It's always a bonus to uncover a shortcut or program enhancement, and here we bring you 100 tips and tricks that we hope will make your computing experience quicker, simpler or more rewarding. From Windows to security, ergonomics to photo-imaging, PC Authority gives you inside information on how to make the most of your IT assets.
Private property
1 Never reply to spam emails. Resist your urges to tell these people where to go or even to request the 'unsubscribe' option – more often than not, your details will simply be added to a 'live' list that can then be sold on at a premium.
2 Read Websites' privacy policies. Do it before divulging any personal information by way of registration, login or enquiry. If the site doesn't have such a policy, find a competitor that does.
3 Use proven, free encryption technology such as PGP (www.pgpi.org), which will integrate with most email clients and provide extremely robust protection for your messages by encoding them with software that was, until fairly recently, classified as a weapon by the US authorities. See this month's Tech Support article, [see Secure your data, page 129].
4 Control your cookies. Mozilla/Netscape users can make use of the cookie management features to edit, view and configure cookie handling. Internet Explorer users should head for the privacy tab in the options box and set the privacy rating as required. We recommend starting high and turning it down if your requirements are compromised too much during use. IE pops a little 'no entry' symbol up in the bottom right of screen when it blocks a cookie – click on this for a full privacy report.
5 Use Opera. You can disable referrer logging so Websites don't know where you've been. Cookies can be used to trace password-protected pages, so you should ensure cached pages from authenticated sites are deleted on exit rather than just the authentication page of a password-protected site. Finally, use the 'Delete Private Data' option to close all windows, stop all transfers, delete cookies, cache, history, URLs, visited links and even transferred files.
6 Opt out of Usenet archives. Usenet messages are archived by Google Groups (www.google.com/grphp), which enables anyone to quickly locate topic-specific postings across hundreds of newsgroups. Use your newsreader client to include 'X-No-archive: yes' in the header of your message, or as the first line of the message body, and Google Groups will obey the no archiving flag. For archived messages, use the 'Automatic Removal Tool' by following the group's help link.
7 Beware of hidden applications that interact with banner ad sites, known as 'adware' or 'spyware'. Most often these are the price you really pay for using 'free' software utilities. If you don't want your Web clicktrail logged by these people, use Ad-aware from LavaSoft (www.lavasoft.de) to hunt down and remove these apps.
8 Clean your browser client by deleting temporary files, emptying the cache, clearing the history and so on. To automate these tasks, and many others that you may miss – like deleting the drop-down URL list, deleting Registry streams, and cleansing private data trails in Windows Media Player, Adobe Acrobat and others – download Window Washer (www.webroot.com).
9 Deleting files from your PC actually just removes the 'pointers' to the files and not the data itself. The only way of being totally sure you have deleted all traces of data is to employ a file destroying tool such as 12Ghosts Shredder (www.12ghosts.com), which will overwrite data tracks with random binary code. Use the 'top security' settings to overwrite each track seven times to achieve US National Security Agency security levels.
10 There's no point in getting security conscious, then not having the basics put in place. All your passwords should be as uncrackable as possible. Strong passwords start with no less than eight characters, should not be based on real words and should contain combinations of upper and lower case letters and numbers.