Elias Saba’s Blog

In response to a submission on digg.com entitled “10 cheap and easy upgrades for your old PC”, user gaqua posted a “better” list in the comments that I found funny enough to want to give it its own post on my meaningless blog.
The comment in its entirety:

Here’s a better list.

1 - Clean up your shit, dad. I’m tired of coming over and finding a new toolbar on IE or Firefox every time. I’m tired of thirty icons in the systray, half of which have some bizarre relevance to programs that are no longer installed. Go to add/remove programs, and remove anything you don’t use.

2 - Defrag that shit. 74% fragmented. SERIOUSLY? How is that even possible? I’m scheduling this for every Wednesday night at 10pm dad. I know it’s going to freak you out when it starts doing this all on its own but just leave it alone and let it do its magic.

3 - 512MB of RAM? Do you know how cheap RAM is? PC2700 DDR1? Oh my God…I think I might throw up. For $50 I can get you to 2GB of RAM. $50.

4 - I’m installing Ad-Aware and Spybot Search & Destroy - your system has over 200 known spyware problems. I’m fixing them. I’m making this machine bulletproof. Don’t fuck with it anymore. I’m installing AVG anti-virus. It’s going to ask you to update it - UPDATE IT WHEN IT ASKS.

5 - Holy shit I can’t believe this - you’re running XP without even SP1 installed. I’m installing SP3, Dad. It’s a lot more secure. Jesus christ this is like the dark ages of computing.

6 - Oh fucking shit - 3 hours to download? What the fuck - you’re still on that 512k DSL? Mom is paying for Cable! She’s paying for Cable internet, Dad. I’m going to unplug this wire from the DSL modem and plug it into the cable modem. Yeah. No it’s very easy. And I’m calling AT&T and canceling DSL. There, I just saved you $50 a month. And yeah, the internet is faster.

7 - Oh look, you have a cutesy animated desktop background. Yeah, your celeron 1.6 GHz probably doesn’t like that, especially with the 16MB integrated graphics. I’m going to turn that off. I know, I know. But it’s best for everyone.

HOLY SHIT YOUR COMPUTER IS FASTER NOW DAD. Please, tell everyone in the family that you “don’t know what he did but the computer is so much better, you should call him and have him come take a look, I’m sure he’d be happy to!”

There’s nothing I love more than that, dad. I love fixing Uncle Butch’s disgusting laptop with the inexplicably stained keys and I love playing around with the disgusting beige eMachine that Aunt Patsy uses to send all those cool inspirational email forwards with pictures of kittens or penguins or koalas or pandas.

No, I understand. As the oldest and most computer knowledgeable, it’s my responsibility. Just like Uncle Mason would help us all out if we got into legal trouble right? Well, if he weren’t disbarred for fraud, I mean.

Firefox is by far the best web browser available. Here are five features I use daily that you may not know about that will turn you into a lean, mean, browsing machine.

1. “Ctrl+F” is so last year. All the cool kids are using “/”.
If you hold “Ctrl” and press “F” you’ll bring up the standard find bar in Firefox. Boring. This is fairly common knowledge. What most people don’t know is that if you press “/” (slash) you’ll bring up the quick find bar. The difference with the quick find bar is that it clears and closes itself once you click anywhere or stop typing for a few seconds, leaving you to continue on your merry browsing way.

Time saved by not having to: Close the find bar when you’re done using it.

2. Make searches come to you.
How often do you load a website and immediately use their search box? Well, you can make the search box come to you. If you right click on the search field of any website you’ll see the option to “Add a Keyword for this Search…”. When selected, you’ll bring up an option box that looks a lot like the one used to bookmark a site with the exception of the extra “Keyword” field. This essentially allows you to bookmark a search. Typing “KEYWORD+SPACE+QUERY” will bring up the search results for the search field you bookmark as if you typed your query directly into the sites search box. For example, if you bookmark dictionary.com’s search with the keyword “define”, simply typing “define chide” would bring up the definition of “chide” on dictionary.com.

Time saved by not having to: Load a website’s front page when you just want to use their search.

3. Acknowledge your mouse’s bastard child; the Middle-Click.
Firefox utilizes your mouse’s middle click (i.e., pressing the scroll wheel down), so you should too. You likely already know that middle-clicking a link will open that link in a new tab, but did you know middle-clicking anywhere on a tab will close that tab? This comes in especially handy when closing multiple tabs because you don’t have to keep moving the mouse to the next tab’s “X” icon as the tab sizes keep changing with every tab you close.
Time saved by not having to: Use that pesky hand-eye coordination.

4. Copy&Paste into Google no more!
Highlight any text on a website and then right-click on it. What do you know, there’s an option to “Search Google for…” the text you have highlighted. Well I’ll be a copy and pasting monkey’s uncle!
[UPDATE] - Jeff G, from the comments, pointed out that this feature does not always use Google, but instead uses the default search engine you’ve selected in Firefox.

Time saved by not having to: Ctrl+C, Ctrl+T, type google.com, hit enter, Ctrl+P, hit enter.

5. Show your Auto-Complete who’s boss.
Using auto-complete is a great way to be more efficient. That is, unless your auto-complete brings up dozens of junk-complete options for you to choose from. Next time in the email field of a web form and Firefox brings up a mile long list of all those bogus emails you’ve used in the past to avoid spam, just press the down arrow once and hold down the delete key to remove all those useless “suggestions”. You can also use the up and down arrows to pick and choose which items you want to remove.
Time saved by not having to: Fish through a list of junk.