Imagine allowing anyone to use your PC without supervision: your children, nephews and nieces, spouse's second cousin, or even your babysitter's boyfriend.
That's the promise of virtualization software such as the $25 Returnil Virtual System. The program creates a virtual PC for you or anyone else to operate in that's sealed off from your system files and personal data. I tried the beta of Returnil Virtual System 2010, which includes the Virtual Guard on-demand malware scanner.
Returnil is another security layer on top of your hardware and software firewall, real-time malware detector, and other security programs. Once enabled, no permanent changes will be made to your hard drive, except to the files and folders you specify beforehand.
The program's installation routine offers to perform a malware scan prior to loading the program onto your hard drive. The option to send to the company anonymous information about the malware it detects is selected by default, but you can choose to be prompted before any information is sent or to prevent any information from being collected or transmitted to the company.
The beta of Returnil Virtual System 2010 offers to perform a malware scan prior to installing.
(Credit: Returnil)After the installation completes, a toolbar is added to the desktop and an icon is placed in the notification area. Right-click the icon to hide the toolbar or the icon, enable or exit the program, or check for updates. Double-click the icon to open the main Returnil window. Here you can access the Virtual Guard antivirus scanner, System Safe virtual environment, and the program's other features.
The main Returnil window lets you access the program's security tools.
(Credit: Returnil)After you register the beta—or the trial version of Returnil Virtual System 2008--you can specify files and folders that you can change while operating in a virtual environment. Otherwise, any changes you attempt to make to your hard drive while Returnil is enabled will disappear when you restart Windows. This includes the files you open, programs you use, Web sites you visit, and any other activity that would normally place or change data on your drive.
By default, Returnil uses half the available space on your hard drive to create its virtual environment. You can change this setting by clicking System Safe in the main Returnil window, choosing the advanced settings link, and selecting the System Safe tab. Use the slider control to reset the percentage of free hard-disk space allotted for the virtual environment, and click OK.
Change the percentage of free hard-disk space available for Returnil's virtual environment via the program's advanced settings.
(Credit: Returnil)Other options let you password-protect the program, wipe all disk changes whenever you shut down Windows, enable protection when Windows starts, and assign a keyboard combination to open the program. I noticed a slight degradation in performance when Returnil's System Safe is enabled, but the slowdown was barely discernable on my 64-bit Windows Vista PC with 4GB of RAM and nearly 100GB of unused hard-drive space.
I experienced no problems using the beta, which is a 7.5MB download. Whether or not the addition of a malware scanner improves your PC's overall security, there's comfort in knowing that anyone—yourself included—can do just about anything on your PC without lasting effect. That's the peace of mind a virtual environment such as Returnil provides, and for little cost and only a modest performance hit.
Compared with Outlook and other commercial e-mail programs (are there any other commercial e-mail programs left?) Mozilla's free Thunderbird e-mail client has a lot going for it. Not the least of Thunderbird's time-saving features are its search capabilities.
If you don't see the search toolbar directly above the main Thunderbird window, click View > Toolbars > Search Bar. By default, you can view all your mail, all your unread mail, all mail with one of Thunderbird's five built-in labels attached (Important, Work, Personal, To Do, Later), mail from people in your address book, messages received recently, mail with attachments, and mail that the program has identified as "Not Junk."
Thunderbird's View options let you sort your mail into several prefab categories.
(Credit: Mozilla Foundation)To create your own message view, click Customize in the View drop-down menu, and choose New in the Customize Message Views dialog box, or select one of the existing views and click Edit. In the Message View Setup window, choose either "Match all of the following" or "Match any of the following," and make your selections in the location and parameters drop-down menus. Enter the text you want to search for in the text box, and click the plus sign to add additional parameters. When you're done, click OK twice. The view you just created will appear in the View box, and messages matching your selected parameters will display automatically.
Create a custom view in Thunderbird to filter your messages with a single click.
(Credit: Mozilla Foundation)
Save time with Thunderbird's Quick Search
Custom views are great if you know ahead of time what you'll be looking for, but you can also create a "view" on the fly by converting a search into a virtual folder. Press Alt-I, Tab to move the cursor to the search box, press Alt-down arrow to display the search-parameters drop-down menu, use the arrow keys to navigate to your desired parameter, press Tab again to select it, and type your search term. When the results appear, choose Save Search as a Folder, rename the folder and make other changes (or accept the defaults), and click OK. The folder appears in the left pane in whichever location you chose for it in the New Saved Search Folder dialog box.
Tomorrow: The perils of trying to break the Microsoft habit.
It took all of about 20 minutes to get accustomed to Linux's virtual desktops, which let you switch between work environments with a single click. The problem is, I still spend most of my computing time on Windows machines that lack this handy productivity-boosting feature.
I tried using Microsoft's Virtual Desktop Manager, a PowerToy for Windows XP that lets you create as many as four separate desktops, but it's as buggy as an anthill, and offers no version for Vista. However, I did find three free virtual-desktop programs that work better and give you more options: VirtuaWin, an open-source program that supports up to 20 separate desktops; Virtual Dimension, another open-source app that offers more features than VirtuaWin; and Z-Systems' Vista/XP Virtual Desktop Manager, which takes advantage of Vista's Aero interface.
VirtuaWin's simple approach
At only 385KB, this lightweight utility keeps things simple but lets you add features via downloadable add-on modules that let you start applications automatically when you enter a desktop, give each desktop a name that shows on its taskbar icon (a feature built into Virtual Dimension), and cycle through your desktops automatically, among other functions. VirtuaWin's support for as many as 20 separate desktops seems like plenty until you consider that Virtual Dimension and Vista/XP Virtual Desktop Manager let you create as many desktops as your system's memory can accommodate.
Configure your virtual desktops in VirtuaWin's Setup dialog box.
(Credit: VirtuaWin)You switch between VirtuaWin desktops by clicking one of the four corners of the program's system-tray icon, or by pressing the keyboard shortcut assigned to it. If you create more than four desktops, the icon displays the active desktop's number; click the icon once to view your open apps, or double-click it to open the Setup dialog box. Beyond that there's not much to the program, which is just fine if you're "cultivating a minimalist vibe," as they say in the movies. (Bonus points if you know which one I'm quoting.)
Customize with Virtual Dimension
There are many more similarities than differences between VirtuaWin and Virtual Dimension, but the differences are noteworthy.
Virtual Dimension lets you give each virtual desktop its own wallpaper, which makes it much easier to distinguish between desktops. The program is also much easier to configure via its Settings dialog box: you can assign various operations their own keyboard shortcuts for moving between windows, adjust the transparency of open windows, and tweak the utility's appearance in other ways.
Give each of your Virtual Dimension desktops its own wallpaper via the program's Settings dialog box.
(Credit: Virtual Dimension)Click the program's system-tray icon to open a small preview window that includes the names you've assigned to each desktop. Choose one of the previews to open that desktop, or click the system-tray icon again to close the preview. In addition to using keyboard shortcuts, you can jump between desktops by right-clicking the icon and choosing one from the pop-up menu that appears.
Get Vista's Aero effect with Vista/XP Virtual Desktop
This program's main claim to fame is its full-screen desktop previews in Vista, which take the guess work out of identifying the desktop you're looking for. You can create a separate system-tray icon for each active desktop, and assign each desktop its own background. The program also lets you adjust the size of the preview windows, but not their transparency as you can with Virtual Dimension. You get fewer keyboard-shortcut options with this program than with Virtual Dimension, though both let you designate programs that will appear on all desktops.
Customize the keyboard shortcuts for switching between virtual desktops in Vista/XP Virtual Desktop Manager's Options dialog box.
(Credit: Z-Systems)
Two virtual winners
The Aero support and full-screen previews in Vista/XP Virtual Desktop Manager make it a good choice for that OS, but Virtual Dimension's easy customization and inclusion of the desktop names in its preview window give it an edge on XP systems.
Whichever program you choose, you'll find the ability to jump between workspaces makes Windows much easier to work with.
Tomorrow: fixes for applications that don't know when to quit.
Perhaps the greatest single productivity-boosting feature in Linux is the ability to open several virtual desktops at one time. This allows you to create separate work environments for various simultaneous tasks, such as one with a word processor, image editor, and spreadsheet open for creating a report, and another with e-mail and browser windows active for keeping in touch with co-workers. The multiple desktops let you focus on the task at hand without interruption, but switch to your other active workspace with a single click.
By default, the Gnome interface used by Ubuntu 7.10 allows only two virtual desktops at one time, though this number can be increased to as many as 36. To add more desktops, right-click the Workplace Switcher icon in the bottom-right corner of the Gnome desktop and choose Preferences. (If you don't see the Workplace Switcher icon, right-click the panel, choose Add to Panel, and click Workplace Switcher in the Desktop & Windows section. You may also want to add the Window Selector applet, which offers another option for switching between your open workspaces.)
Make sure "Show all workspaces in (blank) rows" is selected, and set the number of rows you want the workspace-icons to appear in. Click the up arrow in the "Number of workspaces" field to add more workspaces, or simply enter a number up to 36. Click one of the entries under "Workspace names" twice slowly (but don't double-click) to rename it, and check "Show workspace names in switcher" to add the name to its panel icon. When you're done, click Close.
Increase the number of virtual desktops available in the Gnome Linux interface via the Workspace Switcher Preferences dialog box.
Move to another desktop by clicking its icon in the panel, or click the Window Selector and choose the one you want to open. You can also press Ctrl and scroll your mouse wheel to navigate from workspace to workspace, or right-click the title bar of an open application and choose one of the "Move" options. To show the program in all workspaces, select Always on Visible Workspace.
Switch between workspaces in the Linux Gnome interface by right-clicking an app's title bar and selecting one of the "Move" options.
You get more ways to customize and access your virtual desktops in KDE, Compiz, and other Linux interfaces, including the ability to change the desktop wallpaper for each environment, and to switch workspaces by pressing Ctrl-Tab. There are lots of discussion on Linux forums about the pros and cons of various interfaces, but the consensus appears to be that Gnome is the most generic and least troublesome for new users. Since I'm still in that camp, I'll stick with Gnome for now, but I'm wondering whether the extra features might be worth the risk...eventually.
Tomorrow: freeware adds Linux-like virtual desktops to Windows.
The more files you store on your PC, the harder they are to find and manage. A couple of weeks ago I wrote about Copernic Desktop Search, my favorite local-search freebie, and compared it to Google Desktop Search and Windows Desktop Search. All three retrieve the files you're looking for much faster and more simply than Windows' built-in search tool, but I prefer Copernic for its customizability and clean interface.
Still, most people spend the majority of their file-management time in Windows Explorer, which by default isn't particularly informative about the files and folders it displays. You can spend time tweaking Details view so that it shows more information about files and folders, or choose Thumbnails view to convert image-file icons to mini versions and to get a glimpse of up to four of the image files stored in a folder, but this still leaves the searching to you.
A faster way to find a particular file among the gigabytes of data on your PC's various storage media is to create virtual folders that store all the files matching specific search criteria. Vista even updates these folders for you automatically, though in XP you have to perform a new search to add recent files when you return to these folders.
You already use virtual folders all the time. Desktop, My Documents (or Documents in Vista), the Recycle Bin, and many other standard file "locations" in Windows are virtual. The contents of these folders don't depend on the actual physical location of the files. In fact, the WinFS (Windows Future Storage) technology originally intended for use in Vista relies completely on virtual folders.
To create a virtual folder in Vista, click Start > Search, enter your search term (click the down arrow to the right of Advanced Search to see more options), and once the search is completed, click Save Search. By default, the new virtual folder is placed in the Searches folder under your user ID, along with Vista's pre-built virtual folders: Recent Documents, Recent E-mail, Recent Music, Recent Images and Video, Recently Changed, and Shared by Me. You can save the new folder anywhere, but I find it simplest to keep all my virtual folders in one place.
By default, Vista places your new virtual folder in the same folder as its pre-built virtual folders.
(Credit: Microsoft)Now whenever you're looking for a file matching the criteria you specified, simply navigate to and select that virtual folder in the Searches folder under your user name to see an updated list of the files returned by the search.
You can approximate Vista's virtual folders in XP by clicking Start > Search, entering your search term in either or both of the two text boxes, choosing the drive or location to search, or using any of the other search options available, and clicking Search. When the search finishes, click File > Save Search, specify a location for your saved search file (the default is My Documents), give the file a name (or accepting Windows' default name), and click Save. When you open that .fnd file subsequently, a search window opens with the specified criteria entered automatically, but with no files in the results window. Click Search to repeat the search.
Repeat a search without re-entering the search criteria by using Windows XP's Save Search feature.
(Credit: Microsoft)Tomorrow: Do desktop-search tools slow down your PC?
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