Navigating the net is becoming easier and more intuitive by the minute. The ease of access trend has created a way to go back and forth between pages very easily, using your mouse, without having to click any specific button – but rather by being able click and drag anywhere. I’m sure many of you already know this, but I urge you to read on, I will be giving some advanced productivity tips as well!

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A part of Windows I never understood was image thumbnail previews. This feature is awesome in Vista (and XP), and supports most commonly used formats. If you want to preview TIFF or PSD files however (still pretty common) you will not succeed.

Some clever people have developed a freeware solution to this problem, adding more file types to the preview list. The page boasts 19 image types, which includes the 4-5 already native to Windows, but this is still pretty cool. The best part is that it isn’t a script or an app running in the background, but rather a shell extension, and is only called upon when needed.

Personally I get quite bothered if I have 20 pics in a folder, out of which I can preview 18, but not the other two. This is probably due to my organization and productivity Ninja senses. I think this is a small, lightweight solution to an equally small, but nagging problem, so it’s worth the try. Just one quick note, on the download page Vista support is not yet official and sure enough, it didn’t work for me. Apparently it either works or it doesn’t, but on XP it’s definitely ok.

Get ThumbView – Orginally found on FreewareGenius

Happy New Year everyone! I hope you all had a great year and that your new one will be at least as great. If you didn’t have a good year, well here’s your chance to do something about it, sit down, get organized and be productive! For those of you who need to work today, I have put together a roundup of my most popular posts, happy reading.

Using Google Reader and Gmail together
Use Google Calendar to send free SMS messages
A guide to batch renaming files
Note taking made easy with Übernote
Separate work and play with user identities
How to get out of the shower without freezing

As some Google searches will prove, this has been a debate that has been going on for some time. I was actually faced with the same problem just today, and not because I wanted to write a post about it, but because I had a practical problem I needed to solve. The problem has two parts. One is solved by Picasa, the other is solved by Windows Photo Gallery. In the process, I tried to determine which is better, without success. I have developed a method though that works for me, so perhaps it has some workarounds that might for you too, read on!

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While I do like to have everything in a centralized location, for a few very distinctly drawable boundaries, I like to keep them separate. I work for an online company where I manage a lot of projects, and I also blog a lot nowadays. For me it is best and most productive if these two are separate, but this is quite hard to do totally. I have just come up with a solution using Window user identities that aims to organize me.

When I recently reinstalled Vista, I created three accounts. The one labeled “Daniel” is where I keep all my personal stuff, like photos, music and so on. The one labeled blog is where I manage everything related to my online stuff like posts, guest posts, other articles, website promotion and so on. The third is where I have all the stuff related to my dayjob.

This method has considerable advantages, but I’m sorry to say it has quite considerable disadvantages. It looks like it will work for me, but I don’t want to yell that out loud just yet. Read on to take a look at the good and the bad, and decide for yourself!

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If you’ve ever tried to scroll with your mouse but couldn’t, this small app (script) is for you. I bet everyone knows that microsecond of panic. “Oh no, my mouse isn’t working! Or maybe Windows froze? Did time itself stop???” In the end you realize that the window is just out of focus, another window has popped up somewhere which leaves you without scroll ability.

To stop this horror from happening, some clever German people have developed a script that runs in Windows to enable you to scroll the window the mouse pointer is hovering over. The only problem is that it sits in the system tray, clogging up space (see post on hiding system tray icons) and it also seems a waste to have an app for such a specific task. It could also include some other advanced mouse features and be developed into a suite of small apps.

Download PCW Hover Wheel from their website, story via gHacks