Windows 7 all in one for dummies PHẦN 7 pptx

bowl- ✦ Windows Live Search search.live.com from Microsoft — which was merging with Microsoft Bing bing.com as this book went to press — covers much of the same ground as Google, althou

Book V Chapter 4

Bookmarking with the Fox

Bookmarking with the Fox

Firefox handles bookmarks differently from Internet Explorer

The easiest way to understand Firefox bookmarks? Start with the Unsorted

Bookmarks folder

If you hit a Web site that you want to bookmark, follow these steps:

1 Click the Bookmark icon on the right edge of the Address bar (Refer

to Figure 4-2.)

This step bookmarks the page and puts the bookmark in a kind of All Other folder named Unsorted Bookmarks

2 If you’d rather stick your bookmark in a place where you can find it

later or assign a tag to it, double-click the bookmark star on the right

edge of the address bar.

Firefox opens its Edit This Bookmark dialog box, shown in Figure 4-5

3 Type any tags you want to associate with the bookmark in the Tags

box, at the bottom.

Tags help you find things on the Address bar For example, if you assign

a Conficker tag to the bookmark, typing conf in the address bar brings

up this particular bookmark

on the Bookmark bar, click the down arrow to the right of the Folder box.

Firefox lets you choose the bookmark folder that should contain your new bookmark or create a new folder to hold the bookmark (see Figure 4-6)

518 Bookmarking with the Fox

Figure 4-6:

Add new

folders here

5 If you create a new folder, you can leave it in the Unsorted

Bookmarks folder, but if you want to make it more readily sible from the Bookmarks menu, click and drag the new folder in the Edit This Bookmark dialog box so that the folder appears under the Bookmarks Menu folder.

acces-6 If you want to put the new folder on the Bookmarks toolbar, to the right of the Latest Headlines button, click and drag it to the Bookmarks Toolbar folder (see Figure 4-7).

makes it appear as a button here

Placing a folder under theBookmarks Toolbar folder

After the folder has been created (and, optionally, located on the Bookmarks menu or the Bookmarks toolbar), you can place any book-mark in the folder by double-clicking the bookmark star

Book V Chapter 4

Creating Smart Folders

You can rearrange the buttons on the Bookmarks toolbar by simply clicking

and dragging

Creating Smart Folders

Firefox Smart Folders work much like a saved search You can save searches

of your Bookmarks folders, or of your browsing history in Smart Folders, and

they can be accessed from either the Bookmarks menu or the Bookmarks

toolbar

Here’s how to set up a Smart Folder saved search:

1 In Firefox, choose Bookmarks➪Organize Bookmarks.

The Library appears, as shown in Figure 4-8

2 On the left, choose which folders you want to search.

For example, you can search your browsing history by choosing the History folder, or you can search all bookmarks by choosing All Bookmarks You can also narrow the scope of the saved search by click-ing a lower-level folder, such as News Sites

3 In the upper-right corner, click in the Search box and type the items

you want to locate.

In Figure 4-9, I search All Bookmarks for the term windows.

4 Just below the Search box, click Save.

Firefox prompts you for a name for your saved search, er, Smart Folder

5 Type a name for your search and click OK.

Firefox creates a folder with the name you provided in Step 5 and puts the folder on the Bookmarks menu

520 Working with RSS Feeds — the Real Way

The new Smart Folder acts just like any other folder If you open the folder on the Bookmarks menu, or click the button on the Bookmarks toolbar, Firefox runs the search and delivers the result

Working with RSS Feeds — the Real Way

In Chapter 3 of this minibook, I talk about RSS feeds in Internet Explorer, but I had to bite my tongue, er, stifle my typing fingers Though IE can handle RSS feeds all by itself, there’s a much better way, using the Web site igoogle.com Firefox makes it easy to add RSS feeds to your own, personal-ized igoogle.com page

Here’s how RSS, or Really Simple Syndication, works — really:

1 A Web site (usually with “newsy” topics, but sometimes just a site that

wants to get noticed) creates a specific kind of file, an RSS feed.

2 When the Web site has, uh, new news, it adds a short new item to the beginning of the RSS feed file and drops the last item off the end.

Typically, the new item is just a few sentences long That keeps the RSS feed short and simple and reasonably up to date

3 If you go to a Web site that maintains an RSS feed, Firefox can tell that

it has an RSS feed, and a little orange box with “radio waves” appears

to the right of the Web page’s address.

You can see an example of the orange radio waves icon on the far right end of the address bar in Figure 4-2, at the beginning of this chapter

4 When you find a site with an RSS feed you want to follow, you

sub-scribe to the feed.

It’s kind of like subscribing to a newspaper or magazine

Book V Chapter 4

Working with RSS Feeds — the Real Way

5 A program on your computer, an RSS reader, periodically looks at the

RSS feeds for all Web pages on your subscription list, and keeps track

of the latest items.

Many different RSS readers are running around If you like, you can use the

RSS readers built into Internet Explorer, Firefox, or Chrome Personally, I

find all of them intrusive and hard to work with My personal choice for an

RSS reader is the iGoogle customized page from Google

Here’s how to set up a custom iGoogle page, with your own RSS reader:

1 If you don’t already have one, go to gmail.com and create a Gmail

account.

Be creative Your name is William Gates, right?

2 In Firefox, go to igoogle.com.

You see a sign-up page like the one shown in Figure 4-10

3 Pick and choose the RSS feeds you want to see, and then click Save.

iGoogle shows you your initial iGoogle home page After you have the page set up, you can add more RSS feed content by using the steps later

522 Working with RSS Feeds — the Real Way

Feel free to use iGoogle as your browser’s home page I do

With an iGoogle account set up, you have everything you need to keep on top of every site on earth Here’s how to start feeding your iGoogle page:

1 In Firefox, navigate to the site that you want to add to your RSS reader.

You see the orange radio waves button to the right of the site’s address

2 Click the radio waves button.

Firefox shows you the latest news items from the site and offers to set

up a subscription to it, as shown in Figure 4-11

4 Choose Add to Google Homepage.

If you’re already signed in to Google, your personal iGoogle home page appears (If you aren’t already signed in, you have to type your user-name and password.) The RSS feed you choose appears in the upper-left corner of the page (see Figure 4-12)

Book V Chapter 4

5 You can click and drag the new RSS feed anywhere on the page.

Every few minutes, iGoogle reaches out to all sites on your iGoogle home page and retrieves the latest news from the sites’ RSS feeds

You can customize the Google home page till the cows come home A series

of tutorials is at google.com/support/websearch/?ctx=web

If you don’t want all of your RSS feeds served on your home page, try the

Google Reader With the Google Reader (reader.google.com), you have

to click one additional time — typically on a Reader widget on your home

page, or a Favorites or Bookmark icon — but the feeds contain more detail,

and you have more control over the layout than with iGoogle

Adding Firefox’s Best Add-Ons

An enormous cottage industry has grown up around Firefox The Firefox

people made it relatively easy to extend the browser itself As a result, tens

of thousands of add-ons cover an enormous range of capabilities

To search for add-ons, mosey over to addons.mozilla.org/en-US/

firefox (see Figure 4-13) You can search for the add-ons recommended by

Firefox itself or look for the most frequently downloaded add-ons

524 Adding Firefox’s Best Add-Ons

Here are some of my favorites:

✦ Adblock Plus blocks ads (What did you expect?) It doesn’t work all the

time — in the free version, you have to choose which ads you want to knock out — but it certainly speeds up download times See a demo at adblockplus.org/en

✦ Greasemonkey adds a customizable scripting language to Firefox

After you install Greasemonkey, you can download scripts from userscript.org that perform an enormous variety of tasks, from tweet assistance to downloading Flickr files

✦ Video Download Helper makes it easy to download videos from the

Web

✦ IETab embeds Internet Explorer inside Firefox If you hit a site that

absolutely won’t work with Firefox, right-click the link, choose Tools➪ Open This Link in IETab, and Internet Explorer takes over a tab inside Firefox

✦ eBay Sidebar watches your trades while you’re doing something else.

✦ DownThemAll “scrapes” all downloadable files on a Web page and

pres-ents them to you so that you can choose which files you want to load Click Start and they all come loading down

down- ✦ NoScript lets you shut down JavaScript programs, either individually or

for a site as a whole Many sites don’t work with JavaScript turned off, but NoScript gives you a fighting chance to pick and choose the scripts you want

Book V Chapter 4

Using Smart Keywords in Firefox

✦ Ghostery keeps an eye on sites that are watching you It tells you when

sites contain “Web beacons” that can be used to track your surfing habits

✦ Linky lets you open all links or images on a page, all at once, either on

separate tabs or in separate windows It’s a helpful adjunct to Google image search

To install the latest edition of any of these add-ons, go to addons.mozilla

org/en-US/firefox and search for the add-on’s name

Using Smart Keywords in Firefox

Imagine being able to type, oh, news obama high tech on the Firefox

address bar and have the Google News site search for news with the words

obama high tech Imagine being able to type tv star trek and have

TV.com search for star trek Or, it might be blogs conficker and have

Technorati search for conficker.

It’s easy Firefox calls them Smart Keywords If you can find a Web site with a

place to perform a search, you can create a Smart Keyword for that search

Here’s an example I need to look up Google images all the time It’s a pain in

the neck to go to google.com and click the Images link, or go to images

google.com and run a search for a specific image Using Smart Keywords,

I can tell Firefox to treat, oh, im as a Smart Keyword That way, whenever

I want to search Google images for, say, pictures of the ASUS Eee PC, I can

type im asus eee pc and see all the hits in no time flat

Here’s how to set up the Smart Keyword:

1 Go to a Web site that has a search box.

In Figure 4-14, I go to images.google.com

2 Right-click inside the search box and choose Add a Keyword for This

Search.

Firefox shows you the New Bookmark dialog box, shown in Figure 4-15

3 In the Name box, type a name that reminds you of the purpose of the

Smart Keyword In the Keyword box, type the Smart Keyword you want to use Click Save.

Your Smart Keyword takes effect immediately Go ahead and try it

526 Using Smart Keywords in Firefox

✓ Searching quickly and effectively

✓ Using Google pet tricks

✓ Posting on newsgroups with Google

Internet searching can be a lonely business You’re out there, on the

Internet range, with nothing but gleaming banner ads and text links to guide you What happens when you want to find information on a specific subject but you’re not sure where to start? What if Google leads you on a wild goose chase? What if the Microsoft Bing “decision engine” takes the wrong turn?

Microsoft has been gunning for Google for years as though it’s the only big search engine in town, but the fact remains that alternatives to Google abound You don’t need to develop a religious attachment to a single search engine Look around and go with what works best for you

We cover Google with near-religious fervor on AskWoody.com

Even though everybody (outside of Redmond) says that Google is the best search engine, not everybody knows just how great Google is Some of the engine’s best parts are also its best-kept secrets That’s a shame, really, because folks who spend time searching the Web for information can save a lot of time and effort if they know how to use Google effectively And, folks who don’t spend time searching the Web for things should

This chapter helps you get the most from Google, yes, but it also shows you many alternatives that can truly come in handy, whether you use Google or something else

528 Understanding What a Search Engine Can Do for You

Understanding What a Search Engine Can Do for You

It ain’t easy being the biggest, baddest search engine around A decade

or so ago, Google (then named BackRub) amounted to little more than a simple idea: If a lot of Web sites point to a particular Web page, the page being pointed to probably contains information that many people would find interesting

Stanford grad students Larry Page and Sergey Brinn, the BackRub founders, scrimped together enough money to build a working prototype in a Stanford dorm room By 1998, the (ahem!) PageRank system, which tries to assign a number that predicts the relevance of a page to a specific query, was gener-ating a lot of interest on campus: Students could find the stuff they wanted without having to slog through endless lists of categories In September

1998, Page and Brinn adopted the name Google and opened a real office with

a cool $1 million in initial capital Truth be told, the “office” was in a garage, which came with a washing machine, dryer, and hot tub They blew all the money on computers — my kind of people

Google has gone from one of the most admired companies on the Web to one of the most criticized — on topics ranging from copyright infringement

to pornography to privacy and censorship — and the PageRank system has been demonized in terms rarely heard since the Spanish Inquisition Few people now believe that PageRank objectively rates the “importance” of a Web page — millions of dollars and thousands of months have been spent trying to jigger the results Like it or not, Google just works The Google

spiders (the programs that search for information), which crawl all over

the Web, night and day, looking for pages, have indexed billions of pages, feeding hundreds of millions of searches a day Other search engines have spiders, too, but Google’s outspider them all

As this book went to press, Google was worth about $140 billion, the verb

to google had been embraced by prestigious dictionaries, the company was

taking on Microsoft mano a mano in many different areas, and many other

search engines offered decent alternatives to the once almighty Google

In this section, I show you several kinds of searches you can perform with Google (and the other search engines) No matter what you’re looking for, a search engine can find it!

Searching for text

One of the main reasons you use a search engine is to find textual tion For example, you might want to find out what the longest river in Asia

informa-is You go to a search engine such as Google (www.google.com) and type

longest river in Asia in the search field Figure 5-1 shows the results of the

Google search for longest river in Asia.

Book V Chapter 5

The number-one result points to the Scottish Indoor Bowls Web site —

surely a definitive source of information about rivers — which, indeed,

delivers the correct answer: The longest river is the Yangtze (known locally

as the Chang Jiang), at 6,380 kilometers, or 3,960 miles, long The second

Google response to the search phrase longest river in asia is an Answers.

com entry for the longest river in Australia Erp The third result leads to the

Microsoft MSN Encarta site, which has a thorough and accurate write-up

If you don’t find what you’re looking for at Google, try one of these alternatives:

✦ Dogpile (www.dogpile.com) automatically combines the search

results of Google, Yahoo! Search, Windows Live Search (formerly MSN Search), and Ask.com (formerly Ask Jeeves), with a proprietary rank-ing formula that frequently gives excellent results As shown in Figure

5-2, the first two Dogpile results for longest river in Asia match Google’s

exactly, right down to the idiosyncratic choice of an indoor lawn ing league as the preeminent authority on river lengths The third result points to a kids’ social studies page, but the fourth gets near the heart of the matter, with a link to the Wikipedia list of rivers by length

bowl- ✦ Windows Live Search (search.live.com) from Microsoft — which was

merging with Microsoft Bing (bing.com) as this book went to press — covers much of the same ground as Google, although I find some of its proclivities irritating For example, in Figure 5-3, you see how Live Search pulls the correct answer (with no details) from the Encarta Encyclopedia, but the next result links to the kids’ social studies page, and the third link opens a list of books at Amazon.com — which isn’t close to what I want

No doubt Microsoft has some sort of deal with Amazon

530 Understanding What a Search Engine Can Do for You

Book V Chapter 5

Understanding What a Search Engine Can Do for You

✦ Yahoo! Search (search.yahoo.com) has an interesting and different

history Years ago, Yahoo! drew much acclaim for its directory — kind of

an Internet Yellow Pages In 2002, Yahoo! bought Inktomi, which had one

of the best search engines at the time, and in 2003 it acquired AltaVista

The Yahoo! search site used the Google search engine until 2004, when

it switched to a new engine based on the offerings from the acquired companies As a result, Yahoo! frequently comes up with results that are significantly different from Google’s — which may be good or bad, as you can see in Figure 5-4

✦ Ask (ask.com), formerly Ask Jeeves, developed a small following

because of its ability to work with natural-language questions My search for the longest river in Asia (see Figure 5-5) yielded the best results of any of the engines I tested

532 Understanding What a Search Engine Can Do for You

I’ve gone back to using Google for almost all my searches If I hit a snag, I’ll try Dogpile Microsoft’s Bing doesn’t seem to offer anything better than Google, although it’s packed with advertising and abounds with offers for overpriced goods And, I would have to be downright desperate to use Microsoft Live Search for images (see the next section)

Searching for images

If you search for images — photos, video clips, drawings — the ties of the various engines may surprise you At least, they surprise me For

capabili-example, if I run the longest river in Asia search through the Google image engine (images.google.com), all the top search hits match my criteria

(see Figure 5-6) That’s quite remarkable

The Windows Live Search image search (images.live.com) presents results in a unique, and very usable, way Unfortunately, as you can see in Figure 5-7, the results have precious little in common with the search terms The first item returned points to an eight-year-old CNN article about the Three Gorges Dam construction project, which was completed two years ago The second result talks about a river in Malaysia, and the next dozen

or more entries are all travel advertisements, some (but not all) of which actually talk about the Yangtze River

Book V Chapter 5

534 Finding What You’re Looking For

The Dogpile image results show a travel brochure, an elementary school site, and a river in South America Blech Yahoo!’s image search relies heav-ily on Flickr, which contains a substantial amount of unverified information Ask’s image search suffers from the same timeliness problems as Windows Live Search

Searching for everything else:

Blogs, news, and more

Other search engines, which rely more on audience participation than on automated scanning and gathering, are worth mentioning Check out these examples:

✦ Technorati (technorati.com) specializes in indexing blog entries It

includes a kind of audience-participation engine that makes it easy to find the most popular blog entries: You’re invited to vote for blog post-ings that ring your chimes The emphasis is on technical topics

✦ Digg (digg.com), like Technorati, relies on user votes to bring news

stories and specific postings to your attention Unlike Technorati, Digg doesn’t scan or index entries — instead, it relies on submissions from the world at large The Digg emphasis is on news, broadly defined, in the areas of technology, science, world, business, videos, entertainment, and games

✦ del.icio.us (del.icio.us) makes it easy for you to bookmark sites and

then leaf through other folks’ bookmarks, with popularity rankings and affinity scores

Finding What You’re Looking For

Google has turned into the 800-pound gorilla of the searching world I know people who can’t even find AOL unless they go through Google True fact.The more you know about Google, the better it can serve you Getting to know Google inside and out has the potential to save you more time than just about anything in Windows proper If you can learn to search for

answers quickly and thoroughly — and cut through the garbage on the Web just as quickly and thoroughly — you can’t help but save time in everything you do

Using the other Google engines

Google searches for much more than text If you run a standard Google search using the search box, with the results shown earlier (refer to Figure 5-1), you’re presented with a number of options above the Google search box:

Book V Chapter 5

Finding What You’re Looking For

✦ Images: I think Google has the best image search engine around I talk

about the image search engine in the “Searching for images” section, earlier in this chapter

✦ Maps: Google Maps continues to amaze me The direct connection here

on the Google main page makes it quite easy to type search terms — no physical address necessary — and zero in on a location, anywhere in the world (see Figure 5-8)

✦ News: Google News aggregates news reports from 4,500 English

lan-guage newspapers, wire agencies, and the like, all over the world It’s completely automated: no human intervention required That’s good and bad It’s good because you get to see a cross-section of how the news is being reported in many different places It’s bad because the automatic distiller ain’t perfect

I like searching Google News because it doesn’t try to “spin” a topic, and the biases that show through tend to be biases shared by English-speaking people worldwide You can sign up for Google News alerts via e-mail or SMS, and there’s an RSS feed, so you don’t need to search for the news — it can find you (See the discussion of iGoogle and RSS feeds

in Book V, Chapter 4.) ✦ Video: Google has pioneered the indexing and lookup of video clips,

from sites all over the Web — YouTube, Picasa, AOL, MTV, NBC, Dailymotion, MySpace, and many more

536 Finding What You’re Looking For

✦ More/Groups: Google owns newsgroups If you’re looking for Internet

newsgroups — the largely unmonitored postings of millions of Internet users, on every topic under the sun — use the search box and then click More➪Groups Google literally owns the newsgroup archives, to a first approximation, anyway Google newsgroup tools and interface run rings around anything Microsoft can deliver See the “Posting on Newsgroups” section, later in this chapter

To keep on top of the latest specialized Google search engines, go to

google.com and click first the More link and then Even More

✦ Capitalization doesn’t matter Search for diving phuket or diving

Phuket — either search returns the same results

✦ The first words you use have more weight than the latter words If

you look for phuket diving, you see a different list than the one for diving phuket The former list emphasizes Web sites about Phuket that include a mention of diving; the latter includes diving pages that mention Phuket

✦ Google shows you only those pages that include all the search terms

The simplest way to narrow a search that returns too many results is

to add more specific words to the end of your search term For ple, if phuket diving returns too many pages, try phuket diving

exam-beginners In programmer’s parlance, the terms are anded together.

✦ If you type more than ten words, Google ignores the ones after the

tenth.

✦ Google ignores a surprisingly large number of short words (such as

who, how, where, to, and is) as well as single-digit numbers The

results page tells you whether it ignored certain words In Figure 5-1,

at the beginning of this chapter, the underlines under the terms in the

upper-right corner tell you that the terms longest, river, and asia were used in the search but in was not.

Book V Chapter 5

Finding What You’re Looking For

✦ You can use OR to tell Google that you want the search to include two

or more terms — but you have to capitalize OR For example, phuket

OR samui OR similans diving returns diving pages that focus on Phuket, Samui, or the Similans

✦ If you want to limit the search to a specific phrase, use quotes For

example, diving phuket “day trip” is more limiting than diving

phuket day trip because in the former, the precise phrase day trip

has to appear on the page

✦ Exclude pages from the results by putting a hyphen in front of the

words you don’t want For example, if you want to find pages about

diving in Phuket but you don’t want to associate with lowly snorkelers, try diving phuket -snorkeling

You can combine search tricks If you’re looking for overnight diving, try diving phuket -”day trip” to find the best results

✦ Google supports wildcard searches in quite a limited way: The asterisk

(*) stands for a single word If you’re accustomed to searches in, say,

Word or Windows, the * generally indicates a sequence of characters, but

in Google only stands for an entire word You might search for div* and

expect to find both diver and diving but Google won’t match on either

Conversely, if you search for, oh, email * * wellsfargo.com, you find a lot of e-mail addresses (The second * matches the at-sign (@) in an address Try it.)

If you use Google to search for answers to computer questions, take

advan-tage of any precise numbers or messages you can find For example,

goo-gling computer won’t start doesn’t get you anywhere; but two beeps

on startup may If you’re trying to track down a Windows error message,

use Google to look for the precise message Write it down, if you have to.

Using Advanced Search

Didn’t find the results you need? Click the link to the right of the Google

Search button to bring up the Advanced Search page

If you need to narrow your searches — in other words, if you want Google

to do the sifting rather than do it yourself — you should get acquainted with

Google’s Advanced Search capabilities Here’s a whirlwind tour:

1 Run your search and, if it doesn’t have what you want, click the

Advanced Search link.

Google brings up its Advanced Search page (see Figure 5-9)

538 Finding What You’re Looking For

2 Fill in the top part of the page with your search terms.

In Figure 5-9, I ask for sites that include the word diving and the exact phrase underwater photography I also want to exclude the phrase day

trip and return only pages pertaining to Phuket, Samui, or the Similans.

Anything you can do in the top part of this page can also be done by using the shorthand tricks mentioned in the preceding section If you find yourself using the top part of the page frequently, save yourself some time and brush up on the tricks (such as OR, -, “”) that I mention in the earlier section “Searching wisely.”

3 In the bottom part of the Advanced Search Page, further refine your search by matching on

Book V Chapter 5

You can find more details about Google Advanced Search on the Google

Advanced Search page, google.com/help/refinesearch.html

Pulling out Google parlor tricks

Google has many tricks up its sleeve, some of which you may find useful —

even if it’s just to win a bet at a party For example:

✦ To find the status of your UPS, FedEx, or USPS delivery, just type the

package number (digits only) in the Google search box.

✦ The search box is a stock ticker Type a symbol such as MSFT or

SCBSET.

✦ To use Google as a calculator, just type the equation in the Google

search box For example, to find the answer to 1,234 × 5,678, type

1234*5678 in the search box Or, to find the answer to 3 ÷ π, type

3/pi No, Google doesn’t solve partial differentials or simultaneous

equations — yet

✦ Google has a built-in units converter The word in triggers the

con-verter Try 10 meters in feet or 350 degrees F in centigrade (or 350 f in

c) or 20 dollars in baht or (believe me, this is impressive) 89 euros per

liter in dollars per gallon You can also use to, as in 90 f to c.

✦ To find a list of alternative (and frequently interesting) definitions for

a word, type define, as in define booty.

540 Posting on Newsgroups

✦ You can see movie reviews and local show times by typing movie and

then the name of the movie, such as movie lincoln.

✦ Try quick questions for quick facts For example, try height of mt

ever-est or length of mississippi river or currency in singapore.

Posting on Newsgroups

One of the most important (but largely unknown and underutilized) Google gems is the ongoing archive of Usenet newsgroup postings For many, many years, the Usenet newsgroups on the Internet served as a vital person-to-person link, with hundreds of millions of absolutely uncensored messages

on every conceivable topic

You may know newsgroups for their extensive collections of pictures, movies, songs, and other types of media You may not know that the original reason for the newsgroups — providing a way for people to communicate with each other, about a bewildering number of topics — is still alive and well

Google, being Google, has indexed the messages, built a credible viewer that shows you who replied to which message and when, and even assembled quite a serviceable front end so that you can post your own messages in the groups

When you perform a standard Google search, frequently you find the results

of a Google Groups search at the bottom of the search results page Feel free

to click the offered links and see what other people are saying!

To search for a message in the massive Google newsgroups archive, follow these steps:

1 Start your favorite browser and go to groups.google.com.

Google shows you the Google Groups search page (see Figure 5-11)

2 Type your search terms in the box and press Enter.

Google returns a list of all messages that meet your criteria In Figure 5-12, I search for newsgroup messages that deal with Microsoft Knowledge Base (KB) article 960715

The results are normally presented to you in order of Google’s lated relevance You may find it more enlightening to click the Sort By Date line at the top of the results list

calcu-Book V Chapter 5

3 You almost always want to see the entire thread (the message itself,

with all the messages that came before it and after it), so click the underlined link at the top of a message that interests you.

Google shows you the thread, as shown in Figure 5-13

4 To reply to a message, locate and click a Reply link.

Generally, you can post on threads that are no more than 60 days old You may need to sign up for a Google account, which takes only a few seconds As soon as you’re signed up, you see a Posting form

5 Type your message in the space provided and click Post.

Your message appears on the group in short order

That’s how hard it is to talk to anyone, on any subject, anywhere in the world

Chapter 6: Sending Windows Mail Live

In This Chapter

✓ Choosing the right e-mail program

✓ Whatever happened to [fill in the blank] mail?

✓ Using Windows 7’s Live Mail Essential

✓ Putting together decent e-mail messages with a minimum of hassle

✓ Keeping on top of your contacts

Q: What happened to Outlook Express?

A: Oh, it went away a long time ago Outlook Express was the free e-mail

program that shipped in Windows XP and almost all its predecessors It’s kaput Bygones

Q: What happened to Windows Mail?

A: It disappeared, too Windows Mail was a barely warmed-over minor

upgrade to Outlook Express Microsoft shipped Windows Mail as the free e-mail program in Windows Vista But Microsoft forgot about Windows Mail shortly after it shipped Orphaned Abandoned at birth

Q: So what do we do for mail in Windows now?

A: Microsoft now actively encourages all Windows users — even those with

Windows XP — to download and install Windows Live Mail, the latest and greatest incarnation of the Outlook Ex — er, Windows Mail line Either that

or you can buy Outlook, which is part of Microsoft Office

Microsoft dropped all significant support for Outlook Express and Windows Mail years ago Why? Because they don’t make Microsoft any money As

“free” e-mail programs inside Windows, Microsoft couldn’t charge for them, couldn’t stick advertising in them, couldn’t make a sou Now, with the new, improved Windows Live Mail — which doesn’t ship inside any version of Windows — Microsoft feels free to “monetize” its e-mail program (I love the

word monetize — it means that Microsoft can do just about anything it

wants to turn a buck from the software, over and above what you paid for Windows 7.)

Contents

Chapter 6: Sending Windows Mail

Live 543

Choosing an E-Mail Program 546

Conversing with E-Mail 553

544 Counting the Microsoft E-Mail Programs

Q: Hey, I’m confused What about Hotmail? I thought that was from

Microsoft, too How many different mail programs does Microsoft make? Which one should I be using?

A: Therein lies a tale Told by a dummy, full of sound and fury .

This chapter takes you through the choices you have in e-mail programs and, if you so decide, steps you through setting up Windows Live Mail, one

of the vaunted Windows 7 Live Essentials

Counting the Microsoft E-Mail Programs

Microsoft now has five — count ’em, five — different e-mail programs, with

countless versions of each one: Hotmail, Outlook, Outlook Express, Windows Live Mail, and Windows Mail None of those programs bears even a slight semblance to the others And when you go on, beyond Microsoft, a great big world of e-mail awaits

Two of these mail programs are obsolete: Windows Mail is a free program that shipped with Vista, and Outlook Express is the nearly-identical free program that shipped with Windows XP and earlier versions If you know anyone who has technical problems with either or both of these programs, gently suggest to her that she’s beating a long-dead horse and that she should consult the “Choosing an E-Mail Program” section for some good alternatives

I cover the still-viable Microsoft e-mail programs in the following sections

Outlook

Outlook, the e-mail program in Microsoft Office (see Figure 6-1), stands out

as the granddaddy of e-mail programs It’s enormous It’s convoluted It’s expensive Its pieces don’t hang together well It doesn’t travel well unless you have a corporate Virtual Private Network (VPN) or Office Web Access (OWA), the latter of which truly should be counted as another Microsoft mail program Most of the corporate world, and many normal folks (includ-ing yours truly), depend on it every day Hundreds of versions of Outlook are used by tens of millions of people every day

To further add to the confusion: Outlook was part of Office 2003 Student

& Teacher Edition, the low-cost version of Office that sold like hotcakes But the new, improved Office 2007 Home & Student Edition doesn’t have Outlook It’s the price of progress, I guess

Book V Chapter 6

Hotmail is the online Microsoft e-mail service (see Figure 6-2) This week,

the politically correct name for the product is Windows Live Hotmail — that

could change next week — but everybody knows it as Hotmail Hotmail

once owned the online e-mail market Every few months, Microsoft comes

out with a facelift or a name change, each time promising that the new,

improved Hotmail — er, Windows Live Hotmail — works “just like Outlook!”

546 Choosing an E-Mail Program

In fact, Hotmail doesn’t work anything at all like Outlook It can’t Hotmail stores all your messages on the giant Microsoft servers — none of it ever comes down to your desktop, unless you use a separate program to reach into Hotmail and pull mail down to your computer

Windows Live Mail

Windows Live Mail, the primary topic of this chapter, is one of the Windows Live Essentials (which I talk about in Book I, Chapter 5) Windows Live Mail pulls mail down and stores it on your computer Windows Live Mail gobbles

up mail sent to your e-mail address, whatever your address may be, using

traditional Internet e-mail computers (POP3 servers) It can also grab mail

from Hotmail, Google’s Gmail, Yahoo! Mail, and many other online mail services

Choosing an E-Mail Program

You have three good reasons to use Windows Live Mail: inertia, inertia, and inertia All the other reasons aren’t convincing If you’re stuck with Windows Live Mail because you have a big collection of old Outlook Express (OE) or

Hotmail blazed new ground as the first free

Web-based e-mail service when Sabeer Bhatia

(a native of Bangalore and a graduate of both

Caltech and Stanford) spent $300,000 to launch

it in 1996 On December 31, 1997, Microsoft

bought Hotmail for $400 million, and the service

has never been the same Microsoft struggled

with Hotmail for many years, adding new users

like flies, but always suffering from severe

per-formance problems and crashes heard round

the world Ultimately, Hotmail was shuffled

under the Microsoft Network (MSN) wing of

the corporate umbrella, its free services were

clipped, and its user interface was subjected to

more facelifts than Dick Clark, which is saying something

As MSN lost its luster and competitors such

as Gmail and Yahoo! Mail battered at the, uh, Gates, the Hotmail subscription-based income model died almost overnight and the company’s market share fell precipitously Why pay for 20

MB of Hotmail message storage when Google gave away 1 GB for free? Hotmail became the number-one candidate for a “Live” makeover and the poster child for Microsoft’s entire Live effort It remains to be seen whether Hotmail,

er, Windows Live Hotmail can survive another decade

A brief history of Hotmail

Book V Chapter 6

547

Choosing an E-Mail Program

Windows Mail (WM) messages, you have my sympathies If you want to stick

with Windows Live Mail because it looks and acts like OE or WM, at least at

first glance, I s’pose that’s a reasonable fear, er, justification

But if you’re willing to look beyond Windows Live Mail and Outlook Express

and Windows Mail, you have all sorts of good options:

When you choose your own e-mail program, keep these points in mind:

✦ If you don’t want to carry your mail with you, use one of the many

Web-based e-mail services Internet access is cheap, easy, and generally

reliable all over the world Recently, Google’s Gmail (mail.google.com, see Figure 6-3), and Yahoo! Mail (mail.yahoo.com) have garnered the best reviews Hotmail (er, Windows Live Hotmail, hotmail.com, or mail.live.com) and, perhaps surprisingly, AOL Mail (discover.aol

com) cover all the bases It seems like the feature set and promotions change every week, so check each Web site to see what’s best for you

✦ In my experience, people who rely on e-mail, and want to keep their

mail on their own computer, ultimately gravitate to Outlook I know

that’s a heretical observation, but it’s true Outlook 2003 and 2007 bine hyperactive spam filtering and so-so antiphishing technology with the kind of industrial strength that many e-mail addicts need It’s also surprisingly easy to use — at least, the common e-mail actions are easy

com-to find and run The big downside? Outlook is expensive

548 Choosing an E-Mail Program

If you decide you want Outlook, keep several points in mind Many panies get licenses for Outlook that come along for the ride when they buy Microsoft Exchange Server; your company may have a license for Outlook that’s already paid for If you have to buy a copy of Outlook, read

com-up on the differences between Outlook 2003 and Outlook 2007 You may find that Outlook 2003 has everything you need — if you can find it — for

a fraction of the 2007 price

✦ Several people I know use Mozilla Thunderbird (mozillamessaging.

com), a lightweight, open source (free) mail program from the same foundation that brought us Firefox Most Thunderbird users I know

are old Eudora fanatics; Thunderbird picked up where Eudora dropped dead in its tracks Personally, I don’t like Thunderbird; given a choice, I would always opt for one of the online services But if you need to carry your messages with you and you don’t like Windows Live Mail, it’s a good alternative

Keeping up with all the e-mail buzzwords is

difficult Here’s a quick little list that should

get you through the major twists and turns of

installing and using an e-mail client (an e-mail

program that runs on your computer) and

get-ting it to retrieve your mail

In a traditional e-mail client, you type a

mes-sage, list which addresses you want to receive

the message, and then send it When your

com-puter sends the message, it connects to a

spe-cific kind of computer attached to the Internet:

a Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) server

The SMTP server is responsible for putting the

message onto the Internet, destined for its

intended recipient

The Internet routes messages based on the

e-mail addresses of the recipients The last

part of your e-mail address — the part after

the @ sign — is your domain name In Woody@

AskWoody.com (yes, that’s my e-mail address; no, capitalization doesn’t matter), AskWoody.com is my domain name A mes-sage sent to me ends up on a particular kind

of computer, a Post Office Protocol 3 (POP3)

server, that is tasked with handling messages sent to AskWoody.com

When you tell your computer that you want to receive messages, it goes out to your POP3 server and downloads all the messages wait-ing for you in its queue In most cases, after the messages are downloaded to your computer, they’re deleted from the POP3 server

Attachments to messages (pictures, files, and

so on) travel as text, and your e-mail client (or the Web program you use to send and receive mail) takes care of the details using the spe-

cific set of rules named Multipurpose Internet

Mail Extensions (MIME).

E-mail client, POP3, and bafflegab

Book V Chapter 6

549

Getting Started with Windows Live Mail

Getting Started with Windows Live Mail

Windows Live Mail is one of those Windows 7 Live Essentials that is

distrib-uted independently of Windows 7 I talk about the Windows Live Essentials

in Book I, Chapter 5

Chances are very good that you can’t see Windows Live Mail on your

com-puter Not to worry Even if you have it installed, you’d be well advised to go

out and download the latest version Here’s how to do it:

1 Use your favorite Web browser to navigate to download.live.com.

2 Click Download.

The Windows Live Installer, wlsetup-web.exe, is transferred to your computer Double-click it or do whatever you need to do (depending on your browser) to run it

3 Select the check box marked Mail and deselect the others Then click

Install.

The Windows Live installer downloads Windows Live Mail and sticks it

on your computer Time to grab a latté

Then (as I describe in detail in Book I, Chapter 5), Microsoft asks you to let it take over your Web browsing, uh, experience — and keep track of all your Windows activities

The final panel asks you to sign up for a Windows Live ID

5 If you want to use one of the Microsoft online services and you don’t

already have a Windows Live ID, click Sign Up and follow the tions in Book V, Chapter 7 to create a completely bogus ID.

If you have a Hotmail ID, a Messenger ID, or an Xbox Online ID, you already have a Windows Live ID

6 Click Close.

Windows Live Mail is now installed on your computer You can’t see it yet, but it’s there

Now you’re ready to run Windows Live Mail (WLM) for the first time Here’s

the easy way to start:

550 Getting Started with Windows Live Mail

1 Choose Start➪Windows Live Mail.

WLM whizzes and gurgles for a bit and then shows you the Add an E-Mail Account dialog box, shown in Figure 6-4

2 If you have a Hotmail account and you want to use Windows Live Mail

to access that account, fill out the Add an E-Mail Account dialog box with the information for your Hotmail account Click Next and then click Finish.

Starting with a Hotmail account is a quick and easy way to get going with Windows Live Mail: WLM understands Hotmail, and you don’t have to futz with any settings

On the other hand, you may want to use a conventional e-mail account,

in which case you need to fill out the details (see the nearby sidebar,

“E-mail client, POP3, and bafflegab”) Your Internet service provider (ISP) should’ve given you all that information

If you set up a Hotmail account, WLM advises that it needs to download the folders before you can read the messages in this account

3 Click Download.

WLM goes out to Hotmail (or whichever e-mail account you set up) and retrieves your Inbox In the end you see your inbox, which looks more

or less like the one shown in Figure 6-5 Yes, WLM blocks pictures, even

if they come from the Microsoft Security Response Center (See the nearby sidebar, “Why does Windows Live Mail block pictures?” for more information.)

Book V Chapter 6

Quick Views panel Message search bar Warning bar

Mailboxes for each e-mail account

Previewed messageContents of selected mailbox

4 You’re ready to read, write, send, and receive, so you may as well.

See the next section for details

The Windows Mail window (refer to Figure 6-5) is easy to figure out Across the

top is a traditional menu bar that changes depending on which Live Mail

appli-cation you’re running, plus icons for colorizing (adding a background color to

the main window), “menus” (which behave much like a traditional Tools menu

item, with a hodgepodge of settings underneath), and Help (See Table 6-1 for a

description of the menu items, from left to right, and what they do.)

Table 6-1 The Windows Live Mail Menu

Name What It DoesNew Opens a window that lets you write a new message (see the

“Conversing with E-Mail” section, later in this chapter) Also lets you create new events for the Calendar, a new contact for your Contacts list, or a new e-mail folder

Reply Opens a window that lets you write a new message The e-mail

address in the current message is used as the To address in the new message, and the contents of the current message are copied into the bottom of the new message

552 Getting Started with Windows Live Mail

Calendar Creates a new event, to go in your calendar, with the message subject used as the event’s subject, and with a copy of the message

in the text of the event You have to add dates, times, and other information

Delete Moves the message to the Deleted Items folder, on the left

Junk Moves the message to the Junk e-mail folder, on the left You’re

also given an opportunity to forward the message to Microsoft (and unnamed “third parties”) for its giant junk collection

Sync Sends the mail in your outbox and retrieves mail for your inbox This

is the same as Send/Receive in Outlook

In the upper-right area are tools that let you crank up Windows Live

Messenger and change your Messenger persona I talk about Windows Live Messenger in Book V, Chapter 7

On the left, you see these items:

✦ The Quick Views panel: The Quick Views panel lets you filter your

inbox quickly, so you see only Unread E-Mail, Unread E-Mail from Your Contacts, or Unread RSS Feeds

✦ All the different mailboxes for each e-mail account: In Figure 6-5, I have

only one e-mail account, so Windows Live Mail shows only my Hotmail mailboxes

✦ Links to the other Windows Live Mail applications.

You may want to use Windows Live Mail to read your RSS Feeds, but I greatly prefer iGoogle, which is trivially easy to hook up with Firefox (see Book V, Chapter 4 for details) You may also want to use Windows Live Mail to read newsgroups, but for my money, Google Groups has the WLM program beat to pieces (see Book V, Chapter 5 for details)

In the middle, Windows Live Mail shows you the contents of the selected mailbox In Figure 6-5, I select the inbox on the left, so the middle pane has a list of all messages in my inbox

Book V Chapter 6

553

Conversing with E-Mail

On the right, you see a modified preview of the selected message If

Windows Live Mail has modified the message in some way, the

notifica-tion appears in a bar at the top of the message For example, in Figure 6-5,

Windows Live Mail blocks pictures in the message (For an explanation, see

the following sidebar, “Why does Windows Live Mail block pictures?”)

If you click the link marked Delete and Block on the message notification bar,

Windows Live Mail deletes the current message and puts the sender on the

Blocked Senders list Then you never see another message from that sender

ever again If you accidentally click Delete and Block, you can bring the

sender back from the blacklist: Click the down arrow on the “menus” icon,

choose Safety Options, click the Blocked Senders tab, select the accidentally

banished sender, and click the Remove button

Conversing with E-Mail

If you grew up with e-mail, you’re lucky Windows Live Mail should behave

more or less the way you expect If you were born before, oh, 1999, you may

not be so adept This section scratches the surface of what there is to know

about e-mail It should suffice to get you started on the right foot

Unless you specifically tell Windows Mail that

you want it to download and show you pictures

inside e-mail messages, it won’t There’s a

reason why — and it has nothing to do with all

the, uh, shall we say, creative pictures floating

around on the Internet these days

Pictures can be put inside e-mail messages

in one of two ways Either the whole picture

goes in the message, or a link to the picture

goes inside the message The link points to a

place on the Internet where Windows Mail

can retrieve the picture, if you ask it to If the

whole picture is inside the message, Windows

Mail shows it But if a link exists, Windows

Mail doesn’t retrieve the picture unless you tell

it to

Why? Because of a “Web beacon.” Spammers

learned long ago that they could put unique

pointers inside e-mail messages, referring to pictures on their Web sites When Windows Mail reaches out and grabs the picture,

it leaves behind a trace of where it came from — and that trace can be linked to the e-mail address of the person who received the message Spammers send out millions of messages with Web beacons, and they’re rewarded with a list of all the e-mail addresses

of the people who opened the messages

Windows Mail doesn’t follow the picture links — and thus it doesn’t confirm the validity

of your e-mail address to spammers — unless you choose Tools➪Options, click the Security tab, and deselect the Block Images and Other External Content in HTML E-mail check box

Why does Windows Live Mail block pictures?

554 Conversing with E-Mail

Setting up mail accounts

The process of setting up mail accounts — and you can set up dozens, if you choose — is a simple one Get your accounts in order and you’re free to create, send, and receive e-mail messages at will Or to Will

How many e-mail accounts do you need? Many people have several e-mail addresses — perhaps one for work, one for school, and one for personal use

I strongly recommend that you not add e-mail accounts for several people in

Windows Live Mail You can add a hundred accounts for yourself, but the minute you add an account for your significant other or your kids or your parents, things get sticky — not just because you all find yourselves reading each others’ mail, but because replying, deleting, and forwarding other peo-ples’ mail gets real hairy, real fast

If more than one person is using Windows Live Mail, set up a separate Windows account for each person (see Book II, Chapter 2) That way, even if you don’t put passwords on the accounts, you can keep the mail sorted out automatically Little Billy won’t accidentally delete Daddy’s notification about winning the Irish lottery Little Melinda won’t accidentally leave her love letter in the family Sent Items folder

To add other e-mail accounts or modify your existing one, follow these steps:

1 Start Windows Live Mail.

2 On the left, above the list of applications, click the link marked Add E-Mail Account.

The Add an E-Mail Account dialog box, shown in Figure 6-6, appears If you have a normal e-mail account, you probably need to select the check box marked Manually Configure Server Settings for E-Mail Account

3 If you’re very lucky — or if you’re adding a Hotmail, Gmail, or Yahoo! Mail account — just fill out the boxes and click Next Windows Live Mail handles all the rest.

Windows Live Mail includes the Autodiscovery technology, which can automatically track down all your settings, based on your e-mail address Microsoft has a big database of domain names (that’s the part

of your e-mail address to the right of the @ sign) and if your domain is in that big database, Windows Live Mail can guess at all the settings neces-sary to set up e-mail service

4 Unfortunately, in many cases you have to select the check box marked Manually Configure Server Settings for E-Mail Account and then click Next.

Book V Chapter 6

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Conversing with E-Mail

If you choose to set up the account manually, you see the dialog box shown in Figure 6-7

5 Fill in the requested information and click Next.

Unfortunately, you have to get that information from the company that handles your e-mail service

Someday it’ll be easy to set up e-mail accounts That day hasn’t arrived yet

556 Conversing with E-Mail

Retrieving messages and attachments

When you want to check your e-mail, click the Sync link on the Windows Live Mail toolbar A notice appears in the lower-right corner of the Windows Mail window, advising that you’re receiving mail Click the Receiving link in the lower-right corner of the Windows Live Mail main window and you can watch the details as Windows Live Mail uploads and downloads your mas-sive missives (see Figure 6-8)

The latest version of Windows Live Mail blocks certain kinds of files, based

on the filename extension of the attached file (See Book II, Chapter 1 for a discussion of filename extensions — and why you need to make Windows show them to you.)

Of course, the concept of a “dangerous” filename extension is laughable Until September 2004, the jpg filename extension was considered “safe.” Then somebody discovered that it was possible to stick a killer program inside a JPEG picture file and a filename extension that was once considered innocuous became, overnight, one of the world’s Ten Most Wanted

Microsoft doesn’t block jpg files because that would make it impossible to receive photos