History Repeating

Sydney Morning Herald

Saturday June 10, 2000

Helen Bradley

Finding your way back to sites you forgot to bookmark is easy, writes Helen Bradley.

Netscape's History list is a great way of tracking sites you know you've visited recently but have forgotten to bookmark. Every page you visit is recorded in the History file for a specified period before it is removed.

You can view the list by choosing Communicator, Tools, History. You can sort the History list by any of the visible columns, simply by clicking the column heading. Click the heading once again to reverse the sort order.

To search the list, choose Edit, Search History List. Select the item to search on and the parameters to use from the dropdown lists.

When you get a list of matching pages you can go to any of them by double-clicking its name in the list. If you have plenty of room on your hard drive and you'd like to see more days in the list in future, choose Edit, Preferences, Navigator, and under History increase the number of pages in the setting.

You can save your History list by choosing File, Save As, type a filename with the .htm extension and later you can open it as a clickable list of sites in your browser.

Disabling autoplay

A few weeks ago I explained you can stop a CD from autoplaying if you hold the Shift key as you insert it. To disable the autoplay feature indefinitely choose Start, Settings, Control Panel, System, Device Manager tab. Double click your CD's name, choose Settings, disable the "Auto insert notification" checkbox and click OK.

Selecting multiple Mac files

To select a number of files in a Mac window, hold the Shift key as you click each file in turn to select it. Alternatively, if the files you want are all side by side, click and drag your mouse over all the files.

Reader tip

This week's tip for closing down Windows programs comes from Matthew Petrucci of Homebush, NSW. "You can close any open program by pressing the ALT-F4 key combination. Repeat it to close each open program in turn and press it once more to shut down your computer. CONTROL-F4 works in a similar way to close open windows inside a program."

Published tips earn their authors a copy of Norton SystemWorks 2000 (Standard Edition) for Windows, or for Mac users Norton Utilities 2000 and Norton AntiVirus 6, courtesy of Symantec Australia.

Submit your original tips (100 words or less) to icontips@helenbradley.com