Here is a quick Outlook Express tip I found very useful the other day when I was having a problem with Outlook Express.

I had some emails that I just COULD NOT get rid off. After a little searching I found a help page which suggested holding the Shift key while pressing the Delete button. So I gave it a shot, and guess what! – it worked like a charm! However, be warned, this will delete the message immediately, it will not go to the Deleted Items folder, but if you are having this much trouble with an email you probably don’t care what happens to it!

For any old timers out there or someone looking for an easy-to-use compression software application I would have to go with WinZip.

I “grew up” with the WinZip interface and I still find it to be one of the easiest compression tools around. With its built in compressed-file manager and extractor and simple GUI it’s a good place to start if you are new to file compression and just want to pack up some files. At under $30 bucks you can’t go wrong with Winzip.

However, there are several other very viable options including:
WinRAR – Complete RAR and ZIP support. Can create self-extracting and multi-volume archives. Optional archive encryption is also available.
StuffIT – StuffIT is available for MAC, Windows, and Linux. Create, manage, browse .zip, .tar, .sit archives.
7-Zip – Creates 7z archives using LZMA compression. Relatively new format that achieves a very high compression ration.

For a complete listing: Compression Utilities

The Reply To All button has caused a lot of grief in it’s lifetime. Most people don’t use it very often and many people have used it once and really regretted it! This doesn’t have to happen. It is pretty easy to enable/disable the Reply To All button. Easy enough that I would recommend leaving it disabled until such time that you really need it.

In the majority of email programs (I use Windows Live Mail) you can just right click on the Toolbar and if allows you to “Customize Toolbar”. From here you can just select “Reply To All” and remove it from the list of available buttons on your active Toolbar. You just repeat the steps to re-enable it should you actually need that button.

Since it is not used that often, it shouldn’t be that big of a deal for most people. If you find that you need to have the button available at all times, or if you actually use it a lot in your line of work, then perhaps a copy of Reply To All Monitor would be a good investment for you!

Open Office 2.0 – Are you looking for a quality alternative to Microsoft Office that is fully compatible with Microsoft Office documents?

Would you believe that you could get it for free? Open Office is your answer. This program has been developed over a dozen years, initially by Sun and later open-sourced to the developer community. Unlike Microsoft Office, it runs an almost any platform (including Unix/Linux). Its features generally cover Microsoft Office’s capabilities and the user interface is easy to use if you are already familiar with Microsoft Office.

Open Office consists of a suite of applications: – Open Office Writer: the substitute for Microsoft Word. As a bonus, writer can save files in PDF. Saves and reads Microsoft Word files. – Open Office Calc: the substitute for Microsoft Excel. Saves and reads Microsoft Excel files. – Open Office Impress: the substitute for Microsoft PowerPoint. Saves and reads Microsoft PowerPoint files. – Open Office Draw: application used for vector graphics illustration. – Open Office Math: if you are a college student or need a way of expressing complex formulas, this is your application.

Make Firefox Faster – The Mozilla Firefox browser is fast, but here’s a way to make it load pages lightning fast.

First, open up Firefox. Now, enter “about:config” into the address bar. The resultant page is the control panel for your browser’s configuration. Next, enter “pipelining” into the filter. Now, double-click “network.http.pipelining”. This will turn the pipelining feature on. Pipelining expedites page loading by send multiple data requests rather than a single data request. Now, to increase the page loading speed even further: double-click on “network.http.pipelining.maxrequests”. Then enter the number “10” into the pop-up box and hit enter. It’s as easy as that. There should be a noticeable increase in browser speed. Enjoy!

Newly released verison 3.00 has numerous capabilities not only including such things such as the color pallette but also numerous warp tools which can make images look greater than ever before.

And not only does the Paint.Net work a lot like Adobe Photoshop (for non-experts), but it also includes such support including layers, and photography techniques. It is a great tool to use when manipulating colors, or creating images such as graphics from scratch. Images are easily copied and pasted, and most images can be saved in numerous ways, the number one being a jpeg file. In addition to this, images can be printed, saved as webpages, or copied for future use. In general, there really is no reason why you shouldn’t have Paint.Net on your computer. The capabilities (for free!) really are remarkable, and with no ads or trial software to mess with – it really is worth your time to download it. From the old Paint that was flopped with all of our programs, this update of a new product will truly be helpful to the average soccer mom or industrialized worker.