check, your syncs should speed up.

Turn your scanner into a photocopier: Unlock the photocopier trapped inside your scanner with Nico Cuppen's free Photocopier 2.26 utility. Just slap an item on the scanner and select the relevant specs: type of scan (black-and-white, gray-scale, or color); magnification (100 percent or 70 percent); darkness level; and number of copies. Then click Copy, and they roll right out of your printer. Upgrade to the $18 Photocopier Pro to run copies by pressing your scanner's copy button. The Pro version also lets you preview scans, wield editing and manipulation tools, and save copies to disk in various formats. Download Photocopier 2.26 and a trial version of Photocopier Pro. Bonus tip: Scanning a newspaper article? To avoid scanning the stuff on the other side of the clipping, place a piece of black paper behind the item you're scanning.

Scan it high, and then boil it down: When you scan at a high resolution, the larger file's extra data protects against image degradation that may occur during editing of the file, by giving you wiggle room. If your scanning software permits, scan in high-bit mode (12 or 16 bits per channel). The resulting file is bigger than if you used a lower bit rate, but you can probably slim it down in your image editing program. When you're happy with the result, convert the picture to 8-bit color.

Get more from your JPEGs: If speed be your muse, save your camera images as JPEG files. For everyday shots, medium resolution (1024 by 768) is sufficient for great-looking 5-by-7 prints. For nature pix, increase the JPEG resolution or save the shots as TIFF files. When you edit a JPEG, note its compression ratio and save it at that value. If you increase the compression ratio, the image quality will degrade. You'll do better to save edited JPEGs as bigger--and slower--TIFFs.

Stream tunes from your stereo to your PC: Don't start using your old LPs as placemats just yet. To MP3 'em, you need just a sound card, a cable with a stereo minijack on one end and a pair of RCA plugs on the other, and a program--such as CFB Software's $30 LP Recorder 5--that captures analog audio ( download a trial version).

Plug the cable's RCA jacks into the left and right audio outputs on your stereo, and put the 0.125-inch plug into your sound card's line-in port. Fire up the capture program, turn on your stereo, place an LP on the turntable (the setup works with audio cassettes as well), and start recording. Before you know it you'll have converted your analog music library into a folder full of MP3s on your PC.

That's a moiré: When you scan images from magazines and newspapers, they often look as if they've been captured through a chain-link fence--this is called a moiré pattern. To remove moiré, try rotating the image slightly. If that doesn't help, increase the scan resolution by as much as 50 percent. If your scanning software has a descreen feature, use it. If none of these methods work, open the image in your image editor and look for a "despeckle" or "Gaussian blur" option. In Adobe's Photoshop, for example, choose Filter, Noise, Despeckle (which automatically smooths the image) or select Filter, Blur, Gaussian Blur, a similar tool that provides more-precise control. Another option in Photoshop is to select Filter, Sharpen, Unsharp Mask and then play with the sliders until you get the desired effect.

Burn faster, cheaper, and safer: Burning CD-Rs from disc to disc is slow and fraught with peril. A better way is to save an image of what you're burning to your hard disk, shut down all other active programs on your PC, and then burn the image to CD-R. You save time in the long run, and you avoid the dreaded buffer underrun error. Bonus tip: Got a fast burner? You may not have to buy top-speed media. For example, 40X media can burn at 48X or even 52X in many cases. Experiment with media recommended by your drive's manufacturer--you could save bucks and still burn to the max.

Save a buck, save the planet: A hundred smackers for a laser-printer toner cartridge? Just say no! Buy a remanufactured cartridge instead, and save half the cost, or more. They're sold everywhere: online, at superstores, in subways. Just remember to purchase remanufactured cartridges--units that have been disassembled and cleaned, have had their worn parts replaced, and have then been retested. Avoid companies that "drill and fill" used cartridges; these can leak toner and ruin your hardware. When in doubt, ask the company about its products.

Save a buck, save a tree: Paper doesn't grow on trees, you know. Oh, wait--it does. But it's still expensive. One way to help preserve our nation's natural resources when you print photos is to use Veena Jayaram's $20 Photo Paper Saver utility. The program lets you pick the photos you want to print and the size of each print (it warns you if there are too many for a single page). It even arranges the layout of photos on each page to maximize use and minimize waste of that pricey photo stock. Stop by Veena Jayaram's download page to get your copy.

Photograph by: Kevin Twomey

Clean up your video screen grabs: Grabbing a frame from a DVD movie playing on your PC can be ugly. Screens captured from a DVD viewing program such as CyberLink's PowerDVD look terrible when pasted into an image editing program because you capture an interlaced video frame--the two interposed scan lines that make up the video image. Look for a de-interlace option in your image editor. In Adobe's Photoshop 7, for example, select Filter, Video, De-Interlace, choose Odd or Even Fields, select the Interpolation option, and click OK.

Happiness is a warm scanner: Before you use a flatbed scanner, wipe the device's platen with regular window cleaner or a vendor-recommended glass-cleaning solution. Then let the scanner warm up for at least 15 minutes. Scans made before the scanner's bulb reaches its normal temperature may look fuzzy.

Shoot in any season: When it comes to cameras, "digital" and "rugged" aren't synonymous. At temperatures above 90o Fahrenheit, digital noise will show up in dark shots. So get a shade for your camera. Shooting in misty weather? Put your camera in a Ziploc bag that has a hole in it for the lens to poke out of.

Diagnose your fuzzy scans: Is your scanner output spotty? Digiversity.tv site manager Russell Viers suggests a test: Write the word TOP in big black letters on an 8-by-11-inch sheet of white paper and scan the page. (Any resolution will do--72 dpi is fast.) Open the scan in your image editor and find an equalize option to adjust the image contrast so you can identify problems. If you see a wavy black line along the paper's edge, the scanner lid may be leaking light. If you see spots, the scanner may need a new bulb, or you may need a new scanner. Can't afford either? If spots are confined to one area, you can avoid that location when positioning originals for scanning.

Beware the dark--and bright--side: Want your scanned images to stay sharp? Don't fiddle with the brightness or contrast controls in your scanning or image editing software. Adjusting them changes every pixel in the image by the same value, muddying dark areas of the shot and washing out bright ones. The trick is to master nonlinear correction, such as with the Levels and Curves tools in Adobe's Photoshop. Visit the Adobe insider's site at RussellBrown.com for more on this and other Photoshop verities.

Fine-tune your TCP/IP settings: Is your TCP/IP all that it should be? Zip over to SpeedGuide.net and find out.

First, click the TCP/IP Analyzer link to see whether your connection--from Windows settings to modem options--is properly configured. If the analyzer finds something amiss, click the TCP/IP Optimizer link to download a little tool that analyzes your connection and tweaks your settings; alternatively, you can dig into the optimizer and set your own custom preferences. The topper: It's all free.

Cloak your e-mail address on the Web: Listing your e-mail address on a Web site is like issuing an invitation for it to be harvested by spambots, those nasty automated programs that troll the Web for anything that looks like an e-mail address and then sell their catch to spammers. Keep the canned creepy-crawlies at bay by showing your e-mail address as a bitmap image rather than as text--bots can't read images. Alternatively, you can add characters (such as Remove) to your e-mail address (for example, "rluhnREMOVE@msn.com"), and then include a note telling visitors that they should delete the extra characters when sending messages to you. A more sophisticated approach is to place a field on your Web page in which visitors must enter a code that's shown elsewhere on the page to display your e-mail address. Pay a visit to JavaScripts.com or to other JavaScript libraries to locate free scripts like this one that require only minimal adjustment.

NIC network slowdowns in the bud: If your PC seems to take forever to find your network, its network interface card may be running on automatic pilot, trying (and failing) to detect a network setting that isn't there. Or you may be faced with mismatched settings: For example, your computer's NIC may be configured to function at 10BaseT, but your LAN hub may recognize only 100BaseT. You can't easily change the hub, so instead try tweaking the network card. Right-click My Network Places (or Network Neighborhood in Windows 98 and Me), select Properties, and click the Configure button for your network card. Choose the Advanced tab, and look for an entry labeled 'Link Speed' or 'Media Type'. The typical options are 10BaseT and 100BaseT (full or half duplex for each), Hardware Default, and Auto. Make sure these settings match the specs for your network router or hub. When you're unsure how to proceed (if you have both 10BaseT and 100BaseT devices on the LAN, for example), just go with the lowest common denominators--10BaseT and half duplex.

Ferret out network printers: Setting up a shared printer is normally the province of your friendly neighborhood IT department; but if they're off fishing, why not try setting it up yourself? (Note that Windows XP's Add Printer Wizard should find network printers for you, but your network's server may not cough up the information XP needs.) First, select Network printer in the Local or Network Printer dialog box, and then choose Browse for a printer. This may show all the printers attached to the LAN. (Just don't pick the printer in the CEO's office!) If the printer you want to use isn't listed, but you know the printer's server and shared name, enter that data in the 'Browse to' text box in this format: \\servername\printername. Make the connection, and then select the appropriate printer driver (XP may already have it on hand; if not, download it from the printer vendor's Web site). If this doesn't work, find the IP address of the networked printer or print server, open the Printers and Faxes control panel, double-click Add Printer, and click Next. Select Local printer, uncheck the Automatically detect box, click Next, choose Create a new port, and select Standard TCP/IP Port. In the subsequent dialog boxes, enter the IP address of the printer or print server, and select the Device Type according to the printer or server appliance name. Choose the make and model, and finish the driver installation. You'll need to download and install the proper driver for any print servers as well.