PC Hints and Tips

To delete various remnants of your browsing history quickly, go to Tools and select Delete Browsing History. This lets you delete individual elements such as temporary internet files, cookies and passwords, or wipe everything in one go by choosing ‘Delete all’.

If you miss the old Menu Bar in IS, which contained the File, Favourites and Tools menus, hold down Alt on your keyboard and it will temporarily re-appear. To restore the missing Menu Bar to the browser permanently, right-click a  blank area of the main toolbar and select Menu Bar.

If you delete a bookmark by accident, don’t panie. Click Bookmarks, Organise Bookmarks, and then click Edit and Undo (or press Ctrl+Z on your keyboard). The bookmark will be instantly restored.

You don’t need to click the address bar to select it each time you want to type in a web address. Just press Alt+D to highlight the bar ready for you to enter a URL.

You can reload the current web page from scratch, so that all content is pulled from the site and not from your cache, by pressing Ctrl+F5. This tip also works in IE7.

You can create a direct shortcut to any website simple by dragging-and-dropping the page to your Desktop. Double-clicking the shortcut icon will load the page in Firefox.

Caret Browsing places an insertion point cursor wherever you click. This lets you select text from a website using your keyboard, like in a word processor. Press F7 to toggle this feature on or off.

Google’s toolbar takes up a lot of space but you can configure it so it simply replaces the existing search box. Click the Settings button, choose Options and click Layouts. Select the option ‘Replace Fiefox search box and hide Toolbar’.

Annoyingly, if you close a tab in IE7 by mistake you can’t just re-open on the same page. An add-on called Open Last Closed Tab (http://tinyurl.com/yrz718) solves the problem by letting you re-open a tab just by pressing Alt+X.

We’ve all closed tabs by mistake before, but with Firefox it’s really not a problem. Just press Ctrl+Shift+T and the closed tab will magically reopen.