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.

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Here is a simple trick to shutdown Windows quickly from a shortcut on your desktop rather than going through the Start menu.

Right-Click on the desktop and click ‘New‘ and then click on ‘Shortcut‘. When prompted to fill in ‘Type the location of the item‘, enter ‘shutdown -s -t 00‘ . Click Next and enter a name for the shortcut. You can now shutdown Windows through the shortcut. The -t flag lets you set the time lapse in seconds.

Changing the ‘-s‘ to ‘-r‘ will cause the shortcut to restart Windows instead of shutting down.

This may interest you: How to shutdown Windows almost instantly

Most people open an application in windows through the Start menu or by clicking on a shortcut on their desktop. Starting an application from Start menu takes a few clicks and as for the desktop, it could be hidden if you have an open folder.

Windows XP has a way, that many people are not aware of, by which you can quickly access your most used applications and documents from any folder.

The trick is to add a links toolbar. Here is how you do it.

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Keyboard shortcuts are definitely great time savers. Here is a list of shortcuts for Windows, Word, Excel and Outlook for you to use. Of course, it wouldn’t be possible for an average person to remember all the shortcuts but then you wouldn’t need to. It would be enough if you remember the ones that you would use most frequently. I would suggest that you take a print out of these shortcuts and keep them handy.
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Often, the quickest way to open a built-in Windows XP application or utility is to use the command prompt or Run box, instead of clicking through a series of menus.

To get to the Run box, choose Start>Run. To get to the command prompt, choose Start>Run, type command, and press Enter. For example, to open Notepad, at the Run box or a command prompt, type notepad.exe and press Enter.

You can run dozens of Windows XP utilities and programs this way. Of course, one can’t remember or rather doesn’t need to remember all the shortcuts. It would be enough to remember the shortcuts to utilities that you use frequently.

Here’s a list of shortcuts to some applications and utilities that people use often.

netstat.exe - Active Connections Utility - Lets you view information about your current network settings.

hdwwiz.cpl - Add Hardware Wizard

appwiz.cpl - Add or Remove Programs

ntbackup.exe - Backup

calc.exe - Calculator
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Firefox is one of the best browsers around and is a pleasure to work with. You can speed up your browsing by learning some shortcut ways to work with Firefox that besides being extremely convenient also save a lot of time. Here are some of the shortcuts that you would do well to remember.

• You can middle-click (clicking the middle button or the scroll-wheel of mouse) on the Back, Forward, and Home buttons in the toolbar to open the corresponding link(s) in a new tab(s). This is very useful if you want to see the other page without leaving your current page.
• You can place the input cursor in the search bar by pressing Ctrl-K or Ctrl-E. This avoids taking your hands of the keyboard to click the search bar with your mouse before you enter the search term.
• Normally we enter the search term in the search bar and press enter to start the search. This will cause the search result to load in the current page. Alternatively, you can hit Alt-Enter to force the search result to appear in a new tab. Again a very useful shortcut to remember.
• If you want to search the web for a word or phrase that is on a webpage, you can select the word or phrase by dragging across it (You can select a single word by just double-clicking on the word) and then right-clicking on the selection. This will bring up the context menu where you will see a Search for “Whatever you selected” item. If you click on this item, Firefox will perform a search for the selected text on Google.
• To quickly search for a particular word in a webpage, you can bring up the Quickfind toolbar by just pressing ‘/’ key.

You can find some more useful Shortcuts for Firefox here.