How To

Six ways to work faster in MS Outlook

Organizations large and small rely on Word documents, Excel spreadsheets, and PowerPoint presentations to get the job done. In some ways Outlook is the poor cousin of the three high-profile Office apps. But the true workhorse in Microsoft's ubiquitous suite is the unglamorous e-mail/contact manager/task scheduler.

These six tips for Outlook 2010, 2007, and 2003 will let you spend less time reopening archived messages, jog your memory about reminders, drag files to send them as attachments, add terms to the spell checker, clear space on the taskbar, and enhance your list of click-saving keyboard shortcuts for Outlook.… Read more

How to install and use Mac OS X Lion's high-quality speech voices

One of the features of OS X Lion that was discussed early on in its development was the updated text-to-speech technology that not only brings much more natural-sounding voices, but also has options for dialect and accent support for various regions of the world. Since early in the Classic Mac OS, Apple has supported text-to-speech technology, with very basic and robotic output that has improved over the years, but with Lion the technology takes a relatively major leap forward.

The system ships with some default voices, including the long-standing novelty ones such as laughing, whispering, bells, and alien voices, but … Read more

How to fix the single most annoying thing in OSX Lion: Bring back tap-to-drag

The new gesture controls in Apple's OS X Lion operating system update can take a little getting used to on a MacBook (such as the new 11-inch and 13-inch MacBook Airs). The reverse "natural" scrolling, for example, has its fans and detractors, and we've previously shown you how to roll back that particular change.

Potentially more annoying is the change from the tap-to-drag trackpad gesture to a new three-finger-drag gesture. In fact, it's probably the single most annoying Lion feature we've found so far.

Traditionally, one could could do a double tap, then hold … Read more

What to do with your USB flash drive: Run portable apps

What's more portable than a laptop, tablet, or smartphone? Answer: A USB flash drive. If you want easy access to applications like Firefox, Chrome, OpenOffice, and more, all you need is your USB flash drive and a host computer.

In part five of our "What to do with your USB flash drive" series, we'll show you how to install portable apps onto your USB flash drive.

Step 1: Download the PortableApps 2.0 PR1.1 platform from PortableApps.com.

Step 2: Insert a USB flash drive into your computer and double-click on the downloaded file, PortableApps.… Read more

How to keep Snow Leopard when upgrading to Lion

The features and advancements in OS X Lion may make it an enticing installation; however, as has been mentioned previously, Apple is doing away with a few key features that have maintained compatibility with some popular applications. Some of these features, such as the lack of Java, can be remedied by installing support for them, but there is no workaround for others like Rosetta and support for 32-bit system extensions in the default 64-bit boot environment. And a number of (perhaps mostly relatively obscure) applications may have trouble running, as can be seen on the RoaringApps Lion compatibility database. As … Read more

How to create an OS X Lion installation disc

OS X Lion has been released and is available in the Mac App Store to download and install. While its availability solely as a download may have its conveniences, the lack of its initial distribution on optical or other media has been met with a decent amount of criticism, especially by those looking for options to troubleshoot and customize their OS installations. Apple's approach to installing and managing your Lion installation does offer a decent amount of flexibility, but if you would like to have your Lion installation on DVD, then you absolutely can do this.

Luckily the OS … Read more

What to do with your USB flash drive: Install Windows 7

Installing Windows from a USB flash drive is more convenient and faster than optical discs. Plus, if you have a netbook or another type of computer without an optical drive, you don't have any other choice than to use bootable USB media. In part four of our "What to do with your USB flash drive" series, we'll show you how to configure your USB flash drive to install Windows 7. Here's how:

Step 1: Open a command prompt with administrator privileges by clicking on the Start button, then type cmd in the search box and … Read more

How to install RAM in an iMac (video)

With the arrival of Mac OS X Lion, a lot of folks are going to discover that Apple's latest operating system is more of a memory hog than Snow Leopard and that a little RAM boost may be required.

Regardless of whether you're upgrading to Lion or not, upgrading your RAM is good idea because it's one of the most affordable--and easiest--ways to speed up your machine. Also, for anybody looking to buy a new iMac, we strongly recommend upgrading the RAM yourself, because you can save a good bit of money by not ordering extra RAM … Read more

How to disable your keyboard Windows key

The Windows key is an extremely useful keyboard shortcut tool, unless you're a gamer. If you've ever played an FPS game in full screen and hit the Windows key by accident, you likely ended up a casualty in those few jarring seconds of window switching.

Some gaming keyboards now support disabling the Windows key, but not everyone uses a gaming keyboard with that feature. We'll show you the manual and automated methods for disabling (and re-enabling) the Windows key on any keyboard.

Automated method Disable the Windows key

Step 1: Download the Microsoft Fix it program 50465 … Read more