Hands on: Shortcuts and searches

Reader Dave Spathaky has found a shortcut that opens Firefox with multiple tabbed pages loaded.

Just create a shortcut with multiple URLs, each separated by a vertical bar (Alt & 0124). Note that this only works if Firefox isn’t already running, but as you can have as many shortcuts as you like, it’s a great way to start various surfing tasks that each need a multiplicity of pages.

From any web page, drag the icon at the left of the URL in the address bar onto the Desktop or into a folder of your choice. This will create a shortcut that runs Firefox and loads that page.

Next, open all the pages you want your shortcut to open as tabs in Firefox. Go to Tools, Options and in the Main tab Startup section click ‘Use Current Pages’. This will load the URLs of all the open tabs into the Home Page box. Click in here, Control & A to select all, Control & C to copy.

Cancel out of the dialogue, open the properties of the shortcut you just created and paste in the URLs. OK out of the shortcut properties and rename the shortcut to suit. If you noticed, in passing, that you can have multiple tabbed Home Pages, this was news to me as well.

Finally, yes, we did try this in Internet Explorer 7, and although you can have multiple tabbed Home Pages, the shortcut trick didn’t work.

Search me
Further to May’s piece on Windows Desktop Search, I was puzzled to hear that Vivian Dunn had a completely different set of options to those shown in our screen.

It transpired that WDS had been ‘upgraded’ from version 2.66 to 3.01, probably sneaking in under the radar as part of an Office 2007 update. In version 3.01 you don’t get the option to retain the Search Companion as the default in Explorer or the Start Menu – so you have to click on ‘Use Search Companion’ every time you want to search for a non-indexed file such as a program or system file.

There are also several Registry settings that can either be applied directly or via an Administrative Template and the Group Policy Editor, but the one that reinstates the Search Companion in the Start Menu no longer works in version 3.01.

As mentioned in May, you can choose which folders you want indexed, so that you can quickly find text in the files therein. While this is obviously an advantage for text documents, it also comes in handy in other ways. If you look at the File Types tab in the Advanced Options of WDS search you’ll see a huge list of file types, many of which you may never have heard of and most of which are enabled.

Although you can disable indexing of obscure file types, it’s not worth the effort – if you don’t have any of those file types in the locations specified, this won’t make a difference to the time spent indexing or the space occupied by the index.

What is interesting are the two options below the list – Index properties only or properties and contents. Whereas you’d want the latter option for Word documents, for instance, the former is useful for media files. If you’ve got the default settings for mp3 files – ie index properties only, and you add your music folders to the list included for indexing, you’ll be able to search your collection for artist, album title or other information that isn’t included in the file name.

The same applies to images – you’ll be able to search your digital photos by camera used, the day the photo was taken and other metadata. Since WDS is only indexing the properties, the overheads of time and size are very small.