According to the speed-reading gurus, one of the main reason people tend to read slowly is that, they read one word at a  time or very small blocks of words. Added to that, our eyes frequently go back to the previously read block of words and we reread them,which slows down our speed significantly.

Spreeder is a free online reading tool that can help increase your reading speed.

Using spreeder is easy. Just copy the text you want to read and paste it in the text box in spreeder and click use. The spreeder player is now ready. Click on the play button to start reading. What spreeder does is that, instead of showing you the full text, it flashes blocks of text and you just need to keep reading the text that appears. Since the text appear and disappear fast, you wouldn’t have time to read each word separately. You will be forced to read the entire block at one go. Also, your eyes can’t wander back to the text you have already read.

Spreeder offers quite a few ways to customize how you want to read the text. You can control the number of words that appear in each block; the default is one word. You might find that it is difficult to understand the content if you read one word at a time. So to start with you can set the number of words to 3 or 4. As you gain practice you can increase it to higher numbers. Spreeder lets you change the speed ( words per minute), the font size, the window size and so on.

While copying the text, opening up spreeder.com  and pasting it into the text box is not difficult, there is a much easier way to use spreeder. Spreeder Bookmarklet.

Just add the spreeder bookmarklet to your browser bookmarks toolbar. Now any time you want to spreed read, just select the text and click on the spreeder bookmarklet. A new windows instantly opens with spreeder preloaded with your selected text.

• It instantly doubles your desktop space with buying a larger monitor.
• You can work with two maximised windows at the same time.
• If you are working on a tool like Photoshop, which has lots of toolbars and panels, you could move the tools to the second monitor and have a large work area on your main monitor.
• If you need to compare two documents, you can open each of the documents in a different monitor.
• When browsing your picture library, you can view the thumbnails on one monitor, and use the second monitor to view the pictures full screen.
• If you need to stay on top of your e-mail while working, you can keep your inbox open on one monitor and work on the other.

These are just a few suggestion but actually how you use the dual monitors is only limited by your imagination. Now lets see how to set up the secondary monitor. Make sure that both your Laptop and the monitor are switched off. Connect the monitor to your Laptop by connecting it to the VGA or DVI connector, typically found on the rear of your laptop computer. Now switch on your laptop and the monitor. You will notice that initially, only one of the two monitors is activated. You can usually switch between the monitors by pressing the hotkeys in your laptop. Normally, it is a combination of the Fn key with another key with an image of a monitor on it (normally found on one of the function keys). To bring on the display on both the monitors you’ll need to adjust your display settings by following these steps:

1. Right-Click on an empty area on your desktop. On the context menu that pops-up click on Properties and on the resulting ‘Display Properties‘ window, go to the Settings tab.



2. Click the monitor icon labeled 2, and then select the Extend my Windows desktop onto this monitor checkbox.
3. If necessary, drag the monitor icons so that they are arranged in the same way as the monitors on your desk. Clicking on the Identify button will help you know which monitor is 1 and which monitor is 2.



4. If need be, change the resolution of your secondary monitor to the most appropriate settings. You change the resolution of both the monitors independently.
5. Click Apply. Windows XP will activate your new monitor.
6. Finaly, click OK.

Once your monitor is set up, you can use your mouse to grab the title bar of a window and drag it to your new display. Make sure that the window your are trying to drag is not maximised, in which case you will not be able to drag it. To be able to drag it, first double-click on the title bar and then drag it. It may take you a while to get used to working on dual monitors, but once you do, it will forever change the way you work with your computer. Be creative and experiment with the sizing of application windows and what information you can keep in constant view while doing multiple tasks.

While there are several alternatives that your recipients can adopt to view the file, here is a simple solution that you can follow that will save your recipients the hassle.

When you send an email with such attachments, just mark a copy to ipaper@scribd.com, i.e. add ipaper@scribd.com as a cc: recipient. Your recipients will then get a second email message that contains links they can click to view your attachments as iPaper, which is a sort of online PDF alternative and all anyone needs to view them is a browser.

You don’t have to be registered with Scribd.com to use the above feature but If you have an account, the converted documents will be stored in your account and you can view them later. The only hitch is that the iPaper documents are not editable and are not always exact representations of the original. But the pros definitely outweigh the cons.

Say you have a list of items in a plain text file and you wanted to sort them alphabetically. There is no way you can do that opening the file in either Notepad or Wordpad. You could workaround the problem by importing the text file into an Excel file or any other spreadsheet application, sort it, and export the file back to the text format.

But that is way too much work for getting such a simple task done and what if the computer you are working on does not have a spreadsheet application installed. Sortmylist.com is a free online tool that can help you manipulate your plain text data in several ways. There is no registration or login involved. Just go to sortmylist.com and you can start using the tool. The tool has an intuitive help built into it. Just place your mouse pointer on any of the choices available and on the right side you will see a short description of what that choice would do and a simple example illustrating the effect of the choice.

Sortmylist lets you sort lists in various ways, like alphabetical sort, name sort, address sort, email sort, href sort etc. And it does quite a smart job of sorting them. For instance, while sorting email Ids, it sorts them by the domain name so that emails belonging to the same domain are grouped together. Similarly, HREFs are alphabetized by what the user sees and not what the URL is.

Before you begin to sort any list, remember to select the separator or delimiter that separates each item in your list. You can choose from the most commonly used separators like comma, new line, space, tab etc or you could choose a custom separator. While sorting is one of the stronger points of Sortmylist, it can do a few other tasks too, like changing the case of the text and cleaning up the text. Cleaning up includes, removing non-alphanumeric characters, white-spaces, duplicates etc.

In fine, sortmylist.com could be a very useful tool when you want to manipulate text.

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If you are a Gmail user, you might already know that there are no folders in Gmails. Instead of folders, you organize them by labels. Even all the built-in views like inbox, sent mail, draft, trash etc are also labels.

Here is how it works. Just press down on the wheel, like kind of clicking with the wheel. You will see a two directional or four directional arrow (depending on the type of scrolling possible in the current application) appear at the point where you clicked indicating that you are in the scrolling mode. Now, to scroll, just move your mouse in the direction you want to scroll: Up, Down, Left or Right.  The farther you move away from point where you clicked the scroll-wheel, the faster the scroll speed. It is really much more convenient than constantly rolling the wheel.

To stop scrolling, move the mouse back to the original position where you clicked. One unique possibility of this method is that you can even scroll diagonally, if the view in the application you are working on, needs both vertical and horizontal scrolling. To come out of the scrolling mode, just left-click your mouse.

This trick works in most applications including almost all web browsers. So stop scrolling and start power- scrolling.

 Desk Drive a free tool that offers a very quick and convenient  way of accessing your removable media. Once you have Desk Drive up and running (shows up on the system tray), as soon as you insert a pen drive or a CD, a shortcut to the drive is automatically created on the Desktop. You can then easily open the drive anytime through the shortcut. Remove the media and the shortcut goes away.

Right-clicking on the system tray icon brings up a settings window where you can choose which drives to monitor.

A very simple tool, but can save you quite a bit of time and clicks.

Note: Desk Drive needs .Net Framework 2.0 to work.

Download Desk Drive.

Most of the time all those extra space reserved for the recycle bin goes wasted. For example, for a 500GB drive, the default space allocated would be 50GB (10%). You would hardly ever need that kind of size for the Recycle Bin. To prevent wastage, you can reduce the space allocated for recycle bin to whatever amount you think is right. Here is how to do it.

Right-click the Recycle Bin and choose Properties from the pop-up menu. If you only have one drive, or if you have multiple drives and want them to all have the same setting, just slide the slider (under the Global tab) to the left until you get the percentage you think is appropriate. Say, if you have a 500GB drive, 2% or 10 GB should be fine (or even 1%-5GB) should be sufficient.

If you have multiple drives and you want a different percentage of space reserved for each drive, click the Configure Drives Independently radio button. Then click each drive’s tab at the top of the dialog box and adjust the slider for each drive.

Apart from speed, Copy Handler offers some interesting options. Like for instance, when you copy a folder containing lot of files, while pasting you can filter the files that you want copied based on the extension, size, date etc. So you don’t have to waste time selecting the correct files, just copy all the files and choose the desired filter while pasting.

Copy Handler allows full-control over the copying/moving process by allowing you to pause, resume, restart and cancel the process. It can even automatically resume all unfinished operations when system starts. Copy Handler limits count of simultaneously processing tasks (copyings/movings). The tasks are set into a queue and are processed in order it was inserted into queue.

Copy Handler has lots of settings that you can configure according to your requirements. Once you install it, spend a few minutes exploring the various options and you would be on your way to working faster and smarter.

Download Copy Handler