Information & Tutorial

Learn Windows Vista

Hello everybody, in this tutorial I share you some knowledge about Windows Vista. Windows Vista is a great product from Microsoft, it has many improved and enhanced features that you don't find in previous Windows. I hope that by reading this learning/tutorial, you will know more about how to use Windows Vista.

Photoshop Tutorials

The power of Photoshop in manipulating images and photos make it becomes the most popular graphical software in the world of digital image manipulation. You can use it for repairing and enhancing inferior photos, creating poster design or other advertising media, drawing abstract and various effects, or even designing website layout.

Modifying Windows XP Visual Effects

Visual effects on Windows XP determines greatly the beauty of your XP appearance and performance. Elements included in Visual effect componenets among other things window animation while minimizing and maximizing, menu and pointer shadows, and so on. All the effects depend on the capability of your computer hardware. If you're using a slower computer, it would be better to not force applying all the effects. The other way, with a fast computer, you can enjoy all the effects. Windows XP gives you chances to modify and specify which visual effects components that you wanna use.

Customizing Windows XP Sounds

By default, Windows XP will play a sound when certain events happen, such as Windows logon and logoff, exiting Windows, and so on. You can easily change and set the sound for each program events. Windows XP also makes you easily change the sound volume.

Not all of the photos we take can be gratifying. Sometimes the photos look too dark, too bright, less contrast, or perhaps there are objects inside photo which disrupt the entire look. Photoshop is a very powerful software you can use to edit unsatisfied photos/images. You can also manipulate them with various tips and tricks by using photoshop. In this section, I will show you several nice photoshop tutorials relating to photo retouching which you can learn, so that will be able to edit photos yourself as your desire.
Please click each the title below to see its detail explanation.

One of popular effects for photoshop user is Text Effect. In this part, I try to choose nice text effect tutorials from any photoshop websites just for you. May you will get much .. much lesson from these tutorials.

For people that have their own blog or website on internet, photoshop offers the opportunity to make the design of theirs themselves. In this page, I try to collect links of photoshop tutorials related to designing of website layout, including full layout design as well as specific parts of web layout such as menus or header. Hopefully, these tutorials will be useful for you and can give you inspiration in designing your web layout.

Section 09 - Windows Vista Security

Windows Vista provides some tools that can help protect your computer from harmful softwares such as virus, spyware, and other malicious software. In this tutorial, we will learn about the tools that you can use to optimally protect your computer.

Section 10 - Windows Vista Maintenance

Besides knowing to use your computer, you should also know how to care for your computer. In this tutorial, we will learn about some ways to keep you computer and your datas always safe.

Section 11 - Using Windows Mail on Windows Vista

In Windows Vista, Microsoft introduced the successor of Outlook Express, namely Windows Mail. This program, which functions to especially send and receive e-mail, has been enhanced with better security features such as protection against phishing and spam. In this tutorial, you will learn to use it easily and practically.

Using Large Icons on the Desktop

By default Windows XP uses desktop icons with size of 32 x 32 pixels. This is the normal size in XP. Besides that, Win XP also supports for larger icons with size of 48 x 48 pixels. This feature is very useful if you want to focus on helping your vision, or just for getting unique look.

Showing The Icon Label Drop Shadow Effect

One way to make your desktop looks nice, is by turning on the drop shadow effect for label of desktop icons. To do that, please follow these steps:

Setting a Keyboard Shortcut For a Program

If you have one or some programs that you run many times a day. It will be more efficient if you make a keyboard shortcut for the program, so you can run it just by pressing the keyboard combination instead of running it from the Start menu.

Putting a Folder on the Taskbar

If you have a favorite folder that contains important documents and other datas. You can make it easy to access the content of the folder, by putting it on the Taskbar. So, you can access and open the documents inside the folder directly from the Taskbar without having to access Windows Explorer.

Prevent Windows Messenger from Starting Automatically

By default, Windows Messenger starts automatically when Windows XP starts. For several people, this annoys so much. Well, actually you can easily change this behaviour, which means to prevent messenger from starting automatically.

Hiding All Icons on the Desktop

Do you want to see your screen or desktop background free from icons? Maybe you have a nice wallpaper and you don't want the desktop icons deface it.

Displaying Web Content on Your Desktop

Windows Vista enables you to display a web content - which is called Active Desktop - on your desktop. This is an interesting feature, because you can show web page which provides periodic updated information such as news tickers, stock, forex, weather forecast, and so on, directly on your desktop. Surely your computer must be connected to internet to get such information. But however Active Desktop can also access the local HTML document on your computer, as well as web content from your local network.

Displaying the Control Panel as a Cascading Menu

Control Panel is the center to modify every aspects on your Windows XP. In order to access its contents, you must open the Control Panel window. However, you can set the Control Panel to be a cascading menu on Start menu, expanding all items so that you can open each item only with one-click.

Customizing the Taskbar

Taskbar is the long horizontal bar at the bottom of the screen. Unlike the desktop, which can get covered by the windows on top of it, the taskbar is visible almost all the time. It has four main sections:

Customizing the Start Menu

Start menu is the gate to all programs in Windows operating system family including XP. Start menu is the place of all shortcuts located. Windows XP enables you to easily customize it. Here, you'll learn to pin/unpin a program, change the Start menu style, and deleting/renaming a shortcut.

Customizing the Mouse

Really, you don't want to use computer without mouse, do you? even though it's only an extenal device, but it's very necessary especially if you wish to work more comfortable with your computer. Windows XP provides you the facilities to customize the use of mouse, through the control panel.

Customizing the Desktop

Customizing the desktop is one way to make your eyes always fresh and not boring to be in front of computer. Windows XP enables you to customize any Desktop elements such as wallpaper, screensaver, theme, and others. Moreover, you can customize all of those desktop parts only on one window, namely the Display Properties dialog box.

Creating Your Own Screen Savers

Windows XP enables you creating your own screen saver in the form of images slideshow. If you have your own images that you want to use as screen saver, just put them in specific folder, or through My Pictures folder. Then when the screen saver runs, Windows XP will show your images one by one continuously.

Configuring Number of Frequent Programs on Start menu

One of the nice new features in Windows XP is the list of frequent programs displayed on Start menu. In helps you get faster to access programs that you often use. By default, Windows XP will display only six shortcuts of frequent programs there. However, you can specify it up to 30 shortcuts.

Clear My Recent Documents List on Exit

By default, Windows XP will record all documents you've opened and display them in My Recent Documents that appears on the Start menu. Maybe some of you don't like this feature because of privacy related reason, don't worry, Windows XP enables you to always clear this list every time you exit your computer.

Changing Folder Icon and Folder Picture

This is one of interesting Interface feature in Windows XP, you can modify icon and/or picture of a folder. You can see the result while exploring files/folders in Windows Explorer.

Cascading Items in Start menu to Save Your Time

For me, this way saves my time. It is cascading items in Start menu, such as My Documents, My Pictures, Control Panel, and so on. So I can access items faster.