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A Simple Trick To Resize Icons And Text Easily In Windows 7

Posted: 22 Apr 2011 09:00 AM PDT

A very simply trick you may not know about is the ability to easily resize text and elements in Windows with a simple shortcut: hold the Ctrl key while scrolling the mouse wheel up or down.

Here are some examples of what happens when you do this in particular location:

On the desktop: Icons grow or shrink accordingly.
In a Windows Explorer folder: File view is toggled between icons/detail/list views.
In a browser: Font sizes grow or shrink.

I have tested these cases in Windows 7, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it works in other versions of Windows (or other OS’s) as well.

Are there any additional locations you have utilized this functionality?

Post from: PCMech. Helping Normal People Get Their Geek On And Live The Digital Lifestyle.

A Simple Trick To Resize Icons And Text Easily In Windows 7

Retro Friday: Things You Can Do Museum-Style With Older Computers

Posted: 22 Apr 2011 07:00 AM PDT

There are more than a few computer collectors who have a dedicated room where all their vintage boxes are set up for display. I mean, if you’re gonna collect the things, you might as well make them conversation pieces. This is similar to what coin-op arcade machine collectors do. Rarely do the games actually get played, but they do leave them turned on when company comes over because it’s just interesting to see them in action.

The goal here is just to make the display show something interesting so the box isn’t just sitting there with a blank gray screen.

Here are a few time-honored favorites. The difficulty of each depends on availability and programming skills required, if any.

Flying Windows

Using the Flying Windows screen saver is to get that "Oh my God, it’s Flying Windows" reaction. Yes, it’s tacky and yes, everyone hated it – but that’s the whole point. Flying Windows is one of those things that evokes an affectionate reaction from those who see it and remember where it came from.

This screen saver to the best of my knowledge made its first appearance in Windows 3.1 and its last in Windows ME. When Windows 2000 and XP were introduced, Flying Windows was nowhere to be found. It’s rumored that it was left out of NT5-based Windows due to the fact so many people loathed it originally – but it’s unknown whether that’s actually true or not.

It should be noted that the WingDings (a preinstalled font) is required in order for Flying Windows to work correctly. What this means is simply to not remove WingDings from your Fonts folder.

Flying Toasters

flying_toasters Originally made for the Mac in 1989 but was made for Windows shortly thereafter, After Dark’s Flying Toasters was the screen saver for many. Contrary to how everyone hated Flying Windows, everyone loved Flying Toasters.

For whatever reason, seeing toasters fly across your screen along with pieces of toast just seems to make total sense when it comes to computers. Don’t ask me why because I don’t have an answer. All I know is that people like seeing flying toasters on a computer screen and have never stopped liking them.

Mac users can still download this. It even has Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard support.

Bad Dog

This was probably After Dark’s second most popular screen saver after Flying Toasters. It involves a cartoon dog appearing on your screen and virtually wrecking it. This includes scratching off fleas, digging holes and so on.

Yes, there is an option to turn the sound off.

ASCIIQuarium

ASCIIQuarium is literally nothing more than a Perl script, and obviously runs easiest on Linux and UNIX machines. Being it’s a script, it can also be run direct from a terminal.