By Rich Eichacker
Vibrance Technology Corporation
This quarter, I thought I'd tackle the lighter side of technology and present some tips on reducing the clutter that plagues every Windows system.
Icons Icons Icons
Is your Task Bar and/or Desktop clogged with rarely used icons? Are all those icons really necessary? Unfortunately, today's software stuffs your Task Bar's system tray until it stretches half-way across the screen. The same phenomenon occurs on your Desktop and Programs menu - icons everywhere.
TrayManager, a free program from PC Magazine, lets you selectively hide the icons on your system tray. Hidden icons are placed on TrayManager's right-click popup menu for easy access. A nice feature of TrayManager is that it remembers to hide icons after re-installing an application.
You can organize Desktop and Start Menu icons on your own by moving them into folders and submenus. To create a folder on the Desktop, right-click and select New:Folder. To create submenus on the Programs folder, right-click on the Start button and click Explore, then create new folders with New:Folder. To move the icons, simply drag and drop them into your new folders. By organizing your icons, you will reduce the visual clutter and make finding your programs a lot easier. Remember: moving or renaming an icon does not change or disable the program that the shortcut represents.
Popup Windows
The new paradigm in advertising is to pop up any number of browser windows when you navigate to a site. Not only are these windows annoying, but while they're popping up, they make it almost impossible to navigate or enter information into the target web page (e.g. when logging in).
There are a number of shareware programs that trap and stop popup windows. I use one called Pop-Up Stopper Pro by PanicWare software. For $19.95, this utility traps and disables popup windows and even gives you statistics on how many popup windows have been stopped from a given site.
The Office 2000 Clipboard
You may find the Office Clipboard distracting as it pops-up when you are copying and pasting between documents or spreadsheets. The Office Clipboard can be useful once you figure out how to use it, but for my preference, I'd rather have it turned off. To do this, you need to add a value to the Windows registry. For details, visit ProductivityReports.com.
You can find plenty of utilities to help you organize your Windows PC at sites like shareware.com and in the Utilities section of pcmag.com.
Spring 2002 - Volume 12, Number 2