How to save time on your PC

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This is the fourth and final entry of a series I am doing about How to save time on your PC. These are a few of the ways that I try to shave off minutes or even hours of wasted time on my computer each month.

8. Google toolbar

The main reason I use Google Toolbar is for the bookmarks. It has a few other features that make it useful, but I think the best part is that my bookmarks are right at my fingertips at all times. The Google toolbar also allows you to TAG your bookmarks, rather than putting them in folders like most browsers. Tags are more versatile, because you can add multiple tags to any bookmark. Del.icio.us is another great bookmarking tool as well.

9. Firefox Quick Search

If you are a Firefox user you will have a quick search box in the top right corner. You can add all kinds of searchable websites to the list. You can search within Google, Yahoo, Ebay, Amazon, Various dictionaries, Flickr, Wikipedia and many others. Rather than going to the individual sites themselves, you can search many sites from your browser.

You can download Firefox with Google Toolbar, if you aren’t using Firefox yet. If you are still using Internet Explorer, I recommend using Firefox. There are a bunch of reasons why Firefox is better, but the safety factor with Firefox was a big one for me.

10. Google Homepage

My Google homepage is where I tie a lot of these tools together. Google homepage is basically a dashboard of whatever you would like. They have thousands of different widgets to choose from so you can create a custom homepage that can have just about anything you could want or need all on one page for you.

This is a quick snapshot of my Google homepage…

I have my email, calendar, stock quotes, weather, to-do list, feedreader, Jotts, bookmarks and a few other things all accessible on the same page. I love the ease of being able to get updated information from various different pages all in one place. And who knows how much time you save by having it all together rather than going to one site to check weather, another to see if you have any new emails, another to check your stocks, etc…

You can find out more about Google homepage here.

Check out the previous posts in the series…
How to save time on your PC – Part One
How to save time on your PC – Part Two
How to save time on your PC – Part Three

{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }

Tristan November 6, 2007 at 3:11 pm: Great series here, Bob. Thanks for all you do, Buddy.
bob November 6, 2007 at 4:41 pm: Thanks Tristan – I appreciate it!!
David November 7, 2007 at 6:02 pm: Yes, GoogleToolbar is best of best. I use Firefox with GoogleToolbar usually.