Washington - Keep your kids safe online by enlisting the help of parental control software. Vista users have parental controls built into the operating system, but third-party parental control software is available for users of XP and Macs - and most of the programs provide advanced options that are even attractive to those who already have parental controls in their operating system. Look to top-rated programs such as Net Nanny and CyberPatrol. --------
Washington - Ever wonder how people send an e-mail to a lot of people at once without having everyone's e-mail address show up to all recipients? The sender is using BCC, which stands for "blind carbon copy." Most e-mail programs have a BCC field. To send e-mail this way, simply type the address of one person in the normal "to" field - the address might be your own - and then activate the BCC field to enter everyone else's. Sending e-mail this way maintains the privacy of those to whom the e-mail is sent.
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Washington - How much hard drive space do you have left? To find out quickly, open Windows Explorer and right-click the drive letter of the disk you want to check. Select Properties from the pop-up menu. The resulting Properties dialogue box shows you a pie chart of the free and used space on the drive.
-------- Washington - Need to run a DOS command in Windows? Just press Windows Key-R to bring up the Run dialogue box, and then type "cmd," without the quotation marks. Press Enter, and you'll see a command prompt, as in the days of DOS. The DOS prompt in Windows remembers what you type in each session. To recall a command you typed earlier, just press the up arrow key. This is handy if you need to enter the same command multiple times but need to make minor changes on subsequent runs.
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Washington - In any web browser, you can quickly navigate from one link to another by pressing the Tab key. This is often quicker than using the mouse, especially if you are visiting many links on a page in quick succession. Press Shift-Tab to move backwards through the links. To open a link in a new browser window, hold down the Shift key and press Enter.
