PCTips Box

Most people who see Vista for the first time really like the look of the new operating system and some features, like 3D Flip and Thumbnail Preview are an instant hit. However, for old fuddy-duddies, like me, who are waiting for things to settle down before switching their main PCs to Vista, here’s a way to get that Vista feel, but still keep hold of XP.

This tip will give you Vista like Thumbnail previews, which basically means when you hover your mouse over a Taskbar icon you see a thumbnail image of the program or document it represents. (more…)

TweakVI is a freeware program that claims to be the first to both both tweak and optimize Windows Vista. The free Basic version of TweakVI comes with 13 plugins that perform various functions. Other plugins are available, but they have to be paid for.

The TweakVI feature I like the sound of the most is the settings transfer, which allows you to transfer your Vista tweaks between machines, which will be handy if you building a new machine or even just rebuilding your current one.

Other Key features of TweakVI include: (more…)

Most people learn to type as they go, graduating slowly from hunt-and-peck to look-see every now and again. If you are anything like me after a few years you can go at a fair old lick, but you still make a lot of mistakes, simply because you’ve never been taught to touch-type.

It’s never too late to learn and this little freeware program, called TypeFaster Typing Tutor could help you to lose some of those bad habits, and increase your speed. (more…)

Anyone who has ever received an email from a friend or relative with several megabytes of picture attachments will know that newcomers to the wonderful world of computing and digital photography are often unaware that they need to re-size images before they are sent by email or uploaded to websites. Windows has a picture resizer built into the My Pictures folder options but here’s an even better way, a small freeware program called PIXresizer. The key features are that works with both single and multiple files, it converts between most popular image file formats (.bmp, .gif, .jpg, .png, and .tif), it creates thumbnails and there are multiple resizing methods, to make sure you get the best looking results