What are your best, most priceless tips/tweaks?

As I was recently updating my 'bookmarks/favotires' list in IE to replace Spychecker.com with some sites provided by Mike Healan in one of his posts here https://www.wilderssecurity.com/showthread.php?t=6182;start=0#lastPost I was suddenly aware of how helpful a tip/tweak I had come across a while back had been. It was one of those real 'lifesaver' kinds of tips/tweaks. It's easy to do; uses components already in Windows, and saves hours and hours of time and heartache if/when a reinstall is ever needed without a recourse to a full backup. And since I'd been running Windows for quite a while without ever having come across it, I thought there might be some other folks out there in the same boat who might benefit from me posting it here. The next logical step was to start this thread and invite other members to share from their 'treasure chest' as well. The tip/tweak I'm talking about is simply to routinely access the 'Export Favorite' utility that can be found in IE by clicking on "File>Import and Export...>Next>Export Favorites". I make sure that I designate a folder that's not on my main hard drive/partition, and do it at least once a week.

I can't really describe how much time it saves to not have to start over trying to reconstruct hundreds or even thousands of favorites. In conjunction with this, I also have set up a favorites shortcut on my quick launch bar by going to the newly saved html file, right clicking on it, choosing the send to desktop/create shortcut option, then dragging it down to the quick launch bar. (I'm sure there are other ways to accomplish this but this one works best for me). I am also able to choose any icon I want for this quick launch shortcut so I can customize it the way I want to. One of the advantages of having this shortcut to favorites is that it expands all of the favorites categories automatically, and sometimes, if I just can't remember where I placed something in my favorites, I can click on this shortcut and scroll down one long page, instead of having to go in and out of a million different subcategories. Sometimes it's been able to help me find a bookmark that I just couldn't find trying the more traditional route. So this is a helpful tip in its own right. (As an added plus, it alphabetizes every favorite and highligts the most recently used ones as well, making it a little easier to spot a recently added one.)

I can't wait to see what everybody else has to share!

sk

 

Hi sk,

This is a (kind of) related program that makes it easier for you when you're scrolling down that list. It makes it easier to recognize links when the favicons are present. IE only, unfortunately: http://www2.sunysuffolk.edu/mandias/tips/favorg.html

Regards,

Pieter