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Digital Quest

Tech News, Software Reviews, Tips & Tricks & more... - By Suresh

How to quickly resize icons in Windows VistaNovember 20

If you feel that the icons are too small or too big for your liking you can very easily resize them in Windows Vista.

Just right click on an empty part of the desktop or a folder and select View. You would be able to choose between Large, Medium, and Classic icon sizes. The Classic is actually the WinXP style and is the smallest of the lot.

But what if you are the picky type and are not satisfied with any of the three available sizes? As long as you have a mouse with a scroll wheel, you can further fine-tune the size of your icons. Click anywhere on the desktop or inside a folder. Now hold the CTRL key down and scroll the mouse’s wheel up or dwon to grow or shrink the icons. It works just like you would use the scroll wheel to zoom in and out of a web page.

Remember, that this works only in Windows Vista, not in XP.

You may also want to read 6 ways to use your mouse wheen to do more in Firefox.

Get your Windows XP start menu to work like in Windows VistaNovember 19

If you have used Windows Vista, I am sure you would admit that starting a program or searching for a file in Vista is way much faster than how you do it in Windows XP. Just start typing the first few letters of the program name or file name and Vista fetches the matching programs and files almost instantly.

Once you get used to it, using the XP start menu doesn’t feel good at all.

Good news!! Now you can get the same Vista start menu functionality in XP with a tiny free application called ViStart from Lee-Soft. It is a <1MB file and requires no installation. Just run the tool and the XP start menu begins to function exactly like how it does in Vista. Even the look of the menu matches that of Vista. Now, instead of traversing numerous sub-menus, you can quickly start any program or open any file by just typing in the first few letters. It works beautifully.

Download ViStart

Volumouse - Easily control sound volume using a wheel mouseAugust 13

Volumouse is a free utility that lets you quickly and easily control the sound volume on your computer by simply rolling the wheel of your mouse.  This can be much more convenient than finding the sound volume icon in the system tray, clicking on the sound icon, and then adjusting the volume.

Volumouse allows you to customize the settings as to when the wheel will be used for changing the volume. For instance, you can configure Volumouse to use your mouse wheel for volume control when the Alt key is held down, or when the left mouse button is down and so on.

I find that enabling the ‘when the mouse cursor is over the taskbar’ option is the most convenient for me as I can control the volume with a single hand.

When the conditions that you define are not satisfied, your mouse wheel will be used for the regular scrolling tasks, exactly as before.

Download Volumouse

6 ways to use your mouse wheel to do more in FirefoxAugust 12

Did you know that in Firefox, you can do more with your mouse scroll wheel than just scroll a web page up and down?

Here are a few tips on using your mouse scroll wheel in Firefox that could save you some time.

1. Closing Tabs
To close a tab just place your mouse cursor on a tab and click with the scroll wheel. This is more convenient and faster than clicking the small cross on the tabs, especially when you want to close several tabs.

2. Opening hyperlinks in a new tab
Very often we would like to open a link in a page in a new tab. The normal way to achieve this is by right-clicking on the the link and choosing ‘Open Link in New Tab‘. Here’s a much quicker way. Just click on the link with the scroll wheel. Presto! the link will open in a new tab. You can even click on the Home button or the Forward/Back button to open the respective url in a new tab.

3. Paste URL & Go
Sometimes you would need to copy a link from another source and paste it into the address bar and hit Enter to open the link. There is an easier alternative in Firefox. You can just press the scroll button in the content area to paste, and go to the url. By default this functionality is disabled in Firefox but you can enable it with two simple tweak in about:config. Why two tweaks? Because of a bug in Firefox,

How to use error messages to troubleshoot problemsAugust 11

Whenever you encounter an error message, be it from Windows or any other application you are using, don’t get alarmed. Dealing with errors and error messages is a part of computing.

More often than not, people just don’t have the patience to read the error messages. Sometimes my friends or co-worker call me for troubleshooting. First thing that I ask them is whether they saw any error message and most of the time their reply is ‘Yes, some kind of message popped up but I didn’t read it.’

‘Knowing the problem is half the battle won.’ This applies to everything in life and so to, to computers. Whenever you come across any error message, read it first and see if it makes sense to you.  Once you understand the problem, you may be able to find a solution yourself. But if you don’t understand the message or you don’t have a clue as to how to solve it, then the simplest way out is to type out the exact message into Google.

That’s what I usually do. And I find that I get better results if I enclose the message within double quotes. But it is important that if you use double-quotes, you must make sure that  you type the message exactly as it appears, including the commas, apostrophe  and little things like that. Most of the time, the search engine would lead you to one or more pages that tell what the error message means and how to get rid of it.

Typing out the message is both time consuming  and also prone to typos, b