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In troubleshooting PC problems in Windows, you often have to copy text from message boxes that look like this:

If you try and highlight the text with the mouse, nothing happens.  But there’s a little known trick that works like a charm.  Simply, press Ctrl-C.  It will copy the Window title, message text and button labels.  It’s a very useful trick for when you get an error message and need to do a Google search on that error.  I just stumbled upon this recently and for years, I’ve been manually typing the error text in.  When trying to fix these problems, it’s no fun having to type in “Access violation at address 10002593 in module ‘LIBMYSQL.dll’…” Especially with the arcane wording usually involved with Windows error messages.  I’m not sure why this “feature” isn’t well documented somewhere, but I’m glad I finally found it.  It’s just a quick tip but, I hope this helps you as much as it helped me recently.

What's an easy and effective way to protect yourself from viruses?  Connecting your cable modem or dsl modem to a router instead of directly to your computer.  The reason is simple, when you connect your computer directly to your modem, attackers have access to and can interface directly with your computer.  By default, unless you are running a good firewall, all ports are exposed.  Theoretically this shouldn't be a problem since the operating system should be secure and won't allow unauthorized access.  Unfortunately, virus writers are quite good at circumventing security. 

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