The Lounge #1: Windows Shortcuts

As this is the first post here, i thought i should post some easy stuff.

Some of you may know these shortcuts, others may not. All my tutorials will be categorised into 3 different sections, "The Lounge" for beginner, "Rec Zone" for intermediate and "Pro Series" for advanced tutorials.

Alrighty a quick run-down of all the hidden key combination shortcuts i know of in Windows;

• Winkey + Pause|Break = Brings up system properties window. Especially useful when you want to find your system specs or access things like Environment variables or other advanced system properties.
• WinKey + D = Shows the desktop by minimising every window.
• WinKey + E = Opens Windows Explorer. (Opened folder by default is My Computer)
• WinKey + F = Opens a new search window.
• WinKey + G = Brings any desktop gadgets into view (Windows 7 only)
• WinKey + L = Locks the computer (Unknown effect if user has no password)
• WinKey + P = Opens the Multi-monitor switch window. (Windows 7 Only)
• WinKey + U = Opens "Ease of Access Center" for things like magnifier, OnScreen Keyboard etc.
• WinKey + R = Opens the "Run" dialogue. (Note: This is very useful if explorer.exe crashes and you have no way of getting your desktop and taskbar back. Just press WinKey + R then type "explorer.exe" without the quotes and it should reload your desktop and your taskbar)
• WinKey + TAB = Brings up the flipbook alternative to "Alt + TAB" (Windows Vista and 7 only)
• WinKey + M = Similar to WinKey + D. (Actually i can't find the difference)
• PrintScreen|SysRq (Also abbreviated to "PrntScrn" on some keyboards) = Takes a screenshot of what is displayed on your screen at the time of pressing the key. Note: It will only copy a screenshot to your clipboard, so you will have to open an image program like Paint or Photoshop to paste the captured screenshot. Also note; It does not capture your mouse pointer and may not work at all in some programs/games.

Now for this next tip, not everyone knows this about windows, and i'm pretty sure this feature is on other operating systems aswell.

• Double clicking a word in a text document or anywhere where text is selectable will select the full word (any characters like _ and . and , etc will also be inlcuded in the word if they dont have a space before/after them. Go ahead try it on one of these words. Try_it_on_this and you will see it selects all of the "Try_it_on_this" because there are no space. (Note: Some text editors like the one i'm using to write this post work differently and don't select any special characters when double clicking the words)
  
• Related to the above, Triple clicking a word will select the entire paragraph or section of text where the word is located. In the editor i'm using now, it's smart enough to know that when i triple click, it selects only the current paragraph. Again some text editors may act differently.

I find myself using triple click at times when i need to select multiple paragraphs at a time or another example is if you want to select a serial number in notepad you might be able to triple click and select the entire serial at once instead of clicking and dragging the mouse to highlight the characters. I know that sounds like a very small shortcut but it is very useful to know.

And finally i wanted to share another little shortcut that i discovered a while ago;
In Windows Vista and Windows 7, you can add your own folder shortcuts to the left hand pane in Windows Explorer by simply dragging the folder into the "Favorites" section. At the moment because i have just recently installed Windows 7, i've only got steamapps because i access that folder daily and its much quicker than opening Program files, then steam, then steamapps...

Well that's all i'll be posting on The Lounge for this week, stay tuned :)