Techie Hacks

I always crave for extra bit of time to finish that long pending job. Summing up the time that gets wasted on little things while working the computer, found it amounts to be quite large. Waiting for a huge pdf file to open, system taking forever to boot, spend hours together searching the internet etc.

Here are the 10 tips for techie to save those extra minutes to get more things done:

1. Minimize the number of items on Windows desktop screen: I used to have my desktop screen completely filled with desktop icons, documents, etc. The number of items on the windows desktop is directly proportional to the amount time it takes to boot. Removing some of the icons not used since long did help reduce the booting time.
2. Use hardrive partitions cleverly: Moving some of the data and files from C drive to another partition did free up some space. Also, made Windows run faster by improving the data seek times significantly. Having C drive hold only the OS and essential applications is a good idea to make Windows run faster.
3. Keep only necessary applications: Installing only the applications that I really needed and uninstalling the rest helped keep my system clean.
4. Control startup applications: Many applications starting up can increase your boot time. Disable the unnecessary programs to improve boot up time. Common applications that I had to disable Yahoo Messenger, MSN Messenger, Skype, Real player etc. However, make sure to not disable antivirus and desktop firewall applications.
5. Chuck Adobe PDF reader: It takes quite a long time to open a PDF document through Adobe pdf reader. Foxit reader is a free PDF reader which incredibly faster because of its small size (just 2.5 MB). It can downloaded from here
6. Use Firefox: Firefox with its addons called extensions save significant amount of time while browsing the Internet.
7. PDF download: While browsing the web to research on a topic. I often come across PDF files. While clicking on these links, I need to wait until the PDF gets download first and then wait some more time while the PDF reader loads. This not only wastes time but also crashes the browser. The Firefox’s PDF download extension that allows me to choose what to do with a PDF file. Download it, view it with an external viewer or view it as HTML. I particularly like the “view it as HTML”. It allows me to view the pdf on the browser without opening a pdf reader.
8. Foxclocks: This displays the local time zones around the world. I have this on my status bar. Since I need to interact with people around the world, this helps me save time from looking up the time on the internet.
9. Sage: I used to visit several news websites to keep myself updated with the latest news. I had individual go to these sites and read news. Sage is a lightweight feed reader pulls all the latest news from these websites and presents it all in one window. In addition, I can choose to read just the headlines from these websites and read what interests me.Therefore saving me lots of time.
10. IE tab: Some websites do not get loaded as expected on a non-IE browser. IE tab extension allows you to use the embedded IE engine with Firefox to render these websites correctly.