Tips & Tricks

Today's monitors don't need them the way '80s displays did, but most of us still like to use Windows screensavers. This week's tips 'n' tricks offer both plain and fancy ways to make your own screensavers, disable or delete unwanted ones, and save energy by letting your CRT catch a few ZZZ's.

Customizing your Windows startup and shutdown sounds is fun, but dealing with the operating system's other audio feedback can be an earache. Here are five tips for spiking Internet Explorer 6.0's annoying sound effects, muting and restoring Windows' sounds with a single click, optimizing CD audio quality, and more.

Ready for some desktop spring cleaning? This week's tips 'n' tricks help you tidy your Windows workspace -- by getting rid of unused shortcuts, unwanted labels, and sending applications to the system tray instead of the taskbar -- so you'll have space to add handy sticky-note reminders. As a bonus, Gregg's got a secret for high-speed printing of your frequently used documents.

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Push it around, point, click -- you use your mouse a thousand times a day, but are you using it for more than the basics? This week's tips 'n' tricks concern good mousekeeping: saving clicks and keystrokes, reading Internet Explorer pages without eyestrain, finding wayward pointers, and reducing the risk of painful carpal tunnel syndrome.

The only bad thing about reading WinPlanet's Tips 'n' Tricks column is that it increases the odds of friends and family hitting you up for Windows help. So this week, Gregg shares his favorite tools and tactics for quickly diagnosing and fixing colleagues' PC problems -- and for hinting how they can help themselves next time.

Don't look down -- that strip at the bottom of your screen isn't pulling its weight. Windows' taskbar is a handy indicator of the programs and documents you're working with, but these five tips 'n' tricks can make it do more -- including hiding or moving the taskbar or controlling it with your keyboard instead of your mouse.

The Start menu and Control Panel hide a handful of ways to configure, customize, or add convenience to Windows, but you haven't really used the operating system until you've tweaked it. In this week's Tips 'n' Tricks, Gregg Keizer presents five versatile tweaking toolkits for Win 98, Me, 2000, and XP, from Microsoft's legendary TweakUI to freeware and shareware favorites.

You probably visit Windows' Control Panel at least every few days to tweak a setting or change a default. But have you tweaked the Control Panel itself? This week's tips 'n' tricks help you do everything from removing unwanted modules or applets to remodeling the Control Panel as a toolbar or pop-up menu for faster access.

Gregg Keizer's Tips 'n' Tricks column usually explores various helpful features within Windows -- but this week, he's out to shut down some not-so-helpful ones. Check out these five quick fixes for some of the operating system's more annoying intrusions.