Now that the new Ubuntu release has come out triple booting has become very easy. I am now trip booting XP, Vista abd Ubuntu. I have a multitude of reasons for having all three, I am making Ubuntu my full time OS as you know, but Vista still has its merits. For starters, I know it better, so if I need something done quickly thats still where I go. I use XP for the little gaming I do, about once a week I get together with a friend and play some games, XP is still the best for that.

If you take a look at APCmag, you’ll quickly find instructions for double booting Xp and Vista, regardless of which one you have installed first. Then comes the beauty of Hardy Heron, the WUBI install system. This enables you to install Ubuntu from within the Vista environment and Ubuntu will be added to the Windows bootloader. Since I really hate trying to find out how to get Grubb to boot Windows this was a Godsent and now I’m happily and easily booting all three systems.

As a side note, my Feisty used to take at least 3 minutes to load, an error which I read about, but failed to resolve. They seemed to have fixed it in Hardy, so now I don’t spend more than a minute booting any of the three, hip-hip-hooray to Hary and the Ubuntu team.

Martin from gHacks usually writes great technical posts, but it seems he’s not bad at productivity at all. He wrote a post explaining why he keeps his Windows taskbar on the right side of the screen.

“Moving the taskbar to the side makes it possible to display additional windows before the Windows grouping feature kicks in”

Sure enough, he reports that you can minimize about 25 applications to the tray before they become totally unreadable, so if you work with a load of windows, this may be a breath of fresh air. This is great for widescreeners, since they have the screen real estate to do this anyway. While I despise having so many windows open, sometimes you just have to, so this is a great tip, although it does take some time to get used to.

I always liked Windows explorer and although I acknowledge its shortcomings, I never really grew accustomed to replacements like WinCommander or Xyplorer. An application I just found while reading Lifehacker enhances explorer with one of the best features yet, the ability to jump from folder to folder really quickly.

Direct Folders gives you the ability to navigate through your folders much more productively by letting you navigate to any folder you specified before hand from anywhere inside an explorer window. Just double click on an empty space to bring up the menu, and select the folder you want to go to.

This is free so far, if you want some added functionality you can buy the pro version which supports jumping to the last used folder, setting default folders for apps and so on. All in all this is a great app for productivity which should ease folder navigation for you.

If you hate confirming that yes, you do want to delete the file in question (hence the reason you pushed delete) I just found an application via Mysticgeek’s Realm that could save you from a lot of OK pushing.

PTFB (Push the freakin’ button) basically sits in the background waiting for dialogs to appear and presses the pre-designated button for you. The great thing is that you can make it dialog specific, so you can enable it only for file deletion notifications, or only for overwriting and so on.

You can set up the delay time as well, although I don’t really see the point, maybe unless it’s part of a macro. By the way, there is a pro version which can do a lot more, but for basic usage this is perfect, especially if you are batch deleting some files one by one, it will save you a lot of time (time saving = productivity).

I didn’t actually realize thus far what a huge performance increase can be given to Windows by changing the battery settings. I should actually approach this from the other side, you can elongate battery life by a considerable amount if you take down power consumption. You can also dim the display and so on, just don’t forget to turn the battery consumption back to high performance when you are back at the desk.

I was opening tabs, looking at a YouTube video and everything seemed really slow. The video was choppy and switching between tabs was a pain. I realized after about 5 hours of work that this is due to my battery setting, which I didn’t change back from “power saver”. If you recently used this setting, be sure to set it back, because you will experience performance issues otherwise.

The time may come when you too will want to change the file extension of a file. In windows this can be quite tricky, since it hides the extensions and if you try renaming a text file to “mp3″ you will get the following file: “mysong.mp3.txt”. Here’s the hack to solve your file renaming problem.

Windows Xp users open My Computer or any folder and select “tools -> folder options”. Then, click on the “view” tab and scroll down until you see “Hide extensions for known file types”. Un-check the box next to it and click ok. You should now be able to see, and modify extensions.

Windows Vista users should open Computer or any folder and click on “Organize” in the top bar. Click on “Folder and search options” and then click on the “view tab”. From then on it’s the same, go down until you see “Hide extensions for known file types”, un-check the box and click ok.

A nice feature built in is that if you rename a file, windows automatically highlights the filename, but only that, not the extension. While I do rename file extensions I rename filenames way more often, so a nice touch by Microsoft (for once?).