It’s taken a while for browsers to catch up with the delights of undo. Of course, the need for an undo command only really became pressing once tabbed browsing appeared on the scene.

Before that, you could always return to a site during a session using the Back button, or from session to session by using the browser’s history cache.

Once we gained the ability to view multiple sites concurrently using tabs, the Back button was no longer sufficient. With multiple sites open, it’s all too easy to close one of those tabs and then realize you need that site open after all.

Opera, not surprisingly, was the first to bring the undo concept to the browser. It gave us the ability to undo a closed tab by pressing Ctrl-Alt-Z.

Then it went further and added a multilevel undo in the form of the Trash Can. The Trash Can stores each tab you close during a session, plus every closed popup window. Click the Trash Can at the far right of the Tab Bar and you can open any of these closed items.

Firefox has had tabs all along, but no undo. Due to its support for extensions, though, third-party developers were happy to remedy that omission.

A number of extensions provided basic undo functions, all the way from the single-minded Undo Close Tab to the spectacularly all-inclusive Tab Mix Plus.

The folks at Mozilla have since seen the list and in Firefox 2 you can undo a closed tab by pressing Ctrl-Shift-T. If you already used the keyboard shortcut Ctrl-T to open a new tab, that’s particularly easy to remember.

If you close a series of tabs, you can reopen each of them by pressing Ctrl-Shift-T repeatedly. It’s a LIFO stack (Last In, First Out), so Firefox will open the most recently closed tab first, then the next most recently closed and so on.

Firefox also includes a (less elegantly implemented) version of Opera’s Trash Can: to select from a list of closed tabs, click History —> ‘Recently Closed Tabs’.

Reopening a closed tab also restores that tab’s history, in both Opera and Firefox, so you can browse back though the sites you viewed on that tab.

So where’s the undo closed tab feature in Internet Explorer 7? It’s not there. Microsoft is still playing catch-up with it’s browser.

Up A Notch

Reopening a closed tab is handy, but wouldn’t it be great if you could undo a browser crash or re-display a bunch of sites after you’ve accidentally closed your browser? That’s where crash recovery comes in.

Once again, where Opera leads, the others have followed.

Opera will automatically load your last session exactly as it was – all the tabs and all the windows – if you click Tools —> Preferences —> General and from the Startup menu select ‘Continue from last time’. You’ll no longer have to worry about accidentally closing a bunch of tabs.

Firefox has a similar options: go to Tools —> Options —> Main and in the ‘When Firefox starts’ box, select ‘Show my windows from last time’.

Once again, IE 7 doesn’t quite get it right. There is an options to re-display the currently open tabs, but there’s no way to set this to occur automatically. Instead, you have to remember to do it each time.

1. Open at least two tabs.
2. Click IE’s close button. A dialog will appear, asking whether you wish to close all tabs.
3. Click the ‘Show Options’ button.
4. Tick the ‘Open these the next time I use Internet Explorer’ options and then click ‘Close tabs’.

Firefox and Opera have the ability to recover from a crash. Should your computer or browser crash, the browsers will automatically offer to reload your last session. It’s not fool-proof, but it usually works.

Matching Opera

To match Opera’s graceful undo handling, Firefox and IE 7 both need the help of add-ons. For Firefox, you should install Tab Mix Plus, one of the all-time great Firefox extensions.

Tab Mix Plus provides a huge array of tab options, including a right-click ‘closed tabs list’, as well as it’s own highly flexible crash recovery and sessions saver.

Once installed, navigate to Tools —> ‘Tab Mix Plus Options’ —> Session to find settings to suit your needs.

For Internet Explorer, there’s IE7Pro. This add-on provides a whole bunch of enhancements for IE, including crash recovery and advanced tab management.

Tips

Tweak Firefox
If you like fiddling under your browser’s bonnet, you can manually tweak Firefox’s session restore and crash recovery settings.

Type about:config in the address bar and set the Filter to session.

You’ll see all of Firefox’s session-related settings. Double-click a setting to change it.

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Just a quick note before beginning: this guide has been written for Windows XP (my operating system) and therefore the names of certain options or menus might be different.

Almost every single USB flash drive comes formatted with the FAT file system by default, which allows them to be used by virtually any version of Windows that supports USB.

Although Microsoft doesn’t make it either intuitive or straightforward, you can format a flash drive with the NTFS file system. This gives you the added benefit of a robust file system and a smaller allocation unit, which makes smaller files occupy less space on large flash drives (why NTFS is better than FAT).

In addition, you can take advantage of NTFS compression to create additional effective space on the flash drive or enable the Encrypting File System for added security.

Unfortunately, all good things come at a price and this statement is no different for the NTFS file system. The price you will pay for NTFS features is slower copying times (about 1.5x for USB 1.1 and 2x for USB 2.0), even without encryption or compression enabled.

To enable compression for the entire flash drive:

1. Open My Computer, right-click the flash drive and select ‘Properties’.
2. Tick the box that says ‘Compress drive to save disk space’ in the bottom box and click OK
3. In the ‘Confirm Attribute Changes’ dialog box, keep the default ‘Apply changes to [drive letter]:\, subfolder and files’ and click OK.

You can also enable or disable compression for single files and/or folders, which is the only option for encryption.

To start either procedure:

• Right-click the file or folder and select ‘Properties’ and then click the ‘Advanced’ tab
• You can now tick either Compression or Encryption. Make your choice, click OK and see step 3 above.

Although you can’t enable both compression and encryption on the same file or folder, you could compress one set of files or folders and encrypt a different set.

With Windows XP’s default settings, NTFS isn’t included on the Windows format tool’s list of file systems, but you can add the option by changing the default on the ‘Policy’ tab for the flash drive from ‘Optimize for quick removal’ to ‘Optimize for performance’, as illustrated here.

Although you must have ‘Optimize for performance’ ticked to add the ‘NTFS format’ option, if you wish you can change back to the default after formatting. However, either policy gives the same time for copying files to the flash drive because apparently XP only enables the write cache for fixed USB drives.

If you frequently swap files on and off your flash drive(s), you should check out Microsoft USB Flash Drive Manager. This freeware program requires the .NET Framework 1.1, but won’t install if you have .NET Framework 2.0 or later (weird, eh?).

The solution/workaround to this problem is to temporarily uninstall the later version of .NET Framework, install version 1.1, install USB Flash Drive manager and then reinstall the later .NET Framework.

And so ends this article on Fine-tuning your flash drive.

If you have any questions, comments or something was unclear, leave a comment or contact me on my site.

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“It prompts me to allow or deny every two minutes!” Not true! While Vista does have a security feature that prompts you to allow certain things, it is no where near annoying as commercials make it look.

Pretty much anything involving altering your computer (installing/uninstalling programs, connecting to the internet via a non-browser program, deleting important files, etc.) prompts the allow/deny popup.

But for running your programs, saving your files, and pretty much everyday computer-use stuff, you won’t be seeing much of the allow/deny prompt. But if you’re annoyed by the prompt, you can very easily turn it off and it will never bother you again.

“It crashes a lot! There’s Blue Screens of Death EVERYWHERE! AHH!!” Also not true! Unlike XP and the Windows’ before it, Vista does NOT crash often.

I’ve been running Vista for months now and the only time I’ve seen it crash was when I overloaded my graphics card by playing a game that didn’t support it.

Furthermore, the blue screen of death is more like the blue screen of reboot these days. A simple reboot usually fixes whatever caused the pretty blue screen.

“It stole from Mac OS X! Bill Gates is a pirate!” Not really true. The biggest similarities between OS X (which is really 4 different Operating Systems) and Vista are the quick search and sidebar.

First of all, Vista didn’t steal the quick search from OS X. It might have taken the concept of an instant search (which I find to be faster than OS X’s anyway) and recreated it, but it certainly didn’t steal the technology.

Then theres the sidebar, which lets you dock little widgets on the side of your screen, or let them hover around on your desktop.

OS X has a very similar feature, but again its more of concept recreated for Windows than it is stolen from OS X.

This might sound like a case of “well technically its borrowing, not stealing”, but its not that at all.

The fact of the matter is that OS X and Vista share similar concepts and each does it differently. If companies didn’t do that, we’d all be using the Nexus (also known as “World Wide Web”) browser.

So in conclusion, some of Vista’s rumors are true, and some aren’t. Microsoft is usually pretty good with fixing problems when they release Service Packs, so hopefully most, if not all, of Vista’s bugs and problems will be cleaned up by the SP.

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What happens when a key driver goes missing or a system disk fails? How would you go about recovering the system and especially, all your precious data?

Problem: How do you recover a damaged Vista system?

There are basically two ways to recover a damaged Windows Vista system: the installation DVD or the Windows Recovery Environment (WinRE).

Solution #1: Use your installation DVD to boot up your system.

This is the simplest method. All you have to do is locate your installation DVD and use it to boot up your damaged system. This launches the Windows Vista installation.

Don’t worry, you’re not going to reinstall Vista. All you want is to get to the “Install now” screen.

The process begins by launching the Windows Preinstallation Environment (Windows PE), a simplified version of Windows that runs in memory only and is designed to replace DOS. Then it presents a screen which asks for three things:

• Language to install
• Time and currency format
• Keyboard or input method

Making a selection and clicking Next will bring you to the “Install now” screen. What you’re looking for is the two options in the lower left corner of the screen:

• What to know before installing Windows
• Repair your computer

Clicking “Repair your computer” will move you to another screen that lets you choose your existing system partition. When you click Next, you’ll get a series of choices for system repair. From there on, just follow the prompts.

Solution #2: Use the WinRE console to diagnose and repair the problem.

The problem with using the installation DVD is that you might not always have the disk on hand. If you want to make sure your system is always running but don’t want to depend on the installation media, then you can use WinRE.

The WinRE console is new to Windows Vista and is specifically designed to support the recovery or repair of a system. It is based on WinPE and offers features such as:

• Automatic diagnosis and repair of boot problems with the Startup Repair tool
• A centralized platform for advanced recovery tools

You can even use WinRE to reinstall Windows without damaging your data, since the image-based setup Vista uses protects data during an upgrade process.

The ideal way to install WinRE is to create two disk partitions as you install Vista on your system: one for Vista and one for WinRE.

This way, WinRE will be accessible if you run into system disk problems and Vista won’t start. The WinRE partition only requires 1GB of space, since WinRE is a very small system. Both partitions must be primary and active.

To install WinRE, you have to create a system image that you can install on your system.

For this, you’ll need the Windows Automated Installation Kit, which kit gives you the tools you need to customize a WinPE image and turn it into a WinRE image.

Once the image is ready, you simply apply it to your WinRE partition. Full instructions for this operation are located in this step by step.

Once you’re done, you’ll never be caught off guard if things go wrong on your Vista PC.

Did you find this article useful? Why not visit the authors site today.

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In this article, I’ll be covering a few of the most popular rumors. Feel free to email me rumors you’ve heard (at toxicityj@gmail.com) and I’ll gladly update this article and reveal the truth behind the rumor.

“You’ll need to buy a new computer for Vista, because your computer isn’t good enough” This one might be true if you haven’t upgraded in a while.

For example, if you’re like my mom who lives off of 128 megs of RAM and uses the cheapest graphics card Dell could find, then you’ll need to buy a new computer (or invest a few hundred and upgrade your RAM and graphics card, which is very easy to do).

But if you’ve been good to your computer and have a nice chunk of RAM (512MB required, 1GB recommended), a decent processor (800MHz required, 1GHz recommended), and DVD ROM drive (required), you’ll be fine (I would suggest going for the recommended rather than the required, but that’s your choice).

In the long run, if your computer isn’t up to date as far as specs go, you’ll probably be dishing out maybe $200-$300 in upgrades.
“Nothing works on Vista! UGH!” While “Nothing” might be a overstatement, it is true that Vista has a few backward compatibility issues (meaning it has a few issues running things that worked fine on XP, ME, 2000, 98, etc.).

In fact, most programs work fine on Vista but there are some that simply don’t work. Hopefully, this will change with the release of a Service Pack. So if you want to be 99% sure that your programs are going to work on Vista, wait for the SP to come out before you upgrade. Or, just grab Vista and live without a program or two for a while.

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