Tabbed browsing is one of the best features of the Firefox web browser (www.mozilla.com/firefox). However, moving between the tabs using the mouse can be a cumbersome process. A quicker way to cycle through the tabs is using the CTRL-TAB keyboard shortcut. By using this shortcut, you can cycle through the Firefox tabs in order (much like using the ALT-TAB shortcut to cycle through Windows applications). Another useful shortcut is CTRL-T, which will create a new (blank) Firefox tab. (more…)

I have a few questions regarding reliability of USB flash drivers. Firstly, can the drive be damaged by removing the drive from the computer without first stopping the device? Whenever I remove the drive I always use the Safely Remove Hardware feature to ‘Safely remove USB Mass Storage Device - Drive (E:)’. Once the drive has been stopped, a message appears informing ‘The ‘USB Mass Storage Device’ device can now be safely removed from the system’. The wording of the message implies that removing the drive at any other time is not safe. Sometimes I shut down Windows (or have Windows hibernating) forgetting my flash drive is still connected. Could this damage the drive? Secondly, how durable and reliable are these flash drives? They are still more expensive than hard-disk drives, but I feel inclined to think since they have no moving parts they should be less prone to failure. Is this assumption correct, and would you recommend flash drives for backups? (more…)

About the same time my computer was infected with a Trojan horse virus I could not clean, a website appeared [URL omitted from publication] claiming it could help fix the problem. Is this website legitimate? (more…)

Before selling my aging Windows 98 machine I want to make sure all my personal data is removed. Can you provide some guidance on procedures to remove the data? (more…)

If you are looking for information on a particular item or topic, one of the best places to find information is Wikipedia: en.wikipedia.org. Wikipedia is a free-content encyclopaedia, allowing visitors to add and modify content within the encyclopaedia. This gives the content a degree of peer-review, meaning should something be incorrect, it is likely someone will correct the inaccuracies. Wikipedia contains a huge number of articles, on both common and obscure topics. Next time you want to find out more about something make sure you check out Wikipedia! (more…)