1. Turn off Google Search Suggestions in Firefox Awesome Bar

Firefox has a nice awesome bar placed at the right top of the browser window. This is how the “Awesome bar” looks in Firefox:

By default, the awesome bar consists of a list of search engines e.g Google, Yahoo, Amazon, Answers, Creative Commons and Wikipedia. The awesome bar lets you perform a search in any of these search engines right from the browser and without requiring to open the search engine in a new tab. This is useful but may be embarrassing some times. If you want to turn off the search suggestions in Firefox Awesome bar, follow the steps mentioned below:

1. Click the Search icon placed at the left top of Firefox Awesome bar and select “Manage Search Engines”.

2. In the next window, deselect the checkbox “Show Search suggestions” and press Ok. You are done.

The Firefox awesome bar search suggestions feature is disabled forever.

2. Search From the Firefox Address Bar

You can use the address bar to search using your favorite search engine (lets’ assume Google). Just follow the simple steps mentioned below:

1. Type about:config in Firefox address bar and click “I will be careful, I promise”.

2. In the next Window that appears, type keyword.URL as the filter type.

3. Double click the “Value” field and enter http://www.google.com/#hl=en&source=hp&q=

Press Ok and you are done. Type anything in the Firefox address bar and hit enter to perform search at Google. You can use the same procedure and tweak Firefox address bar to search for a keyword on a different search engine instead.

3. Turn Off Website and Bookmark Suggestions in Firefox Address Bar

The Firefox address bar has two useful features. First, you can bookmark websites right from the address bar by clicking the small yellow “star” icon placed at the extreme right. Second, when you type something – the Firefox address bar shows a list of websites as suggestions. These websites are shown depending upon your browsing history and bookmarks.

It can be really annoying to see address bar suggestions and you may want to completely turn off suggestions from showing up in the Firefox address bar. Just follow the simple steps mentioned below:

1. Click “Tools -> Options” and navigate to the “Privacy” tab.

2. You will see a setting for the Firefox Location bar under “When using the Location bar suggest”. Choose “Nothing” as the option.

3. That’s it. You have just tweaked Firefox not to show location bar suggestions from your browsing history and bookmarks.

4. Interchange the Position of Firefox Address Bar and Firefox Awesome Bar

If you use the Firefox Awesome bar for frequent searches, you might want to align it in the center. You may  want to interchange the positions of the Firefox address bar and the Firefox Awesome bar. The process is very simple and takes just a couple of minutes:

1. Right click on an empty area just above the Firefox awesome bar and select “Customize”.

2. This will open the customization window. Ignore the customization window and move the mouse cursor towards the left edge of the Firefox Awesome bar.

3. As soon as you move the cursor to the left edge, you will notice that the mouse cursor changes into a “hand icon”. Now select the Firefox Awesome bar with the “hand icon” and drag the bar towards the Firefox address bar. This will interchange the positions of Firefox address bar and awesome bar. You will get the Firefox awesome bar aligned in the center as shown below:

5. Combine the Firefox Address Bar and the Firefox Progress Bar

Here is a very quick and easy way to combine the progress bar with Firefox address bar (just like Safari). Download and install the Fission extension for Firefox, restart the browser and it’s all done.

Later, you can change the colors and position of the progress bar from the extension options. (Tools > Addons > Fission > Options)

6. Increase The Font Size of Firefox Address Bar

Do you find it real hard to read the URL’s in Firefox address bar? Want to increase the font size of Firefox address bar text? Install the Make Address Bar Font Size Bigger extension for Firefox. After installation, restart Firefox and you will see that the address bar font has grown bigger and better. Here is an example:

Also check out some really useful Firefox about config tricks and hacks. What’s your favorite Firefox address bar trick? Please share your ideas and suggestions in the comments section.

1. Disable Unnecessary Visual Effects

• Right click on “Computer” in windows start menu and choose “Properties”.
• Click on “Advanced System Settings” at the left pane.
• Under the “Advanced” tab, click on “Settings” under “Performance” category. Select the “Custom:” option.
• Look through the list and uncheck the effects that you have no used for it. (Note: For optimum result, uncheck all the check box except the last four items). Click OK.
• Restart your computer.

You will notice the result immediately.

2.Increase the Boot Speed

With this small tweak, you can decrease the boot time of your Windows 7.

• Press Windows Key + R to launch the Run window.
• Type “msconfig” and hit Enter. The System Configuration Window will appear.
• Under the “Boot” tab, find the box (on the right side) labeled with “Time out”. Generally it is set to 30.
• If you are using only one operating system then you can set the value as 0. But if you are using more than one, then set to 3.
• Check “No GUI Boot” option.

• Click the “Advanced Options” button.
• Check the box labeled with “Number of Processor” and select the number of processors in your computer. Most probably it will be 2.

• Now click “OK”.
• Click “Apply” and then “OK”.

Note: The above tricks will work only If you are using multi-core (more than one) processor in your computer.

3: Disable Windows Aero theme

Windows Aero theme is the eye candy in Windows Vista/7. While its performance was greatly improved in Win 7 as compared to Vista, it is still taking up a large amount of memory and squeezes the graphics card to its maximum. If you can live without the eye candy, then it is a great choice to disable it.

• Right click on the desktop and select “Personalize” .
• Chose One of the standard themes from the right hand side. “Windows 7 Basic” is a good choice.

4. Remove unwanted items from startup menu

Some of the applications that you have installed are automatically added tn the startup menu without your knowledge. If you are wondering why your Windows take so long to startup, they are mainly the culprit. The best way to fix this is to remove the unwanted programs and services from the startup menu.

• Press Windows Key + R and type “msconfig” in the run dialogue box.
• Go to the Startup tab. Uncheck the applications that you have no use for. (Make sure you do not remove any system services).

5.Use your USB flash drive as RAM

In Windows 7, there is this awesome and useful feature that allows you to use your USB flash drive as an external RAM.

Before you start, make sure that you are using a freshly formatted USB drive.

• plug in your USB drive. Right click on the USB drive in My Computer window and select Property.
• Under “Ready Boost” tab, check the box “Use this device”.
• Configure the space of your USB flash drive that you want to allocate for system speed.

6. Disable unnecessary system sounds

When it is active, the system sound can take up a lot of system resources and slow down the computer.

• Press Windows Key + R to open the Run window. Type “mmsys.cpl” and hit Enter.
• Go to the Sound tab. Select “No Sounds” from the Sound Scheme dropdown box.

Note: You can still keep some of your favorite sounds, but you must disable the Shutdown, Start up, Logoff, Start navigation and Logon sound for the best performance.

If you know of any more ways to speed up Windows 7, do let me know in the comments.

Slowly but surely Google has been adding a feature here and a feature there. Some have been bigger steps than others; all of them are chipping away at the reasons you need to buy an office suite. I’m not going to get on a soapbox and shout to the world. I will however, give you a few nifty tips to make using Google Docs spreadsheets a little easier.

1. Lookup

Much like other spreadsheet programs, Docs can do calculations and formulas. The question to ask is the other programs would be, “Do you have built in Google search?” No? Hmmm…. well anyway, here are a couple handy formulas to enter into the desired cell to utilize Google’s search. Make sure to keep the quotation marks surrounding the terms you are adding.

The values will automatically update as the information changes; imagine the possibilities.

=GoogleLookup(“entity”; “attribute”)

Replace entity with something like Ireland and attribute with population.

=GoogleFinance(“symbol”, “attribute”)

An example for this function would be:  =GoogleFinance(“AAPL”, “Price”) The result would end up being what ever the current stock price is.

=GoogleTranslate(“text”, “source language”,”target language”)

The translation function is really cool. It allows you to translate a word or a few sentences from English to Modern Greek or Chinese to Spanish. The most difficult part is having to use ISO 639-1 country abbreviations.

For easy access check out this list of all the functions available.

2. Google Doc Forms

A Google Docs Form is a very simple way to add a survey to an email or website. The basic idea behind these forms is to gather information and automatically aggregate the results into a spreadsheet. You also have the choice to get an email notification when someone completes the form or add a gadget to your iGoogle page to track all of your surveys.

Creating a form is really straightforward.

1. From the main Google Docs screen, choose New — Form

2. If you don’t like the plain blue and white color scheme, you can pick a new one by clicking Theme.

3. Click apply on the new theme to start editing.

4. From there, simply type in the question, choose the type of question you’d like it to be and if it is required to complete the survey.

5. If you click the Share button, there is an option to email the survey or even get the code to embed it into a web page on your site.

3. List View

List view is a fast loading version of a spreadsheet you can publish or embed to your website. The settings you determine in the Share menu will carry over to the spreadsheet you embed.

One of the coolest parts is the spreadsheet is auto-updating. If, for example, you have stock quotes or dollar amounts from a fundraiser; these will all be updated on the embeded version instantly.

If you are a Google Sites user, you can add a editable version of the spreadsheet onto the page by going to the Insert menu.

List view provides a few basic ways to modify data:

• edit cells
• add rows
• filter and sort data
• cells with formulas can’t be edited in this view

4. From Your Mobile

If you have an Android, iPod touch/iPhone or Nokia S60, you can access and manipulate your Google Doc spreadsheets. I was a little disappointed there isn’t a Blackberry or Windows Mobile access, but I’ll live.

• Create shortcuts to your spreadsheets on your home screen
• Edit cells
• Add data
• Sort columns to give you relevant data first

5. Styling

Even though it isn’t an option in a drop down menu, the forms can be modified. You do have over 70 themes available, but if that isn’t enough for you, here are a few tips to spice them up even more by Gill Smith.

What are your productivity tips for Google spreadsheets and forms?

image credit: TaopaiC

Open up any photo editing program and create a 180 x 114 pixels image. Save the image as a bitmap (.bmp) and name it oemlogo.bmp. Next, open up your notepad and create a text file with the following format:

[General]
Manufacturer=Make Tech Easier
Model=MTE Super Computer

[Support Information]
line1=For even more great tips visit
line2=http://maketecheasier.com

and save it as oeminfo.ini. Now, place both the bmp and ini file in C:\Windows\System32 folder.

Open up your System Properties, you should see your own logo and support information in the panel.

Before

After