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Archive for the 'PC tricks' Tag

SleeSpot: Stuck on Microsoft? Its Fix It site has fast help

August 28th, 2009, 4:00 pm by

SLEEspot: Gadgetress intern Sandra Lee spots a tech deal daily.This month, Gadgetress’ summer intern Sandra Lee has been posting a tech bargain, tip or fun fact every day at 4 p.m. Short, sweet and simple: It’s the SleeSpot! But today’s her last day. Sandra hints that SleeSpot may continue if she can handle her high-school workload as an incoming junior. Stay tuned…

Having a difficult PC problem? Microsoft’s Fix It may have a solution to solve your technical problems in the click of a button. From “Uninstalling Microsoft Internet Explorer 8” to “Fix Windows Update error 0x8000FFFF,” the help page has hundreds of answers. Best part: It’s free! Visit support.microsoft.com/fixit for instant help (Fix It also has a Facebook and Twitter page). No more waiting for those long phone calls that never seemed to help much anyway! ~ Sandra Lee

Got a tip for the SLEEspot? Tell me about it at slee@ocregister.com or Tweet me @sleespot.

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Learn to type sideways

April 16th, 2008, 1:00 pm by

icontimewasterIn honor of iGirl, here’s another installment of our weekly endeavor to make you laugh, have fun and in all cases waste time.

I wrote about how to send an upside-down e-mail a few weeks ago and then I ran into the sideway screen. Hit the Ctrl+Alt keys and then either the left or right arrow. Your screen’s orientation will rotate sideways. You can likewise hit Ctrl+Alt and the down arrow and your screen flips upside down. The Ctrl+Alt and the up arrow key rights everything.

Flip your screen sideways

In the back of my mind, I knew about this Windows trick. But it wasn’t until Widget, my 5-month old, had her way with my laptop that I remembered it existed. I resorted to Google to find the cure and stumbled upon Eric T’s Internet Duct Tape, a tech blog. His post has 174 comments and quite a few are from people mention their kid did this.

Eric goes on to say that this feature was built into the Windows XP Tablet PC edition where flipping the screen is a useful feature. But Intel added the same feature to its video card drivers so if you want to disable it, you’ll need to get into the card’s menu.

But why disable it? I say try it on an unsuspecting colleague and stand back and watch the results. Maybe I should call this prank day?

(Attention Mac users: Widget doesn’t want to leave you out. She figured out VoiceOver, Mac’s screen reader. It’s Command+F5.)

Send an upside-down e-mail

April 2nd, 2008, 4:00 pm by

icontimewasterYes, Hump Day Timewasters are the total opposite of the new focus of this blog but hey, I hear people love it. And I am very grateful to iGirl for maintaining this blog in my absence. So, in honor of iGirl, here’s another installment of our weekly endeavor to make you laugh, have fun and in all cases waste time.

Freak friends out and send them an upside-down e-mail. Sites like Flip, by Reverse Fad Productions, turn anything you type upside down. Just cut and paste the reverse text into an e-mail and you’re sure to get a ‘How’d you do that?’ response.

op oʇ ʎsɐǝ sı sɹǝʇʇǝl uʍop-ǝpısdn

It uses Unicode, the computer “language” that assigns a number for every character. But beware, upside-down lettering doesn’t work with everything. Some e-mail and instant messaging programs I tried resulted in gibberish. But it does work in Lotus:

Upsidedown letters

To waste even more time, visit the Hump Day archive.

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